Egregore
[1][2][3] 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.
This was the case in Jan Potocki's novel The Manuscript Found in Saragossa, which referred to egregores as "the most illustrious of fallen angels.
"[7] The French author Victor Hugo, in La Légende des siècles (1859) ("The Legend of the Ages"), also uses the word égrégore, first as an adjective, then as a noun, while leaving the meaning obscure.
As René Guénon said, "the collective, in its psychic as well as its corporeal aspects, is nothing but a simple extension of the individual, and thus has absolutely nothing transcendent with respect to it, as opposed to spiritual influences, which are of a wholly different order".
The Meditations on the Tarot described the Antichrist as "an egregore, an artificial being who owes his existence to collective generation from below".
Ambelain had defined the egregore as "a force generated by a powerful spiritual current and then nourished at regular intervals, according to a rhythm in harmony with the universal life of the cosmos, or to a union of entities united by a common characteristic nature".
"[15][13] Liber Null & Psychonaut, by the British chaos magician Peter J. Carroll, uses the word egregore for the first time at the end of the following passage:Religion takes the view that consciousness preceded organic life.
Magic, which has given more attention to the quality of consciousness itself, takes an alternative view and concludes that organic and psychic forms evolve synchronously.
"[16] Following this usage, though giving no citations, the glossary in the 2022 book The Philosophy of Dark Paganism, by Frater Tenebris,[17] defines an "egregore" as "an occult term for an independently functioning spiritual entity created by one or more magick practitioners.
"[17] Mauricio Medeiros, writing for the theosophist website Estudo Teosófico, defined an egregore as "an astral, mental, or spiritual construct sustained by several people over a long period of time, giving it a character of permanence that does not depend on any particular individual".
[10] According to Guénon, the term was first used to designate these collective entities by Éliphas Lévi, "who, to justify this meaning, gave it an improbable Latin etymology, deriving it from grex, 'flock,' whereas the word is purely Greek and has never signified anything but 'watcher.
