egregore

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An egregore is an occult concept representing some non-physical entity arising from the collective thoughts of a certain group of people. When people come together to act as a group this gives rise to a higher entity. The group takes on spirit of its own. Teams take on a personality. Companies have a vibe. Cities have a soul. Mobs are taken over by type of “darkness”.

One of the defining qualities of an egregore is that it exerts a level of control over the individuals within the group that summoned it. The agenda of an egregore can look a lot like a coordinated agenda. It can be invoked to explain a lot of popular conspiracy theories.¹

The word eregrore has been applied to include any and all ancient Gods and also to imagine that egregores “fill” the space created by various social affordances like money and power.² Materialists will even use the term to describe an emergent property that isn’t easily explained by the constituent parts.

There been some push back on the idea of egregores as purely emergent phenomena. For example, Jonathan Pageau recognizes higher beings as constituted from assemblages of people, e.g. a sports team, a town, or a corporation. But he doesn’t recognize these “garments of skin” as purely emergent phenomena devoid of spiritual principles. After all, humans emerge from collections of cells but they are so much more than that.

The Biblical cosmology, instead, sees man as the union of heaven and earth through body and spirit — heavenly ideals manifested through earthly matter. Any higher order system involves the convergence of some spiritual principle integrating the constituent parts. This is why Pageau takes exception to the idea of the egregore as a purely emergent property. He sees all beings, including higher beings, as an expression of some principle of the Logos.³ Thus, Pageau is skeptical of the materialist attempting to explain these higher-order systems apart from any organizing principles from above.⁴

The Christian tradition certainly acknowledges the existence of non-corporeal beings. These are referred to as angels. There are angels and fallen angels. They form into different ranks of a hierarchy consisting of principalities, thrones, and dominions. These are the principles that unify parts into wholes. In other words, spiritual identities that cover composited earthly phenomena. The Church exemplifies this. Christ’s spirit animates the ecclesial body.

There is an ancient idea that some angels rebelled against God. Some of them “interbred” with humans, creating evermore elaborate ‘garments of skin’ through techne.⁵ This, according to Pageau, gives rise to giants, which in our contemporary world includes collective systems like cities, corporations, and even the military industrial complex.⁶

It is in this context that Daniel Townhead and Kenneth Florence find egregores consonant with Christian cosmolology. They see egregores, in principle, as “rebel angels, fragmented heavenly beings of the fallen world traversing the woeful valley between Creation and the Age to Come.”⁷ They trace the use of the term ‘egregore’ through time noting that as materialism became mainstream the association with higher-beings diminished. References to the term today tend to focus on human action. A balanced and historical description might consider egregores as “the participatory aspect of humans in the manifestation of higher beings.”⁸

This begs the question of whether these higher beings are sentient. Is Chicago a being or a body? Is every body a being? A body can be formed by human action, for example a corporation. But does the corporation derive its identity from the mediation of some non-corporeal being? Townhead and Florence don’t got that far. But they notice that Mammon’s influence can be found in the New York Stock Exchange and also in other exchanges around the world. So are the various exchanges a single entity or do they have separate identities? Maybe the exchange itself isn’t Mammon but a body consisting of Mammon along with various other spiritual identities — some sort of egregore arising from non-corporeal beings?

One way to look at the identity of these collective entities is to understand them as lacking ontological unity like an ephemeral Tower of Babel, unable to hold together over time. They are ultimately torn apart by the pull between earthly self-sufficiency and the heavenly divine. These are “headless” entities given structure by humans but lacking any divine principle at its head. It’s not that these collective bodies are uninfluenced by higher beings (quite the contrary), but that none sit firmly at the head. This makes them highly unstable.

Ultimately, the term egregore gives name to these headless structures and points beyond them. It helps us to recognize higher beings are at play. And it calls the materialist paradigm into doubt. But it may be a stretch to call these “beings” as such. Nonetheless, this “headless structure” seems like an appropriate description of the vast sprawling, yet confused, social networks that reside on the internet.

Both emergence (bottom-up activity from below) and emanation (top-down activity from above) are involved here. Most phenomena are neither entirely good nor wholly evil. Typically, there is a mixture of beings at work in any given system. And these beings don’t necessarily map neatly to the underlying structures. The term egregore provides us a means to talk about the collective structures that humans co-create while pointing to the beings that are above them. Materialists who use the term generally use it to describe emergent phenomena. However, there is a bigger picture that they are missing.

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