{"id":1288,"date":"2018-07-11T21:58:26","date_gmt":"2018-07-12T04:58:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/admin.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/?p=1288"},"modified":"2018-07-11T21:58:26","modified_gmt":"2018-07-12T04:58:26","slug":"on-the-egregore-group-minds-and-the-conscious-creation-of-deities","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/2018\/07\/on-the-egregore-group-minds-and-the-conscious-creation-of-deities\/","title":{"rendered":"On the Egregore, Group Minds, and the Conscious Creation of Deities."},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>
(c) Sam Wagar 2018. A horned god at Beltaine Faire Edmonton 2017.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>
\u00a0<\/p>\n
It seems absurd to believe that all of the Gods\u00a0have existed for eternity. The Gods of agriculture, for example, rather than sitting around during the time of the dinosaurs waiting for human beings to come along and start planting things, playing Canasta to while away the millennia, came into existence at the same time as agriculture did, grew out of the spirit and developed jointly along with agriculture as it developed. These Gods, to continue this example, both prodded and shaped the development of agriculture and were shaped and prodded by it in turn, with human and divine efforts working in tandem.<\/p>\n
Deities and guardian spirits are created or come into being whenever any group of people work together consistently on some project or another or are just involved with and identify with one another. \u00a0It is as though a side effect or energy in the spirit is secreted by human beings into their surroundings or activities which make them numinous. This is very similar to the common experience of a group mind, when a wonderful co-ordination\u00a0of effort and thought strikes a group of people and they all are suddenly doing the same thing, toward a common goal, but at a very high level of feeling and effectiveness.<\/p>\n
This creative process, if carried out unconsciously (as it usually is), is erratic, short-lived, and weak in effect, with the people involved in the process having widely differing views of what they are doing and why and donating very small amounts of energy each to the process.\u00a0 A guardian spirit may be slow to emerge and very weakly defined or experienced.\u00a0 Those few who are conscious and who do forcefully concentrate and shape the flow of energy and emotion can have an effect out of proportion to their numbers for this reason \u2013 think of \u201cmob mentality\u201d when a sudden shift in mood and enthusiasm strikes a crowd of people and they suddenly become focused, angry and destructive, as the strongest and most focused personalities shape the movement\u00a0of energy and the form of its expression.<\/p>\nTwo Elemental Guardians at CWAA religious retreat 2016.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
\u00a0<\/p>\n
Mobs are short-lived, and the group minds\/egregores created by them usually quickly disperse, luckily.\u00a0 Groups that consciously choose to create on the spiritual\u00a0level together and that exercise their creative emotional and spiritual force toward the ends of shaping and worshipping deity can have a stronger and more clear effect as a result, a Guardian that expresses and enhances their spiritual power, hopes, and personal capacity for wonder over a lifetime or longer.<\/p>\n
A fascinating experiment that was carried out by the Toronto Psychic Society in the 1970s on the conscious creation of a ghost of a man who never lived, documented in Iris Owen\u2019s Conjuring Up Philip<\/em>, resulted in psychic phenomena of all of the classic types. Isaac Bonewits uses Owen\u2019s book as partial evidence for his theory of magic in chapter six of his Real Magic, <\/em>which is where I first heard about it.\u00a0 Briefly, a group of people came together every week with the intention of communicating with a ghost that they knew they had invented, and he came. They fleshed out their fictional portrait with details of appearance and biography, time and historical context and made it as real as they could, while remaining aware that it was fiction. In the early 1980s, when I was living in Toronto, I met one of the people who\u2019d been involved in the original Philip group and he told me that the group would still get together occasionally and whenever they did, Philip would show up.<\/p>\nA Krampus December 2015.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
The egregore\u00a0begins as a reservoir of power, a creative project, and an amplifier of prayer at the early stage when it is consciously or spontaneously created, fed and reinforced.\u00a0 Well-organized covens and lodges create this entity from the group mind\u00a0that emerges in their activities and by naming it and investing it with personal characteristics (a face, clothing, mannerisms, favourite foods, songs and dances and so on), feeding and worshipping it, it transforms from a tool of the group to a partner with the group members\u00a0and an actor in its own right in the world in the expression of the ideals and spiritual\u00a0goals of the group \u2013 like the Gods\u00a0of agriculture, Who are no longer just the tools of the farming groups who started this process.<\/p>\n
In the religion\u00a0of Vodoun\u00a0(Voodoo) it is common for notable individuals to become deities (loa) after their deaths. The soul is called upon, worshipped, fed by sacrifice and invoked into the bodies of Priestesses\u00a0and Priests\u00a0and asked to help with concerns around those particular places, powers, and things which were important to it in life. The quality of the advice and help that the new loa gives people determines whether they will continue this process until it becomes a deity in time, and perhaps moves out of the Temple\u00a0where it began to be more widely called upon. This is very similar to rituals\u00a0of ancestor worship world wide although possession trance by ancestors\u00a0is uncommon. Wiccan covens\u00a0and Temples\u00a0can learn from the Vodoun practices to do what we already do, but with a more concentrated effect, with conscious awareness and focus.<\/p>\n
I would like to add here that I don\u2019t want to say that the Gods\u00a0are simply projections from our minds. If They were only this then Their effects would still be useful, like fetches, but They would just be tools and not beings with whom we can have working relationships. There is \u201csomething out there\u201d which collaborates with humans given the opportunity, a spiritual\u00a0\u201cstuff\u201d that shapes itself around and works through these images. In addition, as abundantly demonstrated through the Afro-diasporic religious practices of possession trance and the Wiccan equivalent of Drawing Down the Moon and Sun, the Gods, once awakened and connected with a Priestess or Priest, can come in to join the rituals\u00a0and bless the worshippers through the bodies of religious leaders.<\/p>\n
(Adapted from \u201cGrowing Wiccan Temples and Leaders\u201d, pp 26-29)<\/p>\n
Groups that consciously choose to create on the spiritual\u00a0level together and that exercise their creative emotional and spiritual force toward the ends of shaping and worshipping deity can have a stronger and more clear effect as a result, a Guardian that expresses and enhances their spiritual power, hopes, and personal capacity for wonder over a lifetime or longer.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3443,"featured_media":1294,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[184,181,149,23],"class_list":["post-1288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-egregore","tag-group-mind","tag-sam-wagar","tag-wicca"],"yoast_head":"\n
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candidate in Ministry\/theology at St. Stephen's College. Author of \"I Know Where the Bodies are Buried: A Memoir, 1956-2011\" (Obscure Pagan Press \/ Createspace, 2014) \"Growing Wiccan Temples and Leaders: Temple Organization and Leadership Development in a Mission-Centred Wiccan Movement\" (Obscure Pagan Press \/ Createspace 2012) \"The Uses of Ecstasy: Ritual and Practical Mysticism in Wicca\" (Obscure Pagan Press \/ Createspace 2012) \"Creating Lore, Writing Ritual\" (Obscure Pagan Press \/ Createspace 2012) Edited and provided an introduction and recommended reading appendix to \"Adelphon Kruptos - the Secret Work of the Knights of Labor 1886 \" (Washington DC: Westphalia Press, 2016) Compiled and wrote seven editions of a \"Directory to Canadian Pagan Resources\" , and edited \"A Pagan Teen Survival Guide\" (Obscure Pagan Press 1998). I have sixteen academic publications in theology, sociology of religion and Wicca. I'm the father of two adult sons and a mead-maker. I have a drum but rarely play it, love dancing naked around the fire at Pagan events. I've been reading Tarot for forty years.","url":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/author\/swagar\/"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3443"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1288\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1294"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/translatingworlds\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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