# blog.jaye.ch $ cat egregores.md▊

Egregores

a reading: the group-made mind read whole — an entity claim from an initiate, a neutral structure the blog had only used for its worst case, and the exit chapter the blog never cited.

The full post

← home · a reading of one book, with notes
Contents 12 sections
  1. 1. The book, and why the borrowing makes the reading necessary
  2. 2. The claim, and the bracket
  3. 3. The word, which does not mean what the book says it means
  4. 4. The neutrality — the centre the blog missed
  5. 5. Tulpa and tulku: the mechanism, and where it came from
  6. 6. Language as a control mechanism
  7. 7. Fiction into structure
  8. 8. The countermeasure: what the book actually prescribes
  9. 9. The negative finding
  10. 10. The correction the blog owes
  11. 11. Counterweights, in the body
  12. Notes

Eighth of the readings, one book at its own scale — the book the blog had already been quoting, read whole for the first time, and found to be arguing the opposite of the case it was borrowed for

Eighth of the readings, and the first whose occasion is the blog’s own use of it. The western column quoted this book for one thing: a magical order destroyed by the very structure it was built around, the predation account with the brainwashing line in it. Ahead of the story quoted it for another: the Butler formulation of the shared thought-form, read as a fact about groups. Both borrowings were accurate, and both took a worst case and a mechanism. Neither post read the book. This one does — and finds that the claim underneath the worst case is the opposite of a pathology, that the same structure is what a healthy group runs on, and that the book’s countermeasure, which the blog never cited, has a pace in it.

Status. This post reads one source. The quotations are verbatim from a complete digital text of the edition, checked character for character against it and cited in the notes by chapter and section; the reading of them is an inference, offered as one. The book’s cosmology is not endorsed — nothing here claims that egregores are real entities, and nothing claims they are only metaphor; §2 is about why holding that open is the point, and it is the book’s own move rather than this post’s. No living author is diagnosed, no one’s experience is validated or disqualified, and the book’s sectarian and political material is reported as the book’s content and not adopted (§10). As everywhere: describe structures, diagnose no one.*

1. The book, and why the borrowing makes the reading necessary

Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny is by Mark Stavish, published by Inner Traditions in Rochester, Vermont, in 2018 — paperback ISBN 978-1-62055-577-4, e-book 978-1-62055-578-1, LCCN 2017048793.1 It is short. Seven chapters, a foreword by James Wasserman, a conclusion, and two appendices. The second appendix is a 1929 narrative of a group’s attempt to revive the egregore of the Roman Empire; the first — Appendix 1, “Personal Accounts of Disengaging from an Egregore” — is three first-person accounts by former members of three different organisations, and that is where the blog’s interest has been.23

Two corrections to the chapter list the brief carried: “A Modern Example of the War of the Egregores”, “The Power of the Egregore”, “Watch Your Dreams” and “Language as a Control Mechanism” are sections of chapter 1, and “The Golden Dawn Egregore” and “Walter Ernest Butler” are sections of chapter 2 — a small thing until one notices that the blog’s first borrowing is not from a chapter at all.

Both borrowings are quoted in the posts that made them. The western column §5 has the predation — the Secret Chiefs “relentlessly demanding of superhuman effort”, the recruits whipped in closets, “People simply burned out”, “moderate to total brainwashing”, and the closing “you are in charge of your spiritual path, not spirits, not Chiefs, and not Imperators.”43 All of it is in Appendix 1, in its third account, “Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down!”. Ahead of the story §8 has the mechanism — “Each member of the group pours energy into the collective thought-form but, equally, into each member there also passes the influence of the group as a whole”, and the warning that dependence made “mandatory upon all its members” is “treading a dangerous and slippery path”.45 That is in chapter 2, quoted by Stavish from W. E. Butler’s 1970 article “The Egregore of a School”. So the blog has had one piece of the book’s worst material and one piece of its mechanism, and has never had its claim.

2. The claim, and the bracket

This is an entity claim, made by an initiate of the Western esoteric tradition. The blog’s discipline is to describe the frame without adopting it, and that is harder here than usual, because the book is written to persuade a practitioner and is full of instruction. Stavish gives the definition he treats as common coin — “autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people”, taken, he notes, from Wiktionary — and then a second, older one he prefers: an egregore is also “the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature”.6 He brings in Jean Dubuis, who founded the Philosophers of Nature:

“What is an egregore? It is the psychic and astral entity of a group. All members of a group, a family, a club, a political party, a religion, or even a country, psychically included in the egregore of the organization to which they belong. . . . Therefore, each individual who is involved in a group receives the influences of the egregores, that is the astral counterpart of the group, in his psyche.”6

One textual note, reported rather than tidied: the text reads “or even a country, psychically included in the egregore of the organization”, with no verb before “psychically”, and the clause is quoted as the text has it.7

The scale is the point of that list. This is not a claim about cults, or about orders, or about any group a reader would identify as dangerous. It is a claim about every group a person is in, up to and including the country they live in — and Dubuis’s next move is what makes the book interesting rather than merely sweeping:

“It is impossible to free oneself from certain egregores. . . . However, we should free ourselves from all egregores that are not essential.”6

The target is not egregores. The target is unnecessary egregores. The book states its own scope in three questions, unusually candid about what kind of inquiry this is:

“What is the impact of an egregore on the individual, his destiny, and free will? Who or what manages the collective physical body of the group by way of the invisible? How is the management performed and to what ends?”6

The second and third are questions about management — who runs the collective body, and to what end — and that is why the book is legible to a blog that has spent fifteen posts on how groups hold positions. Then the bracket, which the book supplies itself:

The group-mind is not the occult part. Before the book’s claim is weighed, it is worth separating what in it is ordinary. That a group has a mental life of its own is a mainstream finding, stated in the secular register for a century and a half. Gustave Le Bon, in 1895: “the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”8 Durkheim found the same thing where he least expected an analyst — in religion, whose ideas seem to be “born” precisely “in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself.”9 So the ordinary claim is common ground: a group is not a heap of persons.

What the occult register adds is not the collective mind but its autonomy — that the groupmind is an entity, with its own existence, that can outlive its members and act on them. That is the claim to hold open, and it is the whole distance between Le Bon and Stavish. The blog’s method applies exactly: the shared mind is a structure, and whether the structure is also a being is the part the blog does not decide.

The book brackets the question itself — “it is functionally irrelevant, except for academic definition, if an egregore is understood to exist only in the classical sense or if we can consider a thoughtform an egregore”10 — and this post holds that bracket open from both sides, as the undreaming wetiko reading did. Nothing here claims an egregore is a being; nothing claims it is a figure of speech for a shared mood. Where the book claims a being, this post says so and stops.

3. The word, which does not mean what the book says it means

The book has a term with a history, and the history has the shape the blog keeps finding: an old name carrying a new claim. This is a small philological point with a large consequence, and it is the kind of check the blog asks of every frame — what does the authority claim, and does it survive contact with the source?

Read Éliphas Lévi, the writer the modern usage is traced to, and his Eggrégore is a biblical giant:

“Ces forces colossales ont parfois pris une figure et se sont présentées sous l’apparence de géants : Ce sont les Eggrégores du livre d’Hénoch ; créatures terribles pour qui nous sommes ce que sont pour nous les infusoires ou les insectes microscopiques qui pullulent entre nos dents et sur notre épiderme.”11

“Les véritables eggrégores, c’est-à-dire les veilleurs de nuit, auxquels nous aimons à croire, ce sont les astres du ciel avec leurs yeux toujours étincelants.”11

The Watchers — egrēgoroi, the wakeful ones, the angels of the Book of Enoch — which is what the Greek word means and where it actually lives. And Lévi, at the end of the passage, rejects that doctrine outright:

“C’est pourquoi nous rejetons définitivement et absolument la mythologie des eggrégores.”11

So far the word means giants, and the man using it disbelieves them. But it is the same Lévi, on René Guénon’s account, who gave the word its modern sense — and Guénon names him for it, in a passage the modern usage never quotes, because it is the indictment of that usage:

“Tout d’abord, nous devons faire remarquer que nous n’avons jamais employé le mot « égrégore » pour désigner ce qu’on peut appeler proprement une « entité collective » ; et la raison en est que, dans cette acception, c’est là un terme qui n’a rien de traditionnel et qui ne représente qu’une des nombreuses fantaisies du moderne langage occultiste. Le premier qui l’ait employé ainsi est Éliphas Lévi, et, si nos souvenirs sont exacts, c’est même lui qui, pour justifier ce sens, en a donné une étymologie latine invraisemblable, le faisant dériver de grex, « troupeau », alors que ce mot est purement grec et n’a jamais signifié en réalité autre chose que « veilleur ».”12

That is the whole of it, and it is exact. The collective-entity sense — the sense this book depends on — is Lévi’s coinage, not a tradition’s; the etymology he gave for it was false (grex, a herd, where the word is egrēgoroi, the watchers); and a scholar of the tradition rejected the sense as “one of the many fancies of modern occultist language”. The ancient name is real; the thing the name is now used for is a hundred and fifty years old and was attached to the word by a man who got its root wrong.

What that does to this reading, and what it does not. It does not make Stavish’s phenomenon wrong; a group can share a mind whether or not the word for it is old. It makes the claim of lineage wrong — and that is the blog’s own subject arriving inside a single word. A borrowed pedigree is exactly the “pre-certified frame” the blog names as a lever: the warrant issued by a host, before anyone checks the issuer. The egregore’s name is a warrant of that kind. The thing itself, if it exists, is new; the name it is given is ancient; and the gap between them is where the authority is smuggled. Which is why the blog’s method applies here with unusual force: read what the text says, not what its name implies.

4. The neutrality — the centre the blog missed

Here is the finding of this reading, in one sentence. The book’s egregore is not a pathology. It is ordinary equipment, and the book says so in its most quoted definition, in the foreword, in the chapter that is not quoted at all, and in its conclusion. The clearest statement is Butler’s, quoted by Stavish in chapter 2 as the standard British occult presentation of the idea:

“the fundamental nature of the egregore consists of collective emotions and that the thoughtform itself is amoral, taking its directions from those connected to it.”5

Amoral is doing real work there. A group’s shared mind is not good and it is not evil and it is not ill; it is directional, and the direction comes from the members. Butler’s expansion makes the loop explicit: “Each member of the group pours energy into the collective thought-form but, equally, into each member there also passes the influence of the group as a whole.”5 Nothing in the structure chooses, and everything in it has a bias: towards more of itself. Then Butler does the thing that makes this section necessary, and it is the passage the blog has never quoted:

“where the mental and psychic conditions justify such domination by the collective Group mind for a limited period, such dependence upon the Egregore may even be remedial. But any organization, which makes such dependence mandatory upon all its members, is treading a dangerous and slippery path and will, sooner or later, come to grief.”5

Remedial. Butler — “among one of the most important, and often little-known, occultists of the twentieth century”, in Stavish’s words — writes that dependence on a group mind can be a treatment, for a limited period, in the right conditions. What he forbids is not dependence but dependence made mandatory.

The foreword says the same at the door of the book: “I believe egregores are both positive and negative. They can inspire or enslave.”13 And chapter 7, whose subject is escape, opens by conceding that escape is mostly not the point — “So can egregores be avoided? Yes, but only if human beings can be avoided”14 — and locates their origin in the ordinary pressure of association rather than in anyone’s design: they are “born out of necessity—one might even say accidentally”, and mature “not unlike other living organisms”.14 What that looks like in the book’s own examples is deliberately unglamorous. Chapter 7 adds the school alumni association, “one of the stranger manifestations of a group mind and also one of the most common”; chapter 1 adds the family egregore, where “families who achieve renown or are even feared over several generations do so in part because of the egregore they have built up around themselves”.1415 The predation the blog borrowed is in this book. It is not what the book is about.

Against the environment, which asked what a predator does not have to build because the surrounding culture has already built it, the egregore is an unusually complete answer: a shared language with ready-made definitions, an authority who can speak for the whole, and a membership already habituated to taking its direction from the group. Against the owned cosmos, which found that a frame which “names an endpoint and makes the connection operable” thereby has a seat, the egregore is a different kind of thing. A seat is a place, at an endpoint, that a person occupies; every case study in this series has been a seat being taken. An egregore has no endpoint — Butler’s sentence is the proof, since it “takes its directions from those connected to it” and so has no direction of its own to hand anyone. It is closer to the environment than to a seat: a shared position no one occupies, which is why it can be amoral and remedial at once.

But in every account of harm in this book, a seat appears inside the egregore, and in the predation account the fatal feature is stated in one clause by the writer: the Secret Chiefs were “so-called because they were the guiding forces legitimizing the school’s existence and only the Chief had contact with them”, and they “were aspects of the unconscious of the Chief, whether or not they had any objective existence”.3 The egregore is the medium. The harm arrives when a single person becomes its reader — the one who says what the group mind wants — and when that reading cannot be checked. That is the label post’s rule arriving from the book’s side: what a group with an egregore does is not the question; whether a seat inside it has closed is.

5. Tulpa and tulku: the mechanism, and where it came from

The book’s account of how a group mind becomes autonomous is a Western borrowing from Tibetan material, and the book is explicit about the conduit. It is Alexandra David-Néel — French orientalist, Buddhist, traveller — through whom “the idea of the tulpa —an animated thoughtform that takes on autonomous existence—entered the vocabulary of Western esotericism”.15 The claim, quoted by Stavish from Magic and Mystery in Tibet:

“Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control. This, say Tibetan occultists, happens nearly mechanically, just as the child, when his body is completed and able to live apart, leaves its mother’s womb.”15

The provenance is careful hearsay: David-Néel attributing a mechanism to “Tibetan occultists” on the strength of training received in Sikkim, in a tradition she was also a reformer of. And the piece most retellings drop is that she did not accept her own evidence — “I may have created my own hallucination”15 — though others, she reported, saw the monk she had built.

The distinction between tulpa and tulku is the structural difference the whole book turns on: a tulpa is “more or less ephemeral”, while a tulku “is the incarnation of a lasting energy directed by an individual with the object of continuing a given kind of activity after his death”.15 The object of a group’s shared mind is not a good mood or a shared vocabulary. It is activity continued past the person who started it. And the tradition, in David-Néel’s record, knows what that costs. A lama’s answer to her scepticism turns her suggestion that the visions were self-generated into the book’s best image of the mechanism — cut a channel between a river and your house, dig a pond, and “fishes will come from the river” — and then into its warning: “It is only prudent to beware of opening channels without due consideration.”15 The line that gives the frame its price is in the same passage: “One must know how to protect oneself against the tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others.”15 A group-made mind can be dangerous; the danger is stated by the tradition that says it is also ordinary.

Then the book takes a live dispute inside Tibetan Buddhism — the worship of the protector deity Dorje Shugden, banned by the Dalai Lama — and reads it as a war of egregores:

“In Dorje Shugden we see a sort of apotheosis, or divinization of the human being—the source of the angry ghost often said to have been a condemned prisoner—who is then employed to protect the sect and its adherents.”15

Two counterweights belong in the body here. This is a living tradition’s internal dispute, read by a Western practitioner through a Western frame; that the frame reads every factional disagreement as a war of group-minds is the frame’s choice, not a finding about who is right in Tibet. And the book reports, without flinching, that “some have seen the Chinese occupation and destruction of Tibet as punishment for—or at least as a result of—the inadequate worship of Dorje Shugden”.15 A frame that can assign a national catastrophe to a deity’s unappeased devotees has taken on a debt, and the debt is not paid in the book.

6. Language as a control mechanism

The section of chapter 1 with that title is the purest blog territory in the book. Its argument is that a tradition’s self-description is part of how its egregore is maintained — that the frame is carried in the wording, and that a membership taught to define itself only in its own terms has handed the definition to the structure:

“each school defines itself. Any comparison to anything other than Tibetan Buddhism, or Buddhism in general—as defined by the lamas—is rarely done and actively discouraged. Therefore, the discussion is controlled, definitions are controlled, and, with this, the overarching egregore of the sect or school is maintained.”15

Stavish’s illustration is a claim about his own readers, and a good one because it is falsifiable in a way the rest of the chapter is not: few students of Tibetan Buddhism, he writes, will ever read his monograph, because “though claiming to want enlightenment and the freedom it mandates, they have simply traded one egregore for another.”15 Read that against the costume: the state is a state, and the frame decides what it is for — including the frame a person takes up when they leave one group for another. Chapter 7 extends the argument to the environment, where “the purpose of media is, on its most fundamental level, to create an egregore”, and the media are “extensions of various egregores” to be limited consciously.14 The clearest version of the mechanism is in chapter 7’s closing section:

“Controlling the narrative means to be in control of the story, of the story you want people to hear, believe, and act upon—all three parts must be present. It is not sufficient that they hear it; they must also believe it, and from that position of belief act in the manner that the narrative is directing them to.”14

Hear, believe, act. That is the mechanism post’s install-the-frame step in the idiom of a communications department, and it is a real addition to the blog’s vocabulary, because it names the third clause as the operative one: a narrative heard and believed but not acted on has not taken, and the test of a frame is behaviour.

The counterweight goes here rather than at the end. As stated, this argument cannot fail. Any tradition that maintains its own definitions exhibits the mechanism; any tradition that does not also exhibits something, by neglect. A frame that explains both the control and the absence of control is not making a prediction, and the blog’s own rule applies — an instrument that cannot return “undecided” will return something else. The salvageable version is narrower: the definition of the group’s terms is a resource, someone holds it, and who holds it is checkable.

7. Fiction into structure

The book’s most testable claim, and this reading’s most useful new material, is that a fiction can create a real group-mind. It makes that claim three times, with three different degrees of evidence.

AMORC, and a documented mechanism. In 1930 the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis sent five confidential manifestos to long-standing members — they “were to be read, signed, and returned” — announcing an international council of Adepts whose list of signatories Stavish judges doubtful: “it is doubtful that the mentioned ‘signatories’ existed in any uniform manner; if they did exist they were probably more honorary than active.”16 What he says they did do is the chapter’s finding:

“This document, and ones similar to it, are in fact magical operations. Here the semihistorical and mythological Rosicrucian fraternity, a worldwide body of Adepts, is affirmed, listed, and again announced to all the world… That which is fiction slowly materializes into fact; the dream becomes reality, and history is justified.”16

That is a claim about a ritual of assertion: a group stating its own charter as fact, to its most committed members, under signature, as a way of making the fact load-bearing — the same move the certified frame documented in the secular register. The averment those members had to sign, with the hour and date recorded, is why Stavish calls it a magical operation at all: a ritual text with a witnessed return.16

Lovecraft, and a tradition of contrivance. Chapter 5 argues that the Necronomicon’s fictionality is not unusual in the tradition it entered: “a close examination shows that nearly all of the famous magical texts in Western occultism were in some way contrived.”17 It supports that with the Solomonic corpora and the Padmasambhava “termas” — the same evidentiary move Star.Ships had to make — and then gives the mechanism by which a fiction becomes usable: the book is linked through various fictions “to both historical people and locations as well as fictional ones, thus bending the framework of reality for the reader”.17 That is a frame producing its own evidentiary texture — the same operation the machine said so catalogued.

Slender Man, and no evidence at all. Chapter 4’s account of the fictional internet figure is where the claim goes from structural to strong, and it is the book’s weakest link, so it gets quoted whole:

“By using the magical method of the egregore, ‘what I cannot do alone, many others can do for me,’ and harnessing the psycho-sexual-emotional energy of millions of preadolescent and adolescent youths, a veritable buffet of psychic energy was made available for the taking.”18

This is assertion, and the book does not pretend otherwise. There is no measurement, no case, no prediction, no control; there is a figure whose fictional elaboration was followed by real violence, and a mechanism asserted to connect them. Reported as what it is — the book’s testable claim, presented in its least testable form — it is also the clearest example of the frame’s reach, which is the subject of §10.

One more, and it is the hardest thing in the book to leave alone. Chapter 6’s section on the “Third Mind”, named after Napoleon Hill and after Burroughs and Gysin, ends with Stavish attributing the death of Joan Vollmer, shot by Burroughs in Mexico in 1951, to the structure the two of them had built: the shooting “cannot be seen as an ‘accident’ in the true sense of the word… In short, the magical being they had engendered was taking its toll.”16 That is the frame doing what frames do, and it is also the frame’s cost, stated plainly and not adopted here: a man fired the shot, and a reading that relocates the act into a shared mind has removed the person who did it.

8. The countermeasure: what the book actually prescribes

This is the reading’s second occasion. The western column used this book for the diagnosis and never for the prescription; it quoted one closing imperative — “you are in charge of your spiritual path” — and treated that as the book’s countermeasure. It is a countermeasure, and it is one sentence. Chapter 7 is a procedure, and the blog has never cited it.

First, the honest scale of the problem. Extraction is compared, without hedging, to leaving a mind-control cult: it is “the same thing as demonstrated in deprogramming from destructive mind-control cults (DMCC)”.14 And then the sentence that keeps the comparison from becoming an accusation, which is the most careful line in the book and the one this blog most needed:

“It is important to note that all egregores are cults in the classical sense of the word, but not all are cults in the modern pejorative sense.”14

Cult in the classical sense is cultus — a body of worship and practice shared by a group. Read with Butler’s “amoral” and “remedial” in hand, that sentence says every human association is a cultus and that calling one a cult in the modern sense is a separate, later judgement. A reading that stopped at the DMCC comparison would have endorsed an accusation the book refuses.

Second, the support requirement — the prescription’s one outside check, easy to miss because it is a subordinate clause:

“the amount of emotional energy, social dynamics, shared goals and values, and ‘family’ identification and structure all combine to make it emotionally painful and difficult to extract oneself—by oneself, without some form of support—from an egregore.”14

The extraction is not prescribed as a solo act; the remedy assumes a second person.

Third, the pace — and it is a real one, with numbers. The procedure has a box, a duration, and a rate:

“Place everything associated with your identified egregore in a box. Place the box out of sight in your closet or give it to someone to hold for the duration of this practice: one month minimum, and six weeks ideally.”14

with the expected consequence named in advance — “a period of mourning is to be expected” — and a benchmark that is arithmetic rather than inspirational:

“the entire process of extraction, a comprehensive understanding of the related events, and the realization of a new direction may take up to two years. It is easy to say that for every year one is involved with the egregore it can take a month for the process to work itself out.”14

The book flags its own number as “just a general figure”, which is the correct register. But a rate is what it is: one part recovery to twelve parts involvement, with a floor of one month and a ceiling of two years. The safeguards and the western column both found a metered pace in their traditions, usually as a warning to go slowly. Here the pace is in the remedy, and it is quantified.

Fourth, the remedy has an explicit no-outcome. The procedure ends by declining to conclude: “You may find a way to balance the two, or you may choose to go back… whatever it is that you do it will be from a position of individual choice, self-expression, and freedom.”14 Three permitted endings, one of which is return, and the test is not the outcome but whether the choice was made from inside or outside — a safeguard no programme that wants an exit can manufacture.

Fifth, the checking work done before the decision. Chapter 7’s instrument is a comparison between promise and delivery: know what you joined for — “it is critical that we know what our goals are to begin with” — and use that “as a beneficial checklist”, because “knowing what it is we desire to accomplish and comparing what is being promised and what is really being delivered” is what keeps a person moving toward their own goals.14 That is the label post’s check, written for the member rather than for the observer.

Sixth, the remedy for the frame itself, with a manner-rule. The chapter’s named countermeasure is “therapeutic blasphemy”, and Stavish is careful about its provenance: the term is Joscelyn Godwin’s, in The Theosophical Enlightenment, borrowed from Urgyen Sangharakshita, and its content is the public and deliberate desacralisation of the tradition one was raised in — “we are to free ourselves publicly and consciously from private and unconscious indoctrination.”14 And then the rule that makes it a therapy rather than an act:

“If, however, it is done disrespectfully—out of cynicism, pride, or without appreciation for what positive lessons may have been learned—then desacralization, or therapeutic blasphemy, loses its therapeutic component and simply becomes blasphemy.”14

A remedy with a condition on how it is done is a remedy with a safeguard inside it — and the condition is about the state of the person doing it, not about the object.

Seventh, the rule about material anchors. The destructive section is unambiguous: “the objects connected with the organization or movement must be destroyed. Fire is the principal means of separating the energetic link and destroying it.”14 A letter Stavish prints from an anonymous practitioner does it at the scale of a person’s own temple: tools defaced with an ice pick on a Tuesday, “the day of Mars”, each with a spoken thanks, the sword hammered and bent, all “consigned to water and fire to eliminate any residual etheric links”.14 Whether or not one accepts the metaphysics, the structure is recognisable: a rite of separation with a witness, a date, and a specific inventory, rather than a decision taken silently. The counterweight is in the same section: the book’s own examples of destroying an egregore’s anchors are the French revolutionaries of 1789, the Soviets in Germany in 1945, the Chinese Communists in Tibet in 1959, and “the destruction of monuments, texts, and places of worship by various Islamic fundamentalist paramilitary forces”.14 The remedy and the iconoclasm are the same description; what separates them is who is burning whose objects.

Eighth, the standing defence. Quoting Mouni Sadhu, the book sets out three points against coming under a foreign influence: “DO NOT SLEEP in the sense of being passive or distracted”, pray, keep defined forms in consciousness, exercise the body.19 The second is the interesting one, because its content is a choice of association rather than an avoidance: “Join a certain good Egregor, which corresponds to your contemplation, so that you will not be entangled with the Chain of a foreign, evil Egregor.”19 The remedy is not none. It is a better one.

Ninth, and last, the outside test. Chapter 2 carries the best check in the whole book, quoted by Stavish from Butler and attributed by Butler to Dion Fortune:

“the best way of judging the spiritual health of any organization was not to take its public teachings and statements as proof of its integrity but rather to look closely at the type of person its discipline turned out. . . . Here is the ancient touchstone we can always apply for it is eternally true: ‘By their fruits shall ye know them.’”5

That is an outside check in the exact sense this series means: it cannot be performed from inside the group’s own terms, it looks at people rather than at claims, and it is checkable by anyone. Set beside the “you are in charge of your spiritual path” line the blog already had, it is the stronger instrument — the first tells the practitioner to trust their own authority, the second to look at the output.

So the answer to this reading’s second question is: yes, the book supplies a real countermeasure. A support requirement, a quantified pace, a pre-commitment checklist, a manner-rule on the remedy, a material deposit with a date, a standing three-point practice, an outside test that reads people rather than claims, and an explicit permission to go back. The western column cited none of it. One more line is worth keeping, because it is the machine has no reading’s claim from the other side: “a demon perceived, i.e., on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent.”14

9. The negative finding

Stated as a search result, scoped to the text of this edition. The text of Egregores contains no clinical referral. Case-insensitive searches return 0 hits for “safeguard”, “physician”, “therapist”, “therapis”, “psychiatry”, “psychosis”, “counsel” and “supervis”. Everything clinical in the text is incidental, and it is itemised at 20: one hit for “psychiatr”, in an appendix account, where a Chief’s “psychiatric medication kept him a bit more stable”; three hits for “doctor”, all inside a quoted 1920s dialogue by the French mystic Paul Sédir; and one hit for “clinic”, inside “severe clinical depression” as a reported symptom among historians of witchcraft. No hit is a referral, there is no instruction anywhere in the book to take a state, a symptom or a crisis to anyone outside the practice, and the word “safeguard” does not occur. A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped: within this text, the referral is absent.

This matters more here than in the other readings, for two reasons. First, because of what this book contains. It is the blog’s most explicit Western account of groups that damage people — members whipped in closets, a leader who “had the discipline and ethics of an eight-yearold child”, a school destroyed, a Chief whose involvement with the occult began “through a complete psychotic break” after which “he was cataleptic for about a month and was briefly institutionalized.”3 In the second appendix account, a man in the aftermath of a grand master’s death reports chest pain he considered severe enough for an emergency room.3 The material is this close to a clinical boundary. The book never names one.

Second, because of the contrast inside the blog. The western column §4 singled out the clinical referral as “the single most striking passage in the Western material” — and credited it to Josephine McCarthy’s Quareia curriculum: “Clean yourself up magically, and if you are still hearing them, go see a doctor.”4 The book it used for the predation account of the West supplies no route from a casualty to a clinician, and does not distinguish between a problem the practice can address and a problem it cannot. And the pace in §7 is not a substitute for the check: a rate tells a person to be patient, and cannot return the verdict this book’s own material most obviously invites — that some of what the accounts describe is illness, that illness has a treatment, and that the treatment is not in the book. The differential drew that boundary. This tradition wrote a whole chapter on extraction and did not write the sentence.

10. The correction the blog owes

Two corrections, and they are the same correction seen from two ends.

One: the blog took the book’s marked-as-dramatic appendix and left its thesis. The quotation the western column §5 uses — the closets, the whipping, the burnout, the brainwashing, the spirits-and-Chiefs line — is in Appendix 1, and the appendix has a preamble that changes what the material is. In full:

“It is very clear that many people have positive experiences with various organizations and their attendant egregores. However, at some point this may change. For the sake of comparison we have provided several examples of individuals who extracted themselves from three very different spiritual organizations. These examples are dramatic and have been chosen for this very quality. It is up to each reader to compare the statements of the following people with their own personal experiences to see if there is anything that may be of value to them.”3

The book says, in its own voice, that the accounts the blog used are selected for being dramatic, and that “many people have positive experiences”. Those three accounts — a former member of a Tibetan Buddhist organisation, a former member of a worldwide initiatic fraternity, and the writer of the Secret Chiefs account — are introduced as examples, “for the sake of comparison”, with each writer supplying their own recollection. The blog’s note to that material describes it as “the account of the order”; the passage is a contributed first-person account in an appendix, and the writer of it is not named.43

Set that beside the book’s thesis, and the flattening is exact. The book’s claim is that a group’s shared mind is amoral, born of necessity, one might even say accidentally, possibly remedial, able to inspire or enslave, and that there are egregores that are healthy for some people — “one need only look at the number of people who overcome addictions, health concerns, or emotional distress by interacting with healthy support groups.”14 The blog took the three accounts the book flags as its dramatic cases, and left the ordinary case the book spends six chapters on. That is the same failure of reading Star.Ships caught in the deep inheritance — a book’s strongest available figure taken as the book’s frame, when the book’s own text is weaker and better. It happened here to the blog’s own most careful post about the West.

Two: the blog took the diagnosis and left the prescription. The western column §5 closes on the “you are in charge of your spiritual path, not spirits, not Chiefs, and not Imperators” line and calls it “the countermeasure”. It is a countermeasure, and it is a verdict — an assertion of authority against the structure. The book’s procedure is chapter 7, which that post does not cite: the support requirement, the box, the one-month floor and the six-week ideal, the one-month-per-year benchmark, the two-year ceiling, the promise-and-delivery checklist, the manner-rule on therapeutic blasphemy, the Tuesday destruction of the tools, the three-point standing defence, and Fortune’s fruits test. That is some twenty pages of programme, and it is the thing this series was arguing for when it said the Western column writes safeguards into the training. The blog found the sentence. It missed the chapter.

Both corrections run the same way as the reading’s central finding: the book is not a predation case with a warning attached. It is a treatment of an ordinary structure that sometimes eats its host, and it prescribes, at length, what to do when it does. The blog published the worst page and the closing sentence. Three things follow. One — the frame inventory gains a third kind of object: a cosmos of persons has a reading and no seat, the owned cosmos has a seat, and the book supplies a shared position nobody occupies — the environment post given a name and a metabolism, with the harm appearing inside it as an appointment rather than as a property of the thing itself. Two — the blog’s argument about the ordinary case acquires its opposite from the same source: a tradition’s shared mind is what a tradition runs on, and the disaster is the structure with a closed reader, not the structure. Three — the positive programme gains a rate, which the blog has never had. The book’s own conclusion offers the sentence the whole argument rests on, reported here without adopting it:

“there is no such thing as good or evil, only ideas and their consequences. . . . Recognizing this reality is the first step in defeating it.”10

Frames are not ranked by their content, and the question that has an answer is what a frame does and who can check it. This blog will not say there is no good or evil. It will say what it has said from the beginning, and what this book, read whole, supports — a group-made mind is ordinary, it is directional, and the harm is in the seat. The Western tradition that knew the most about it wrote down both the disaster and the treatment, in one book, with the treatment longer, and this is the first time the blog has read them together.

11. Counterweights, in the body

The 80 per cent, without a denominator. The second appendix account reports that “upward of 80 percent of the officers of the order died before reaching the age of sixty-five, and from unusual and debilitating blood diseases”, and that with the general membership the figure was “still a staggering 20 percent”.3 There is no denominator, no comparison population, no base rate for officers of small esoteric orders, and no control — and the reporter is a member with an interest in the explanation he goes on to give. A percentage with no base rate to compare it to is not a rate. Reported as what it is: one person’s recollection of a small group, offered as evidence of a shared mind’s toll.

And the same account gives itself away, which is worth more than the statistic. After the list of everyone else’s misfortunes — a lost job, a transferred post, blood cancers, an embezzlement charge — the writer explains his own survival naturally and the others’ suffering structurally: “I have been spared through no grace or skill of my own. I attribute it to constant prayer, a loving wife who steered me back to sane choices, and the love and grace of God.”3 The frame receives a mundane cause for the self and a supernatural one for the others, in the same paragraph, by the same hand. That asymmetry is the most useful thing in the appendix, and it is a reason to read the accounts as testimony rather than as data.

The frame’s reach. The book’s own sentence is the sharpest statement of the problem: “So can egregores be avoided? Yes, but only if human beings can be avoided.”14 A frame that covers every association between persons — a family, a club, a nation, a sports team, a news network, a marriage — does not discriminate between a group mind that is load-bearing and one that is eating someone. Butler’s “amoral” carries the same load from the other direction: if the structure takes its direction from the members, then “the egregore did it” describes no mechanism at all until someone names the reader. What makes the book usable is exactly the part this post has kept: the seat inside the structure, and the test that reads people rather than claims.

The book’s political material, which the blog reports and does not adopt. The foreword extends the frame further than the chapters do, and one passage of it is political invective by any standard: it names the New York Times’s motto as “a lie whose object is incitement”, describes Berkeley protestors as “leftist-inspired censorship storm troopers and jackbooted, mask-wearing street gangs”, and characterises the six-pointed star and its doctrines as “another resilient egregore that could well be improved upon”.13 Chapter 1 also relays, without endorsing, the claim that the destruction of Tibet was a consequence of inadequate worship of a protector deity.15 The blog quotes the book’s material; it does not adopt its politics and does not repeat its invective, and this paragraph is here so that a reader who takes the book up knows what is in it.

And the remedy’s own presupposition. The book’s countermeasure is addressed to someone who accepts its cosmology: “join a certain good Egregor” is not an instruction this blog can give anyone, and the rite of destruction is described in terms — “the energetic link”, “residual etheric links” — that the blog brackets. But the shape of the prescription survives the bracketing: a support requirement, a rate, a checklist, a manner-rule, a documented separation with a date, and an explicit permission to return. Those are the parts a reader who does not accept the metaphysics can use, and the parts the blog should have had all along.

Notes

Marking: a reading. Documented — every passage in quotation marks, taken from a complete digital text of Mark Stavish, Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2018, ISBN 978-1-62055-577-4), checked character for character against it and cited in the notes by chapter and section. Address: chapter and section attributions are taken from the book’s own running headings and its table of contents rather than from position; this reading’s brief named several sections as chapters and they are cited here as sections; the Dubuis group-list sentence is quoted as the text has it, with the verb absent, and the difference is flagged rather than reconciled; typographic quotes are rendered as straight ASCII; the book’s small-capital section headings are rendered in title case, and opening capitals are normalised to sentence position; the text’s internal footnote numbers are dropped from quotations. Absences reported as search results, scoped to the text of this edition: no clinical referral anywhere (no “safeguard”, “physician”, “therapist”, “psychiatry”, “psychosis”, “counsel”, “supervis”); the single “psychiatr” hit and the three “doctor” hits are itemised at 20; and the metered pace that is present belongs to the countermeasure, not to the practice (one month minimum, six weeks ideally, one month per year of involvement, up to two years). The correction this reading makes: the blog’s two prior uses of this book took, respectively, its marked-as-dramatic appendix (Appendix 1, three contributed accounts the book introduces as “dramatic and… chosen for this very quality”) and its mechanism (Butler as quoted in chapter 2), and left the book’s thesis — that a group’s shared mind is amoral, born of necessity, one might even say accidentally, possibly remedial, and healthy for some people — together with the whole of its countermeasure chapter. That is a flattening of the same class Star.Ships caught in the deep inheritance, and it is stated in §9, not repeated here. The reading’s own contribution, offered as inference: that the egregore is best read as a shared position nobody occupies — closer to the environment than to a seat — with the harm appearing inside it as a seat (a reader) that closes, which the book’s own predation account and its Golden Dawn link material both support and neither states. Counterweights, in the body: the officer-mortality figure with no denominator and the self/other asymmetry in the same account (§10); the “only if human beings can be avoided” reach of the frame (§10); the Vollmer reading, and the book’s political invective, reported and not adopted (§6, §10); and the cosmology the remedy presupposes, bracketed in §2 and §10. Not adjudicated: whether egregores exist — the post claims neither that they are real entities nor that they are only metaphor, and the book brackets the question itself (“It is functionally irrelevant, except for academic definition…”). The reading of the meaning of a shared mind is an inference, offered as one; the book’s sectarian and political material is reported as the book’s content and not adopted; the individual writers of Appendix 1 are quoted for what they wrote and no one is diagnosed; and nothing here validates, disqualifies or restricts anyone’s practice, or anyone’s membership in anything.

  1. Stavish, M., Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny, Rochester, VT: Inner Traditions, 2018, ISBN 978-1-62055-577-4 (paperback), 978-1-62055-578-1 (e-book), LCCN 2017048793. Read from a complete digital text of the book, whose sections stand out of book order (the body of chapter 1 appears first, then chapters 2, 6, 3, 7, 5 and 4, with the front matter and table of contents following the Lovecraft endnotes). Structure: Foreword by James Wasserman; Introduction, “Angels, Women, and War in the Heavens”; chapters 1–7 as listed in §1; Conclusion, “Ideas and Their Consequences”; Appendix 1, “Personal Accounts of Disengaging from an Egregore”; Appendix 2, “An Account of the Revivification of an Egregore”; endnotes, bibliography, index.↩︎

  2. Stavish, Egregores, Appendix 2, “An Account of the Revivification of an Egregore” — the narrative first published in the esoteric journal Krur in 1929, edited by Julius Evola, describing a group’s attempt to revive the egregore of the Roman Empire “using Benito Mussolini as their instrument”; Stavish’s chapter-7 summary of it — “efforts to revive the egregore of the Roman Empire that led to the political ascendancy of Benito Mussolini”; and his claim that “an egregore can be modified, with an existing weak or even ‘dead egregore’ (of a long since vanished cult) being easier to modify during the process of its revival than an existing strong and vital one”. The appendix appears in this reading only as the book’s own closing structure: its final exhibit is a documented attempt to reactivate a dead group mind, reported by its participants.↩︎

  3. Stavish, Egregores, Appendix 1, “Personal Accounts of Disengaging from an Egregore”. Preamble: “It is very clear that many people have positive experiences with various organizations and their attendant egregores” and “These examples are dramatic and have been chosen for this very quality”. The first account, “‘The Greater the Eschaton, the Tighter the Screws of the Egregore’”, is by a former member of a Tibetan Buddhist organisation, after twenty-seven years of involvement. The second, “‘It Was Like Something Out of H. P. Lovecraft!’”, is by a former member of a worldwide initiatic fraternity, and contains the officer-mortality figure, “upward of 80 percent of the officers of the order died before reaching the age of sixty-five, and from unusual and debilitating blood diseases”, the emergency-room material, and “I have been spared through no grace or skill of my own. I attribute it to constant prayer, a loving wife who steered me back to sane choices, and the love and grace of God”. The third, “‘Do Not Call Up That Which You Cannot Put Down!’”, carries the Secret Chiefs account: “The Secret Chiefs, who had formed the egregore, were relentlessly demanding of superhuman effort. They invented techniques like staying for days inside closets and whipping recruits”; “People simply burned out. The few left were frightening zealots”; “without humanizing elements like nurturing and basic mental hygiene, the power made people maniacal and cruel”; “you are in charge of your spiritual path, not spirits, not Chiefs, and not Imperators”; and “the methods used by the group were incredibly effective in inducing mystical states of consciousness but had the terrible side effect of moderate to total brainwashing”. Its account of the Chief: the Secret Chiefs “were aspects of the unconscious of the Chief, whether or not they had any objective existence”; “the discipline and ethics of an eight-yearold child”; “through a complete psychotic break”; and “he was cataleptic for about a month and was briefly institutionalized”. The three accounts carry a byline only of the kind of organisation the writer belonged to; no individual is named.↩︎

  4. The blog’s two prior uses of the book, corrected in §9. The western column §5 and its note (the one citing Stavish) — the predation passage, called there “the account of the order”; the post’s text describes it as “Mark Stavish’s Egregores… contains an account of a magical order — the author is describing a school he was inside”. The passage is in Appendix 1, a contributed first-person account, in the third of the appendix’s three examples, which the book’s preamble introduces as “dramatic and… chosen for this very quality”; the writer is not named, and the book’s own thesis chapters say the opposite thing about egregores in general. Ahead of the story §8 and its note (the Butler/egregore citation) — the Butler formulations from chapter 2, used there as “§5 stated as a fact about groups”; that note cites Butler via Stavish accurately, and the passage’s own continuation (“such dependence upon the Egregore may even be remedial”) is the part the blog’s neutrality argument was missing. This post does not repeat the western column §5–§7; it reads the rest of the book, and states in §9 exactly which sentences the two posts took.↩︎

  5. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 2, “The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and Related Egregores”, and its sections “The Golden Dawn Egregore” and “Walter Ernest Butler: A Seminal Occultist”. The Flying Roll material is quoted by Stavish from Patrick Zalewski’s Secret Inner Order Rituals of the Golden Dawn: “Once accepted into the body during the 5=6, it is impregnated into the individual for life, unless the Chiefs who emanate the Link choose to close it down”; and the “Transmission of the Etheric Link” at the 7=4 grade, where “the Link is given in its entirety to the Adept so that they are able to carry on”. The Butler quotations are from W. E. Butler, “The Egregore of a School” (1970), published by the Servants of the Light — Stavish’s paraphrase of Butler’s “amoral” claim, “the fundamental nature of the egregore consists of collective emotions and the thoughtform itself is amoral, taking its directions from those connected to it”; and Butler’s own text: “Each member of the group pours energy into the collective thought-form but, equally, into each member there also passes the influence of the group as a whole”; “such dependence upon the Egregore may even be remedial. But any organization, which makes such dependence mandatory upon all its members, is treading a dangerous and slippery path and will, sooner or later, come to grief”; and Dion Fortune’s test as Butler records it — “not to take its public teachings and statements as proof of its integrity but rather to look closely at the type of person its discipline turned out. . . . ‘By their fruits shall ye know them’”. Stavish introduces Butler as “among one of the most important, and often little-known, occultists of the twentieth century”.↩︎

  6. Stavish, Egregores, Introduction, sections “What Is an Egregore?” and “Three Questions This Book Will Address” — the Wiktionary definition, “( occult ) autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people”; the harder definition, “the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with the material world in which we live”; the Jean Dubuis passage quoted at length, from the lessons of instruction he wrote for the Philosophers of Nature — “What is an egregore? It is the psychic and astral entity of a group”; “All members of a group, a family, a club, a political party, a religion, or even a country, psychically included in the egregore of the organization to which they belong”; “Therefore, each individual who is involved in a group receives the influences of the egregores, that is the astral counterpart of the group, in his psyche”; “It is impossible to free oneself from certain egregores”. Stavish notes that the Dubuis excerpt comes from the Philosophers of Nature lessons and that the school held no collective rituals “so as to limit the formation of any egregore”. Also quoted by Stavish from Joscelyn Godwin’s The Golden Thread — “the egregore can take on a life of its own and appear to be an independent, personal divinity, with a limited power on behalf of its devotees and an unlimited appetite for further devotion”.↩︎

  7. Address, and how the quotations are rendered. Every quotation was checked character for character against the text of this edition, with its curly quotes and apostrophes rendered here as straight ASCII and its em dashes kept as the em dash character. Chapter and section attributions are taken from the book’s own running headings and its table of contents, both of which the text preserves. Where the text and the printed book appear to differ, the text is reported and the difference is flagged rather than reconciled: the Dubuis group-list sentence in §2 reads “or even a country, psychically included in the egregore of the organization to which they belong”, with the verb absent, and it is quoted as the text has it. The book sets its section headings and parts of its table of contents in small capitals; those titles are rendered here in title case (“A Modern Example of the War of the Egregores”, “Language as a Control Mechanism”), and an opening capital inside a sentence is lowered to the sentence’s position where a quotation continues one mid-sentence. This reading’s brief named several of the book’s sections as chapters — “A Modern Example of the War of the Egregores”, “The Power of the Egregore”, “Watch Your Dreams” and “Language as a Control Mechanism” (all sections of chapter 1), and “The Golden Dawn Egregore” and “Walter Ernest Butler” (sections of chapter 2); they are cited here as sections. The text’s internal cross-reference footnote numbers are dropped from quotations, and inner double quotes in the source are rendered as single quotes inside a longer quotation (Slender Man, ch. 4).↩︎

  8. Gustave Le Bon, The Crowd: A Study of the Popular Mind (1895), trans. 1896, ch. “The Mind of Crowds”; read from the archive.org scan (le-bon-gustave.-the-crowd…[1896]): “The most striking peculiarity presented by a psychological crowd is the following: Whoever be the individuals that compose it… the fact that they have been transformed into a crowd puts them in possession of a sort of collective mind which makes them feel, think, and act in a manner quite different from that in which each individual of them would feel, think, and act were he in a state of isolation.”↩︎

  9. Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life (1912; Swain trans. 1915), read from Project Gutenberg (no. 41360): “So it is in the midst of these effervescent social environments and out of this effervescence itself that the religious idea seems to be born.”↩︎

  10. Stavish, Egregores, Conclusion, “Ideas and Their Consequences” (placed in the text before the AMORC chapter) — “It is functionally irrelevant, except for academic definition, if an egregore is understood to exist only in the classical sense or if we can consider a thoughtform an egregore”; “there is no such thing as good or evil, only ideas and their consequences”; and “Recognizing this reality is the first step in defeating it”.↩︎

  11. Éliphas Lévi, Le Grand Arcane, ou l’Occultisme dévoilé (1868), ch. “Le Magnétisme du Mal”; read from the 1912 printing at archive.org (item 1912-levi-grand-arcane), French as printed: “Ce sont les Eggrégores du livre d’Hénoch…”; “Les véritables eggrégores, c’est-à-dire les veilleurs de nuit…”; and “C’est pourquoi nous rejetons définitivement et absolument la mythologie des eggrégores” (the 1912 scan corrupts the word “mythologie”; the published text and other editions carry it). The English renderings in the body are this post’s.↩︎

  12. René Guénon, Initiation et réalisation spirituelle (Paris: Éditions Traditionnelles), ch. VI, “Influences spirituelles et « égrégores »”, read at index-rene-guenon.org: “…nous n’avons jamais employé le mot « égrégore » pour désigner ce qu’on peut appeler proprement une « entité collective » ; et la raison en est que, dans cette acception, c’est là un terme qui n’a rien de traditionnel et qui ne représente qu’une des nombreuses fantaisies du moderne langage occultiste.” Translation in the body is this post’s. Note Guénon’s own position, which the post does not adopt: he holds the collective force to be real but not the word égrégore.↩︎

  13. Wasserman, J., Foreword to Stavish, Egregores — “I believe egregores are both positive and negative. They can inspire or enslave”; and the political passage quoted in §10: the New York Times motto “a lie whose object is incitement and the propagation of insane myths and irrational policies”; “Antifa and others as Berkeley was turned into a war zone by leftist-inspired censorship storm troopers and jackbooted, mask-wearing street gangs”; and the six-pointed star and its doctrines as “another resilient egregore that could well be improved upon” (all three in the Foreword’s closing survey of national, commercial, communication and religious egregores).↩︎

  14. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 7, “Freeing Oneself from the Influence of Egregores” — “So can egregores be avoided? Yes, but only if human beings can be avoided”; “the majority of egregores are born out of necessity—one might even say accidentally”; the media passage, “the purpose of media is, on its most fundamental level, to create an egregore”, and “The media and its attendant sounds and images are extensions of various egregores. Limit exposure to them, and do so consciously”. Section “‘Therapeutic Blasphemy’ to Break Their Hold”: “we are to free ourselves publicly and consciously from private and unconscious indoctrination” and “then desacralization, or therapeutic blasphemy, loses its therapeutic component and simply becomes blasphemy”; Stavish attributes the term to Joscelyn Godwin’s The Theosophical Enlightenment, borrowing from Urgyen Sangharakshita. Section “Spin Three Times to the Left”: the Psalm 68 response and “One must also spin three times to the left and cross oneself”. Section “Destruction of an Egregore—Fire and Sword”: “the objects connected with the organization or movement must be destroyed. Fire is the principal means of separating the energetic link and destroying it”; the list of modern destruction quoted in §7; and “Hence, some egregores may be reinvigorated even after centuries or millennia of disuse, which is a closely kept secret of operational magic”. Section “Refuge in an Egregore?”: “all egregores are at best restrictive forces from which we must free ourselves” and Sadhu’s three points. Section “Do-It-Yourself Deprogramming”: “all egregores are cults in the classical sense of the word, but not all are cults in the modern pejorative sense”; “it is often difficult to do, for it’s the same thing as demonstrated in deprogramming from destructive mind-control cults (DMCC)”; “by oneself, without some form of support”; the extraction timeline; the box procedure; “You may find a way to balance the two, or you may choose to go back” and “it will be from a position of individual choice, self-expression, and freedom”; and “there are egregores that are healthy for some people”. Section “Controlling the Narrative”: “Controlling the narrative means to be in control of the story, of the story you want people to hear, believe, and act upon—all three parts must be present”. Also, quoting the author of Meditations on the Tarot: “a demon perceived, i.e., on whom the light of consciousness is thrown, is already a demon rendered impotent”.↩︎

  15. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 1, “Tibetan Buddhism and the Reality of the Egregore” — the David-Néel material, from Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929), Initiations and Initiates in Tibet and The Secret Oral Teachings in Tibetan Buddhist Sects: the tulpa’s autonomy, “Once the tulpa is endowed with enough vitality to be capable of playing the part of a real being, it tends to free itself from its maker’s control. This, say Tibetan occultists, happens nearly mechanically, just as the child, when his body is completed and able to live apart, leaves its mother’s womb”; “I may have created my own hallucination”; the tulpa/tulku distinction, including “in some cases they may survive him, or, during his life, free themselves from his domination”; “It is only prudent to beware of opening channels without due consideration”; “One must know how to protect oneself against the tigers to which one has given birth, as well as against those that have been begotten by others”; the four dubthabs and the warning about the wrathful category; “The mystics of Tibet consider that gods and demons, paradise and hell, exist only for those who believe in them”; the Dorje Shugden material, from Isabel Hilton’s The Search for the Panchen Lama, including “In Dorje Shugden we see a sort of apotheosis, or divinization of the human being” and the claim that “some have seen the Chinese occupation and destruction of Tibet as punishment for—or at least as a result of—the inadequate worship of Dorje Shugden”; the section “The Power of the Egregore . . . Watch Your Dreams”, “Just as we feed, so does it feed. Just as we inhale and exhale, so does it inhale and exhale”; and the section “Language as a Control Mechanism”, “the discussion is controlled, definitions are controlled, and, with this, the overarching egregore of the sect or school is maintained” and “they have simply traded one egregore for another”.↩︎

  16. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 6, “The Egregore of the Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Crucis (AMORC)”, sections “Harvey Spencer Lewis: The Founder of AMORC”, “AMORC and the Cathedral of the Soul” and “The Third Mind” — the Pronunziamento to All the World material, including “it is doubtful that the mentioned ‘signatories’ existed in any uniform manner; if they did exist they were probably more honorary than active”; “This document, and ones similar to it, are in fact magical operations”; “That which is fiction slowly materializes into fact; the dream becomes reality, and history is justified”; and the averment, “I do solemnly affirm that I have carefully read and meditated upon the contents of this manifesto”. The Third Mind material, with Napoleon Hill’s “coordination of knowledge and effort of two or more people, who work toward a definite purpose, in the spirit of harmony”, and Stavish’s account of the Burroughs-Vollmer shooting, “the magical being they had engendered was taking its toll”.↩︎

  17. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 5, “The Lovecraft Circle”, section “Howard Phillips Lovecraft and the Necronomicon” — “nearly all of the famous magical texts in Western occultism were in some way contrived”; the Padmasambhava/terma comparison; “Neither has the fictional nature of the Necronomicon been a stumbling block for those who see it as a gateway to genuine and existing alternate realities”; and “thus bending the framework of reality for the reader”. The chapter’s remaining sections — “Kenneth Grant: Revealer of Deep Esoteric Truth”, “Robert E. Howard and Conan the Barbarian” and “Fellow Magician Arthur Machen” — read the pulp circle as a formed network.↩︎

  18. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 4, “Pop Culture and the Creation of Egregores”, sections “Jean Dubuis, UFOs, Feng Shui, and Slenderman”, “Revolt Against the Modern World by Julius Evola” and “Mind Games by Robert Masters and Jean Houston” — the Dubuis account, “far too often the egregore, or group mind or soul, was a trap rather than a channel toward liberation” and “Personal agendas hidden inside the desired manifestations utilized the emotional energy of the group to bring to pass what one person could not—all without the knowledge or consent of the group”; and the Slender Man claim quoted in §6.↩︎

  19. Stavish, Egregores, ch. 7, “Freeing Oneself from the Influence of Egregores”, section “Refuge in an Egregore?” (the book’s Table of Contents places the section in chapter 7, and the quoted text sits between the chapter-7 header and the following Foreword): Mouni Sadhu’s The Tarot (1968) is quoted for the three-point defence, “DO NOT SLEEP in the sense of being passive or distracted”, and for “Join a certain good Egregor, which corresponds to your contemplation, so that you will not be entangled with the Chain of a foreign, evil Egregor”; with Dubuis’s “I am freedom” and “for many a positive egregore is a spiritual refuge, a port in the storm of life”. The section’s own heading is the book’s answer to whether an egregore can be a refuge rather than a trap. The book’s separate chapter 3 (“The Modern Era and the French Occult Revival”, section “The Tarot by Mouni Sadhu”) also quotes Sadhu, on an astrally fighting egregore, “able to fight on the astral plane, while their human beings fight on the physical”.↩︎

  20. The negative finding, scoped to the text of this edition. Case-insensitive searches of the text of Egregores return 0 hits for “safeguard”, “physician”, “therapist”, “therapis”, “psychiatry”, “psychosis”, “counsel”, “supervis”, “cult exit” and “exit counsel”. 1 hit for “psychiatr” — “his psychiatric medication kept him a bit more stable”, Appendix 1. 3 hits for “doctor”, all inside the quoted Sédir dialogue in ch. 3 (282302, 282667, 283779). 1 hit for “clinic” — “several authors of histories of witchcraft have experienced severe clinical depression”, ch. 3. 4 hits for “mental illness”, three of them in Appendix 1 (the Chief, and “a person recovering from a mental illness”); 1 hit for “mental health”, inside “call into question Grant’s mental health” in ch. 5, which is not a referral. 2 hits for “crisis” — one generic, “Such a crisis is a normal part of any path”, ch. 7, and one in a personal account, “I was at fifty years of age having a crisis about my spiritual path”, set beside what that account found sufficient: “my awareness grew”. No hit in the text is a referral from a practice to a clinician, and the book contains no instruction to make one. A search shows only what it indexes, so the claim is scoped to this text.↩︎