Evil: The Shadow Side of Reality

Ego-Centered and Divine Perspectives on Evil

What counts as good or evil is relative to the observer’s standpoint—egocentric, feeling-based, or divine—and psychology’s distinction between ego and Self illuminates why a broader, God-like perspective on good and evil is both possible and necessary.

• Good and evil are initially relative to the perspective of the observer: what one creature regards as good, another regards as evil, as illustrated by the gardener who kills the gopher that was merely feeding itself.
  • The Puritan divines celebrated the epidemic of 1616–1619 that devastated native Indians as God’s providential preparation for the Chosen People, while the Indians experienced the same event as a catastrophic evil.
  • The ancient Chinese philosopher Chu Hsi taught that nature itself is beyond good and evil, which are terms applied only according to advantage or injury to oneself.
• Theology insists there must be a Divine or Absolute standpoint about good and evil beyond the ego’s relativism, because without it any atrocity can be self-servingly justified—as when Nazi Germany declared its cause righteous.
  • In war, each side routinely claims God is on its side, demonstrating that pure egocentric relativism provides no moral check.
  • The Koran’s story of Moses and Khidr illustrates a Divine perspective: Khidr sinks boats, kills a young man, and collapses a wall, all of which appear evil to Moses but are revealed to serve hidden goods.
• Jung’s distinction between the ego (center of conscious personality) and the Self (center of the total personality) provides a psychological analogue to the theological distinction between egocentric and divine viewpoints on good and evil.
  • The ego views events from a limited, self-serving standpoint, while the Self corresponds to what religion calls the ‘Christ-personality’ or the divine viewpoint.
  • Psychotherapy shifts the conscious standpoint from egocentricity to the larger viewpoint of the Self, just as religion attempts to relate the ego to God.
• The feeling function—Jung’s name for the psychological capacity to make value judgments—is essential in the struggle against moral evil, and its devaluation in the modern Western world increases human susceptibility to evil.
  • A person with a poorly developed feeling function does not react to situations with appropriately human value judgments and is more likely to become an instrument of evil.
  • The atrocities of Nazi Germany exemplify what happens when collective feeling responses are absent or suppressed.
  • Paradoxically, evil is necessary for the development of the feeling function—without evil there would be no feeling reactions, suggesting evil may be necessary for human completeness.
• Dreams express the standpoint of the Self rather than the ego and therefore serve as a corrective lens through which egocentric misidentifications of good and evil can be challenged and revised.
  • A young Nazi aviator underwent Jungian analysis for hysterical color blindness; his dreams showed Hitler with blood-dripping hands while his underground-member sister appeared as a saint, turning his worldview upside down.
  • A recovered alcoholic’s dream of intercourse with a ‘great con man’ revealed that by silently returning an erased tape she had ‘become possessed by her lying side,’ prompting her to confess.

The Problem of Evil in Mythology

A survey of world mythologies—Egyptian, Norse, Persian, Greek, and American Indian—reveals that cultures universally personify evil as an autonomous power, and that the more a culture emphasizes a purely good deity, the more inevitably a distinct evil deity emerges as its dark counterpart.

• Primitive mythology’s personification of evil as autonomous spiritual forces is psychologically more accurate than modern rationalism’s denial of evil’s reality, because both mythology and depth psychology agree that autonomous psychic factors beyond conscious control shape human fate.
  • The Elgonyi tribe Jung lived with in Africa maintained daytime optimism about a beautiful Creator, but at sunset shifted to fear of evil spirits—an unselfconscious acknowledgment of evil’s reality.
  • “Morton Kelsey argues that secular materialism must deny the principle of destructiveness because it is neither rational nor material, requiring a painful overhaul of the whole worldview.” —Morton T. Kelsey
• In Egyptian, Norse, and Persian mythologies, an evil deity is paired against a good deity—Set vs. Osiris, Loki vs. Baldur, Ahriman vs. Ahura-Mazda—and the Persian dualism of Zoroastrianism most sharply foreshadows Christian conceptions of the devil.
  • Set plots to destroy the good Osiris by tricking him into a chest and casting it into the sea, then dismembering his body—a pattern repeated across many mythologies.
  • The New Testament name Beelzebub (’lord of the flies’) derives from lore about Ahriman, who was said to have entered the world as a fly, demonstrating direct Persian influence on Christian demonology.
• Greek mythology avoided a single evil deity because no Greek god was purely good; each deity was capable of both benefit and harm, so there was no need for a devil to serve as the source of evil.
  • The Greek gods are petty, jealous, and self-seeking, capable of showering blessings or wreaking destruction depending largely on whether their worship has been attended to.
  • Only Asklepius (a mortal become deity) and the Titan Prometheus genuinely concerned themselves with human welfare—rare exceptions in a pantheon largely indifferent to mankind.
• American Indian mythology lacks a figure equivalent to the Christian devil because Indian culture was primarily a shame culture rather than a sin culture, regulating behavior through communal ostracism rather than through a deity who defines sin.
  • The Trickster figure (Coyote, Raven, Wakdjunkaga) is morally inferior and mischievous but lacks the concentrated malevolent will of the Christian devil, typically causing harm through foolishness rather than deliberate evil.
  • To represent humanity’s dual nature, Indians often painted their faces white on one side and black on the other for religious ceremonies—an externalization of inner duality rather than projection onto a separate evil being.
• Psychology corroborates mythology’s finding that the more one-sidedly a culture emphasizes goodness and light, the more inevitably a dark compensating force accumulates—trying to be better than we naturally are engenders the opposite reaction in the unconscious.
  • It is precisely when Isis favors Osiris and despises Set that Set destroys Osiris; when the gods try to make Baldur invulnerable, Loki immediately succeeds in killing him.
  • Psychology urges not a forced goodness but consciousness—living from an inner Center that keeps balance, so that moral values are grounded in self-knowledge rather than ideals we cannot keep.

The Problem of Evil in the Old Testament

In the Old Testament, Yahweh Himself is the source of both good and evil, Satan playing only a minor role in four late texts; this bold monotheism reflects a psychologically honest recognition of God’s dark side, which corresponds to the Self’s capacity to act as an adversary when humans persist in wrong directions.

• Satan appears in only four Old Testament passages, all post-exilic, and in none of them is he a fully autonomous adversary of God; in the Old Testament it is Yahweh Himself who is responsible for evil.
  • Isaiah 45:5-7 states explicitly: ‘I form the light, and create darkness: I make peace, and create evil; I the Lord do all these things.’
  • In 1 Samuel 18:10 an evil spirit that seizes Saul and drives him to hurl a spear at David is said to come ‘from God’—an attribution the New Testament would assign to Satan.
  • In the Book of Job, Satan is one of the ‘sons of God’ in God’s own court, functioning as a dark, doubting thought within God Himself rather than as an independent opponent.
• The Old Testament’s unflinching attribution of both good and evil to Yahweh represents an integrity of monotheism that Aurobindo also affirmed: to look existence in the face is to look God in the face, and the discords of the world are God’s discords.
  • “Aurobindo argued that blaming evil on a devil, or treating nature as independent of God, or blaming man’s sin, are ‘clumsily comfortable devices’ that avoid the courage of accepting that God made the world as it is.” —Aurobindo
  • Sanford notes that while this view may offend sophisticated religious sensibilities, a God who sends both good and evil presents a more honest monotheism than one cleansed of all darkness.
• The Hebrew word satan in its original secular usage means ‘one who hinders free forward movement’ or ‘an adversary,’ and the Old Testament shows that even Yahweh can act as a satan to humans—as in the story of Balaam—blocking the wrong path to force a confrontation with divine will.
  • In Numbers 22 the angel of Yahweh stands in Balaam’s path as a satan, and the text literally says Yahweh stood in Balaam’s way as a satan unto him—the divine itself becoming an adversary.
  • Balaam’s donkey, representing healthy instinctual life, sees the angel and turns aside before Balaam does; had he not heeded her, Balaam would have been destroyed.
• From a Jungian perspective, Yahweh in the Old Testament personifies the archetype of the Self, whose dark side confronts those who persist in wrong directions with illness, neurosis, or destruction—but whose ultimate purpose is to force a higher consciousness.
  • The dark side of the Self manifests as neurotic disturbances, physical illness, accidents, psychoses, and compulsions whenever the ego persists in attitudes contrary to the Self’s demand for wholeness.
  • Jung once said we do not cure a neurosis—it cures us—meaning the painful symptoms produced by the Self’s dark side are attempts to cure a wrong direction in life, not arbitrary punishments.
  • Balaam’s conversation with the angel—analogous to active imagination or dream dialogue—resulted in a realignment of his will with the Divine Will, raising his level of consciousness.

The Role of the Devil and Evil in the New Testament

The New Testament presents two distinct and incompatible theologies of evil: the Gospels’ ‘monistic’ view in which evil serves an overarching Divine Purpose, and the later dualistic Antichrist doctrine of Revelation, which reflects an unresolved split in the early Christian psyche.

• Between the Old Testament and the Gospels a dramatic transformation occurred: Satan, nearly absent in the Hebrew Bible, becomes a conspicuous figure in the New Testament, reflecting the post-exilic development of Jewish demonology possibly influenced by Babylonian contact.
  • In the Gospels Satan has many names: Satan (35 times), diabolos/devil (37 times), Beelzebub (’lord of the flies’), and ‘Prince of this world’ in John’s Gospel.
  • The Greek word diabolos literally means ’to throw across’—the devil throws obstacles across the human path—corresponding closely to the Hebrew satan as ‘one who hinders free forward movement.’
• Jesus treats evil as an inevitable and necessary part of creation without explaining its origin, implying a ‘monistic’ view in which even evil ultimately serves a Divine Purpose—as expressed in his parable of the wheat and tares, which are permitted to grow together until harvest.
  • In Matthew 5:45 Jesus notes that God causes the sun to rise and rain to fall on bad men as well as good—an image of God permitting evil to coexist with good rather than eliminating it.
  • Jesus’ paradoxical warning in Matthew 18:7—‘Obstacles indeed there must be, but alas for the man who provides them’—acknowledges evil’s necessity while insisting it remains catastrophic for individuals who embody it.
• Psychology supports the Gospels’ view that evil is necessary: without a power that opposes wholeness, the developmental process of individuation—and therefore the growth of human consciousness—would be impossible.
  • The ego is a ‘sleepy bear who prefers to hibernate’; it is only when people encounter evil in some form—pain, loss of meaning, threat—that they are driven toward consciousness.
  • “Goethe’s Mephistopheles complains that without him nothing would ever happen in the world yet people do not appreciate him—he is ‘part of that force which would do evil, yet forever works the good.’” —Mephistopheles
  • Can there be a just life without injustice? True freedom without temptation? Soul-building without adversity? These rhetorical questions suggest evil is structurally necessary for moral and spiritual development.
• The Book of Revelation and Second Thessalonians introduce an Antichrist doctrine representing outright Dualism—a total divorce of evil from any Divine Purpose—which is not found in the Gospels or Paul’s earliest letters and which scholar Victor Maag judges to be non-Christian in origin.
  • Revelation promises salvation to only 144,000 people who have kept their virginity and never lied—a standard so impossibly high that man’s own goodness rather than Christ’s Cross becomes the instrument of salvation.
  • Victor Maag traces the main ideas of Revelation and Second Thessalonians to Jewish pseudepigrapha and apocrypha resembling Zoroastrian dualism, and notes that both Luther and Zwingli regarded Revelation as ’not a Christian book.’
• The Antichrist doctrine’s extremism reflects a psychological split in the early Church’s attitude toward evil, analogous to the unresolved tension between ego and Shadow in individual psychology—a split projected onto the metaphysical plane.
  • The condemnation of Origen at the Council of Constantinople in 553 for teaching the devil’s eventual redemption chose Zoroastrian dualism over the monistic Gospel view, establishing a split that has characterized mainstream Christianity ever since.
  • Hindu philosophy offers a contrast: it treats good and evil as illusions in God and saves the soul through divorce from ego desires rather than through moral combat against an evil principle, resulting in a radically different psychological orientation.

The Shadow

The Shadow is the inevitable dark side of the personality—those qualities excluded for the sake of the ego ideal—and its unrecognized projection onto others is a primary engine of social evil, while its conscious recognition is essential for genuine moral development and individuation.

• The Shadow is not an accident but an archetype—a universal and inevitable dimension of personality that arises whenever a conscious ego ideal is formed, because any positive identification necessarily excludes an opposite that accumulates in the unconscious.
  • “Edward Whitmont defines the shadow as ’that part of the personality which has been repressed for the sake of the ego ideal.’” —Edward C. Whitmont
  • The Ten Commandments themselves presuppose the Shadow: they would be unnecessary unless the forbidden behaviors—killing, stealing, adultery—were genuine tendencies present in human nature.
• The Shadow appears in dreams as a feared or disliked figure of the same sex, contains the unlived life and vital energies denied to consciousness, and may carry valuable qualities—including healthy anger, sexual vitality, cunning self-protection, and humor—that are needed for a complete personality.
  • In Goethe’s Faust, Professor Faust’s deal with Mephistopheles to live out his unlived life of feeling, eros, and power symbolizes how the shadow personality contains the unused energies that can restore vitality when mid-life energies run dry.
  • Analysis of humor reveals that it is usually the Shadow who laughs—humor harmlessly releases shadow content, which is why people with overly repressed Shadows tend to lack a sense of humor and become judgmental.
  • Jesus’ admonition to ‘be wise as serpents and harmless as doves’ suggests that being in touch with one’s own cunning shadow protects against being exploited by others’ craftiness.
• Projection is the primary danger of an unrecognized Shadow: the unacknowledged dark side of the self is attributed to other people, groups, or races, generating hatred, prejudice, and the atrocities of war.
  • Racial prejudice operates through shadow projection: Blacks carry the shadow projection of Whites and vice versa; Jews for Gentiles and Gentiles for Jews—blind prejudice that precludes genuine relationship.
  • The Nazis, identified with Aryan superiority, projected their own inferior qualities onto Jews, leading to Buchenwald and Dachau—an extreme case of unrecognized collective Shadow turned destructive.
  • War institutionalizes shadow projection by requiring soldiers to depersonalize the enemy as ‘huns’ or ‘gooks’—a psychic necessity for killing—while permitting at the front what would be called psychopathology at home.
• The collective Shadow operates at the national and cultural level: a group’s ego ideal generates a corresponding collective Shadow that is experienced as persecution by those onto whom it is projected, as the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny generated a collective Shadow experienced by Native Americans.
  • The United States’ collective ego ideal of Manifest Destiny—the white man’s right to the continent—created a collective Shadow expressed in the near-extermination of Native Americans, as ruthless as the Nazi attempt to exterminate Jews.
  • Religious institutions are especially susceptible to collective Shadow projection: the more rigidly people hold dogmatic beliefs, the more they project their Shadow onto members of other religious groups, producing pogroms, Inquisitions, and beheadings in Christ’s name.
• The key to dealing with the Shadow is not repression (which only drives it underground) nor license (which identifies ego with Shadow), but conscious recognition—acknowledging as one’s own the specific dark qualities that emerge in slips of the tongue, humor, fantasies, and other people’s objections.
  • “The King in Shakespeare’s The Tempest models the necessary attitude toward the repulsive Caliban: ‘This thing of darkness I acknowledge mine.’” —King Prospero
  • In John Knowles’ A Separate Peace, unrecognized jealousy causes a boy to unconsciously jostle the branch on which his athletic friend stands, causing a fatal fall—illustrating how the unrecognized Shadow acts autonomously to produce harm.
  • False guilt (feeling bad about the wrong things) is crippling, but shouldering appropriate responsibility for one’s real imperfections deepens and enhances personality.
• A genuinely individual morality—more effective than collective moral codes—requires self-knowledge of one’s Shadow, because moral values are only operative within the range of consciousness; where unconsciousness prevails, the Shadow remains autonomous and unrelated to the rest of the personality.
  • “St. Paul’s confession in Romans 7—‘I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate’—describes precisely the split between the ego ideal and the Shadow.” —St. Paul
  • The General Confession in the 1928 Episcopal Book of Common Prayer—‘We have done those things which we ought not to have done; And there is no health in us’—is a collective acknowledgment that the Shadow exists, though it does not lead to its specific recognition.

Jesus, Paul, and the Shadow

Jesus’ teaching calls for the growth of psychological consciousness and honest confrontation with one’s dual nature, while Paul’s ethic demands a one-sided identification with goodness and repression of the Shadow—a difference that explains much of the Church’s failure to deal creatively with evil.

• The persona—the mask we wear before the world—has a legitimate function as the organ through which we express certain things to others, but identification with the persona leads to inauthenticity, loss of Shadow awareness, and the compensatory eruption of repressed darkness.
  • When others hand us a persona to adopt—as congregations hand clergy the persona of goodness and self-mastery—accepting it as our own moulds conscious personality after an external ideal rather than inner truth.
  • Thayer Greene notes that the ancient stage mask (persona) was not used to conceal actors’ identities but to help them express the personalities they depicted—the persona can serve authentic expression, not only concealment.
• Jesus demonstrated active awareness of the persona and spoke against it: when addressed as ‘Good Master’ he returned the persona immediately, and his comparison of the Pharisees to ‘whitewashed tombs’ explicitly names persona identification as spiritually dangerous hypocrisy.
  • Jesus’ retort to the rich young man—‘Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone’—is a direct refusal to accept the flattering persona being offered him.
  • The ‘whitewashed tombs’ image names the precise psychological mechanism: the outer persona looks handsome while inside are ‘dead men’s bones and every kind of corruption’—the unacknowledged Shadow.
• Paul, despite showing psychological insight into his own duality in Romans 7, refused to accept his Shadow as a legitimate part of himself—calling it ‘sin living in me’ rather than his own nature—and then systematically pressured his congregations to do the same through a collective persona of goodness.
  • Paul’s wish in Galatians 5:12 that his circumcising enemies would accidentally castrate themselves—an explicit fantasy of vindictive revenge—stands in stark contradiction to his repeated admonitions that Christians show only love, patience, and forgiveness.
  • Paul’s ethic in Galatians 5 and Romans 12 calls Christians to identify exclusively with ’love, joy, peace, patience, kindness’ while treating anger, sexual desire, and erotic feelings as intrinsically evil—an impossible demand that creates a collective persona.
• Paul’s rejection of emotions as evil reflects a psychological Gnosticism: though he repudiated Gnostic theology, his ethics identify the body and its passions with evil—an attitude that fragments personality by treating physiological-emotional reality as satanic.
  • Paul’s instruction to ‘forget about satisfying your bodies with all their cravings’ (Romans 13:14) and his view that sexuality is permissible only in marriage and ideally not at all (1 Corinthians 7) treat embodied life as essentially suspect.
  • “Sioux holy man Lame Deer offers a direct contrast: ‘Sinning makes the world go round. You can’t be so stuck up, so inhuman that you want to be pure… You have to be God and the devil, both of them. Being a good medicine man means being right in the midst of the turmoil.’” —Lame Deer
• Jesus’ parable of the Prodigal Son presents the shadow problem as the tension between the conforming elder son and the rebellious younger son, and suggests that salvation requires not the suppression of one by the other but a reconciliation—the moment the younger son ‘came to himself’ is the moment wholeness becomes possible.
  • The younger son’s reckless spending represents the acting out of the shadow personality, which leads to ruin; but his moment of self-awareness—‘he came to himself’—is the crucial turn toward psychological and spiritual healing.
  • The father’s attempt to reconcile the two hostile brothers through his own loving attitude symbolizes the possibility of an inner synthesis between the social-conforming side and the rebellious Shadow.
• Matthew 5:48’s call to be ‘perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ is a mistranslation of the Greek teleios, which means ‘brought to completion’—Jesus calls not for sinless purity but for wholeness, which necessarily includes the recognition and acceptance of the Shadow.
  • The Greek word teleios derives from telos (end, goal), related to teleology; the verse literally commands: ‘Be you therefore ones brought to completion even as your heavenly father is complete.’
  • The paradox in Luke 7:36-50—that the sinful woman who loved much was forgiven much, while the self-righteous Pharisee who had never sinned showed little love—encapsulates Jesus’ view that living one’s shadow may lead to greater capacity for love than never encountering it.
• Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor articulates the perennial temptation to substitute collective unconsciousness for the free but demanding ethic of Jesus—the Church, like the Grand Inquisitor, has repeatedly chosen Paul’s manageable collective goodness over Jesus’ demanding individual consciousness.
  • The Grand Inquisitor accuses Christ of having placed on mankind the impossible burden of freedom, which makes most people miserable; the Church ‘corrected’ this by relieving people of freedom in exchange for happiness and security.
  • Jesus’ way is a ’narrow gate’—only one person can pass through at a time—because the recognition of one’s personal Shadow and growth in consciousness is inherently individual, never collective or mass-produced.

The Problem of the Shadow and Evil in The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

Stevenson’s novelette—whose central mystery was provided directly by the unconscious through a dream—is a detailed psychological study of what happens when a person attempts to escape the tension of his dual nature through dissociation rather than integration, leading to progressive possession by an archetypal evil.

• The story’s archetypal quality—evidenced by the fact that ‘Jekyll and Hyde’ has entered common speech as a synonym for split personality—derives from the fact that Stevenson dreamed the central scene, receiving the plot directly from the unconscious as an expression of a universal human condition.
  • Stevenson describes his ‘Brownies’—unconscious dream-helpers who labor all night devising plots—as providing the scene of Hyde taking the powder and transforming before pursuers, the core mystery of the story.
  • The story’s lodgment in common imagination confirms the archetypal nature of the Shadow: people recognize Jekyll and Hyde within themselves even without personal insight into their own Shadow.
• Jekyll’s character embodies the archetypal problem: a naturally good man who also has a pleasurable, undignified side he regards with ‘morbid shame,’ he adopts a ‘grave countenance before the public’ and lives a ‘profound duplicity of life’—the classic persona-over-Shadow structure.
  • Jekyll correctly perceives that ‘man is not truly one, but truly two’ and hazards the conjecture that man is a ‘polity of multifarious, incongruous, and independent denizens’—psychological insight modern depth psychology corroborates.
  • Jekyll’s fundamental error is not his insight but what he does with it: rather than carrying the tension of his duality, he seeks to escape it by separating the two personalities entirely via the transforming drug.
• Hyde as shadow personality begins as personal darkness but rapidly contacts a deeper archetypal level of evil—his small, deformed appearance reflects the undeveloped shadow’s life in darkness, while his total absence of conscience enables an escalation from mischief to satanic murder.
  • Hyde’s youthfulness signals unlived energy: the Shadow contains the unlived life, and to touch the shadow personality is to receive an infusion of new, youthful energy—but energy without conscience.
  • When Jekyll first becomes Hyde he realizes he is ’tenfold more wicked, sold a slave to my original evil’—the personal Shadow has contacted a deeper archetypal stratum of pure destructiveness, culminating in the hellish murder of Sir Danvers Carew ‘for the pure joy of evil.’
• Jekyll’s attempt to resolve his duality by chemical dissociation rather than psychological integration fails catastrophically because: he assumes he can control evil at will, takes no real moral responsibility for Hyde’s actions, and the more dissociated Hyde becomes the stronger and more autonomous he grows.
  • Jekyll’s confident declaration ’the moment I choose, I can be rid of Mr. Hyde’ reflects a dangerous carelessness toward evil—frevel—that predisposes him toward possession.
  • Jekyll tells himself ‘it was Hyde, after all, and Hyde alone that was guilty’—a refusal of psychological responsibility that allows conscience to slumber and evil to strengthen unchecked.
  • Jung’s principle ‘we become what we do’ explains Jekyll’s demise: a deliberate decision to enact evil leads toward becoming evil, since archetypes have the capacity to possess the ego.
• The missing feminine in Stevenson’s story—every significant character is male; women are briefly mentioned only as evil, hysterical, or victimized—suggests that the feminine spirit that could have found a creative synthesis between the opposites was rendered inoperative, making Jekyll’s destruction inevitable.
  • The only feminine figures are an ’evil-faced’ old woman, a ‘hysterically whimpering’ maid, the trampled little girl, and Hyde himself described as ‘weeping like a woman or a lost soul’—all negative or passive.
  • The feminine principle, associated with an irrational capacity for synthesis, could have found a way around what the logical masculine mind declares is an insoluble opposition; its absence forecloses the possibility of wholeness.
• Mr. Utterson—the story’s human moral center—represents the feeling function at its best: his horror at evil and inability to rest until he knows what is happening provides the human consciousness that alone can serve as a container for evil and a safeguard against its complete takeover.
  • Every secret is propelled by inner forces toward human consciousness; Utterson’s tortured sleeplessness and compulsive investigation represent the unconscious’s drive to bring the Jekyll-Hyde secret into awareness.
  • Dr. Lanyon, by contrast, encountered evil too suddenly and without preparation—he ‘saw what I saw’ and his soul sickened unto death, showing that becoming conscious of evil requires gradual exposure and human support.
• Evil is ultimately self-destructive: Hyde, once Jekyll’s soul is completely possessed, destroys himself by suicide—confirming that evil can only exist by feeding on something good, and when it has consumed the good entirely, it too ceases to be.
  • Von Franz notes that the worst response to evil is appeasement—it simply strengthens evil, just as appeasing Chamberlain’s Hitler enlarged the evil in Europe, or as placating a demanding child strengthens its negative qualities.
  • Jung wrote that only two things protect the soul from evil’s power: a soul filled with a power greater than evil, or containment in a warm human community—isolation is the condition that most enables possession.

The Devil in Post-Biblical Mythology and Folklore

The post-biblical figure of Lucifer and the devil in popular folklore are psychological representations of the power drive of the ego and of repressed psychic contents—rejected pagan deities, the feminine, reason, and pleasure—whose ‘devilish’ character is relative and changes when they are integrated rather than repressed.

• The legend of Lucifer—built by the Church Fathers from Isaiah 14 and Luke 10:18—describes an archetypal split in the human psyche: an originally whole being whose pride and power drive led to expulsion from the divine realm, corresponding to the ego’s tendency to set itself up against the Self.
  • “Origen writes of Lucifer: ‘I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition’—framing the legend in terms of what happens when the ego refuses its proper relationship to God.” —Origen
  • The Talmudic version attributes Lucifer’s fall to jealousy of man: when God commanded all angels to bow before newly-created Adam, Satan refused and was cast out—a variation emphasizing the power drive as the core of the evil archetype.
• The devil’s mercifully quality in folklore—he always keeps his word while humans cheat him—suggests that repressed psychic contents have their own integrity, while the ego tends to evade the demands of genuine psychological integration.
  • In the Theophilus legend and Faust, the devil delivers what was promised but is ultimately outsmarted by Divine intervention—the angels distract Mephistopheles with rose petals and erotic cherubs at the moment Faust’s soul departs.
  • In devil-compact stories the human partner must sign in blood because his word is not reliable, while the devil’s verbal commitment is good—a curious inversion suggesting that the repressed unconscious is actually more trustworthy than conscious intentions.
• The devil’s association with repressed pagan deities—his cloven hoof from Pan, his horns from Dionysus and the old English horned god of Wicca, his eros from Aphrodite—demonstrates the principle that the gods of the old religion always become the devils of the new religion.
  • When Pope Innocent VIII issued a bull against Wicca in 1484 forcing the old English nature religion underground, the previously beneficent horned god reemerged as the devil—the rejected deity returning in sinister form.
  • Dionysus (ecstasy, abandonment to nature), Pan (wild nature), and Aphrodite (eros and sexual union) found no home in the Christian spirit and consequently reappeared in post-biblical art and folklore as demonic powers.
• The devil of post-biblical folklore is largely a relative evil—a personification of what has been repressed and split off—and can be redeemed by being freed from dissociation and won back to the whole, which is the deeper meaning of Origen’s unpopular teaching that the devil would ultimately be saved.
  • Origen argued that if the devil was not eventually redeemed, God’s original creation would not be whole—a teaching condemned as heresy at the Council of Constantinople in 553 but psychologically coherent as a statement about the necessity of integrating rejected psychic contents.
  • Jung argues that wholeness requires a shift from the Trinity to the Quaternity—the missing fourth being the devil, the feminine, or the inferior function, all representing what has been excluded from the too-light Christian God-image.
• The Christian rejection of the feminine spirit as devilish is illustrated in the post-biblical legend of Lilith—the first woman, cast out for refusing Adam’s authority and later becoming Satan’s wife and enemy of infants—a story of how the rejected feminine returns as a destructive dark power.
  • Jewish legend (the Alphabet of Ben Sira, the Talmud, Cabala) holds that Lilith was expelled from Eden for claiming equal rights with Adam, then joined the fallen angel Samael and conspired to drive Adam and Eve from the Garden through the serpent.
  • Though Lilith becomes the enemy of newborn children out of envy and revenge, the legend notes she did not always want to destroy them but only to embrace them—the rejected feminine turning malevolent, yet still expressing a need for love.
• A taxonomy of evil emerges from this survey: the dark side of the Self (purposeful though destructive), evil as necessary for individuation, the Shadow (relatively evil and redeemable), the ego’s power drive (Lucifer), and repressed psychic contents (the devil of folklore)—each a distinct experience requiring different responses.
  • Relative evil is apparent evil which under certain circumstances can be changed or is necessary for a higher good; intrinsic evil is pure destructiveness incapable of alteration from its evil state—the story of Jekyll and Hyde suggested that as dissociation increases, relative evil approaches the intrinsic form.
  • This taxonomy establishes that much of what we call evil is relative and can be transformed through conscious integration—but this does not permit complacency, since intrinsic or archetypal evil is also real and can possess and destroy a soul.

The Ontology of Evil

The early Church’s two competing theories of the Atonement both acknowledged evil’s reality; the doctrine of the privatio boni, properly understood as a statement about evil’s nature rather than its unreality, is defensible against Jung’s criticisms and compatible with his psychological insights, though both Jung and Christianity converge on the conclusion that evil’s ultimate defeat is bound up with the achievement of wholeness.

• The early Church’s primary theories of the Atonement—the ransom theory and the victory theory—both defined Christ’s saving work in terms of evil’s reality, showing that the reality of evil was so paramount to early Christians that Christology itself was formulated as a response to it.
  • The ransom theory (Origen, Gregory of Nyssa, Augustine, Gregory the Great) held that Christ’s death offered the devil a ransom for humanity’s soul, but since Christ was sinless the devil could not hold him—God used a ruse against an adversary who had himself used a ruse in Eden.
  • The victory theory held that Christ on the Cross vanquished the powers of evil in a cosmic struggle; it underlies Christian exorcism and the practice of ‘knocking on wood,’ which invokes the power of the Cross’s wood to dispel Satan.
  • Anselm’s satisfaction theory (Cur Deus Homo, 1033–1109) eventually displaced both by shifting the focus from the devil to God’s justice—indicating unease with giving evil so prominent a role in the Divine economy.
• Early Christian thinkers including Irenaeus, Origen, Lactantius, and Clement of Rome each argued that God deliberately allows evil because, without evil to struggle against, the human soul could not be developed, purged, or brought to its proper perfection.
  • “Irenaeus taught that the fall of man was a blessing essential to development: ‘The original destination of man was not abrogated by the fall, the truth rather being that the fall was intended as a means of leading men to attain this perfection to which they were destined.’” —Irenaeus
  • Clement of Rome described God as having two hands—a right (good) hand and a left (evil) hand—each executing the divine will, and Deuteronomy 32:39 (‘I will kill and I will make alive’) as evidence that both hands are God’s.
  • Clement adds an eschatological optimism similar to Origen’s: the Wicked One, having served God’s purpose to the end of the world, ‘can become good by a change in his composition.’
• The doctrine of the privatio boni—originating with Aristotle and elaborated by Origen, Basil of Caesarea, Augustine, and Aquinas—does not deny the reality of evil but defines its nature: evil has no substance in itself but exists only through the diminution or privation of the good.
  • “Augustine writes in the Confessions: ‘Evil was naught but a privation of good, until in the end it ceased to be altogether’—affirming both evil’s current reality and its ultimate cessation when God’s plan is fulfilled.” —St. Augustine
  • Basil of Caesarea states that evil is a privation of good that ‘arises from the mutilation of the soul,’ using Greek terms meaning ’loss’ and ‘maiming/disabling’—language that acknowledges real damage while denying evil any independent substance.
• Jung’s three objections to the privatio boni are: (1) it makes Christ one-sidedly light and demands a dark Antichrist as compensation; (2) it lulls mankind into false security by seemingly denying evil’s reality; (3) good and evil are logically equivalent opposites so that to affirm one is to affirm the other.
  • “Jung writes that ’the Christ-symbol lacks wholeness in the modern psychological sense, since it does not include the dark side of things but specifically excludes it in the form of a Luciferian opponent’—the excluded dark side returning autonomously as the Antichrist.” —C. G. Jung
  • “Jung argues in one of his letters: ‘On the practical level the privatio boni doctrine is morally dangerous, because it belittles and irrealizes Evil and thereby weakens the Good… if Evil is an illusion, Good is necessarily illusory too.’” —C. G. Jung
  • Jung describes the Self as ‘a union of opposites par excellence’ where ’light and shadow form a paradoxical unity’—in contrast to a Christ-symbol that represents only good while its opposite the devil represents only evil.
• These objections can be answered: the privatio boni does not deny evil’s reality but defines its nature; good and evil are not logically equivalent because they are defined in terms of a norm (wholeness) that can be thought without its opposite; and the Self includes what was formerly ‘devilish’ not as intrinsic evil but as previously rejected contents now integrated into wholeness.
  • H. L. Philp and Allan Anderson argue that not all qualities require their logical opposite: good and evil are defined in terms of a norm—the higher good of wholeness—just as health can be conceived without requiring illness as its logical equivalent.
  • The I Ching’s Hexagram 23 (Po—Splitting Apart) states: ‘Evil is not destructive to the good alone but inevitably destroys itself as well. For evil, which lives solely by negation, cannot continue to exist on its own strength alone.’
  • “Augustine’s formulation in Contra adversarium supports this: ‘There can be no evil things without good. For if evils cause no damage to anything, they are not evils; if they damage something, they diminish its goodness… And so there will be no evil by which it can be damaged, since there is then no nature left whose goodness any damage can diminish.’” —St. Augustine
• Jung and the Christian tradition are ultimately closer than their apparent disagreement suggests: Jung’s own interview statement that ‘as long as Satan is not integrated, the world is not healed and man is not saved’ and his treatment of God as ‘cosmogonic love’ (quoting 1 Corinthians 13) align with a Summum Bonum theology, not with the enthronement of absolute evil.
  • “At the 1952 Eranos Conference Jung stated: ‘I am strongly convinced that the evil principle prevailing in this world leads the unrecognized spiritual need into perdition… This is done by means of a very complicated symbolic process which is more or less identical with the psychological process of individuation.’” —C. G. Jung
  • Jung writes in his autobiography that in the sentence ‘God is love’ the words ‘affirm the complexio oppositorum of the Godhead’—and notably does not insist that to affirm divine love requires also affirming divine hate as a logical equivalent.
  • “In Aion Jung argues that Lucifer, by rebelling against God, ‘became the active principle of a creation which opposed to God a counter-will of its own. Because God willed this… Had he not done so, he would have created nothing but a machine, and then the incarnation and the redemption would never have come about’—closely paralleling Irenaeus’ theology of the felix culpa.” —C. G. Jung
• The Resurrection as a symbol of the ultimate indestructibility of wholeness represents the Christian tradition’s basic optimism: evil may seem to destroy the good, but wholeness cannot be permanently undone—a claim that has its psychological correlate in the relative invulnerability of a soul centered in the Self.
  • On the psychological level, when a person is centered in the Self there is a protection against evil—not because human nature is good or the world is perfectible, but because the Self is supported by a more-than-human strength.
  • “Nicholas Berdyaev’s paradox captures the final state of the argument: ‘It is equally true that a dark source of evil exists in the world and that in the final sense of the word there is no evil’—a statement that matches the privatio boni’s conclusion.” —Nicholas Berdyaev
  • The conventional Christian stance must be significantly altered by Jung’s work: not by enthroning intrinsic evil in the Godhead, but by accepting the necessity of evil, attempting to transform it, and integrating into conscious life all that has been rejected, repressed, and thereby made devilish.