International Journal of Coercion, Abuse, and Manipulation Volume 9, Issue 2 2026 48
(Jung, 1963). An uncle, Ernst Karl Jung (1841–1920),
was also a Grand Master of this Lodge (Agrippa’s
Diary, 2023). In childhood, he had several frightening
experiences and dreams that remained with him into
his eighties. At the age of three or four, for example, he
had a dream that he was taken into an underground
chamber where there was a strange object like a tree
trunk made of skin and flesh, with an eye on top, which
he later realised was a ritual phallus. He described
this experience as ‘a kind of burial in the earth’, both
wonderful and terrible, but was amazed that he was
not destroyed by it (Jung, 1963, p. 28 Bair, 2004, p.
24). There are various higher degree Masonic rituals
that involve the initiate descending into a sacred vault.
In the 64th degree or Sage of Mythras, for example,
the candidate enters the vault and is told that when
he achieves this ordeal alone, he will be purified and
emerge ‘from the bosom of the earth and his soul will
be prepared for the revelation of the Mysteries’ (Yarker,
1911, p. 77). He is then named Child of Earth. In the
literature of ritual abuse, there have been many reports
of young children being taken into underground spaces,
vaults or basements where strange rituals and abusive
sexual practices have occurred (Miller, 2012). As in the
case of Francis Bacon, Jung was sexually abused as a
boy, telling Freud about this in 1907 (Freud, Jung, &
McGuire, 1974, p. 94–95).
The author’s study of The Red Book examined each entry
and its accompanying paintings, demonstrating that
almost all of Jung’s fantasies contain plots, characters,
settings and symbolism that are remarkably similar to
those of Masonic rites practised in Switzerland during
his childhood and youth (Brunet, 2019). Many of them
borrow from the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite but
appear to be distorted versions conducted abusively and
involving hypnosis. They include corrupt renditions of
religious themes in which the concepts of good and
evil are reversed, such as in ‘Mysterium Encounter’,
where the prophet Elijah appears with Salome (Jung,
2009, pp. 174–177). She is supposedly the prophet’s
daughter and is represented as desirable and good, in
stark contrast to her role in the Bible. To his horror,
Jung is told to love this bloodthirsty woman, that she is
his sister and, eventually, that his own soul is as evil as
hers. In ritual abuse, portraying evil as good and vice
versa aims to confuse the child and establish a basis
for moral indecision as the spurious rituals progress,
while creating scenarios where the child is made to
believe that he has committed criminal acts, which
convinces him that he is evil (Miller, 2012). As early
as December 1913, Jung was becoming aware that he
might be recording mystery plays, as an early title one
entry was ‘The Mystery Play, First Night’ (2009, p. 146,
note 81). The mystery religions of the ancient world,
such as those from ancient Egypt, Greece and Rome,
with their secret initiation rites enacted as dramas,
have been a key source of inspiration for Freemasonry,
and a lot of its symbolism has been drawn from these
ancient beliefs and practices (Harwood, 2006, p. 18–
19).
Many of Jung’s fantasies involve infuriating
experiences, trickery, and dreadful riddles, and
vary from the bizarre and the ridiculous to vile and
excruciating horrors. A nonsensical experience in
a desert, where he is pursued by invisible robbers,
leaves him filled with rage and complaining that it is
‘comedy and drivel...You can go on devising torments,
spider-legged monsters, ridiculous, frightful, theatrical
spectacles... I perceive trickery’, he says (Jung, 2009, p.
158). As the scholar of religion Henrik Bogdan notes,
in old versions of the Masonic rites, the candidate was
exposed to ‘a great many ceremonies to frighten him’
and ‘1000 ridiculous postures and grimaces’ (2007, p.
75-76). Another horrifying encounter appears in ‘The
Sacrificial Murder’, where Jung feels that he is being
forced to eat the liver of a dead child (2009, p. 320–
327). Clearly, for a young person, this would have been
a shock that might have produced amnesia. However,
in his journal, Jung recognises that this is another event
involving theatre and trickery (2020, vol. 3, p. 136). In
ritual abuse, the eliciting of strong emotions such as
fear, terror, revulsion and rage enables the creation of
a tabula rasa state, the disintegration of the personality
and the death of childhood that Eliade (1995) describes.
Being taught the religious beliefs of the group and
taken to the ‘realm of the gods’ can be part of the
training in these ritually abusive contexts (Miller, 2012
Scott, 2001). In Jung’s case, he recognised that he was
being led on an internal journey similar to those of the
ancient mystery cults. After contemplating the nature
of his fantasies for over a decade, he realised that his
fantasies contained many references to Mithraism,
the mystery cult of the ancient Roman soldiers (Jung,
2009, p. 197, n. 211). Among Freemasons and other
scholars, there is a belief that Masonry has rites of

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Lynn Brunet |Ripping back the veil on Masonic abuse
initiation similar to those of Mithraism (Burkert,
1987, p. 41 Hutton, 1999, p. 59 Pike, 1871). In the
late-nineteenth century, it was believed that the god
Mithras was crucified like Christ, a concept that has
since been debunked (Burkert, 1987). In one of Jung’s
fantasies, he is accompanied by Elijah and Salome,
and he describes a torturous bodily sensation in which
he assumes the position of the crucified Christ, with
a serpent coiled around his body and his face taking
on the countenance of a lion, blending Christian and
Mithraic symbolism. Salome tells him, ‘You are Christ’,
and then the serpent squeezes his body and his blood
spills down the mountainside (Jung, 2020, vol. 2, p.
195). In writing this down, though, Jung realised that
hypnosis through crystal gazing was at play.
The Black Books contain much material that Jung did
not include in The Red Book, which is explored in this
author’s second study (Brunet, 2024). These additions
include conversations with many different inner
characters, and extensive ones with his soul that begin
amicably but then develop into something like an
ongoing domestic argument. This inner multiplicity,
which Jung (2001) later realised, is one of the
psychological sequelae commonly found in survivors
of ritual abuse. Woven through the journals are his
concerns over his affair with Toni Wolff, and this,
too, seems to have its basis in one of the mystery plays
where he is told by a figure dressed as a Turk that he
is a sick child and that women can bring him healing.
Then, for three years, he struggles with the problem
of dark magic in these fantasies, eventually realising
that it was all meaningless and of no use to him. He
also grapples with vanity, ambition and the question
of whether to become a cult leader, and it transpires
that the creation of The Red Book was not only for his
own healing but was also to become a holy book for a
new religion. However, he rejects this role and decides
not to publish it. By Black Book 6, Jung presses his soul
to provide a glimpse into what all of this is about. She
answers with a series of questions: ‘Temples in deserts?
Secret societies? Ceremonies? Rituals? Colorful robes?
Golden images of Gods of terrible aspect?’ (Jung, 2020,
vol. 6, p. 268). This answer, along with many other
details, helps to corroborate the thesis that Jung’s active
imagination is closely associated with the rituals of the
secret societies.
William Golding (1911–1993)
This author’s current study focuses on the work of
the English novelist William Golding, author of
the internationally taught text Lord of the Flies. He
wrote twelve novels in total, but while the story lines
are fascinating, there are often many unfathomable
elements within them (Barker, 2022). Golding is
another famous author who had inexplicable and
terrifying childhood experiences. These experiences
related to the old cellars in his family home at 29 The
Green, Marlborough, in England.
Frightened by spiders and other crawling things, the
dark and anything supernatural, he was left with panic
attacks, phobias and dreadful nightmares that plagued
him into old age. To control the fear, he drank (Carey,
2012). As stated earlier, reports of children undergoing
frightening ordeals in spaces like cellars or basements
appear in the literature of ritual abuse. For example,
Australian medical doctor Cathy Kezelman (2010)
recounted her terrifying childhood experiences in her
grandmother’s cellar, where adults in robes, whom
she called The Cloaks, performed strange rituals. A
recent report on ritual abuse in the United Kingdom
acknowledges that these practices have been a reality
within British culture and are often perpetrated within
family networks (Hanson, 2025).
The maternal side of Golding’s family came from
Cornwall, an area of England known for its folk
beliefs, witchcraft and magic practices (Carey, 2012).
His mother, Mildred Golding née Curnoe, passed on
these beliefs to him through ghost stories and other
frightening tales. Golding was born in Newquay and
spent his first years in his grandmother’s house she was
Mary Curnoe, and he described her as ‘fierce, mean
and dangerous’ (Carey 2012, p. 4). His grandfather,
Thomas Curnoe, died before he was born, although he
was of most interest to Golding. He was a Freemason,
but from all accounts, a wild and immoral man
(Golding, 2012, p. 53). This set of grandparents had
a reputation for domestic violence, so much so that it
was said that they would have murdered each other
had they lived too long together. His grandfather was a
mining engineer, and his solution to this domestication
situation was to follow the gold rush trail around the
globe (Carey, 2012).