A
couple years ago, John Steadman wrote an interesting survey* of the impact of
H.P. Lovecraft’s fictional creations on contemporary occult practice. Various groups, among them Wiccans, Satanists
and Chaos Magick enthusiasts, have adopted Azathoth, Yog-Sothoth, Nyarlathotep
and other members of Lovecraft’s pantheon as names for the diverse entities
they invite to their gatherings.
Steadman
makes a distinction between ritual evocation,
in which the practitioner summons an entity, and invocation, during which the practitioner in some sense becomes the
entity or manifests its power and characteristics. Each procedure involves
three steps.
A
successful evocation requires that
the particular entity is 1) solidly “implanted” in the practitioner’s
subconscious, 2) energized through magical rites, and 3) “…sent on the task for
which the rite has been designed.”
Invocation, the complimentary process,
involves the practitioner identifying himself or herself with the nature of the
summoned entity, achieving some sort of unity with it, and then manifesting its
powers and behaving accordingly.
These
are ancient ideas, and probably reach
back to prehistoric understandings of the supernatural and its interactions
with humankind. Steadman cites a passage
from Peter J. Carroll’s Liber Kaos
(1992) which describes a ritual for summoning Azathoth, or something like it:
Azathoth
is an egregore associated with the emergence of sentience from the primeval
slime and the quest of sentience to reach for the stars…Azathoth has no shape
or name for itself that is meaningful to humans, yet, it will respond to the
names Azathoth, Atazoth, and occasionally Astaroth…Historically, this egregore
was known to certain alchemists whose name for it, Azathoth, means an increase
in azoth, or increasing etheric (morphic) fields in contemporary terms.
Steadman
defines an egregore as “an entity that has been intentionally created by the
black magickian for some specific purpose.”
This seems, in my view at least, to be too narrow a definition. Can egregores be summoned or manifested unintentionally, by accident? This is certainly a frequent trope in horror
literature and film. And more broadly,
can the concept be applied to a variety of phenomena that impact all of us
collectively, not merely as individuals?
It may
be productive to think of the egregore as a kind of undifferentiated energy
that takes the form given it by the preconceived notions of humans sensitive
enough to detect its presence, interact with it, and perhaps worship or invoke
it. The egregore draws its power and shape from the imagination and the
attention of those who believe in it, seeming to take on a life and a will of
its own. Egregores are not easily eradicated
as long as its enthusiasts continue to exist.
Egregores
may be the base material from which gods, ghosts, demons and other entities are
formed by the human imagination, and the source of religious sensibility. Certainly it is the inspiration for idolatry,
that recurrent horror of the Old Testament.
But it seems possible that an egregoric process is also involved in more
disturbing secular phenomena: extremist political movements, xenophobia,
and celebrity cults for example. Insofar
as egregores are memes that negatively impact collective human behavior, they
are potentially very dangerous.
A
couple of years ago NPR broadcast an interview with Malcom Gladwell who
discussed the sociology of mass shooters, in particular the concept of the
“hundredth shooter”. Gladwell was asked
about a recent mass shooting at Umqua Community College in Oregon, and
referenced a theory about riot behavior.
The first shooter is the most radical and
charismatic. In this context he mentioned
Eric Harris, who perpetrated the horrible Columbine murders. However, by the time of the hundredth shooter, the act has become
ritualized, and emerges from a “fraternity of shooters”. While the first shooter may have had severe
mental and emotional problems, the hundredth shooter, while somewhat deviant,
is not as extreme or distinguishable.
Gladwell
quoted the young man who shot people at Umqua as saying “Eric Harris is in my
head”. What could this mean exactly? Is this a kind of egregore, a projection of
the minds of isolated, emotionally unstable young men? Gladwell noted that posts on social media that
emulate Eric Harris were numerous at the time of the Umqua shootings—a kind of
“netromancy”, to use a term coined by Jenna Wortham of the New York Times Magazine. It
is chilling to think how social media inadvertently creates the conditions by
which an egregoric version “Eric Harris” can be evoked and invoked.
Radical
[fill-in-the-blank] extremism? “Fake
news” narratives? Election year
politics? But this is too upsetting to think about for very long. Let’s return to a subject that is more
edifying and comforting, like horror literature.
(Continued
in the next post.)
********************
*H.P. Lovecraft and the Black Magickal
Tradition (2015)
The
concept of the egregore has been discussed in several earlier posts. See also
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