But Are They Alive?

Railing against what he saw as the stupidity of making and worshipping idols, the unknown author of Psalm 135 describes how “They have mouths, but cannot speak, eyes, but they cannot see; they have ears, but cannot hear, nor is their breath in their mouths.”1 And the prophet Jeremiah—from whom the pejorative term jeremiad2 is

The Uncanniness of Online Meeting Platforms

Like millions of other people, I have been conducting much of my life “remotely” these days, using online meeting platforms like Zoom, GoToMeeting and the like.  At first the experience reminded me of that TV show from the 60s and 70s, The Hollywood Squares1—a human Tic Tac Toe game enlivened by amusing repartee among celebrity

The Social Construction of Serial Killers

The last post discussed a horrific school shooting in Oregon some years back.  In retrospect the event seemed to be mediated in part by an internet subculture, a “fraternity of shooters”.  The eerie invocation of the name of an earlier mass murderer suggested an egregoric process of some sort, and one broadly active in society.

Internetromancy

In his book about Lovecraft’s influence on occult traditions1, John L. Steadman defines an egregore as an entity intentionally created by a black “magickian” for a specific purpose.  This willful creation of the egregore is accomplished either by evocation or invocation. During an evocation, the practitioner summons the entity. This is done by implanting the

Egregore “Energy”, Attention and Cost

In the last post I briefly examined competition between egregores, with examples taken from the Hebrew Testament and the New Testament.  The book of Isaiah records the ongoing struggle of the ancient Israelites to avoid the distraction and assimilation of rival belief systems, a dynamic that continued for millennia.  The situation in Ephesus, where the

Competition Among Egregores?

The idea of the egregore is not new.  According to various occult scholars1, the term comes from the Greek égrégoros, meaning “wakeful” or “watcher”.  Various non-canonical texts, such as the Book of Enoch, suggest it is a kind of angel.  This differs from more contemporary views, which see egregores as similar in some ways to