H.P. Lovecraft, Horror Writing and “Transliminality”

H.P. Lovecraft’s letters to various associates are as fascinating as his stories.  They reveal much about the author, his approach to writing and publishing, and the historic times he lived in.  He often wrote about his dreams, shared them with his colleagues, and transmuted dream content into stories.¹   

In September of 1933 he wrote to the younger Robert Bloch, then a teenager, describing a recent dream he’d had.  He wrote: “You astonish me when you say you dream but twice a year.  I can never drop off for a second—not even in my easy-chair or over my desk—without having dreams of the most vivid sort; not always bizarre or fantastic, but always clear-cut and lifelike.” 

He goes on to describe what he typically dreamed about, reporting that in “nine dreams out of ten” he dreamt about his childhood circa 1903 “—which was by all odds the happiest period of my existence.”  He later commented that “…besides these comparatively mundane dreams I occasionally have boldly fantastic ones which make good weird-fictional material.”  A couple of months later, in a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, he wrote: “I hope my increased fantastic dreaming is a prelude to a new writing spell.”²    

Lovecraft and some of his colleagues noticed the connection between heightened dream recall and writing productivity, regardless of whether the dream content could be transformed into a publishable form.  The ease with which he remembered and interacted with the content of his dreams, and the overflow of unconscious imagery into his waking thoughts, might be considered an example of transliminality. 

This is a term I recently came across as I was reading through a textbook on parapsychology.³ The authors had surveyed several research studies to identify characteristics of people who show heightened susceptibility to experiences of ESP, either in the laboratory or spontaneously, “in the wild”.   

Though parapsychological research is often riddled with methodological flaws—as is much of what passes for scientific study in the social sciences—results are suggestive.  Irwin and Watt identified the following as characteristics predisposing people to paranormal phenomena:  intelligence, (either high or low), creativity, memory, visuospatial ability, dream recall, dissociative tendencies, susceptibility to hypnosis, capacity for psychological absorption⁴, and transliminality.  

Irwin and Watt define transliminality as “the readiness with which subconscious material can cross the threshold of consciousness in a given person.” Others have described it as a psychological trait or cognitive style characterized by hypersensitivity to psychological material originating in the unconscious or the external environment, encompassing ideas, images, emotions, and perceptions.  A transliminal personality has been linked to increased probability of believing in magic, experiencing paranormal events, creativity, mysticism, mania, hyperaesthesia⁵—and a positive regard for dream analysis.  

The concept was named and developed by Michael Thalbourne, an Australian parapsychologist, though the notion can be found in the earlier writings of the psychologist William James.  Thalbourne and his colleagues developed a 17 item Revised Transliminality Scale (RST) to assess this trait.⁶ One of the findings was that transliminality, as measured by the RST, was positively associated with certain types of dreams, among them lucid dreams, archetypal dreams, and vivid nightmares. The questionnaire contains items like these:  

“#2.  At times I perform certain little rituals to ward off negative influences.” 

“#3.  I have experienced an altered state of consciousness in which I felt that I became cosmically enlightened.” 

“#8.  I have sometimes sensed an evil presence around me, although I could not see it.” 

How might Lovecraft or other writers in his circle have responded to items like these? Lovecraft’s preoccupation with the dream state is well documented, and his personality seems to have contained several of the elements of a transliminal cognitive style.  

However, his official view of supernatural experiences is not at all consistent with the content of his stories. In letters to Zealia Brown Reed (1927) and Frank Belknap Long (1929), he describes himself as a “mechanistic materialist”, believing that nothing can exist apart from matter, and that all phenomena can ultimately be explained in terms of laws that pertain to matter.⁷  

Transliminality seems a useful term to describe aspects of personality that may be conducive to writing horror fiction—and having paranormal or extrasensory experiences. One wonders—I do, at least—if transliminality is ultimately the neurological basis for “thin places”, those gateway regions of the Celtic spiritual landscape—insofar as supernatural or paranormal phenomena are projections of inner, subjective experiences. Or something else… 

I am also intrigued with the notion, cited in Irwin and Watt’s text, that ESP—and perhaps related features like transliminality—can be interpreted as “a relic of a form of communication characteristic of a distant epoch of our evolution, and indeed, that ESP itself may have been a major mechanism of evolution.”  This ground is also explored in a fascinating book by Julian Jaynes, The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind, (1976). 

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¹For an example of incomplete transformation of Lovecraft’s dream content into narrative, see his story “The Evil Clergyman”, (also known as “The Wicked Clergyman”).  Appearing in Weird Tales in April of 1939, this was essentially a dream fragment—contained in a letter sent to Clark Ashton Smith in 1933—that was later published posthumously.  It seems very close to the source material. 

²H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934, edited by August Derleth and James Turner, (1976). 

³An Introduction to Parapsychology, by Harvey J. Irwin and Caroline A. Watt, (2007). 

⁴Defined by one researcher in Irwin and Watt’s text as “…a ‘total’ attention, involving full commitment of available perceptual, motoric, imaginative and ideational resources to a unified representation of the attentional object”. 

⁵ Hyperesthesia is defined as extreme sensitivity in one or more of the five senses.  Think of the narrator of Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”, whose acute hearing was his undoing. 

⁶ “The Revised Translimity Scale: Reliability and Validity Data From a Rasch Top-Down Purification Procedure”, by R. Lange, M.A. Thalbourne, J. Houran, and L. Storm, Consciousness and Cognition, (December, 2000).  

⁷ Cited in H.P. Lovecraft & the Black Magickal Tradition, by John L. Steadman, (2015). 

A Dream by H.P. Lovecraft; A Story by Clark Ashton Smith

It is commonplace that creators of horror fantasy often turn to their nightmares for source material, or to the “hypnogogic state”, that period just before drifting off to sleep when ideas unravel from the constraints of reality and daytime concerns and begin to flow towards phantasmagoria and dream.  

Dreams and Horror Writing  

J. N. Williamson describes this condition as a state of heightened creativity, perhaps associated with theta brainwaves.  He recommends choosing a setting that is free of distractions and approaching the hypnogogic state without preconceptions about what is to be accomplished—“A vital point:  Never is this a case of forcing anything.”¹  Bring only paper and pen, and observe the stream of ideas and images that come to mind.  

Though not referring specifically to the hypnogogic state, Stephen King recommends that the aspiring horror writer have a regular time and place for writing, just as one does for sleeping– “…to habituate yourself, to make yourself ready to dream just as you make yourself ready to sleep…”  In both activities, King says we learn to be still, so that our minds can “…unlock from the humdrum rational thinking of our daily lives.”²   

But what happens when dreams and ideas emanating from the unconscious of one author inform the creative products of others?  H.P. Lovecraft, among others in his circle, made a regular habit of sharing dream imagery and content with his fellow writers, not merely reserving them for his own use.  

In a letter to Clark Ashton Smith, dated 11/29/1933, H.P. Lovecraft describes two recent dreams in vivid detail.  According to August Derleth and James Turner, the first of these two dreams was developed into a novel later written by Derleth.  The second of Lovecraft’s dreams may have been the basis for a story Clark Ashton Smith published a couple years later in Weird Tales, “The Treader of the Dust” (1935).³   

A Nightmare of Lovecraft’s 

In Lovecraft’s dream he visits an old address—598 Angell Street, in Providence. “Everything was as it was around 1910”, Lovecraft writes, and he is impressed with the dust-filled decrepitude of pictures, furniture, and books: even items that he taken with him to newer abodes “…were there in their old positions, sharing in the general dissolution and dust-burial.” He flees the sepulchral house when he hears footsteps approaching from his old room. “I would not admit to myself what it was I feared to confront…”, which may have been his own reflection in “the mouldy, nitre-encrusted mirror in the hall.” 

Terrified, Lovecraft runs about a block up Angell Street, through the ancient, ruined dream neighborhood of 1910, and approaches 454 Angell Street. He woke from the dream at this point, shivering. “At the last moment my great fear seemed to be of passing my birthplace and early home…”  

A Story by Clark Ashton Smith 

Whereas Lovecraft’s dream is autobiographical, (or “psycho-autobiographical”)—as much of his writing tends to be—Clark Ashton Smith’s improvisation on this material takes it in a different direction entirely. In “The Treader of the Dust”, the narrator, an antiquarian scholar very much in the Lovecraftian mold⁴, returns to his home after a three-day absence. As in Lovecraft’s dream, he surveys an advanced stage of decay and decrepitude, seemingly accelerated by decades of sifting dust and disintegration.  

As in the dream above, there is something terrifying in the house that the narrator cannot face. The story opens with these lines: “It was after interminable debate and argument with himself, after many attempts to exorcise the dim, bodiless legion of his fears, that John Sebastian returned to the house he left so hurriedly.” Denial is a recurring refrain in the opening paragraphs.  

Sebastian denies the obvious: the house and its residents are succumbing to what we learn later is an inadvertent invocation Quachil Uttaus, “the ultimate corruption”. This was brought about by the accidental reading of a key passage from The Testaments of Carnamagos, part of that library of forbidden books invented by Lovecraft, Smith, Howard and others—and loaned to each other on occasion. 

The narrator re-reads the key passage again, his arrogant skepticism dissolving along with the contents of his house when he realizes that even reading the passage silently to himself “…must incur a grave risk if in his heart there abide openly or hidden the least desire of death and annihilation.” He realizes he is doomed, and now has no energy or strength to flee his approaching fate. “Yet surely there had never been in his heart the least longing for death and destruction.” Had there? 

“The Treader of the Dust” is more of a prose poem than a story, an effective meditation on the inevitability of death and decay, the ravages of time, and our denial of the same.  The house that the narrator returns to is clearly depicted as a tomb, filled with a dusty darkness impervious to the wan light of sundown and the feeble glow from electric lamps. The tone is very similar to that in Clark Ashton Smith’s necromantic-themed stories in his Zothique cycle.  

Why does Sebastian return after three days? Why this specific timeframe?  It seems to me that this is Smith playing with cultural and religious motifs. Who else was gone for three days and then returned? Unlike Christ, who dies, is buried, then “…rose again on the third day…”⁵ Smith’s character leaves the tomb-like house, visits the living, and then returns to join the dead. This grim reversal of the resurrection story is consistent with Smith’s preoccupation with decadence, irony and inescapable doom. 

Unconscious to Unconscious 

Lovecraft’s letter and Smith’s subsequent story is one of many examples of how these authors and others in their circle influenced each other’s work. Near the close of his letter to Smith, Lovecraft mentions having sent another dream— “…my mediaeval, roof-monster dream…” to Robert Bloch. The future author of Psycho (1959), was a high school student at that time. Lovecraft wrote that he “…will be amused to find out what the kid did with the idea.” It would be fascinating to explore how, by sharing their nightmares, these authors communicated at the deepest level with each other’s minds, and through their various stories, our own. 

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¹“A World of Dark and Disturbing Ideas”, by J.N. Williamson, in Writing Horror, edited by Mort Castle, (1997). 

²On Writing, A Memoir of the Craft, by Stephen King, (2000) 

³H.P. Lovecraft, Selected Letters, 1932-1934, edited by August Derleth and James Turner, (1976). 

⁴Pun intended. 

⁵Nicene Creed, (325). 

Beyond the Wall–Lovecraft and the Psychology of Dreams

H.P. Lovecraft’s early efforts, during the first two decades of the 20^th century, are interesting in what they reveal about the future direction of his work.  Though not without flaws—he was, after all still a novice—stories like “The Alchemist” (1916), “The Beast in the Cave” (1918), “The Statement of Randolph Carter” (1920),  “The Picture in the House” (1921), and “The Nameless City” (1921) contain the germ of ideas he developed later in better known works.  Most of these, about two dozen, appeared in amateur publications circa 1916-1923¹.   

An earlier post², discussed Lovecraft’s proto-Cthulhu Mythos story “Dagon” (2019) which anticipates two of his classic tales, “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.  Another story from this early period that seems especially foundational is Lovecraft’s 1919 “case study” of extraterrestrial possession, “Beyond the Wall of Sleep”. 

The story is unique among Lovecraft’s works for showing, through the protagonist and narrator, an uncharacteristic level of compassion and affection for the hapless victim, Joe Slater.³  “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” documents the slow, relentless physical and mental decline of Slater, who in a fit of mania murders an associate.  Slater is subsequently institutionalized in an asylum, where the narrator, a psychiatric intern, first meets him. 

The narrator, “a constant speculator concerning dream life”, looks for patterns in Slater’s rantings.  “Could it be,” he wonders, “that the dream-soul inhabiting this inferior body was desperately struggling to speak things which the simple and halting tongue of dullness could not utter?”  The narrator devises a research experiment involving a “cosmic radio”—a pair of headsets with an apparatus that will link his mind with that of Slater’s while both are dreaming.   

It is through this technologically mediated shared experience with his fellow “brother of light” that the narrator learns of Slater’s true predicament, comes to a deeper understanding of the nature of the dream state, and receives a revelation of his own and humankind’s wider destiny.   

“Beyond the Wall Of Sleep” is possibly Lovecraft’s most “spiritual” story.  Reincarnation is strongly implied, and so is a kind of mystical transfiguration into dream souls occupying an ethereal sphere.  (“How little does the earth-self know of life and its extent!  How little, indeed, ought it to know for its own tranquility!”)  There is also a spiritual adversary, an oppressor associated with “Algol, the Daemon-Star”, who endeavors to thwart the efforts of other cosmic entities. 

S.T. Joshi criticized this early effort for its “stilted prose, confusion in critical points of plot and conception, and a vicious class-consciousness.”⁴ Unfortunately, these are characteristics that persisted in Lovecraft’s work throughout much of his career. DeCamp described the story as “…like ‘The Tomb’, a story showing more promise than performance.”⁵  

Paul Roland, a more recent biographer, links Lovecraft’s position on the dream state—as expressed in the opening paragraph of the story—to the Theosophy movement and work of Madame Blavatsky. He speculates that Lovecraft was impressed by contemporary reports of paranormal phenomena, though the author did not believe in them himself.⁶ 

What is clear is Lovecraft’s lifelong fascination with dreaming, as demonstrated by the titles and content of several of his later well-known works: “The Dreams in the Witch-House, “The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath”, but also “The Rats in the Walls”, “The Call of Cthulhu”, and “The Haunter of the Dark”, among others. References to dreams are common in his correspondence with his colleagues at Weird Tales. The oneironautic focus seems quite distinctive in Lovecraft’s stories. 

“Beyond the Wall of Sleep” inaugurates the use of dreams and dream content in Lovecraft’s later work, but also contains other familiar elements: the beginnings of his cosmicism and his notorious disdain for people of different social class or ethnicity—possibly a projection of anxiety over his own declining fortunes.  

Another recurring motif that may be interesting to explore is the appearance of “bromantic” relationships among characters in Lovecraft’s stories, male duos that from a psychodynamic perspective might be considered alter egos of each other, or of the narrator—in most cases a fictionalized version of Lovecraft himself. Compare the narrator/Slater pairing in “Beyond the Wall of Sleep” with Randolph Carter/Harley Warren (“The Statement of Randolph Carter”), narrator/St. John (“The Hound”), narrator/Crawford Tillinghast (“From Beyond”), and especially narrator/Edward Pickman Derby (“The Thing on the Doorstep”). A lot is going on here!  

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¹Lovecraft’s stories began appearing in Weird Tales magazine around 1923. 

^{2 “}H.P. Lovecraft, Sunday School and ‘Dagon’”, Egregoric Times, 7/29/23. 

³See also “Clinical Lovecraft”, The R’lyeh Tribune, 6/12/13. 

⁴I Am Providence (vol. 1), by S.T. Joshi, (2013). 

⁵Lovecraft, A Biography, by L. Sprague DeCamp, (1975). 

⁶The Curious Case of H.P. Lovecraft, by Paul Roland, (2014). 

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I recently enjoyed watching “The Whisperer in Darkness”, (2011), part of the HPLHS Motion Pictures series in “MythoScope”.  (An offering of the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society at www.Cthulhulives.org.) I especially liked the 1950s black and white retro style. The film takes some liberties with the original material—introducing Charles Fort as one of the characters!—but for the most part stays true to the source material. I recommend “The Whisperer in Darkness” to those looking for an authentic Lovecraft film—not always easy to find.  

Fanaticism as ‘Instrument of Resurrection’—Eric Hoffer’s “The True Believer”

I just finished reading Eric Hoffer’s The True Believer, first published in 1951, a few years after the start of the Cold War.  I found this book at a Kiwanis Thrift Shop, languishing in the “classics” section.  Maybe you have had this experience: a book you have not been looking for or never heard of falls into your hands at exactly the right moment, when you are ready to read about its particular subject.  Sort of a when-the-student-is-ready-the-teacher-will-appear¹ moment.  In my experience, albeit limited, Hoffer’s book is one of the most serious books I’ve read lately. It was regarded as highly influential when it first appeared, over half a century ago.

The True Believer² is dense with insights about human social behavior, especially as it pertains to political and religious movements, war, and culture—it’s about mass movements in general.  Hoffer’s book is thoughtful, systematic, theoretical—and terrifying.     It makes a good companion to Berger and Luckman’s The Social Construction of Reality (1966), which, if you can wade through the academese, also contains some startling observations about what constitutes knowledge and truth in society. 

Hoffer’s book is grim and cynical; the author has a fondness for irony and paradox in human social interactions, often calling out behaviors and thought patterns that achieve exactly the opposite of what might be expected.  Since his book was published at the beginning of the Cold War, and less than a decade after World War II, one might expect Hoffer to go after Communists, Nazis and fascists, but he doesn’t spare religious or capitalist inspired movements either. He is examining what he considers a universal human capacity—and psychological vulnerability—for mass movements of all kinds.  

For example, he delights in quoting Martin Luther, the great leader of the Protestant Reformation, to show how partisan zeal, even religious enthusiasm can be counterbalanced and sustained by murderous hatred:   

“When my heart is cold and I cannot pray as I should I scourge myself with the thought of the impiety and ingratitude of my enemies, the Pope and his accomplices and vermin, and Zwingli, so that my heart swells with righteous indignation and hatred and I can say with warmth and vehemence:  ‘Holy be Thy Name, Thy Kingdom Come, Thy will be done!” 

Yikes! 

Hoffer’s premise is that people who join mass movements are frustrated and disappointed with their lives, and themselves.  They have little hope for the future, and so readily subsume their own individuality in service to a movement and its leader.  In this way they escape themselves (“…from an ineffectual self…”) and their misery, while slavishly hoping for the brighter future promised by the social movement they have joined.  Fortified with a purpose in life and hope for an idealized future, members of mass movements are capable of great devotion and self-sacrifice—as well as grotesque violence and aggression. 

Who would join a mass movement?  Well, pretty much all of us would to some degree, depending on the circumstances of our lives and prevailing social and economic conditions.  Hoffer devotes a section of the book—“The Potential Converts”—to describing all the different types of people who would be attracted to mass movements, among them the poor, as one might immediately suspect, since they may have little investment in the status quo.

But not all the poor.  The abjectly impoverished, being consumed with the very purposeful struggle for survival, are immune to the appeal of mass movements.  It’s the recently impoverished, resentful of what they have lost, or struggling artisans whose creative impulse has been stymied by circumstances, who are most susceptible among the poor.   

Hoffer also lists social misfits, selfish people, “the ambitious facing unlimited opportunities”, minorities, “the bored”, and sinners as ready recruits for an emerging mass movement.  He casts a wide net, and many of us I suspect could easily fall into it.   

He reserves a special place in mass movements for writers and intellectuals.  He writes: 

“It is easy to see how the faultfinding man³ of words, by persistent ridicule and denunciation, shakes prevailing beliefs and loyalties, and familiarizes the masses with the idea of change.  What is not so obvious is the process by which the discrediting of existing beliefs and institutions makes possible the rise of a new fanatical faith.  For it is a remarkable fact that the militant man of words who ‘sounds the established order to its source to mark its want of authority and justice’ often prepares the ground not for a society of freethinking individuals but for a corporate society that cherishes utmost unity and blind faith…” 

Cancel culture comes to mind, along with various extremist ideologies currently promulgated by people on both the left and the right. 

What kind of person leads an emerging mass movement?  According to Hoffer, three types of individuals are needed: “A movement is pioneered by men of words, materialized by fanatics, and consolidated by men of action”.  The fanatic’s role is key, in that he or she serves as catalyst and leads the initial assault on institutions in need of radical change.  But this individual becomes a liability later, a source of dissension, chaos, and factions.   

Hoffer again: “If allowed to have their way, the fanatics may split a movement into schism and heresies which threaten its existence.  Even when the fanatics do not breed dissension, they can still wreck the movement by driving it to attempt the impossible…” 

Does this remind you of anyone? 

Hoffer’s analysis of mass movements and those who join or lead them has some relevance to egregoric phenomena, insofar as a mass movement, an “ism” of some kind, alters the perceptions of its worshipful adherents and directs their behavior toward some end that is independent of its followers.  

Communism, capitalism, evangelicalism, nationalism, scientism—so many isms!—can all become idols that enthrall their followers, especially if such “isms” become personified: Stalinism, McCarthyism, Calvinism, Trumpism, and many others.⁴ Egregores and mass movements are not the same thing, but the social psychological and material aspects of their formation are comparable, and they seem to be complementary processes.      

It’s not surprising that Hoffer’s perspective would be a dark one. He wrote The True Believer just as the world was recovering from the trauma of a World War, and the Cold War was beginning. He offers no encouraging recommendations or solutions for the hazards of mass movements, other than an implied admonition to be aware of their nature.  Hoffer’s book has great relevance today, in a fractured society of partisans seeking charismatic leaders they can dedicate themselves to—and easily identified enemies they can viscerally hate.   

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¹A quote often ascribed to Buddha, but likely to have originated with Theosophists. 

²The True Believer, by Eric Hoffer (1951, 1963) 

³Apparently there were no “faultfinding women of words” in the 1950s, though their existence was suspected by some. 

⁴ “The human heart is a perpetual idol factory.”—John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, (1536). 

H.P. Lovecraft, Sunday School and “Dagon”

“Dagon” is one of H.P. Lovecraft’s earliest stories, often thought to be the precursor to his classic tales “The Call of Cthulhu” and “The Shadow Over Innsmouth”.  According to S.T. Joshi¹, Lovecraft wrote “Dagon” in July of 1917, following a nine-year hiatus from his earlier attempts at fiction writing.  The story was first published in the Vagrant, a publication of the National Amateur Press Association, in November of 1919.   

Joshi reports that at least part of the inspiration for “Dagon” came from a nightmare Lovecraft had.  Explaining a plot point, Lovecraft is quoted as saying “…the hero-victim is half-sucked into the mire, yet he does crawl!  I know, for I dreamed that whole hideous crawl, and can yet feel the ooze sucking me down!” 

The story was later published in Weird Tales in October of 1923.  L. Sprague DeCamp², much more critical than Joshi, references a letter Lovecraft wrote to Edwin F. Baird, the magazine’s editor, regarding publication of “Dagon”.   The letter exemplified Lovecraft’s attitude toward the writing profession and his self-deprecating view of his work: “I have no idea if these things will be found suitable, for I pay no attention to the demands of commercial writing.”   

In his letter he goes on to write: “If the tale cannot be printed as it is written, down to the very last semicolon and comma, it must gracefully accept rejection.  Excision by editors is probably the one reason why no living American author has any real prose style…” DeCamp makes the argument throughout his biography that Lovecraft’s haughtiness, “art-for-art’s sake” attitude, and disparagement of his own work made success as a writer almost impossible during his lifetime.   

“Dagon” takes place during World War I.  The narrator is captured by Germans in the South Pacific but manages to escape in a lifeboat.  After drifting at sea, he wakes to find himself marooned on a vast expanse of mud and slime recently heaved to the surface following volcanic activity.  He explores this strange terrain and discovers an enormous monolith covered with hieroglyphs and weird imagery, including that of humanoid fish-like creatures. 

No big surprise: he is then horrified later to see a giant, living version of one of the carvings, emerging from a nearby pool of water.  He flees, barely retaining his sanity, and is later rescued by an American ship.  He is taken to San Fransisco, where he convalesces in a hospital.   

But he is not safe there for he knows that the horror will follow him.  He relies on morphine to deaden the fear and memory of what he saw.  Almost as an afterthought, he “…sought out a celebrated ethnologist, and amused him with peculiar questions regarding the ancient Philistine legend of Dagon, the Fish-God…” He anticipates a day “when they may rise above the billows to drag down in their reeking talons the remnants of puny, war exhausted mankind…” 

Joshi appreciated this early effort of Lovecraft’s; “Dagon” contains the germ of several themes Lovecraft developed later in his work: the antiquity of earth, the existence of still viable remnants of ancient civilizations hidden in remote locations, the shattering effect of knowledge.  Readers of Lovecraft will also recognize the paranoia and preoccupation with eldritch worship of the Great Old Ones, a common motif in later stories.  

It’s not clear how much Lovecraft based his pantheon of Great Old Ones on biblical sources—he was, after all, officially atheist and disdainful of conventional piety.  DeCamp reports that Lovecraft attended Baptist Sunday school at age five, where he alarmed his instructor by taking the side of the lions against the Christians.  At any rate, his later “cosmicism” would likely not mix well with comforting thoughts of humanity being the “crown of creation^”3 .   

Yet readers will observe in several of Lovecraft’s stories references to circles of stones on hilltops and appalling liturgical practices among secretive cults—similar references are made in the Old Testament in such books as Leviticus, Deuteronomy, Judges, and 2nd Kings, among others.  Dagon is often mentioned here and with good reason: he was an earlier competitor of Jehovah, well established in Canaan and ancient Mesopotamia, and a challenge for the ancient Israelites as they migrated into the “Promised Land”. 

Though he doesn’t get much good press, Dagon figures in several well-known bible stories. In the final moments of Samson’s life, he destroys a temple of Dagon by pulling it down on top of himself and the Philistines gathered there. When the Israelites lose a battle against the Philistines, the latter steal the Ark of the Covenant and put it in their temple next to an idol of Dagon. The next day they discover that the statue of Dagon has been knocked over and its head and hands broken off—hmmmm. It’s possible that Goliath, the Philistine giant whom David killed with his slingshot, was a worshipper of Dagon.  

Though not emphasized in the story “Dagon”, Lovecraft’s horror of miscegenation—of interbreeding with other races and ethnicities, mixing with other cultures—is also a preoccupation in Old Testament passages. Lovecraft was never a champion of cultural diversity, and neither were the ancient Israelites.  

But the real Dagon may not have been a Philistine fish-god at all. Though he was the national god of the Philistines and worshipped in their cities along the Mediterranean coast, he may have been an import or an adopted god who was worshipped throughout northern Syria and Mesopotamia, from the Early Bronze Age to the beginning of the Iron Age. Dagon was connected with fertility, agriculture, and grain, especially corn.⁴ His worship was also related to prosperity and royal legitimacy. He was also considered a “father of gods”.  

Some scholars suspect that the similarity of Dagon’s name to the Hebrew word for fish may have led to early confusion. Dagon also resembles words in cotemporaneous languages for “grain” or “cloudy”. So, it seems likely that the notion that Dagon had anything to do with the sea is erroneous. He was very much a land-based deity. 

The error was not H.P. Lovecraft’s fault. Dagon as “fish-god” was a misinterpretation carried forward from Medieval scholarship and not detected until the early twentieth century. It is the fault of history—too much time—and time enough—for us eventually to get things wrong. To paraphrase the mad Arab Abdul Alhazred: “That is not dead which can eternal lie, and with strange aeons even the facts may die.” 

Lovecraft created a new egregore in his fiction, perhaps fashioned out of his revulsion to ocean creatures. Dagon became Cthulhu, Ashdod became Innsmouth.  What if Lovecraft had known the truth about Dagon? What horror might he have imagined if Cthulhu had arisen from the land instead of the sea?  

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¹I Am Providence, by S.T. Joshi, (2013). 

²Lovecraft, A Biography, by L. Sprague DeCamp, (1975) 

³Genesis 1:26—“Then God said, ‘Let us make mankind in our image, in our likeness, so that they may rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky, over the livestock and all the wild animals, and over all the creatures that move along the ground.’” 

⁴A reader correctly points out that “corn” in this sense is a generic term for grain, not the New World plant that we know today. Lovecraft famously detested sea food and perhaps ocean-based life-forms in general, which may explain why his monsters are often amorphous, polypus, tentacular entities. I’m not sure how he felt about corn. 

Precognitive Dreams and Predestination

Precognitive dreams are common among people who regularly take note of their dreams.  Carl Jung believed dreams could predict events well in advance of their occurrence; he reported he had dreamt of the impending death of his mother.  The notion of someone having a dream or vision that predicts a significant future event is a frequent trope throughout history and across cultures.  It is also a familiar motif in literature. 

A classic example is found in the Old Testament.¹  Joseph, the son of Jacob, interprets the dreams of two of his fellow prisoners, a cupbearer and a baker.  Joseph intuits from the metaphoric imagery in the men’s dreams that the cupbearer would soon be released from prison and restored to his position in Pharoah’s court.  Alas, the baker’s dream—”…on my head were three baskets of bread.  In the top basket were all kinds of baked goods for Pharaoh, but the birds were eating them out of the basket on my head”—foretold his decapitation and impalement three days later. 

There are of course numerous reports of dreams in the Bible, many of them precognitive in nature, and I imagine there are similar examples in other religious texts from various traditions.  Precognitive dreams are a universal human experience, and often associated with both religious and secular matters of importance.  

Analysis of case studies involving precognitive ability reveal some interesting and remarkably stable patterns.²  Parapsychologists identify four typical modes of precognitive experience: intuitive impressions, hallucinations, realistic dreams, and unrealistic dreams.  Citing the work of Louisa Rhine³, Irwin and Watt reported the relative percentages of reports of precognitive experiences in these four categories:  intuitive impressions (26%), hallucinations (9%), realistic dreams (44%) and unrealistic dreams (21%).   

No surprise; the bulk of precognitive experiences occured during ordinary dreaming.  Interestingly, there is research suggesting that precognitive dreams about other people may predict tragic events like serious illness or death, but dreams about the self tend to concern relatively trivial matters.   

I have precognitive dreams from time to time, but they are nothing to write home about.  Usually, they have nothing to do with facing execution or exoneration, much less with success in battle, earthquakes, volcanoes, winning the lottery and so forth.  

My spookier dreams are nothing like those of Henry Anthony Wilcox.  He was the “psychically hypersensitive” sculptor who dreamed of “great Cyclopean cities of Titan blocks and sky-flung monoliths, all dripping with green ooze and sinister with latent horror”. Wilcox’s dream anticipated the dreaded return of one of the Great Old Ones from beneath the Pacific.⁴  

My precognitive dreams are not like this and it’s just as well.  But here are a couple examples from my notes.  See what you think. 

#76 “The Copy Machine Jams” 

I am attempting to copy a big pile of documents, many of the pages clipped together by metal clasps and paper clips.  I put these into the chute without removing all the clips, and the copier soon jams.  I realize I should have removed the clips and go tell the receptionist up front what I have done. 

I had this dream on New Years Eve in 2015. I had been on Christmas break and out of the office for most of the week. When I returned to work, I saw an email from the receptionist sent on 12/30/15, the day before my dream. She had called in the copy machine repairman to diagnose a copy machine breakdown. The tech guy reported that a jam was due to someone putting a stack of material in the automatic feed that contained paper clips. 

“The truth is out there”. 

But this is how pathetic my life had become at the time—that my powers of extra sensory perception detected the psychic scream of our secretary as she once again had to deal with a jammed copy machine. 

Technically speaking, #76 is not a precognitive dream, since I recorded having it after the actual event occurred.  Parapsychologists might classify #76 as an example of clairvoyance or a retrocognitive dream. Or perhaps it was a telepathic dream—I may have channeled the mind of the perpetrator who messed up the copy machine.  In any case, I obtained knowledge of an event that I could not have detected via the usual senses.   

Skeptics would rightly point out that there is a very high probability that some office idiot will neglect to remove paper clips before using the copy machine, thus causing it to jam. It happens all the time. And this is a major problem evaluating psychic experiences outside of controlled laboratory conditions—“in the wild” so to speak. Often, the probability of a precognitive event happening simply by chance cannot be ruled out.  

But what do you think of the following?  

#1067 “Mowing with Two Mowers” 

I am in the backyard preparing to mow the lawn.  The grass is quite high.  I decide to push two mowers at the same time.  I am thinking that this might save me some time to do this task.  I line up the mowers side by side and start off across the lawn.  It’s very hard to keep the mowers aligned, and one veers off in a different direction, leaving gaps in the mowing that I will need to return to later. 

The very next day, I heard a loud crash in the pantry area of a local food bank⁵ where I volunteer a couple days a week.  A woman from the front desk had been pushing two big carts side by side, returning them to my work area. and lost control of one of them. The cart had fallen over making a loud bang. She apologized and explained “I was trying to save some time by pushing two at one time.” 

There isn’t an exact match between the dream about the lawn mowers and the woman pushing the two carts the next day. However, there is an obvious echo of “pushing two instead of one side by side to save time”. When the cart fell over in the work area of the food bank, and the woman apologized, I immediately recognized the incident as a repetition of content I had dreamt about the night before. 

Again, pretty mundane stuff, as with the copy machine dream above. Have you had similar experiences? One wonders what practical value such dreams might serve. In the examples above, neither dream provided information I could make productive or timely use of.  

However, the possibility of precognition and precognitive dreams has interesting metaphysical implications. Does the future already exist in a form that we can perceive at times in dreams? If so, does this lend support to Calvinist ideas about predestination—that events are already determined, recorded as it were, such that we can occasionally preview them?   

I won’t say something facile like “everything works out for the best” or “everything is going to be ok in the end”, or that this or that event is somehow part of God’s master plan, whatever that might be. Events in our lives can be joyful and affirming but also tragic and horrifying. Sometimes we get a glimpse of what’s coming. Often, not.   

But I can predict that right now there are idiots in offices all over the world using copy machines improperly. What do you think will happen next? 

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¹Genesis 40:1-22. 

²An Introduction to Parapsychology, by Harvey J. Irwin and Caroline A. Watt, (2007). 

³Louisa Rhine, the “first lady of parapsychology”, was one of the most influential researchers in the field circa 1948 to 1983, establishing a foundational classification system for psychic experiences. 

^4“The Call of Cthulhu”, by H.P. Lovecraft (1928)  

⁵Support your local food banks if you can—”food deserts” are spreading in many urban areas. 

Unidentified Anomalous Press Reports (UAPRs)

I have been watching all the old X-Files episodes on Hulu lately, making my way through the third season, circa 1996. But why watch a science fiction/horror show about government conspiracies involving extraterrestrials, when I can watch the real thing unfolding in the media right now? 

Declassify the Documents? 

I read in the New York Times this morning that Chuck Shumer, the senator from New York, wants to create a commission that will declassify government documents about UFOs¹.  There is bipartisan support, and part of the impetus for this legislation may be to corral the burgeoning conspiracy theories about government coverups.  Schumer’s bill is modelled on legislation passed in 1992 allowing review of documents pertaining to the assassination of John F. Kennedy—an event that also generated many conspiracy theories.  We have been here before.  

Interest in what the government knows about these phenomena has increased since the recent release of military videos depicting hard to explain objects hovering and flying about. To date, the government has not released all the data it possesses, chiefly for reasons of national security.  This resistance to full disclosure has frustrated congress and encouraged conspiracy theorists, hence the legislation.   

Government officials have repeatedly denied that the videos and other material they have contain evidence of alien invasion.  They have also denied that government agents have retrieved the wreckage of a crashed extraterrestrial vehicle or are warehousing material of extraterrestrial manufacture.  Of course they would.  Weirdly, the proposed legislation contains a provision allowing the government to claim any crashed spaceships that might be in private or corporate hands, “however unlikely that such things exist.”  Hmmm. 

Attack of the Metallic Orbs     

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) has been collecting reports from around the world of “mysterious metallic orbs”.²  The spherical objects range in size from about 3 feet in diameter to the size of an automobile and are white, silver or metallic in color.  They tend to appear at altitudes of 10,000 to 30,000 feet—where commercial aircraft fly.  When spotted, the orbs can be stationary or move at speeds of up to Mach 2 apparently without exuding any thermal exhaust while they operate.  

The AARO receives between 50 and 100 reports of these strange objects a month, though only 2%-5% are considered truly “anomalous”. However, sightings of unidentified anomalous objects increased dramatically following David Grusch’s allegations that special government programs are in possession of fragments and an intact vehicle of non-human origin—and have had these items for decades.  

Write To Congress! 

During a recent interview with Sean Hannity, Senator Marco Rubio of Florida reported that individuals with very high government clearance had come forward to claim that our government is “reverse engineering” fragments of exotic technology to advance our own technologies and defense systems. Senator Rubio could not say whether the allegation was true or not but opined that people with very high clearances involved in important projects for the government are either telling the truth or are crazy. Couldn’t they be both?   

The All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) an agency of the Department of Defense, has stated that they have “not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of any extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.” Of course they would. 

Representative Tim Burchett of Tennessee, who is on the House Oversight Committee looking into UFOs and UAPs, has speculated that Earth would have no defense against an extra-terrestrial invasion.⁴ Technologically speaking, “…we are vastly out of our league” and the aliens could “…turn us into a charcoal briquette”.  

Back in March, the Tennessee lawmaker Burchett reiterated the allegation that the U.S. government has recovered extraterrestrial technology and is attempting to reverse-engineer it—and that it has “recovered a craft at some point, and possible beings.”⁵ According to Burchett, the government may have been involved in this matter “… since 1947, probably since about 1897 in what was the Auroro Texas ‘UFO crash.” 

Representative Mike Gallagher of Wisconsin has helpfully suggested that UAPs are either time travelling vehicles piloted by people from the future, or the manifestation of an ancient, technologically advanced culture that is just now revealing itself to the world after spending millennia in hiding. 

“The Truth is Out There”, as the X-Files proclaimed at the beginning of every episode. But is it really? Who can get to the bottom of this UFO/UAP business now that Mulder and Scully are retired? Maybe we should ask the Cigarette Smoking Man: “What is the plan?” 

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¹“Bipartisan Measure Aims to Force Declassification of U.F.O. Records”, by Julian Barnes, New York Times, 7/14/23.  UFOs are now officially called UAPs, though various government agencies dispute whether the unidentified phenomena are “aerial” or “anomalous”.  Couldn’t they be both? 

² “Pentagon, NASA Have No Idea What Those Weird Flying Metallic Orbs Are”, by Joseph Curl.  DailyWire.com, 7/12/23 

³ “Senator Says UFO Claims May Be ‘Biggest Story in Human History”, by Daniel Chaitin. DailyWire.com, 7/12/23. 

⁴ “Congressman has grim take after access to UFO footage: ‘We Can’t Handle It’”, by Chris Eberhart. FoxNews.com, 7/12/23. 

⁵ “Congressman Says UFOs Can Fly Underwater, Government Has Been Covering Up Presence Since 1890s”, by Joseph Curl. DailyWire.com, 7/8/23.  

⁶ “UFO Fervor Grabs Washington: Congressman Says UFOs May Be ‘Ancient Civilization,’ Senator Says Craft Retrievers Unaccountable”, by Joseph Curl. DailyWire.com, 7/5/23. 

Dreams, Altered States, and Memory

Lately I’ve been fascinated by research about the neurology of dream states, now augmented by ever more sophisticated technology for measuring—and manipulating—brain waves and brain metabolism.  It seems that real progress along the frontier of dream research must take an increasingly neurological approach.  Three developments caught my attention recently. 

Dreaming and Running  

Earlier I reported on recent dream research at our local university¹.  Scientists discovered a new brain wave rhythm, faster than others, which showed an anti-phase synchronization pattern across the left and right brain hemispheres. The brain wave pattern occurred in the retrosplenial cortex, a small associational area at the back of the corpus collosum, near the cerebellum.   

This area interacts with parts of the brain involved with vision, memory, and spatial perception.  The retrosplenial cortex seems connected with sense of time and position in space and is especially active when people are running—and dreaming.  Scientists speculate that, just as the brain must rapidly anticipate potential environmental hazards during a run, it must also manage the oncoming unexpected and fluctuating content of dream imagery.  

Out-of-Body Experiences  

NPR recently carried a story² about scientists who identified a part of the brain associated with out-of-the-body experiences.  These are common in dreams as well as other altered states of consciousness.  Dr. Josef Parvizi, a neurology professor at Stanford, determined that this region was the anterior precuneous, a sausage shaped section of the brain located in-between the two hemispheres, at the back of the brain, near the upper portion of the occipital lobe.  Scientists believe the precuneous has a role in episodic memory, visuospatial processing, sense of self, and consciousness. 

Parvizi reported on a patient who experienced out-of-body sensations related to his epileptic seizures.  The man described feelings of “floating in space” and being “a third observer to conversations that are happening in my mind that I’m not part of.”  Parvizi and his team were able to artificially recreate this out-of-body experience by administering electrical stimulation to the man’s anterior precuneous.  The technique was later applied to eight other volunteer subjects, with similar results.   

Scientists suspect that this region of the brain is responsible for our “physical self”, that is, our sense of being located within our bodies, and that our body and thoughts are ours and not someone else’s.  A fully functioning anterior precuneous is important for ensuring that we perceive our experiences as happening to us and not to other people. 

The drug ketamine may have similar effects on the part of the brain associated with out-of-body experiences.  Ketamine is an anesthetic, useful for pain management, and increasingly prescribed for depression.  Its antidepressant actions are not well understood.  Ketamine can produce hallucinogenic and “dissociative” effects, and as “Special K”, has been used as a recreational drug. 

One researcher speculated that Parvizi’s technique might one day replace the need for ketamine treatment of depression, though no one has investigated this yet.  Parvizi’s first subject experienced out-of-body sensations related to his seizures, which somewhat resemble the effects of ketamine.  However, “dissociative” effects are also observed in dreams—that we are out of our bodies, or that we are someone or something other than ourselves while dreaming—so it seems possible that the same region of the brain is involved. 

REM, NREM and Memory  

More recently, I’ve posted on the role that REM and NREM cycles have in strengthening neuronal pathways—by matching new experiences with older ones—and in so doing transferring memories into long term storage³.   

REM and NREM sleep alternate in multiple 90-minute cycles throughout the night, but the relative proportions of each type of sleep change.  Across cycles, time in REM sleep increases while time in NREM decreases.  (Though dreaming can occur in both phases, it is typically during REM sleep that we dream.)   

As the night proceeds, memories that are referenced in dreams shift from very recent experiences to more remote ones.  Some scientists hypothesize that in the first half of the night, when NREM sleep dominates, weaker or redundant memory traces are erased in favor of preserving and strengthening older, more important connections, a process augmented by the longer periods of REM sleep that occur towards dawn.⁴   

An Example 

This seems consistent with my own experiences.  The dream below seems to illustrate the process of melding recent and older experiences into a kind of metaphor for long term storage. 

In the middle of the night my wife and I are awakened by some animal noises.  From the front window we see nothing moving in the front yard.  (We often have deer that come by to snack in the garden.)  My wife says “It might be coming from inside the house.”  Now I hear sounds coming from the basement.  I descend the stairs into the darkness below, not sure what I will find.  I need a stick or broom handle just in case—I’m thinking it may be rats.  I can hear them but can’t see them.  I’m sure they are some kind of rodent. 

The origin of this dream is pretty straightforward.  There is a wasp nest on the top of the front door, probably under the siding, or inside the frame of the door.  Spraying has not deterred the wasp, which luckily seems to be a solitary species and relatively harmless.  Its wings vibrate against the wood, making a loud, high-pitched buzz—so we know when it comes and goes.  My wife has said a couple of times she thinks it’s inside the house.  At any rate, we do have an animal in the house—this wasp.  The dream seems to recall and comment on this situation.   

It’s interesting that the location of the creature shifts from the front door (in reality) to the basement, (in the dream), from daylight activity (the wasp) to night time (possible rodents), and from small (insect) to large (rats?).  We have had mice and voles in the basement before, so the content of the dream resembles a past reality.  This example seems to support the idea that patterns of REM and NREM sleep serve to bolster long term memory storage—comparing new experiences to old and modifying the underlying neural connections accordingly. 

If I used a Jungian or psychoanalytic approach to this dream, I might ask what it means to have an animal take up residence in my home.  Is my psyche, often symbolized by a structure like a house, being invaded by some more primitive impulse or emotional complex?  This could spin out into lengthy discussion about the archetypal significance of rodent imagery, basements, darkness, climbing downstairs, battling vermin, etcetera.   

But I think in this case the dream is just about household pest control. I’d better get on it. 

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¹“Neurology and Dreaming”, Egregoric Times, 6/12/23. 

²“Scientists have found part of the brain that triggers out-of-body experiences”, Jon Hamilton, All Things Considered, NPR, 7/3/23. 

³“Dreaming and Defragmentation”, Egregoric Times, 6/28/23. 

⁴“What Determines the Contents of Our Dreams?”, by Gary L. Wenk, Ph.D., Psychology Today, 6/23/23. 

Egregores Part Five–Some Speculations

This post concludes a five-part series about egregores.  Earlier I offered several different perspectives about egregores, proposed a working definition of the phenomena, and described both the natural history of egregores and their pervasiveness in society. In this last installment I want to collect several speculations and theoretical questions for future exploration.  I will simply list them below, with a few remarks after each.  I welcome comments from readers who may have insights to share. 

•What is the role of metaphorical thinking in the creation and maintenance of egregores?  Readers are probably familiar with the term metaphor as it relates to the interpretation of poetry and other kinds of literature.  But here we are talking about an overarching process of perception and understanding.   

Metaphorical thinking involves a comparison of something complex, unfamiliar or incomprehensible to something more concrete, mundane, and useful.  Forming a metaphor involves translating or mapping superficial similarities from the unknown to the known.  Thus, we say things like “the mind is like a computer”; it seems to have “circuits” and “files” and “memory storage” like the computers we use every day.  Is the mind an actual computer?  Probably not, and the metaphor simplifies the actual complexity and subtleness of the mind.   

Metaphors masquerade as knowledge or wisdom, when in fact they are merely tentative comparisons of new to old information, a preliminary impression until a deeper understanding comes about.  Their chief value, for better or worse, is to determine subsequent perceptions and behavior in response to the object or phenomena described by the metaphor.   

Does it matter whether we perceive our relationship with China as an athletic event—they are our economic “competitors”—rather than a military conflict—they are our “enemies”.  Would our future actions be different depending on which metaphor we chose?  

Metaphorical thinking seems involved in the formation and maintenance of egregores, especially those that are personified and anthropomorphized: think of “mother nature”, or “big brother”.  These two are not quite egregores according to our earlier definition, but conceivably could become so under certain circumstances.   Is “nature” our mother?  Is a 1984-style totalitarian government our brother?  If we answer yes to these metaphors, how does this affect our behavior towards nature, or government?  

•To what extent is the unconscious mind, through dreaming, involved in the formation of egregores?  Recent dream research suggests that the cycles of REM and NREM during sleep are associated with the culling, collation and strengthening of neuronal pathways that form the neurological substrate of memories.  The process seems to involve matching new experiences with old ones, translating immediate or short-term memories into long term storage, presumably based on some similarity between the old and new.   

This implies a comparison of some sort.  Is this the neurological basis for the highly metaphoric imagery that we experience in dreams?  It’s a short jump from here to the metaphoric content of dreams, nightmares, poetry, literature and other creative cultural products, including egregores. 

Or, from a psychoanalytic perspective, are egregores simply projections of repressed or unexpressed parts of the unconscious, internal subjective experiences rather than external phenomena?  Because egregores are socially mediated and require groups of people focused on their manifestation, is the entity really a collective projection of some psycholgical or emotional issue its followers share? 

•How do social media and related communication technologies impact the life cycle of an egregore?  At the very least social media would expedite the formation of such an entity by disseminating its stigmata rapidly, attracting new members, and facilitating the repetitive, ritualistic homage paid to it.  

Critical to this process is a “naming event”, which allows the undifferentiated “energy” of an emerging egregore to enter the language, everyday discourse, and so begin to affect perceptions, thoughts, and actions.  The naming event lays the groundwork for a socially mediated invocation of whatever kind of egregore is being summoned.  Collectively we ask, “What are we calling this thing?” 

The relationship between society and its various egregores—mediated through social media and communication technologies in general—is symbiotic.  The increasing dissolution of boundaries between private and public life, the transformation of life into simulations of life patterned on media imagery or virtual realities, the confusion of reality and fantasy, of information and disinformation—all these contribute to the demise of a shared perception of reality.  This creates an ideal habitat for egregores to grow and develop. 

There are other questions I have, too many to go into much depth here: Is sensitivity to what Jung calls synchronicity a prerequisite for experiencing egregores? Are egregores also sustained by everyday cognitive habits like “confirmation bias” and the like?  Do some egregores emerge from specific geographical locations because of local history, social conditions, and characteristics of the natural environment?  (That is, are they a form of genius loci?)  I could go on, but I’ll stop for now… 

It seems—to me at least—that a systematic study of egregores would be timely and relevant to our contemporary predicament: the erosion of a shared sense of reality, the demise of some workable consensus about what constitutes truth, and what is desirable in our society.  Given what we may know or suspect about egregores, what if anything should be done?  Or as the prophet Ezekial asks, “How then shall we live?” Right now, it seems best to remain vigilant and self-aware. 

Egregores Part Four–In Society

The last three posts discussed approaches to the study of egregoric phenomena, offered a working definition of egregore, and made preliminary remarks about whether egregores can be considered alive and able to act independently of the minds that formed them from indeterminate “energy”. 

This is the fourth installment of a series I’m tempted to call an attempt at systematic “egregorology”, which I admit sounds a bit grandiose. In this post I will briefly discuss the importance of egregores in history and society—a very broad and unwieldy subject. A clear focus and some parameters will help in covering this ground; any survey of egregoric influences in society cannot be exhaustive. (If this project ever morphs from blog to book, “Egregores in Society” would surely occupy the longest chapter.)  

When I first started the Egregoric Times I wrote a few early posts about egregores in politics, horror literature, and religion. These are just three of many examples of their pervasiveness in society. One can find similar phenomena operating in many institutions, the work setting, in culture, and in economics.  

In fact, almost any endeavor involving organized human social behavior can generate egregores, particularly in situations where there is lack of consensus among groups, and the way forward through some problem or conflict is unclear, complicated, foggy, or undifferentiated. Where to start?  

I could begin at the very beginning—with the account in Genesis, or one of several other creation mythologies—in which a parental god calls forth the world from the amorphous, primordial chaos. No one has ever observed the creation of the earth, much less the universe, but the notion of how it was done—the making and forming and naming of indeterminate matter by a primeval deity—shows some consistency across cultures.   

Is this narrative the model for subsequent human attempts to do something similar at a local level? To “play God” and summon things that may accomplish our will—at least for a while?  

It seems that egregores are the source material for gods, ghosts, demons and other personified supernatural forces. What then follows in history are ever more elaborate rituals for their invocation and worship, and sooner or later, a theology. The inevitable sectarian violence that continues to plague us can be seen as competition among rival egregores over time. 

(Many consider it blasphemous to believe that the Divine is a creation of the human imagination. Out of deference and respect to monotheists—of which I am one—I would clarify: the Divine itself is not a creation of mortals, but its image—the perception fallible humans have of the Divine—almost certainly is an egregore. Hence the prohibition in several faith traditions against the making of “graven images” which can often lead to idolatry, that horror of the Old Testament.) 

In conventional religious practice, as well as in various occult and esoteric traditions, an egregoric entity may be invoked or evoked intentionally by followers. But can this process occur inadvertently? Could an egregore develop and evolve beneath the consciousness of those who later submit to its influence? By accident, or stealth?  

This is a familiar trope in horror entertainment—the fear of “being taken over” by some mysterious and unnamed force, to be possessed and controlled. This prevalent and recurring theme in horror and science fiction may reflect broader social anxiety about phenomena that we experience collectively, and to which we succumb. 

Outside of religious expression and interaction with the supernatural, egregores appear in disturbing secular experiences as well: extremist political movements, xenophobia, warfare, economic oppression, and celebrity cults, among others.  Insofar as they influence and direct collective human behavior, egregores can be powerful “influencers”, and potentially dangerous.  

Here in the United States, we are approaching a tumultuous political year, at a time of rapid social and technological change. There is a lack of consensus about the direction our nation should take on various issues, even a lack of consensus about reality itself. These are ideal conditions for the formation of egregores.  

Will we retain a modicum of self-awareness and self-restraint, or will we submit to being manipulated by forms of thought and perception we are barely conscious of? In these troubled times, what sort of entity will our society unwittingly conjure and empower with our devotion? 

Next time I will collect some untidy and discomforting speculations about the nature of egregores.