A word that people can’t even agree on its pronunciation. Although Eh-greg-gory has more historic accuracy, Ee-greh-gore is more common now. I recently tried to explain this to someone before, we went on the tangent of a related word, “Thought-form”. Thought form has similar meaning to egregore, but is slightly distinct.
First… what is a thought-form? Well, it’s a thought given form. Often people who pracitce energy work or psionics will tell you about constructed objects, constructs or entities, existing in spiritual or etheric planes. How are these objects constructed? Usually though a process of elective belief and often using some form of spiritual energy deliberately directed toward them. There are communities that call them tulpas, using a misnomer popularised by the X-files and The Mothman Prophecies.
How is an egregore different? Well lets see where the word started and the strange journey it has had.
It originally comes from Greek egregoros / egregoroi which means “the wakeful ones” or the “watcher”. For the apocryphal Book of Enoch, egregore was the translation of a word for the Aramaic 2nd century BC word “ir” or “irin” for plural. The book describes them as angels that fell to earth, abandoning heaven, because they were in love with human women. Unfortunately when they had children with them, the children turned out to be monsters. It’s most likely that the original Noah’s ark story was about God wiping out these monsters, not a punishment for sin as the story is told now. So here the word egregore seems to mean a type of angel, which was likely very tall and probably had some animal features such as wings, maybe an animal head.
The word had all but vanished from use, until a Polish author wrote a book in French called the Manuscript Found in Saragossa, a book based in the Nepoleonic period of France which featured fallen angels using this long forgotten word. Thank you Count Jan Potocki for this book around 1810. Decades later, in 1859, Victor Hugo poem that chose to use égrégore alongside demons and witches to rhyme with mandragore (mandrake) with which they could be fed. The new pronunciation behinds to be more apparent.
The word began to change meaning soon after through the French Ceremonial Magician Éliphas Lévi. In The Great Arcana [1868], Lévi made reference to “Astral Light” which I have always considered his word for “energy” or “qi” (which were not as popular until 1960s) and magnetism which I similarly associate with the healing methods of mesmerism which was a natural forerunning for both hypnosis AND enery work.
Levi comments that through this magnetism (or belief) the astral light (or energy) of the universe can be projected upon things like the planets often with human passions, both good and bad. Sometimes great beings begin to manifest which are so great they are hardly aware of our existence, but act in accordance with the energy projected onto them by humans in large groups. Levi uses the word egregor (no final vowel at all) and likens them to demons and jinn.
His works were popularised by the largest occult orders of the early 20th century and by the 80s, Chaos Magic had stripped away the traditional Judeo-Christian cosmology entirely, reframing egregores as psychological feedback loops or conscious, self-preserving, software existing in a shared group mind.
Frequently today, when people talk about a spiritual practice having an effect on the etheric or spiritual planes. Such as drawing a pentagram, or enacting a long established ritual. Often practices might be based on a “well-spread” mistake and yet they seem to have a habit of working on subtle planes for existence, despite the error from which they arose. This occurs consistently when they have had a large number of people who have believed the incorrect information. Most occultists equate this behaviour to these “feedback loops” called egregores. Years of belief by many people begins to manifest a huge being, who, although is not very aware of human beings, through attempts at self preservation perpetuates the beliefs that once gave it form.
Many people talk about each spiritual practice with over 100 people aware of it, automatically developing a weak egregore just from the simple awareness of the traditon alone. And traditions like the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Tradition Wicca have some very strong egregores that help their initiates. As such circles and pentagrams continue to have a spiritual impact, even if the initiate does not understand what they are doing when they use them.
The definition has gone a long way: no longer a watcher angel and certainly not a demon, but still gigantic and a spiritual being. Egregores perpetuate the most helpful laws for the new initiate, but care very little for the initiate. They were contructed through belief and the soup of spiritual energy that forms the world soul, however their creation is far less immediate or intentional than a thought-form. Their countenance is often unestablished meaning it is easier to accidently make a new thought form and communicate with that, than it is to actually speak to one. Egregores are better to be considered as a faceless laws made unintentionally by collective belief, particularly surrounding a popular spiritual path or practice. A thoughtform by contrast can be considered an entity with a face that can be encountered.
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