The Martyr Made Substack

In a recent comment thread, one of you guys turned me onto an interesting Substack ( Handwaving Freakoutery) that has been exploring a concept that’s been on my mind lately, and has come up several times independently in recent discussions (most recently in my podcast discussion with Astral Flight Simulation) - namely, the concept of the egregore.

The egregore is a concept that gained purchase in magical orders and theosophical organizations like Aleister Crowley’s Golden Dawn, the Rosicrucian Order, and even comes up in Masonic discussions, though the concept is much more ancient than those applications. In simplest terms, an egregore is an autonomous psychic entity generated by the thoughts and emotions of an individual or group, either intentionally or not. In general, individuals and small groups can only conjure an egregore through extraordinary focus or heightened emotion, often achieved by elaborate ritual and/or drugs. An egregore conjured under these circumstances is typically fleeting, perhaps dissolving after accomplishing a single task. Large groups, however, might conjure an egregore without any conscious intention or knowledge that they have done so, and these beings may be quite persistent.

The Irish poet and occultist William Butler Yeats famously conducted group rituals to this end, and claimed that he and his comrades had called into existence beings seen with their own eyes moving through his house. In a pamphlet distributed to his fellow occultists, Yeats made clear his belief that the generation of egregores was central to the activity of any magical order. The group’s rules, rituals, hierarchies, etc were in place to ensure that the entity emerging from the group mind would be benevolent, for egregores conjured by other means, or under different circumstances, could be of a very different character.

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