Egregore

Description

1. From the Wikipedia:

"Egregore (also spelled egregor; from French égrégore, from Ancient Greek ἐγρήγορος, egrēgoros 'wakeful') is an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people.

In magical and other occult traditions, it is typically seen as having an independent existence, but in other kinds of esotericism, it is merely the collective mind of a religious community, either esoteric or exoteric. In the latter sense, as a collective mind, the term collective entity, preferred by René Guénon, is synonymous with egregore."

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egregore)

2. Sarah Perry:

" egregores – autonomous psychic entities made up of, and influencing, the thoughts of a group of people. Egregoric entities, whether gods or demons or dictators at the center of a cult of personality, are powerful entities, even as they are imaginary – wholly created by and consisting of thoughts, speech, and behaviors. The human mind is a powerful entity, and becomes more powerful in coordination with others. To say that an “imaginary” entity, existing only in human minds, has agency, is not much stranger than suggesting that humans themselves, inscrutable piles of preferences that we are, have agency. Agency is no more than “a quick and dirty way of contextualizing the temporal activities of entropy climbers,” as St. Rev puts it.

Multiplying entities in this way helps make salient how unknowable these entities are – how little we know about the outcomes of social policy and change ahead of time, and how little we can know about them even after the fact. Here be dragons.

These entities vary in how demanding they are – how much they terrorize their component humans. They also vary in terms of what they are able to get out of their humans in terms of productivity. Productivity (measured in harvests, cathedrals, moon landings, pyramids, and the like) can be modeled as an inverted U-shaped function of terror."

(https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2015/05/07/weaponized-sacredness/)

3. Nara Petrovic:

"Long ago wise men realized that faith and attention—if only they are intense and focused on a specific set of ideas and/or an influential (real or fictional) personality—can create an independent entity that acquires personal traits, character and power and begins to exert control back on its creators, and if necessary also on other groups and even natural environment. Such an entity was called egregore (from the Greek root eger: to be aware of, to control). The larger the group and the more their awareness is directed towards a certain egregore, the greater and stronger its power the greater the control. If you give the egregore your awareness, the egregore will include you in its control and power, to put it bluntly.

The term egregore (spelled also egregor) was used almost exclusively in occult circles to denote a magical entity, purposely created by a group (an order, fraternity, cult) to represent their common aspirations and ideals in a condensed form. This may seem like some primitive voodoo magic but when you bring it into the modern context, you may well recognize how strong egregores actually are in your everyday life.

In 1976 in the book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins described something similar to egregore without metaphysical and magical connotations. Richard probably never heard about egregore, and his coinage meme (analogous to gene) spans biological and sociological frameworks. Meme denotes a cultural idea, social practice, concept, or activity that becomes a norm and is (sub)consciously repeated in society. It could also be defined as a thought that acquires its own identity when spreading through society, as an idea that counts as a replicator, specifically in the sense of it acting as a parasite, forcing people to reproduce it (just like viruses do).

The term is sometimes used in the context of “meme complex” to denote a group of memes that support each other and form a general belief system e.g., religion. This use suggests that cultural evolution, wherein selection is based on the adaptation of ideas, has surpassed biological evolution, in which selection is based on hereditary characteristics. When we marry egregore with meme, we arrive at a biological entity that may, in a sense, be considered alive, capable of spreading, reproducing, proliferating, and parasitizing entire cultures."

(https://narapetrovic.substack.com/p/the-best-explanation-of-egregore)