Egregores

I find the notion of egregores in the modern usage to be dubious at best and I doubt their existence entirely.

Now, I should note that I also find the whole ''watchers'' notion from earlier times also dubious due to its religious assumptions, but when one speaks of an egregore in current times, they’re alluding specifically to notions that have their origin in the Catholic occultist Eliphas Levi’s work.

In Levi's work, Occultism Unveiled, he uses the concept in a very specific way. He is trying to argue against the actual being and efficacy of various gods and spirits as being legitimate, that they're all things that humanity willed into existence.

He was a Catholic, so he makes sure to carve out every exception he can for Christianity to be the One True Religion. It's pretty blatant and self-serving, especially with his utter fear (in the way that reminds me of cosmic horror stuff, of a full on existential crisis at getting one's worldview rocked) at the idea of polytheism. He is freaked out by the possibility that polytheism is true, and the concept of egregores as he uses it is used to write off the idea.

So the idea is that humans, through performing rituals and rites create powers and conditional beings. He argued that, for example, a magician has to create the Devil within himself, instead of calling upon an actually external being. He also argued that the Oracle of Delphi wasn't prophesying, but having cultivated insanity within herself as part of a ritual and also drugged out in a rather grotesque passage about volcanic fumes entering her vagina and maddening her.

This then got recycled into Helena Blavatsky's work. While I haven't gotten to it yet in my reading, it's mentioned in a Wikipedia article about the subject- how she incorporates “tulpas” into her setup for Theosophy. Now, this gets a bit messier. Tulpas are from a Tibetan Buddhist practice, and in that context, it is an enlightened Buddhist who, after ascending to a higher plane of existence, creates with the power of their mind a physical form on the lower plane to interact with and teach people ways to become enlightened in the Buddhist conception.

How Blavatsky uses it very much how Levi uses egregores. Tulpas are transformed in the process, turned into the manifestation of average peoples' belief and will. Precisely the opposite of what a Buddhist who deals in tulpas would argue. This is also a general problem with Blavatsky- she often stole stuff and used terms from other languages without really caring about their actual cultural meaning.

Either way, it ultimately negates the idea of there being something outside of the current humanity that is actually able to act. It argues that the various religious experiences people have had aren’t really real, are really them mistaking one thing for another. In this regard, it's rather presumptuous and solipsistic of both of them, since the framings are that the actual experiences people are having are really products of their own delusions and societies, instead of being really real. It's then used to posit their views. In either case, it's used to presume that there's a single revelation that all secretly know, or that all properly knowledgeable people know, and is the only real wisdom.

It’s the problem that perennialists and monotheists and the like generally have- they have to explain away a bunch of everyone else’s shit and reframe it. This is, again, presumptuous, since they’re assuming that everyone else is wrong and that they have the actual answer and only they have true knowledge. That the gods and spirits people experience are either people mistaking human holy figures for gods, else are demons trying to trick you out of true knowledge, or else delusions, or wishful thinking. That all the mystics and adepts of the world know the “true” knowledge underlying everything.

But, if we’re going to go there, I’d argue that we have direct evidence against Levi’s hypothesis about ''egregores'' in how OCD works.

OCD, for those unaware, is a disorder that isn’t ''wants things clean'' disease. It's instead that one's mind fixates on and freaks out over negative possibilities, and so performs compulsions to stop the anxious thoughts and quell the obsessions. The compulsions have an aspect of ritualism to it, such as how it can either not directly correlate to a thing happening, or else things like specific repetitions (like needing to do something three times instead of just the one that might be normal if you actually do need to do something). This reinforces the obsessions (making a feedback loop, which you have to break to treat the OCD). It's associated with cleanliness because it's a common theme that one can have, and is pretty obvious in its cause and effect to outsiders- that one will get sick or get others sick unless one does the OCD rituals to keep everything clean.

So, by this logic, OCD with both its ritualistic aspect and its mental aspect should be prime ground to create an egregore, and to create a spirit that embodies a given thing, and more likely to make it happen. But this simply isn't so! People with different kinds of OCD simply aren't magnets for the thing that their OCD is obsessed with in terms of actual events.

(I'd note that I mention the mental aspect as also counting for OCD because ''desperately not wanting a thing'' would be similar in its effects to ''desperately wanting a thing.'' It's because of how the opposite of love is not hate, but apathy.)