Egregore's and 21st Century Magical Groups

by Nick Farrell

At the turn of the century the Esoteric Order of the Golden Dawn booted out its autocratic founder and Scottish romantic ‘MacGregor' Mathers and set up a committee under the control of the poet WB Yeats. Mathers responded by performing a black magic rite involving baptising some peas with the names of the committee members and shaking them about in a tin. Then he sent a young soon-to-be infamous magician called Aleister Crowley wearing a kilt and a mask to seize the group's temple equipment. Assisted by a bouncer from a local pub, Crowley managed to get into the building and change the locks only to be ejected by the police. Mathers had better luck with his black magic and the committee was soon at each other's throats and the Golden Dawn went belly up.

Later in that century a talented student of the GD off-shoot Alpha et Omega, Dion Fortune, claimed she had stricken by a plague of cats after falling foul of its leadership. She banished the feline attack and went on to form a successful pussy free group of her own.

Ironically these sorts of dramas are common to many esoteric groups dedicated to the development of spiritual enfoldment and fraternity in a way that they would not happen at your average drama group or sports club. Group conflict is so much part of the esoteric scene that the comedy fantasy writer Terry Pratchett got a laugh from many working occultists by describing the method of advancement in his ‘Unseen University' (a caricature of the Rosicrucian Invisible College) as literally bumping off the person above you in the hierarchy.

When someone becomes involved in esoteric studies they invariably seek a group or organisation to teach them or to work magic with. Occult writer Francis King once said that an occultist needs a group like a politician needs a party. Like a politician, an occultist can survive as an independent but the chances of them actually getting much done is limited.

Many groups start with the best intentions, but swiftly dissolve because they ignore some of the basic ideas of magic and group dynamics. Some forget that they are not creating a club or organisation, because the energies they will be using will change their lives. Others forget that they are not creating a personality or religious cult and need to lighten up and remember the basics of people management. There are some groups that make the fatal mistake of trying to clone autocratic magical schools or organisations of the 19th or 20th Century forgetting that times have changed. Then there are those that attempt to find the solution in anarchy only to collapse through apathy.

An esoteric group is alive with the energy that is created within it and has a personality that is the sum total of its members. From the moment it is born it becomes the embodiment of what its members want – for good or bad.
To an outsider an esoteric group is much the same as any other club. It has organisers, has a venue where it meets, collects subscriptions and gets together regularly. The outsider might admit that the content of the meetings may differ from a golf club, or knitting circle, but the structure is essentially the same. An expert in group dynamics might even add that some of the shenanigans that play out among the members of an esoteric group are easily identifiable in any gathering of humans.

But there is something more that hatches out when a group of occultists get together which cannot be found in any normal group dynamic and for which the word ‘intense' fails to do justice. It is as if the work of bringing people to light corresponds with the projection of tremendous amounts of shadow and the process of working with our angels or demons are revealed.

Another issue that is less likely to happen in the knitting club is the tendency for people to become identified with the divine energies that they represent. This is particularly true of channelling groups where the person responsible for bringing through the entity who provides the group flavour is sometimes mistaken for the being. Master Jesus might be able to walk on water but Gladys from Milton Keynes who channels him every Thursday night would sink like a stone, despite what her followers might think.

The chairman of the Golf club is unlikely to be deified by the other members (unless he gets 18 holes in one in a single game) as some magical orders do their teachers. Nor after his death are future members of the club likely to insist that they are his re-incarnation, as would-be followers of Aleister Crowley, MacGregor Mathers and Dion Fortune have been.

The outsider can put a lot of this down to fancy and the fact that esoteric groups are populated by people that are either eccentric or at very least nuts. However there are a lot of sane people in magic groups who have a tendency to fall for such nonsense and there might be a less obvious answer.

Esoteric groups with their concentration on key human issues like power, imagination and becoming god-like develop a myth all of their own in which people get carried along for the ride.

A group offers great things like initiation, magical fireworks and esoteric recognition that one would not get elsewhere. A man might be a street sweeper or have the exciting profession of chartered accountant, but on every Sunday night he is a Priest after the Order of Melchizadek and can turn bread and wine into the body and blood of Osiris.

This is not saying that the work of an esoteric group is unimportant or trivial; indeed it is the belief in its own importance that is the key to making a rite work. Titles, costumes and the elevation of personality are all part of the math that equals results in the esoteric terms. You might not believe that John, a car salesman from Slough can link heaven and earth, but when he is dressed in an Egyptian headdress and wears a bright red robe and calls himself a Hierophant of ‘The Mysteries' somehow you suspend disbelief and magic happens.

Now if it happens to John, it will also happen to Sara, a high-flying businesswoman, who in the same ritual is mediating the Egyptian Goddess Isis while wearing something that looks like a tin foil turkey on her head and James, a computer programmer who is wearing a mask which is supposed to be the hawk god Horus, but instead looks more like a chicken.

So then with all this power at their disposal and a tendency towards believing they are something they are not ordinarily, it is not a surprise that sometimes things go bang and people start acting a little crazy. In fact given the circumstances it is surprising that esoteric groups last any length of time at all. What prevents this happening is the structure of the group and the magic, which it works and its organisation's personality.

Anyone who studies group dynamics will tell you that when people get together to achieve a common purpose a group mind forms. You see it particularly in team sports where everyone contributes towards winning a game even though only one person gets the final goal. Watching a game of soccer the players blur into a single entity that wrestles with the rival team with the idea of getting a ball into the net. The game moves so fast that unless you are a real fan, you are often unable to identify individuals.

Psychologists have noticed that people do funny things when they are amongst such a group of people. They suddenly become easily manipulated and can do things that they would not do normally. This is the psychology of the mob of people that suddenly forms and then as a single body go off on a rampage. Afterwards people who took part sometimes wonder how they managed to get so excited and do the sort of actions that they would not normally have done.

This is exactly the sort of energy that an esoteric group uses to achieve the levels of faith needed to move mountains. The ritual officers blur into an intensity that enables you to do things that you would not believe possible. In esoteric terms we call this group mind an egregore that is like the soul of the group, only in magical organisations it has a personality that is almost as tangible as any other member.

This egregore is made up of the sum total of aspirations, beliefs of all group members past and present. It is powered up every time a rite is performed and the longer and more often a group meets the more powerful it becomes until it has the power to do lots of interesting things some good, some bad.

On the plus side it means that all the magic you do, whether you are with the others or not, suddenly develops a special power. It is like you are tapping into a reservoir of energy that you never had as a solo magician. I had been carrying out a Golden Dawn ritual called the ‘banishing ritual of the pentagram' to clear out any lower astral nasties from a room for years before I actually joined a GD group. But somehow, upon joining the old dusty rite developed a brand new sparkle; it was easier to visualise and the room felt completely different afterward.

However on the negative side you can fall foul of a group egregore if you don't toe the group line on everything. You can wake up one morning with a different view of the world, go to your group working as normal and find that you just do not get on with any one any more. After a while it becomes clear that you are not welcome and you have to leave. There after the people in the same group that you have known and loved will shun you, speak your name in whispers and poke you with small sticks or shove your head down a toilet. This is because your sudden change of viewpoint goes against the mindset of the egregore.

An egregore has a personality, much in the same way as a human. There are some group egregore's that are slow, plodding and methodical and there are others that are light hearted and ephemeral; some are intellectual while others are touchy feely types.

Just like choosing your friends, you select a group with an egregore with a personality that you most compatible with. I get on better with the more intellectual egregore where you can speak what you think rather than what you feel. For this reason I am more interested in the Hermetic ceremonial magic group over the more emotive green ray egregore. That is not to say that nature magicians are not intellectuals or that Hermetic ceremonial magicians do everything in their heads, it is just that those types of egregore I work best with.

You know if you are in the wrong egregore if you start to feel uncomfortable with what the group does and I am not just talking magically here either. In this group there have been people would be shocked that after a two-hour lecture we depart to a local ‘greasy spoon' restaurant for a huge plate of sausage, egg and chips. Not because there was anything wrong with that, other than the day my egg was a bit runny, but because it did not fit into his idea of what an occult group should be eating! Another guest would be greatly relieved that we were are earthy and would fit in with the egregore well.

People have rejected our group's egregore because it was either too intellectual, or not intellectual enough; it was too practical or impractical, worked you too hard, or was too lazy, was too autocratic or didn't have enough controls. In other words we must be fairly balanced.

You can tell the sort of egregore that your group will have by looking at the types of people that make it up. Are they predominantly intellectual, or emotional? What is it that they have in common? How would they react in any given situation? What is the highest they aspire to and what is the lowest they will sink? The egregore will often behave like the weakest link more than its strongest so are these qualities the sorts of things you will want.

The egregore will have something in common with all the ‘issues' of everyone in the group. It is common sense to think that a group that has too many sexually dysfunctional people will see sexual problems surface between its members and in a magical group it is a certainty. Yet for some reason when groups are formed the personality flaws of its members are too often over looked. One of my pet theories about some neo-pagan groups that are rabidly anti-Christian, and convert members to this fanatical stance is that they are formed by people who have problems with their fathers who will not own up to it and project instead it onto the nearest paternalistic godform they can find. Too many of these people in your group and your egregore will shift everyone toward religious intolerance.

When forming a group it is best to sit down and do some real soul searching about your strengths and weaknesses. In a proper group you would get to do this often anyway so it is a good time to start.

In more established groups a person seeking to join would had over their astrological chart and the most experienced astrologer would do a comparison with the rest of the members, or (if they know the date and time of the group's birth) with the egregore.

A good group is aware of its egregore and does many different things to preserve it and empower it. We do this when we perform the chalice ritual.

In the chalice ritual we acknowledge the existence of the egregore and give it a shape – that of a cup. This tells us that the group is a passive vehicle from which we can draw all things needful. We have the image of a hexagram above it that shows us that we are under the will of the higher that reflects into the group influencing its direction.

We do this rite at times of conflict to remind ourselves that we are actually one group working towards the same goal – what ever our individual state is at the moment. The various Golden Dawn temples  all have power in their own right and it takes the work that all of us do, to keep them going.

In Star Trek II the movie Spock says that there are times that needs of the many sometimes outweigh the needs of the individual. There is some truth in this as far as group minds are concerned, in sacrificing something of ourselves to the group mind we gain a degree of power that we would not have ordinarily. But it is the nature of sacrifice that what is given up is always returned many times over and giving of some of ourselves to the egregore actually gives a greater degree of power to our individuality. To paraphrase JFK out of context and twisted to suit my own ends: “Ask not what your egregore can do for you, but what you can do for the egregore." And you will get the idea.

I deal with this in much more detail in my book ' Gathering the Magic: Creating 21st Century Groups. '