One of those topics is Tomberg's discussion of egregores.
Personally, I had never heard of egregores. I had to go look it up. When I did look it up I was intrigued. Egregores sounded like things I describe in Reviving Old Scratch. But egregores are also controversial in Christian spaces. So, this is a series devoted to sorting it all out.
Let's start with some history.
The Greek word ἐγρήγοροι (egrēgoroi) comes from the Book of Enoch and literally means “watchers.” The Book of Enoch is a Jewish apocryphal text from around the the 3rd–1st centuries BCE, and was an influence upon Second Temple Jewish and Christian thought. In the Book of Enoch, the “Watchers” are fallen angels. These are identified as the "sons of god" in Genesis 6.1-4 who descended to earth, interbred with humans, and gave birth to the Nephilim, which Enoch describes as the "giants." This Enochian tradition influenced later Christian demonology. Specifically, when Noah's flood destroyed the bodies of the giants their disembodied spirits continued to haunt the earth as the "unclean spirits" we encounter in the gospel accounts.
Early Christian thought was heavily influenced by Neoplatonic philosophy and its view of celestial and angelic mediation. For example, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite described a "celestial hierarchy" of angelic powers connecting heaven and earth. According to Pseudo-Dionysius, the nine ranks of the celestial hierarchy are Seraphim, Cherubim, Thrones, Dominions, Virtues, Powers, Principalities, Archangels, and Angels. In the Biblical imagination, the world suffers under these divine powers, the fallen and rebellious "principalities and powers." The Enochian tradition describing the Watchers was later taken to be an example of this angelic rebellion. Consequently, the Watchers come to be associated with fallen angelic and demonic powers in medieval Christian thought.
This theological background laid the conceptual foundation for the egregore in Western esotericism, the concept described by Tomberg in Meditations on the Tarot. The major development occurred in the 19th century, when the egregore came to be understood as a “collective spirit” or “collective consciousness” generated by a group. Drawing on the notion of powerful spiritual forces influencing human affairs, like the Watchers and the principalities and powers of biblical and medieval thought, these collective spirits could be angelic or demonic, benevolent or malevolent. Once the egregore manifested, it was believed to take on a quasi-autonomous agency, exerting influence over the group while remaining dependent on their energy and devotion.
In Tomberg's view, as a Christian esotericist, egregores are demonic and come to "possess" groups, large and small, maintaining and directing their behavior toward bad ends. For our purposes, there are two things that are distinctive about the egregore in relation to more traditional Christian demonology. First, the egregore results from a "bottom-up" process rather than a "top-down" view like what we see Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite's celestial hierarchy. This is an intriguing reversal, and it opens up the idea of viewing the egregore as an emergent phenomenon. But the "bottom-up" creation of the egregore is also where most of the controversy exists. Second, in contrast to traditional views of demonic activity and possession, what is unique about egregores is the focus upon groups rather than upon individuals. The egregore/demon is a product of the group and operates within and upon the group.
That's what interesting about the egregore, the demonic possession of groups.
