For over two thousand years the figure of Satan, both as a theme of
poetico-religious thinking and artistic creation and as a mythologem, has been
a constant expression of the psyche, having its source in the unconscious
evolution of “metaphysical” images. We should go very wrong in our
judgment if we assumed that ideas such as this derive from rationalistic
thinking. All the old ideas of God, indeed thought itself, and particularly
numinous thought, have their origin in experience. Primitive man does not
think his thoughts, they simply appear in his mind. Purposive and directed
thinking is a relatively late human achievement. The numinous image is far
more an expression of essentially unconscious processes than a product of
rational inference. Consequently it falls into the category of psychological
objects, and this raises the question of the underlying psychological
assumptions. We have to imagine a millennial process of symbol-formation
which presses towards consciousness, beginning in the darkness of prehistory
with primordial or archetypal images, and gradually developing and
differentiating these images into conscious creations. The history of religion
in the West can be taken as an illustration of this: I mean the historical
development of dogma, which also includes the figure of Satan. One of the
best-known archetypes, lost in the grey mists of antiquity, is the triad of gods.