[I've been advised there was nothing wrong with this post and no reason that it couldn't be reposted.]

<blockquote>
NW: for those tho who were outcast by large number and small, made helpless and victims and who knocked on the door with no answer and cried for their souls and were spit upon and made to die in humiliating ways before the whole world and no help came... for those, i am sorrowful and it is no small matter in the history of our human life....

Jung would point out that this is shadow projection. We most frequently find our shadow in other people. That is, what we cannot stand about ourselves, we project onto others and hold them accountable for our own crimes. We then punish them for it.

The Salem witch trials are a testament to this weakness of human nature. It was frequently women and children who stood accused of demon possession and were subjected to the cruellest and most inhumane forms of torture as a result. And yet, it's not too difficult to see who might have been "possessed by the devil" in that particular scenario.

</font><blockquote><div id="quote"><font class="small">Quote:</font>

"We still attribute to the other fellow all the evil and inferior qualities that we do not like to recognize in ourselves, and therefore have to criticize and attack him, when all that has happened is that an inferior "soul" has emigrated from one person to another. The world is still full of betes noires and scapegoats, just as it formerly teemed with witches and werewolves"

-- C. G. Jung
Civilization in Transition, p.130; quoted in On Scapegoating: A Collection of Ideas

... in order to maintain its own equilibrium, its own sanity in other words, as psychological defense mechanism, the ego has to constantly project its ugliness onto an appropriate scapegoat.

This is how they cope with their unacknowledged and repressed psychic contents, which can only be tolerated as hatred for another, for a perceived enemy who has slighted them or their family or tribe or culture or ethnicity or nation or religion or ideology.

This happens everywhere, prejudice, bigotry, intolerance, xenophobia, fear and hatred of the "other" are universal. And just because someone claims to, or is thought by others to be, spiritual, or a guru, doesn't make them free of this either.

Source: Projection of the Shadow


</div></font></blockquote><font class="post">

The practice of shadow projection is likely every bit as rampant today as it was then, as borne out by the ongoing saga of humanity's inhumanity.