Archetypal Analysis, The Devil Pattern and the Patriarchy

This section may read condensed without the primary material.

The spiritual emergence that happened in 2015 was not sudden in essence, even if it appeared that way. In essence it was the point toward which everything in my inner life had been quietly moving. My inner world came into sharp focus, and I started to glimpse into one continuous experiential pattern.

Memories, feelings, and dreams that I had mostly treated as background noise suddenly became central, as the reality I had literally dreamt of in 2010 began to take shape around me. It felt as if reality as I knew it until then had shattered. I felt compelled to try to answer the question of God's existence for myself. Completely unaware of what I was setting in motion, I aligned myself with actions that honored my innate sense of integrity of self and refused what violated it, while remaining fair to the possibility of a hypothetical loving God out of principle. That alignment was not intellectual or merely moral but existential.

Fragments I'd carried my entire life began connecting into a coherent whole, and I found myself immersed in what I understood as God - an experience of overwhelming clarity, unity, and love, where everything felt like a paradox while nothing was a paradox - the paradox of paradoxes as I thought to myself then.

I do not see my experience as predetermined in any way, but merely a display of the relationship between cause and effect at the level of experience operating through agency. Unbeknownst to me, I aligned with love for Self and love for Other (God in this case), by refusing to compromise my inner truth. It was the culmination of a practice of awareness directed toward existential honesty, where my choice of authentic selfhood over the paralysing grip of inherited fear and dogma, while remaining fair to the possibility of a loving God would resolve the conflict between the inner reality I experienced and the cultural/societal expectations around faith.

I can easily see how such an experience could turn into full-blown psychosis. Even without crossing that line, it can certainly appear that way from the outside. After my experience, my vocabulary narrowed almost entirely to three words: Love, Truth, Light.

I saw them as both ethical and structural, and I was aware they were a compression of a more complex articulation, but short of relaying the experiential patterns in the entirety of my experience which meant pretty much my entire life, that was all I could speak when trying to describe what I had lived through. Add the word God and it sounds like a recipe for social disaster.

And while I knew that I hadn't lost touch with reality, I still faced the impossible question: how could I convince others I wasn't mad when, short of laying out all the patterns I could see in my experience, I could barely say anything beyond love, truth, light? I could see why these concepts mattered, but I couldn't yet articulate them in any reasonable way.

A short month later, I met A. - the very man I had literally dreamt of a decade before, and grown up labelling the Devil. It was very easy to place the devil label onto a figure belonging to what you believe to be mere nightmares. Even if I was aware that it was an assumption and not truth, my reality was that I was scared in those dreams, and he was the man from two of those dreams.

When I met him however, I felt it would be too heavy and unfair to impose that label onto someone who'd done nothing wrong. At the same time, I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with what cultures call God. In this context and newfound reality, encountering what cultures call the Devil no longer seemed entirely irrational.

A.'s presence lit up a cluster of patterns that I later found described in Jungian terms as archetypal ways in which consciousness organises experience - structural, affective, symbolic and relational patterns gathered around a single axis: God-Devil compressed Love-Fear, Truth-Distortion, Light-Dark, Trust-Control, Self-Erasure of Self. 

Jungian psychology was essential in helping me recognise experiential and archetypal structures, but from what I experienced, shadow seems to be less about repression within Self and more about experiential patterns consciousness has not yet integrated into coherence. 

Furthermore, what happened with A. was in no way me projecting the Devil onto him, nor do I see A. as evil - not then, and not now.

I'd been aware and working through my relationship with the Devil archetype/symbol long before we met. I was able to do so because of one particular contrast I'd observed. I'd never had a physical type when it came to men - except for one very specific aesthetic: a particular combination of features A. fit into. I noticed how when I'd encounter men who closely resembled this particular configuration, I'd feel an instinctive aversion that struck me as odd. My attraction had never been based on physical characteristics, so such strong feelings based on appearance seemed unusual to me given my consistent pattern of behavior. The question of why this particular type arose. It wasn't long until I was able to connect the type with the dreams.

It then took me some more time to unpack what these feelings were about: attraction combined with fear, and shame. The shame was a defense against acknowledging the attraction - which, through years of dreams featuring this type around whom I felt fear, I'd learned to associate with something dark and dangerous. I'd even resolved the shame and part of my fear by the time I met him. Shortly before we met I nearly got involved with someone the same type. It didn't end up happening, although for completely unrelated reasons.

When I met A., the pattern didn't activate because I projected it onto him. I did not impose the symbol onto him, but merely recognised it as a possibility. Projection would mean I made him into something he wasn't, and that projection never happened. I simply encountered in reality a person I'd dreamt of years before, onto whom I had grown up applying the Devil label. The activation was structural and existential. He wasn't someone who merely resembled an internal pattern but the actual figure from two nightmares that came true in precise detail years later - dreams I grew up associating with this symbol.

When I met him, and before having any awareness of our interactions in the dream, I actually didn't see the Devil. We connected over shared values, which sparked an attraction. Then, when the memory of the dream, and associated fear arose, it seemed too on the nose for me. I'd just experienced what felt like alignment with fundamental coherence, and now someone was triggering my oldest fear pattern?

It seemed too convenient and narratively neat. I thought: what are the odds I'd 'find God' and then immediately encounter 'the Devil' symbol - a symbol associated with a figure I didn't even believe in? The timing made me skeptical. I didn't dismiss the possibility, but I wasn't going to project it onto him, because the symmetry/asymmetry itself seemed too suspicious to me. 

I allowed it to co-exist with the other hypothesis - the devil existed alongside the self hypothesis. Both hypotheses emerged from the structure of the 2003 dream where I'd gone back and forth between these two poles.

The day before the dream I had in 2003, I'd been searching for information on tantric sex and could only find relevant material in an article about twin flames. I felt the love implied by the twin soul concept was lovely, but I discarded and dismissed the concept itself as a myth. 

That same night, I dreamt the first encounter with A., twelve years before it happened in eerie detail. In the dream, I'd gone back and forth between 'is he the other half of my soul', or 'is he the devil'?

Then, when I first met him in 2015, certain details felt too specific to dismiss. I saw someone whose values, language, and way of being, appeared to mirror my own, so I held both as possibilities without committing to either.

The Self hypothesis was based on actual observable data. I considered that whatever was true would hold equal value to me. Ironically, I had more evidence for a shared soul, than I did for him as the vehicle for the Devil archetype. I, however, allowed both hypotheses to run side by side. While I loved the idea of that kind of connection, it was also a hypothesis that came with 'Devil' as its contrasting pole. You know that saying 'The Devil doesn't come wearing horns and a red cape, but as everything you ever wished for'? I simply stayed open.

The first thing we connected over was our view on stereotypes - something I felt strongly about, and his statements shared the same conviction. Then, his unprompted use of words like 'unfair' and 'freedom' also struck me. They appeared to carry the same moral weight they held in my own vocabulary. When I invited him to correct my grammar after he complemented my English, his manner of engaging with it had me consider the same relationship with language as I had - precise, careful, weighted. Even his relationship with the very concept of reality resonated with my own. He seemed to engage with the world through the same philosophical lens. Then, based on words he shared with me that night, I was also able to see that people had also independently described our temperaments using virtually identical phrases: him as 'very chill', 'living on a cloud'; me as 'so calm I'll live to a hundred', 'living on a cloud'. Without me sharing my observations, he even remarked that we are very similar.

Then there was what I experienced as synergetic movement between our consciousnesses which was entirely new to me and not something I'd ever considered to look for, or that I could encounter. It was the first time in my life I felt to use the word synergy, a word whose use he reacted to, in what felt like recognition. The synergetic experience felt structural, like two awareness systems recognising similar patterning in each other, bouncing off of each other where even the silent moments felt pleasurably intense yet comfortable.

I couldn't help but observe what to me seemed like an unusual high degree of structural resonance - similar natural orientations, similar values, temperaments, interests, similar ways of organising experience. Later, learning he explicitly identified with human rights values, his training in philosophy and politics, his professional background, his seeming love of words and wordplay, confirmed that my perception of him, at least in these respects seemed to have been accurate. 

The structure of our shared experience seemed to point in that direction as well.

The polarity in the structure of the second time we met, where his reality was a complete inversion of mine. His seemed to be filtered through fear whereas mine was filtered through love. My attempts at inclusion, seemed to register to him as othering. I'd try to talk about my spiritual experience as a way to provide context for my reasoning, wanting to show him why I believed we may share/have the same soul, and he'd hear religious prejudice. Because I was far from having processed my experience, short of laying out the patterns and structure in my experience I didn't know how else to express what I needed from him in order to feel safe without offending him. Nor did I know how else to explain to him, why I believed we share the same consciousness. 

It seemed like the archetypes had taken over our communication that night - Love and Fear, Self and Other, Fair and Unfair in direct communication to one another. I understood Love and Fear as two sides of the same coin during my spiritual emergence, but it was much later that I would get to understand them as two poles of the same underlying field of reality: love vs fear, god vs devil, self vs other/erasure, belonging vs exclusion, fair vs unfair.

Despite all of this, I, treaded carefully and didn't let go of the Devil hypothesis, especially given his ambiguity, and in absence of any confirmation from him. The Devil as contrast made it a safety issue for me, and I worried it would be premature to simply settle on the Self hypothesis, before I fully understood the presence of the Devil.

I wasn't entirely sure what I was supposed to fear exactly, but I observed that the feelings and fears I was associating with the Devil symbol were around control, deception and manipulation through concealment of reality/truth. Despite awareness of the association I was making between these feelings and the symbol, I had yet to understand its exact roots and map it onto my reality.

I used to assign the Devil symbol in my experience to individual agency rather than see it as a systemic pattern. I didn't grasp why the Devil symbol was encoding the feelings I was associating in relation to it, beyond what seemed to be a normal cultural association with the symbol. I didn't make the association with patriarchy because the Devil didn't encode physical or sexual violence - the most obvious patriarchal patterns I would have expected. 

I wasn't naive when it came to how patriarchy operated, but I took the unconventionality of the context for him into consideration, and having seen him feel as strongly regarding bias and prejudice, and that he identified with feminist values, I did not expect such a conclusion. Until the pattern stabilised as a pattern for me during his silence, I allowed for different, kinder, more generous explanations as I started from considering the impossibility of the circumstance for both of us. I didn't do so because I didn't have an understanding of the gender power dynamic, but while my disorientation in the aftermath did not help, by not imposing the feminist lens and merely following structure meant I could remove all variables given that I was facing vagueness, and subsequently silence. Reasoning from inside conditions of maximum uncertainty with the fewest possible assumptions meant the conclusion would follow regardless of the variables in an external reality I didn't have access to.

The association I kept making - manipulation and control through concealment of truth/reality - became readable during his prolonged silence. I find it ironic because this sees the experience come full circle from his core wound around othering to mine, as from where I'm standing today, his words and actions read as the standard operating procedure of a dysfunctional system that threatens women's integrity. 

His treatment of me that second night, was a complete inversion of my reality during which I can't help but feel my inner world and reality were defined with no real attempt to understand it. This, followed by ambiguity, and then silence would have me spend the following decade with severe memory of the traumatic event, disoriented, and unable to locate myself in experience and reality.

His words and actions during that second night were psychological projection: he mocked and ridiculed my spiritual experience while assuming I was Christian, and implying I was engaging in religious prejudice; he made comments consistent with Eastern European cultural stereotypes - Eastern European racist, Eastern European gold digger - while implying I was stereotyping his culture; his seeming blindness and the lack of compassion when faced with my distress: the verbal assault registered so severely in my body that I nearly lost my consciousness, and his cousin needed to intervene to alert him. My state was visibly severe enough that a member of his family, Muslim man himself, and someone I can only assume was biased towards his kin and had witnessed him accuse me of Islamophobia, felt to intervene.

His words that night made me feel as if my pattern recognition skills were evidence of pathology, while his are an asset he earns his living from. He made sure to state his analytical skills as if to point out my lack of them. And while I could never claim it wasn't consensual, the moment he became angry with me, whether or not he was making me feel like a sex object didn't seem to be a care he had, all while I was in a vulnerable condition, desperate for repair - whether or not I was objectified was dependent on whether I agreed with his assessment of my inner reality, therefore dependent on my submission.

In 2017, despite telling him it all went beyond the romantic implications, his words, and subsequent actions reflect I was being reduced to just that: the woman whose only needs could be romantic - a transactional role women are often reduced to. 

He externalised the intensity and discomfort onto me - in 2018 he was telling me 'I wasn't ignoring you before, but it was very intense. Let's keep in touch without the intensity' as if I was responsible for it, as if he had no responsibility for the significant role he played in that intensity. 

I was guilty and responsible for my and his discomfort. I didn't start in agreement with it, but his treatment of me the second night, followed by vagueness and silence had me emotionally internalise it. His sustained vagueness, and subsequent silence took the experience from existential charge to existential crisis, and after all this time I can't help but feel that his choices maximised my cost, while minimising his discomfort with a reality he helped create. 

A. was the point where the patriarchal inversion of reality entered my field most acutely. Gendered dysfunction that became the catalyst for the descent that followed where profound coherence suddenly reversed into fragmentation that left me with no memory of the traumatic event, no explanation, accountability, and difficulty aligning myself with the actual reality of an existentially charged experience, in the aftermath of our meeting.

The first moment I realised how the fear in the dreams with the Devil figure consistently mapped to the constant threat of violence - mental, emotional or physical - girls live in from a young age, was during his sustained silence between 2023-2026.

His silence in the face of my visible distress due to this experience, left me unable to interpret his behaviors charitably anymore. With increased memory recovery and clarity, his silence made it clear that what I had considered might be confusion was a clear marker of the systemic oppression patriarchy engages in - a structure where to define a woman's reality for her with no genuine engagement with her as a human being, where her humanity is dependent on being agreeable, and where lack of accountability after poor treatment and harm is normalised. 

I was able to make a connection between the Devil dreams and patriarchy during his silence, because it felt every ounce like the torment I experienced in many of those dreams. During those times, I would consistently find myself being triggered to remember some of those dreams with the Devil figure. 

In my particular case, this figure never harmed me physically, but there was constant instillation of fear on a background of silence, which felt like psychological torment. The silence felt identical in affective content, and structure. It produced the same specific helplessness that was making me feel under constant threat, where the next step, the next spoken word could either make or break me. The same specific helplessness of needing something minimal and reasonable - clarity - from someone who could give it, who should give it, and watching them refuse it at the expense of my psychological integrity. Not threatening words, not physical danger, but the particular cruelty of being left to dissolve in the gap between what you know is right human treatment and what is being acted on as right.

His silence wasn't just absence. It was actively producing something. Every unreturned ask for clarity, every lack of response to a visible and reasonable need, kept generating the same framing: that I was the unreasonable woman, that my need was the problem. I wasn't asking for anything unreasonable. I was asking for clarity about a shared experience that had existential weight, and robbed me of a decade of my life, while the silence kept insisting, without a single word, that even that was too much.

My body had been learning that particular quality of fear and torment long before A. arrived. The dreams had been encoding it since childhood. His silence was making me feel as if my need for clarity, my need for responsibility for shared reality was the source of the problem rather than the withholding of it - the patriarchal inversion in a socially acceptable form. It didn't require malice, just a social structure that validated his silence as reasonable self-protection while reading my persistent need for psychological survival as instability or excess. 

It was this recognition that made the initial inversion of reality through the self granted permission to define my inner world for me, and subsequent vagueness stop looking like confusion and became recognisable as a patriarchal pattern of behavior. I had started from understanding the strangeness of the context, and his position within it. I considered he was a human being who was just as confused as I was and for a very long time, I thought it was possible he was having equal difficulty wrapping his mind around what had happened. However, my increasingly clearer memory, the sustained nature that betrays a lack of awareness of gender power dynamics, and the accumulation of behaviors made the gendered dysfunction undeniable as a pattern. 

When the silence consistently produced the framing that my need for clarity was excessive and his silence was reasonable, without a single word being exchanged, I could no longer believe I was dealing with someone struggling and confused about how to navigate an unusual situation. The mechanism was too consistent with patriarchal patterns of behavior, too effective, and too socially legible for that. 

The structure I recognised in my own experience, the Devil as patriarchy seems to be more than mere personal mythology with the God vs Devil pattern co-arising with the transition to patriarchal society. I do not refer to the God-Devil symbols per se but to the analogous God vs Devil/Self vs Other pattern prototype (Chaoskampf) that encodes themes of otherness, inversion of reality, deception, manipulation, predation, control, and the force that fragments and dominates. 

Chaoskampf was a motif whose function was to legitimise the transition from matrilocal (possibly matrifocal), heterarchical societies where power was fluid (depicted as 'formless chaos'), to patriarchal structures (depicted as 'structured order') in which a male warrior-god defeats a feminine or serpentine monster who often lives in water (symbol for feelings and continuity) to establish a new, 'structured' and 'ordered' hierarchy.

The Chaoskampf motif encodes themes of inversion of reality where the Mother Figure Goddess from previous societal patterns was demoted from the Source of All Creation to a monster of Chaos, seeing life coming through dismemberment, order coming through destruction, creation coming not through birth, but violence and submission.  

In the Enuma Elish myth Marduk doesn't just defeat Tiamat. After the fact, he defines what she is. She begins the Enuma Elish as the primordial source - generative, prior, the ground from which everything comes. By the end she is a chaos monster whose defeat was necessary for civilisation to exist. She doesn't get to be what she was. What she was gets redefined by the victor, and that redefinition becomes the founding narrative that everyone inherits.

This follows the structure of what happened to me. He defined my inner reality for me that second night - my spiritual experience became religious prejudice, my pattern recognition skills became pathology, my distress became evidence of instability - erasure. The inversion didn't require my agreement any more than Tiamat's redefinition required hers. It just required that the framing take hold in the relational field, which his silence then enforced for a decade by refusing to engage with any alternative reading.

Tiamat can't contest what Marduk makes of her because the myth is written by the victors. I could contest it, and I did, but the social structure validated his silence as reasonable while reading my contestation as excess. The mechanism was the same. The scale was different.

As the irony would have it Othering as civilisational ideological operating system appears to be a patriarchal innovation. Before patriarchy, othering was mostly situational and fluid, tied to things like kinship, territory, or unfamiliarity. Groups distinguished between 'us' and 'others', but these differences were not fixed or inherently unequal, and they could shift depending on context. Under patriarchy, othering becomes fixed and hierarchical, turning difference into lasting inequality. The 'other' is defined as inferior or lacking, and these distinctions are reinforced through social structures, beliefs, and norms, making them stable across time.   

What I find very interesting is that the dreams show my consciousness had been tracking a real structural collective pattern prior to having any concept of patriarchy, or the connection between the Devil symbol and the Chaoskampf motif that functioned as legitimisation of patriarchy. My consciousness absorbed patriarchal dynamics affectively - fear, threat of erasure, gendered power - and compressed that affective registration into the Devil symbol available in my cultural background. 

It is hard for me to ignore how textbook Jungian the God–Devil polarity looks - a polarity that was a compression of Self/Love/Truth/Light/Trust vs Erasure/Fear/Distortion/Dark/Control. While it is difficult for me to ignore how textbook Jungian the polarity looks, I also can't help but diverge from Jung's understanding. That the same structural reality present in my experience appears independently across cultures and millennia through Chaoskampf suggests the dreams weren't generating content from within personal psychology. If anything, my experience shows consciousness was registering the structural reality of what the patriarchal transition produced wherever it took hold, encoding it in the exact correct symbol that was available in my culture not because my individual psyche generated it from within, but because it was real.

The God/Devil axis didn't compress those poles abstractly and what the dreams show is how that structural reality took its specific symbolic form through the specific perceptual and affective structure of the dreams themselves. The same figure carried all poles simultaneously - the fullest expression of what consciousness seeks in terms of love, coherence, recognition of self, and trust, held in the same figure that is also the fullest expression of what threatens it. In the dreams, the attraction and the terror don't alternate but amplify each other. The more the figure seems to embody what is sought (love, recognition of self, coherence, trust), the more the fear intensifies. 

The compression into God/Devil happens because that is the precise structure of what the axis encodes: coherence on one pole where Self/Other is free, the inversion of coherence on the other where Self/Other is erased, held in tension by the same object - a man. 

Love/Fear, Self/Erasure of Self, Trust/Control, Truth/Distortion, Light/Dark don't map onto separate figures. They compress into a single axis because they were activated simultaneously by the same relational site. The God/Devil polarity isn't a cultural overlay applied to ordinary experience, but forms around what I most needed for coherence and what most threatened that coherence. 

This is the signature of what patriarchy encodes at the relational level, and what Chaoskampf encodes at the cosmological one. In the myth, the figure that is most generative, most prior, the ground from which everything comes is precisely what gets cast as the threat to order. The inversion is the mechanism, not an accidental feature but the founding act. Patriarchy is founded on that very structure the myth legitimised, reproducing it in lived relational experience: love that carries control, recognition that carries the threat of erasure, trust that carries the possibility of betrayal. The more fully a figure embodies what coherence requires, the more the threat response activates alongside it, not because the figure is threatening on their own, but because the system has conditioned the two to arrive together. The dreams register that conditioning affectively, attraction and terror amplifying together, the fear intensifying precisely because the recognition intensifies, before any conceptual framework exists to name what is being registered. 

What registered in the dreams before I had any conceptual framework was not just personal conditioning, but the same structural axis the myth had been encoding for millennia - the most generative and simultaneously the most threatening. 

The Devil pole had been registered affectively since childhood through recurring nightmares, where the fear was consistent, repeated across years and the symbol was made explicit. The God pole while it was present in the dreams, it was present through its content - love, recognition of self, coherence, trust, truth activating through the same figure - but without the symbol made explicit. The field was carrying both sides of the axis, one through explicit compression of the expressions encoded in the symbol, and the other through the expressions alone. 

Then, the spiritual emergence in 2015 made the God pole explicit - Love, Self, Light, Truth, Trust inhabited directly and fully as lived reality for the first time. A month later A. arrived. The contrast pole the field had been carrying through the dreams since childhood activated with equal force. Both poles of the axis - the same axis the myth had been encoding at the cosmological level was made fully explicit in my life, in close temporal proximity, through two distinct events. The axis of contrast that had been implicit in the field since childhood became the structure of waking reality.

Given my experience, and observations I can't help but diverge from Jung's emphasis on projection and on integration through suffering, but I can recognise the core insight.

In my view, projection happens when we lack awareness of the archetype's existence which wasn't my case. In regards to suffering being a condition for integration, from my perspective what is called suffering in this context is simply the discomfort of axes being restored and old patterns releasing and reorganising. 

I believe that whatever I integrated was despite the silence and not because of it. The silence prevented me from differentiating, and it was what was blocking the integration, which is what caused most of the suffering I experienced. I am also confident that I would have made the same observations, and would have reached the same understanding I have today, whenever I would have been able to integrate my experience. This is true, regardless of the context this would have been accomplished in. Therefore I do not believe that suffering is a requirement for integration, but only that integration may be accompanied by the release of the initial suffering or pain that led to the initial tangle/collapse/suspension of the poles. 

I believe the pain belongs to a survival relevant axis where contrasting poles became blurred, collapsed, tangled, or inversed and constellated into an archetypal symbolic representation. 

The God/Devil pattern compressed the Light/Dark, Truth/Distortion, Trust/Control, Love/Fear since childhood. Based on my observations the archetypal axis encodes coherence/inversion of coherence through culturally available symbols, where God is a symbol of absolute coherence, Light a symbol of the felt state of coherence from within, Love is the relational-affective component that erases neither Self, nor the Other simultaneously, and Trust the ability to stay in relation without domination. They are ultimately symbols of psychological integrity, with Devil/Dark/Distortion/Control/Fear being their inversion that threatened my survival - the survival of Self - as an individual.

While patriarchy is more often associated with overt violence, that wasn't needed for me to encode the threat of violence girls and women face through the symbol because overt violence is ultimately erasure. I have however, considered many hypotheses until I reached this understanding. I felt it necessary given the heaviness of the symbol, including darker repressed memories. I went down memory lane and retrieved all sorts of memories. I even retrieved the memory that led to the first dream with the figure I associated with the Devil, but it didn't come as a consequence of something overtly heinous but as a consequence of the absorption of the fear women in my environment faced, and the normalised stereotype filled language surrounding women. A kind of language that always threatens women's integrity in one way or another.

The threat of mental and emotional violence was a constant in my dreams with the Devil figure, because aside from absorbing the patriarchal dynamic, I, myself, was subjected to gendered power dynamics from birth, because the world I lived in defined me by my sex. 

I believe the compression of coherence/incoherence became tangled in my early environment through mechanisms that are normalised under patriarchal norms. 

The incoherence lived in the inversion: what was presented to me as love often carried the qualities of fear, control, or erasure, while what protected my coherence and integrity could be framed as wrong, selfish, disrespectful or unloving towards Other. My child's body learned that certain needs - for reality, for clarity, for fairness, for being seen and registered accurately - were already too much before they were even expressed. My psyche compressed this entanglement into the God/Devil - Light/Dark, Love/Fear, Truth/Distortion, Trust/Control - polarity as the most readily available and coherent symbols in my culture which my mind used to make sense of that tangle.

The Devil in is not a metaphysical figure to fight, but a recurring axis in collective consciousness: coherence of self on one side, and reality distortion sustained by erasure based mechanisms on the other. In this sense the Devil is mere socially normalised dysfunctional gender power dynamic given symbolic form. The pattern lives in families, in institutions, in cultures, anywhere truth is bent, and compassion and empathy withheld, in order to preserve comfort or dominance.