Egregore

This article is about the esoteric concept. For the album by Smak, see Egregor (album).

An egregore (from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος 'egrēgoros' and wakeful) also called Collective Effervescence in the scientific field, is a sociological and psychological concept that describes a feeling of interconnectedness of members of a group or participant in an activity, it is described as force or feeling that arises from the collective thoughts, emotions, and actions of a group of people. This phenomenon is very well known across many traditions, has been studied and is related to the sociological phenomenon of collective effervescence, first described by Émile Durkheim. It is also connected to magic in some traditions.

Overview

The concept of egregore encompasses various interpretations across different fields, including sociology, psychology, and esoteric traditions. In sociological terms, it is closely related to the idea of collective consciousness and group dynamics. In psychological contexts, it can be understood as a manifestation of collective unconscious or shared mental states. In esoteric and occult traditions, it is often viewed as a kind of perfect harmony, sometime a thought-form, of a group becoming one through perfect union and harmony.

Historical Development

The term "egregore" has its roots in various traditions and has evolved over time:

Ethymology

The word "egregore" is believed to have originated from the Greek word "egrēgoroi" (ἐγρήγοροι), which means "watchers" or "those who are awake." This Greek term is itself derived from the verb "egrēgorein" (ἐγρηγορεῖν), meaning "to be awake" or "to be vigilant."

Ancient and Religious Origins

• The concept of “a strong feeling of being one with a group” no matter the terminology used, appears in many and various forms in ancient religious and mystical traditions for example the word Zulu word “Ubuntu”: "I am because we are".

Modern Interpretations

• 19th century: Occultist Éliphas Lévi used the term in his writings on esotericism.
• Early 20th century: The concept gained traction in both scientific and occult and esoteric circles.
• Mid-20th century: The idea continued to be explored in psychological and sociological contexts most of the time under the name of collective effervescence or group Psychology.

Attempts at definition

The concept of egregore has evolved over time, with its definition and interpretation varying across different periods and schools of thought. Due to its intangible and experiential nature, the egregore defies simple explanation. It is more akin to a shared feeling or collective energy than a concrete, easily definable phenomenon. Some people might feel the egregore being part of cheering fans during a game, or playing music some have even described A.I. as an type of egregore.

In esoteric circles, the egregore is often described as a kind of group mind or collective consciousness that emerges from the focused intentions and shared experiences of a group. This phenomena is thought to grow stronger and more distinct as the group's cohesion and shared purpose intensify over time.

Some view the egregore as a subtle energetic construct, while others interpret it more metaphorically as the unique "spirit" or "personality" of a group. In magical traditions, it may be seen as a type of thoughtform or semi-sentient psychic entity created and sustained by group ritual and belief.

The elusive quality of the egregore makes it challenging to pin down with words alone. Like many profound experiences, it is something that must be felt to be truly understood. Those who have experienced a powerful egregore often struggle to adequately convey its essence to others who haven't shared in that collective energy. This ambiguity surrounding the egregore concept has allowed for a rich diversity of interpretations and applications across various mystical, philosophical, and social contexts. Its meaning continues to evolve as new generations encounter and work with this enigmatic aspect of group dynamics and consciousness.

• In the scientific community, Egregore is known as collective effervescence, it is defined as; it refers to a state of shared excitement and enthusiasm within a group, characterized by an intensification of social interactions and collective emotions. This phenomenon often occurs during gatherings, rituals, or important events for a community. Still according to Durkheim, these moments of collective effervescence can strengthen social bonds, generate a sense of solidarity, and contribute to the creation or reinforcement of collective representations and social norms.

• For Stanislas de Guaita, the term refers to the idea of "personification" of non-supernatural physical or psychophysical forces. The word is often also synonymous with thought-form. Robert Ambelain defines the term as "a force generated by a powerful spiritual current and then fed at regular intervals, according to a rhythm in harmony with the universal Life of the Cosmos, or to a gathering of entities united by a common character. In the invisible realm beyond man's physical perception, there exist artificial beings, engendered by devotion, enthusiasm, fanaticism, which are called egregores.

• The physician Pierre Mabille, author of several works on this movement, defines the term egregore as a "human group endowed with a personality different from that of the individuals who form it. Although studies on this subject have always been either confused or kept secret, I believe it is possible to know the circumstances necessary for their formation. I immediately indicate that the indispensable, though insufficient, condition lies in a powerful emotional chaos. To use chemical vocabulary, I say that synthesis requires intense energetic action".

• For Gaetan Delaforge, it is a "group spirit that binds members, harmonizes them, motivates and stimulates them to achieve the group's objectives. It also allows them to make 'spiritual' progress that they would not make if they worked alone. However, an egregore can be disturbed by the negative thoughts of people who do not agree with the objectives. Consequently, esoteric groups try to protect themselves from negative thoughts that could affect their egregore".

• In Freemasonry, Jack Chaboud describes it as a moment of collective exaltation, often experienced during ritual or at the end of a meeting during the chain of union gathering the masons forming a circle, hands intertwined, evoking the bond that unites them to masons around the world, to those who preceded them and to those who will follow them or while in taking part of a Ritual in Lodge.

• Moreover, Jules Boucher describes the egregore in Freemasonry as such; "An EGREGORE is a collective being resulting from an assembly. Any assembly of individuals forms an Egregore. There is an Egregore for each religion, and this Egregore is powerful with all the forces of the faithful accumulated over the centuries. Similarly for Freemasonry, each Lodge has its own Egregore, and the union of all these Egregores forms the great Masonic Egregore."

In science; Collective Effervescence

Émile Durkheim

The scientific concept used when relating to egregore is "collective effervescence," a term coined by French sociologist Émile Durkheim in the early 20th century. Collective effervescence describes the shared emotional excitement and sense of unity experienced by groups engaged in common actions or rituals. This phenomenon can be observed in various social contexts, such as:

• Religious ceremonies and gatherings
• Sports events and fan behavior
• Political rallies and social movements
• Musical concerts and festivals

Collective effervescence can lead to:

• Heightened emotional states
• Increased sense of group cohesion
• Shared beliefs and values
• Feelings of empowerment and transcendence

Scientific Studies on the Egregore

The Egregore also called Collective effervescence in the scientific field, is a concept introduced by Émile Durkheim in 1912, has been the subject of various studies across different fields, including sociology, psychology, and anthropology. This section outlines key research that has contributed to our understanding of the egregore and its effects on individuals and groups.

Psychological Well-Being and Social Connectedness

A significant study by Velez et al. (2022) examined the relationship between collective effervescence and psychological well-being. The research, which included a large-scale survey across 12 countries, a longitudinal study, and an experimental study, found that:

• Experiences of collective effervescence were positively associated with psychological well-being across cultures.
• The relationship was partially mediated by increased social connectedness and perceived meaning in life.
• Changes in collective effervescence predicted changes in well-being over time.
• Inducing collective effervescence in online group interactions led to increased positive affect and sense of connectedness.

Religious Contexts

Hopkins et al. (2016)investigated the Egregore in the context of a large Hindu religious gathering, the Magh Mela. Their findings suggested that:

• Participation in collective events was associated with heightened positive emotions.
• The sense of shared social identity among participants played a crucial role in facilitating these positive experiences.

Sporting Events

Sport fans experiencing Egregore

Research by Cottingham (2012) applied the concept of egregore to sporting events, particularly focusing on American football. The study found that:

• Sporting events can generate Egregore among fans.
• This shared emotional experience contributes to the creation and reinforcement of group symbols and solidarity.

Workplace Settings

Metiu and Rothbard (2013) explored egregore in the context of work teams. Their comparative study revealed:

• Egregore can occur in workplace settings, particularly during periods of intense collaborative work.
• Teams experiencing Egregore showed higher levels of engagement and productivity.

Music and Dance

Páez et al. (2015) studied egregore in the context of music and dance rituals. Their findings indicated that:

• Participation in collective music and dance activities led to increased positive emotions and social integration.
• The intensity of these effects was related to the level of perceived emotional synchrony among participants.

These studies collectively demonstrate the diverse contexts in which egregore occurs and its potential impacts on individual well-being, group cohesion, and social identity. The studies all demonstrated a very positive impact for individuals to experience Egregore. However, researchers note that more work is needed to fully understand the mechanisms underlying collective effervescence and its long-term effects on individuals and communities.

Variant descriptions

As independent angelic being

Main article: Watcher (angel)

Egregores had been quite independent entities in the Book of Enoch, and there was then no notion of them arising from a collective. In literature, especially older literature, "egregores" have often been straightforward references to these Enochian entities. This was the case in Jan Potocki's novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which referred to egregores as "the most illustrious of fallen angels." The French author Victor Hugo, in La Légende des siècles (1859) ("The Legend of the Ages"), also uses the word égrégore, first as an adjective, then as a noun, while leaving the meaning obscure.

As spiritual elite

The Traditionalist School philosopher Julius Evola, in his Revolt Against the Modern World, referred to an elite of spiritually aware people, who keep Tradition alive, as "those who are awake, whom in Greek are called the εγρῄγοροι", apparently alluding to the Watchers, and the most literal sense of their name, which is "wakeful" or "awake".

As group mind

In esotericism, the term "egregore" has been used to denote a "group mind" or "collective consciousness" of a religious community. As René Guénon said, "the collective, in its psychic as well as its corporeal aspects, is nothing but a simple extension of the individual, and thus has absolutely nothing transcendent with respect to it, as opposed to spiritual influences, which are of a wholly different order". This usage was followed by Gnosis magazine and by Olavo de Carvalho, and, according to Guénon, began with Éliphas Lévi. See the section on the history of this usage.

As independent magical being arising from collective mind

Thought form of Charles Gounod's music, according to Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater in Thought Forms (1901)

See also: Tulpa

Some authors seem to have merged the esoteric concept with the Enochian concept to arrive at an idea of "spiritual entities" that "feed off the thoughts and energy of a unified multitude", as the website Occultist.net described it, while nevertheless having more of a life of their own – their more specific features and powers will depend on the particular author. Kate Strong, writing for the newsletter "Know Thyself, Heal Thyself", described egregores as "symbols, ideas, or ideals that exist in the collective psyche of a group of people and are thought to have an autonomous existence". This usage seems to have come largely from the Meditations on the Tarot, as may be seen in the next section. The concept of a tulpa is similar, as Gary Lachman and Mark Stavish noted.

In occult and magical thought

In Meditations on the Tarot

The Meditations on the Tarot described the Antichrist as "an egregore, an artificial being who owes his existence to collective generation from below". Elsewhere, the book described egregores as "demons engendered by the collective will and imagination of nations". The book cites, but does not completely agree with, the usage of Robert Ambelain in his work La Kabbale pratique. Ambelain had defined the egregore as "a force generated by a powerful spiritual current and then nourished at regular intervals, according to a rhythm in harmony with the universal life of the cosmos, or to a union of entities united by a common characteristic nature". The author of the Meditations on the Tarot described this passage from Ambelain as "a definition which leaves nothing more to be desired", but disagreed with Ambelain's description of Catholicism, Freemasonry, and Protestantism as egregores.

In the work of Gary Lachman

Gary Lachman followed the usage of the Meditations on the Tarot in his book Dark Star Rising, which went on to suggest that Pepe the Frog may be an egregore in this sense – or a tulpa, which Lachman saw as a similar phenomenon. In the usage of Lachman and of the Meditations on the Tarot, "there are no 'good' egregores, only 'negative' ones". Lachman cited Joscelyn Godwin's The Golden Thread – which had itself cited the Meditations on the Tarot – as a source for the idea that, while a religious (or other) group who creates an egregore can "rely" on it as "an efficacious magical ally", "the egregore's help comes at a price", since, as Godwin had put it, its creators must thenceforth meet the egregore's "unlimited appetite for their future devotion."

In the works of Peter Carroll

Liber Null & Psychonaut, by the British chaos magician Peter J. Carroll, uses the word egregore for the first time at the end of the following passage:

Religion takes the view that consciousness preceded organic life. Supposedly there were gods, angelic forces, titans, and demons setting the scene before material life developed. Science takes the opposite view and considers that much organic evolution occurred before the phenomenon of consciousness appeared. Magic, which has given more attention to the quality of consciousness itself, takes an alternative view and concludes that organic and psychic forms evolve synchronously. As organic development occurs, a psychic field is generated which feeds back into the organic forms. Thus each species of living being has its own type of psychic form or magical essence. These egregores may occasionally be felt as a presence or even glimpsed in the form of the species they watch over.

The book goes on to say that "those who have perceived the human egregore usually describe it as God", and that "magicians consider that all life on this world contributes to, and depends on, a vast composite egregore which has variously been known as the Great Mother, the Anima Mundi, the Great Archon, the Devil, Pan, and Baphomet."

In the work of Frater Tenebris

Following this usage, though giving no citations, the glossary in the 2022 book The Philosophy of Dark Paganism, by Frater Tenebris, defines an "egregore" as "an occult term for an independently functioning spiritual entity created by one or more magick practitioners. Many egregores begin as thought-forms but then become capable of operating independently of the practitioners." It defines "thought-form" as "an esoteric entity created by magick", and "magick" as "a spiritual practice and process to influence the probability of events."

The book itself mentions egregores in the context of "archetypism", a view that understands "the different gods and goddesses" as "either psychological structures, similar to Carl Jung's archetypes, or different currents of arcane energy found in the Cosmos that are anthropomorphized." Noting that "some archetypists consider the gods to be thought-forms created from worship and prayer by generations of believers", it says that "over time these thought-forms may become egregores that exhibit some autonomy apart from their worshipers", and that "one might imagine these gods along the line of Neil Gaiman's deities in the novel American Gods."

In Theosophy

Mauricio Medeiros, writing for the theosophist website Estudo Teosófico, defined an egregore as "an astral, mental, or spiritual construct sustained by several people over a long period of time, giving it a character of permanence that does not depend on any particular individual". While saying that egregores have no "life of their own", Medeiros nevertheless emphasized their independence, noting that egregores "can be associated with physical locations", so that "when we enter an environment and feel uncomfortable, what we are often experiencing is the clash between the energies expressed by the egregores of the place and our own energies."

In other esotericism

The Book of Enoch, 1:5, refers to "ἐγρήγοροι", which is usually translated as "watchers". As René Guénon says, these are "entities of a rather enigmatic character that, whatever they may be, seem to belong to the 'intermediary world'; this is all that they have in common with the collective entities to which the same name has been applied" in esoteric literature.

In the work of René Guénon

While Guénon notes that he had "never used the word 'egregore' to designate" what he preferred instead to call a "collective entity", he notes that he had described these same entities in his Perspectives on Initiation, in the following passage:

Each collectivity can thus be regarded as possessing a subtle force made up in a way of the contributions of all its members past and present, and which is consequently all the more considerable and able to produce greater effects as the collectivity is older and is composed of a greater number of members. It is evident, moreover, that this 'quantitative' consideration essentially indicates that it is a question of the individual domain, beyond which this force could not in any way intervene.

Guénon believed that prayer is not directly addressed to spiritual entities such as gods or angels, but rather, "consciously or not, addresses itself most immediately to the collective entity, and it is only by the intermediary of this latter that it also addresses the spiritual influence that works through it". Olavo de Carvalho believed that, according to Guénon's view, the prayers of persons who are not members of a community are ineffectual.

Origin and development of the concept in esotericism

According to Guénon, the term was first used to designate these collective entities by Éliphas Lévi, "who, to justify this meaning, gave it an improbable Latin etymology, deriving it from grex, 'flock,' whereas the word is purely Greek and has never signified anything but 'watcher.'" According to Mark Stavish's description in his 2018 book Egregores, however, Lévi's Le Grand Arcane ("The Great Secret", 1868) "clearly identifies the word egregore with the Kabbalistic lore of those beings who were said to be the fathers of the Nephilim", i.e., the Watchers. Lévi described them as "terrible beings" that "crush us without pity because they are unaware of our existence."

Following the usage of "egregore" as a "collective entity", a 1987 article by Gaetan Delaforge in Gnosis magazine defines an egregore as "a kind of group mind which is created when people consciously come together for a common purpose".

Olavo de Carvalho's 2017 course on esotericism presented a division among the types of rites: rites are mainly divided into magic rites and religious rites, and religious rites are further divided into propitiatory, sacrificial, aggregation, and initiation rites. Aggregation rites are rites which are directed to the egregore of a community, and make someone a member of it. Olavo cited René Guénon's view that prayer is directed primarily to the egregore, without noting that Guénon himself did not use the term.

See also

• Akashic records – Term in theosophy and anthroposophy
• Collective unconscious – Term of analytical psychology
• Faith healing – Prayer and gestures that are perceived to bring divine intervention in physical healing
• Gestalt psychology – Theory of perception
• Jungian archetypes – Psychological concept
• Memetics – Study of self-replicating units of culture
• Panpsychism – View that mind is a fundamental feature of reality
• Pathetic fallacy – Attribution of human emotion and conduct to non-human things
• Servitor – Psychological complex employed in the use of chaos magic
• Synchronicity – Jungian concept of the meaningfulness of acausal coincidences
• Vitalism – Belief about living organisms

Further reading

• Benchamma, Abdelkader (2022). Ibars, Stéphane (ed.). Abdelkder Benchamma: Egregore. France: Actes Sud Editions. ISBN 978-2330144999.
• Butler, Walter Ernest (1970). "The Egregore of a School". Servantsofthelight.org. The Servants of the Light. Retrieved November 22, 2011.
• Constable, Simon (May 21, 2018). "What Magic Got Trump Elected?". Forbes. Retrieved 2022-03-04.
• Flowers, S. Edred (1995). Fire & Ice: Magical Teachings of Germany's Greatest Secret Occult Order. Llewellyn's Teutonic Magick Series (2nd ed.). Llewellyn Publications. ISBN 0-87542-776-6.
• Greer, J. M. (2017). Circles of Power: An Introduction to Hermetic Magic. Aeon Books Limited. ISBN 978-1904658856.
• Greer, J. M. (2021). Inside a Magical Lodge: Traditional Lodge Methods for Modern Mages. Aeon Books Limited. ISBN 978-1913504755.

External links

• The dictionary definition of egregore at Wiktionary