Enchantment, Emergence, and Egregores: Part 3, Egregoric Possession as an Emergent Phenomenon

I wrote Reviving Old Scratch in 2016 during my early years of prison ministry. As you can tell from the subtitle of the book--"Demons and the Devil for Doubters and the Disenchanted"--Reviving Old Scratch was a "Devil for Doubters" sort of book.

I wrote the book for myself, given that I thought the book would have a limited audience. Conservative Christians don't doubt the existence of the Devil. So why would they need the book? Progressive Christians, by contrast, have deconstructed (if they are ex-evangelicals) or demythologized (if they are mainline) themselves out of any belief about the Devil. Consequently, who was going to read this Devil for Doubters book? 

But Reviving Old Scratch found its audience.  Alongside Unclean, Reviving Old Scratch has been my most rated and most highly rated book on Amazon and Goodreads. In retrospect, this makes sense. For the very reasons I felt I had to write the book. True, a lot of modern Christians might have trouble believing in a literal Devil. But evil is a real thing, which even the most disenchanted Christians will admit. Especially given how much of progressive Christianity is devoted to social justice. (To fight against evil, it seems, you need to believe in evil.) Plus, a lot of Christians who deconstructed started to realize that deconstruction is a dead end. Faith just dissipates into a spiritual-but-not-religious haze. Reconstruction, putting some ontological conviction back into the faith, became a pressing need and desire. So, Reviving Old Scratch, my "Devil for Doubters" book, became a good companion for many on that journey, especially how to think afresh about Satan, demons, and spiritual warfare. 

One of the moves I make in Reviving Old Scratch is how there are trans-personal forces at work in the world that influence human actions, pulling us into the darkness. We are products of our time and place and the forces at work have a profound moral influence upon us. We aren't as free and independent as we imagine ourselves. We are, rather, pulled into the tides of culture and history. Pawns in a game we only dimly apprehend. As N.T. Wright has observed, "there is such a thing as a dark force that seems to take over people, movements, and sometimes whole countries, a force or (as it sometimes seems) a set of forces that can make people do things they would never normally do." Wright goes on to elucidate:

You might have thought the history of the twentieth century would provide plenty of examples of this, but many still choose to resist the conclusion--despite the increasing use in public life of the language of "force" (economic "forces," political "forces," peer "pressure," and so on). 

Now, how are we to imagine these forces? The enchanted view is that these forces are malevolent angelic agents. Demons. But again, I was writing Reviving Old Scratch for skeptics. So, the argument I made wasn't enchantment but emergence, using ants and weather as examples. Here's a bit from Reviving Old Scratch:

We don’t have to get overly spooky when we think of these forces. All we need to recognize now is that there are unseen, impersonal forces in the world that can’t be located in time or space, forces that are perpetually pulling us into darkness, forces prowling the world like a lion looking for someone to devour. And if you’re still struggling to get your head around that notion, let me share two metaphors that might help. Think of an ant colony. No single ant has the blueprint of the ant colony in its head. No one ant is running the show, directing the ants to forage, build, or defend the colony—all these things happen with no one running the show or calling the shots. What we observe from on high, looking down at the ant colony as a whole, is order and pattern, an order and pattern that, once established, has causal effects upon the individual ants, directing and organizing their behaviors. A pattern emerges from the parts and then exerts a downward force upon those parts. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

But this causal force can’t be located in or reduced to any of the parts being affected. If you could ask the ants, “Who’s in charge here?” they’d be stumped. No single ant is the Wizard of Oz running the show behind a curtain. Instead, the Wizard is everywhere, an unseen force at work in every microscopic interaction between the ants, organizing and directing their behavior. And the Wizard of Oz is much older than the ants. As the lives of ants begin and end, the pattern organizing them persists, outliving the individual ants.

The ants die. But the Wizard lives on.

Or think of a cloud. A cloud is a structure that emerges from a collection of individual water molecules. Clouds can’t be reduced to those water molecules, but clouds, once they exist, start bossing around those water molecules, throwing them around in thunderstorms and hurricanes.

Similar things happen with human beings and societies, forces that sweep through human history on large and small scales. Like water molecules, people are sucked into a dark vortex, a moral tempest, a thunderstorm.

Again, what I'm describing here is what is called emergence. There is "upward causation" from smaller, constituent parts at the micro-level that create a larger, patterned, macro-level structure. Then, once that macro-level structure "emerges," like an ant colony or a hurricane system, it begins to exert "downward causation" upon the smaller, constituent parts. One of the things I suggest in Reviving Old Scratch is that if you're having trouble thinking of the dark forces and powers at work in the world as literal demons you can think of them, instead, as emergent forces that exert downward causation upon human behavior. "Spiritual warfare," in this view, is battling against these impersonal and trans-personal moral forces in the world. Instead of demonizing individual persons--battling against "flesh and blood"--we focus our collective efforts upon extracting ourselves and others from the dark vortex dragging us all under the water.

Given this use of emergence to describe demonic powers in Reviving Old Scratch, I expect you can see how Valentin Tomberg's description of egregores in Meditations on the Tarot would have caught my attention. Egregores manifest and behave like emergent systems. The process begins at the micro-level, in the upward causation of the individuals within the group. Once the egregore emerges, it exerts downward causation, shaping and directing the group in return. Also, like all emergent systems, the egregore is bounded and dependent upon the group. That is, the egregore cannot act or display powers beyond the group’s own potentialities. Yet as a demonic power alive within the group, the egregore shows a potency not predictable from its individual members alone, appearing as more than the sum of its parts. The egregore has come to "possess" the group as it exerts its dark moral effect. 

Given this picture, we can define what might be called “egregoric possession” or “emergent possession.” Egregoric/emergent possession is the condition in which individuals within a group come under the influence of an egregore, an emergent property of the collective. In egregoric/emergent possession, the egregore exerts downward causation upon its members, shaping their perceptions, emotions, and actions. Unlike traditional demonic possession, which is imagined as an external spirit invading the self, egregoric/emergent possession arises endogenously from the group itself. Instead of an individual being “possessed” by an alien entity, a community finds itself controlled by the collective spirit it has generated and set loose within itself.