Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny - Mark Stavish 2018
Pop Culture and the Creation of Egregores
JEAN DUBUIS, UFOS, FENG SHUI, AND SLENDERMAN
In the 1990s Jean Dubuis (1919—2010), founder of the French alchemical association known as the Philosophers of Nature (PON), would often lecture about the issue of egregores. For Dubuis, far too often the egregore, or group mind or soul, was a trap rather than a channel toward liberation. 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. This was not limited to esoteric or magical circles but included politics, business, the military, and religious organizations. For this reason Dubuis advocated a solitary path wherein the external influences could be minimized until they could be effectively managed and made more or less inconsequential.
During this same time period Dubuis often used the example of a group working in Switzerland whose obsession was with unidentified flying objects (UFOs), saying that this was all an effort to create a thoughtform that would materialize so that group leaders could take on the role of “interplanetary mediators” and thereby gain some significant level of political control that, in his words, “would be worse than Hitler.” Having lived through the Nazi occupation of France in the years 1940 to 1945, this was no empty statement or hyperbole by Dubuis. To this end he would quote his fellow Frenchman, scientist, Hermeticist, venture capitalist, and author of several bestselling books on UFOs, Jacques Vallée.
Vallée is famous for being the inspiration and technical force behind the Steven Spielberg movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind and is renowned for his scientific investigation of UFO phenomena. Having started his research looking for extraterrestrial sources of UFOs he would ultimately come to the conclusion that they were interdimensional beings. His third book, Passport to Magonia: From Folklore to Flying Saucers, detailed this research.
He also advocated that UFO phenomena was multifaceted, including manipulation by government and nongovernment entities of the sightings—be they real, false, or fabricated—intended to generate belief in the benevolent “space brothers,” as some cults have called them. As with the “Unknown Superiors,” those illuminated beings who guide humanity (referenced in chapter 2), these space brothers always seemed to speak through “chosen representatives” who would foretell of a certain doom that would befall humanity, resulting in mass death save for the “elect.”
This message did not resonate well with Vallée. Maybe the space brothers and their self-appointed representatives were not so benevolent after all.
In addition to expressing the views of Vallée, Dubuis also stated that he had been contacted by a magical group in the Channel Islands who invited him to work with them in their efforts to destroy or at least weaken the egregore of Islam. This was five years before the September 11 terrorist attacks in New York City and the launching of the War on Terror. Dubuis declined the offer, stating that he had other work to focus on.
What does this have to do with Slenderman, the fictional character who was said to abduct children and was briefly portrayed as a new source of horror in the world? 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.
The impressionable quality of children and young people to affect collective outcomes or even predict them is expanded upon by Dr. Baolin Wu in his work (with Jessica Eckstein) Lighting the Eye of the Dragon: Inner Secrets of Taoist Feng Shui.
In 1966, shortly before the beginning of the Cultural Revolution, Dr. Wu’s teacher, Master Du, took him aside to tell him that China was soon going to be in the throes of revolution. Dr. Wu asked his teacher how could he know such a thing. His response was, “It’s part of the I Ching. You can predict things.” Master Du asked his student what he had seen that morning on his way to school. The young Dr. Wu said there had been a group of children playing with a top, a common toy on the streets of Beijing, whipping it with a string to keep it spinning. Master Du explained that the way they whipped the top was like the way of whipping people, the capturing of people; this was a sign. It is the will of heaven to warn us ahead of time about everything that will happen, whether we realize it or not. The study of Feng Shui and of the I Ching is an attempt to recognize these messages ahead of time. . . . Respecting children as representatives of our collective unconscious is a valuable lesson to learn. . . . Whatever a child plays at or with will be what the nation builds up or develops.1
The fundamental premise of psychotherapy, psychospiritual practices, hypnosis, and a legion of government-funded mind-control experiments is that what we are exposed to often enough we become sympathetic toward. What we focus on, we become. Thus if we wish to live in a world of peace, health, and general well-being, it is there our children must place their attention, and not in a world of psychic horror and mass violence—or the usual fare from the entertainment and news industries.
REVOLT AGAINST THE MODERN WORLD BY JULIUS EVOLA
Revolt Against the Modern World is Julius Evola’s magnum opus wherein he details his views about the spiritual state of the world in relation to traditionalist philosophy. Traditionalism, as its name implies, views contemporary ideals as superficial at best, and more often as false and counter to the genuine spiritual ideal that classical societies maintained. In the current state of human affairs, with its blatant materialism, shallowness, and even false schools of initiation, only individuals are seen as capable of realizing these traditional spiritual ideals and the transformative power they contain.
The possibilities still available in the last times concern only a minority and may be distinguished as follows. . . . There are still individuals who are rooted in terra firma. Generally speaking, they are unknown people who shun the spotlight of modern popularity and culture. They live on spiritual heights; they do not belong to this world. Though they are scattered over the earth and often ignorant of each other’s existence, they are united by an invisible bond and form an unbreakable chain in the traditional spirit. This nucleus does not act: it only exercises the function to which the symbolism of the “perennial fire” corresponds. By virtue of these people, Tradition is present despite all; the flame burns invisibly and something still connects the world to the superworld. They are those who are awake, whom in Greek are called the egregoroi (egregores).2
Here we see Evola using the term egregoroi to indicate a spiritual elite, just as we often hear the term illuminati tossed around to designate some such body. The illuminati, however, do not act in the world, they only sustain the spiritual tradition so that it will not be lost to the tides of ignorance that sweep through this, the Kali Yuga.2 Interestingly, this idiosyncratic notion of an occult group of “Watchers” is an idea that has appeared frequently in some of the most popular television shows of the past twenty years—even using the very name “Watchers.”
As Evola states:
There are an increasing number of individuals who experience a confused and yet real need for liberation, though they do not know in the name of what. To orient these people, and shield them from the spiritual dangers of the actual world, to lead them to the truth and sharpen their will to join the ranks of the first type of people is what can still be done. And yet this too affects only a minority, and we should not delude ourselves that in this way there will be sizeable changes in the overall destinies of the multitudes. In any event, this is the only justification for tangible action that can be carried out by men of Tradition living in the modern world, a milieu with which they have no connection.
In order for the above-mentioned guiding action to be successful it is necessary to have “watchers” at hand who bear witness to the values of Tradition in ever more uncompromising and firm ways, as the anti-traditional forces grow in strength. . . . And let us ONLY be concerned about one thing: to keep standing amid a world of ruins. Even though today an efficacious, general, and realizing action stands almost no chance at all, the ranks that I mentioned before can still set up inner defenses. . . .
Finally, we must consider a third possibility. To some the path of acceleration may be the most suitable approach to a solution, considering that given certain conditions, many reactions are the equivalent of those cramps that only prolong agony and by delaying the ends also delay the advent of the new principle. When the contacts are cut off and there is no longer any sound base, the last resort is the heroic capacity. Thus, it would be expedient to take on, together with a special inner attitude, the most destructive process of the modern era in order to use them for liberation; this would be like turning a poison against oneself or like “riding a tiger.”3
Here Evola opines that the search for spiritual illumination is for the self-selecting few, not for the many, and we should not fool ourselves into thinking otherwise. In fact, not only is traditional and authentic spirituality dismissed by the masses, but there are also antitraditional forces or counter-initiatic forces at play. Thus with all that is allied against the genuine guardians of the traditions, and seekers of inner light, we each must guard ourselves against the onslaught and work to bring about the end of “the modern era” so as to terminate its suffering and bring about genuine liberation.
For Evola the most pernicious sign of Western decadence was “unrealism,” wherein individuals are unaware of “spirituality as a reality.” This is then extended to include experiencing the self solely in terms of thoughts and ideas, or as a psychological construct. These thoughts “eventually create a world of mirages, phantasms, and idols that replace spirituality; this is the humanistic myth of culture. . . . Together with abstract thoughts, there arises the romantic world of the ’soul.’ [For what] emerges are ’sentimentalism and faith, of individualistic and humanistic pathos, of sensualism and superfluous heroism, of humility and revolt.’”4
The natural political offspring of passing emotions based on an illusory self-construct is the desire to establish “a new universal civilization” wherein there is no real “I” and humanity is freed from the idea of spirituality. We see this in those demons of Kabbalah known as the Contending Heads, which for Evola are expressed through the evil conjoined twins of rampant consumerism and Communism.
Thus to survive the catastrophe of modern living one must abandon its superficial values and commit oneself fully to one’s own awakening—while helping those who both desire it and those who can be guided into the ranks of the self-selecting spiritual elite. Evola also hints at the existence of psychic beings, or “nonhuman elements,” behind these two worldviews and posits that it may be possible with a heroic determination to use them to “foster experiences of a higher life and higher freedoms.”
For Evola there are only two paths—one forward as part of the elite, to “die trying,” and the other to “die with the dissolution of the modern world.” The ability to use the very forces of ignorance against itself is a peculiar aspect of the time in which we are said to live; “although the Kali Yuga is an age of great destructions, those who live during it and manage to remain standing may achieve fruits that were not easily achieved by men living in other ages.”5
MIND GAMES BY ROBERT MASTERS AND JEAN HOUSTON
The concept of the thoughtform has played a key role in the writings of Jean Houston and her husband, Robert Masters, whom we have discussed earlier. Masters’s encounter with the dark forces of nature as he encountered them while researching Eros and Evil are but one example. The idea of collective consciousness, Tibetan tulpas, and the materialization of thoughtforms is central to his work Swimming Where Madmen Drown. At the center of the Consciousness-Expansion Movement of the 1960s and 1970s, the works of John Lilly (psychedelic research) and Milton Erickson (neurolinguistic programming) played a formative role in the methods used in the writing of Mind Games: The Guide to Inner Space. This was a book intentionally designed as a hypnotic device to be read aloud to group members. Reading the book is, in itself, a guided meditation or magical act.
Masters and Houston write, “We are beginning to go now into trance together. We are going to experience deepening together, finally, each of us will contribute to the pool of consciousness out of which the Group Spirit will draw its substance and arise to exist once again. [emphasis added] And now we will breathe rhythmically together, gradually bringing our breathing together, until we are all exhaling and inhaling in perfect unison [NLP method of entrainment], and we will continue to do that for a while. . . . As we breathe we are creating our unity of consciousness.”6
This is followed by a series of instructions repeated several times to deepen the message and ensure compliance. “And we now are becoming, and all of us are becoming, all of us becoming one mind. One mind, one mind, one mind, one mind, one mind, one mind. One trance, one trance, one trance, one trance, one trance, one trance, one ever-deepening trance.”7
Then, after several minutes, the actual goal of the group activity is revealed. Notice that materialization of the idea is critical to this practice. This is not an abstraction but rather a magical ritual to bring something into materialization by the group under the direction of its leader-reader.
You will be aware of that emergence, and of the Group Spirit’s location in space, there at the center. And you will concentrate on that space, focus intensely and remain focused on that space, and understand now we can and must materialize the Group Spirit, endowing that entity with a sufficiently material being that it can appear to us all. And more, if we are successful enough, we will be able to apprehend the Group Spirit with any one of our senses—be able to see it, and hear it, and we even could touch it, were it not necessary to take certain precautions, which will be taken. But we can materialize this entity, by concentrating on the center and vividly imagining, powerfully imagining, the flow of substance, of material, from you and into that center, where the pool has been created by us.
The image of matter, the image of substance, flowing from us to the center, and the image will materialize as the substance of the Group Mind.8
At the end the energy is dispersed. “We will let go of this Group Spirit to which we have given birth and nourishment and substance. We will let go of it, and when we do let go, then it will in no sense exist anymore as an entity with an independent existence of its own. It will only exist as a memory, and we will remember what we have learned by, temporarily, calling up something that did seem to exist apart from us, and in a way that made it unlike any other existence within our experience.”9
Detailed directions are then given to detach the participants from the collective image while still retaining any insight, information, or ideas that may have arisen during the experiment. The image is dissolved, and the individual nature of each of the participants is affirmed, along with their detachment from the group mind.
The book Mind Games and its ideas were significant enough that John Lennon, an icon of the counterculture movement, wrote a song of the same name about it, which was released as a single.