The Return of the Tower of Babel, Chapter Five, Chaos Magic, Part 5
Egregores, Pepe, Donald Trump as Chaos Magician
5. EGREGORES
Egregores (from the Greek root for “wakeful”) are sigils that turn into collective thoughtforms. As superorganic entities, they function like mind viruses launching pandemics, only unconsciously so that those infected don’t know that a virus even exists.
Groups, whether at a lodge séance, at a sporting event, an academic conference, during guillotine amercements of the French Revolution, or enforcing rules of other authoritarian governments, create egregores that dominate societies or nations for stretches of time, sometimes centuries; see feudalism and the Middle Ages. Egregores can hold together religious cults like Ruland and Warren Jeff’s FLDS (fundamentalist Mormon) sect in which women as young as eleven and twelve married men in their seventies and eighties to join eternal polygamous families. An egregore promising an eternal afterlife in Zion was broadcast into their and their parents’ thoughtforms from early childhood. Whether or not the egregore is real—I won’t address that here—once in force it is all but inescapable. It takes intervention or a radical awakening from the spell.
Egregores are everywhere. They represent consciousness’ innate interdependence and unity and its ability to create transpersonal mindstreams. You could call them indoctrinations or phases of emergent culture and knowledge, but that misses the role of conducted magic and reduces life to chance algorithms. Egregores can be as supernal and longstanding as alchemists’ gold or as evasively concrete as a molecule or cell, as volatile as the fever of a mob, as quotidian as Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” which ignored the Third Reich’s gas chambers, or as crazed as the axe-wielding servitors of the Rwandan interawahme. Remember, in a sacred universe—and this one is—all forms are sacred, for they originate at subtler planes and frequencies. Egregores are self-sustaining blocks of meaning, indications that meaning itself is sacred, contagious, and reinforcing.
Aetheric magician Robert Podgurski refers to egregores as “watchers that preside over earthly affairs or activities” or a “specific spirit or energy [that] could be said to be under the aegis of a specific aspect of the world-will.”64 “World will” is a useful phrase that removes egregores from disenchanting reductionisms. That is, they cannot be generated or manipulated separate of the larger cosmic flow. In The Sacred Alignments and Sigils, Podgurski puts the matter overtly: “To know what your body’s skin cells want is to know the intent of the universe. Herein lies the root force of desire enabling sigils and egregores.”65 They cannot be easily dismissed or dislodged because they align with creation itself. That doesn’t mean they always work or are for good; they operate as sub rosa codes like DNA strands and mitochondria.
Journalist and technocracy whistleblower Elana Freeland captures the esoteric nature and power of egregores in a conversation with a former Vatican official. He acknowledged not only the concept but that the word itself is used in inner circles:
While living in London, I encountered an Italian who had worked at the Vatican in a high secular position during the reign of Pope John Paul II (1978-2005). He shared with me a term used broadly in esoteric circles: egregore.
Her source defined it this way:
An egregore is a kind of group mind which is created when people consciously come together for a common purpose. Whenever people gather together to do something an egregore is formed, but unless an attempt is made to maintain it deliberately it will dissipate rather quickly. However, if the people wish to maintain it and know the techniques of how to do so, the egregore will continue to grow in strength and can last for centuries.
An egregore has the characteristic of having an effectiveness greater than the mere sum of its individual members. It continuously interacts with its members, influencing them and being influenced by them. The interaction works positively by stimulating and assisting its members but only as long as they behave and act in line with its original aim. It will stimulate both individually and collectively all those faculties in the group which will permit the realization of the objectives of its original program. If this process is continued a long time the egregore will take on a kind of life of its own, and can become so strong that even if all its members should die, it would continue to exist on the inner dimensions and can be contacted even centuries later by a group of people prepared to live the lives of the original founders, particularly if they are willing to provide the initial input of energy to get it going again.
If the egregore is concerned with spiritual or esoteric activities its influence will be even greater. People who discover the keys can tap in on a powerful egregore representing, for example, a spiritual or esoteric tradition, will, if they follow the line described above by activating and maintaining such an egregore, obtain access to the abilities, knowledge, and drive of all that has been accumulated in that egregore since its beginnings. A group or order which manages to do this can, with a clear conscience, claim to be an authentic order of the tradition represented by that egregore. . . ."66
The Vatican certainly falls into that definition, under not just one but multiple aggregating egregores, from the living Christ, to Inquisitions and Crusades, to the current Pope.
Egregores share territory with Émile Durkheim’s totems and Carl Jung’s psychoids. Totems, remember, are symbols and beliefs holding together tribes, religions, political parties, nations, religions, and clubs—from Aboriginal sodalities to Masonic lodges to Manchester United football. In Durkheim’s usage, an emotional group energy flows among adherents, raising them to collective action. This is attached to human existence and flows from cave paintings and the dreamtime to conceptual art, graffiti, and cryptocurrencies. The sociologist’s totem is the shaman’s egregore, grounding energy, according to historian of magic Mark Stavish, from “the astral counterpart of the group . . . in [each individual] psyche.”67
Psychoids are borderline entities: poltergeists, UFOs, Loch Ness monsters, sasquatches, leprechauns, fairies, and mermaids, all of which require our psychic collaboration to enter this dimension. That ritual is even conducted by police and village councils in Ireland, Iceland, and the Faroe Islands and by clan chiefs and powwows throughout the indigenous world.68 They engage with and protect Astral thoughtforms.
Real or imaginal; the raison of egregores is that they combine actual and fictive powers in operational figures like the king and bridegroom of alchemy, America the Beautiful, Batman, the sandworms of Frank Herbert’s Planet Dune, and the elements of the Periodic Chart. The Trinity (father, son, and holy ghost) is an egregore of especially far-reaching scope and duration, drawing on a Christic vibration in the universe at large, as well as reliquaries like the Communion, the blood of martyrs, and the Shroud of Turin. Buddhism has similar egregores: lotuses, stupas (sacred mounds), celestial emanations, and rainbow bodies.
Egregores are eclectic enough to generate mass movements, in one instance alien abductions; in another Occupy Wall Street or Stop the Steal. Assorted cartoons, theriomorphs, and spirit animals transcend their origins and stations to take on collectivized power.
John Lennon fashioned such an attractively provocative egregore that a Beatles fan, Mark David Chapman, shot and killed him. Charles Manson, drawing on Crowley and the Beatles, used “Helter Skelter” to reprogram cheerleaders and cowgirls into assassins. Tejano singer and songwriter Selena Quintanilla-Perez was murdered by Yolanda Saldívar, the first president of her own fan club, ostensibly over a dispute regarding Saldívar’s embezzlements from the club, but more under the influence of its egregore. My point is that egregores are not only voracious but unpredictable—and deadly.
From here, I will use sigils and egregores as different frequencies of the same energy.
Endnotes
64. Robert Podgurski, “Thoughts on Egregores,” Concatentations, robertpodgurski.com, November 13, 2020
65. Robert Podgurski, The Sacred Alignments and Sigils, p. 69 (plus an emailed addition).
66. Elana Freeland, Atmospheric Nanoscience Biowarfare: The Geoengineered Transhuman Assault, tentatively Inner Traditions, 2024. This is an expanded and updated version of the first half of her book Geoengineered Transhumanism: How the Environment Has Been Weaponized by Chemicals, Electromagnetism, & Nanotechnology for Synthetic Biology, no imprint (self-published), 2021.
67. Mark Stavish, Egregores, p. 8.
68. See my discussion of psychoids in Richard Grossinger, Dark Pool of Light, Volume 2, pp. 160-161.
6. PEPE THE FROG
Gary Lachman identifies Pepe as an evolving egregore. The humanoid cartoon was initially adopted by the alt-right and white supremacists as an emoji and password. What may have contributed to the choice was Pepe’s entrée “as a kind of millennial slacker . . . in his first appearance, urinating in public. When asked why he was acting so deplorably, Pepe answered, ‘Feels good man.’”68
That same energy typified much of MAGA’s appeal up through the January 2021 march on the Capitol.
Embraced by pop singers Katy Perry and Nicki Minaj, Pepe migrated through the internet, becoming a 4chan frog. As creator Matt Furie had lost control of his amphibian. Pepe was seen looking over the U.S.-Mexican border—the “ultimate internet troll, the personification of the cynicism [4chaners] felt toward everything.”69 He partnered with Donald Trump as underdog pals during the 2016 Presidential campaign, gaining alt-right mascot status to the horror of Furie.
Rival Hilary Clinton, not an aficionado of imaginal realms, declared Pepe “a symbol of hate” or, as Lachman spoofed, “an amphibious postmodern swastika.”70
From a conflation of Egyptian hieroglyphs and Nile frog deities, Pepe rose to “the modern-day avatar of an ancient Egyptian god [Kek] accidentally resurrected by online imageboard culture.”71 Through a further conflation of Korean and English graphemes with the mistranslation of an acronym—coronation by aleatory cut-up and synchromysticism—Pepe settled into a frog-headed god of primordial darkness.72 Alt-right founder Richard Spencer was wearing a Pepe badge when he was attacked by Antifa members.
In a 2017 discussion with clinical psychologist Jordan Peterson, symbolist Jonathan Pageau expounded on Pepe’s range:The frog is a perfect liminal character because it lives both on water and on land. It has a monstrous characteristic that it can cross over between worlds. You see that in stories. The story of “The Frog and the Princess” is a perfect example, and it relates to the Pinocchio story.73
Peterson then showed his own rendition of the frog as a psychopomp, mediating between not only water and land but the known and unknown. Pageau added:\
We’re in a situation where things have been inverted, and the people who create the norm are being marginalized—they’re being pushed into the margins. . . . That’s why they’ve identified with the frog. A strange inversion happens. The power of inversion and the power of mocking and the power of humor is usually on the side of chaos, the power of the margins. . . . Pepe is like an inversion machine. The people who use Pepe take something like an insult that is being thrown at them, and they flip it around on those who insulted them.74
Trumpism 101.
As a demonstration of his shapeshifting ability, Pepe was espoused by 2019 Hong-Kong protestors against Chinese takeover of their city-state.
Endnotes
69. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 85.
70. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.
71. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.
72. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 89.
73. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, pp. 93-95.
74. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, “The Metaphysics of Pepe,” YouTube, January 3, 2017.
74. Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Pageau, “The Metaphysics of Pepe,” YouTube, January 3, 2017.
7. DONALD TRUMP AS CHAOS MAGICIAN
A swarm of sigils and egregores were put in play under Trump—a blend of eighties Warholism and cyborg phantoms like Gorilla Monsoon and Junkyard Dog. MAGA extended aughts Reality starz into twenty-teens techno-magicians, political rallies into temporary autonomous zones.
Trump became Pepe, or Pepe became Trump. Either way, he never had to distinguish between entertainment and agenda, strategic fuckery and diabolic lies.
Lachman cites a similar egregore in post-Soviet Russia, replete with “Satanism, séances, Ouija boards, occultism, drugs, sex, alcohol, role-playing, and fascism. [These] came together in a heady brew.”75 In Absurdistan, a thin line separates “bohemian occult-science fiction” from poisoning political opponents with nerve agents. You end up with “Guénonism plus tanks.”76
Vladislav Surtov, deputy prime minister of Russia (1999-2013), a devoted Putinist, was the Russian “Steve Bannon,” as he “combined his political technology with a love of gangsta rap, Beat Poetry, and writing postmodern fiction.” He was the likely author, under a pseudonym, of a 2009 political satire about New Russia, Almost Zero. Lachman concludes, “He is a real twenty-first-century hipster, with posters of Che Guevara and John Lennon on his walls and a photo of Tupac Shakur topping his desk, next to one of Putin. He writes essays on modern art and the occasional rock lyric. . . .”77
At the same time, he is an authoritarian Putinist: Tupac plus Putin equals Kremlin synchromysticism. Next thing you know, missiles are being fired at apartment buildings in Ukraine.
MAGA started as a trademark and sigil, then became an egregore, launched by rallies, bling, and crowdmind. The 2016 Presidential campaign was a masterpiece of chaos magic. One persona of Trump may have blithered like an idiot, unable to complete grammatical strings or thread together three logical sentences, a limited vocabulary, and almost no attention span. The other was Pepe in a suit, an Elvis-like Reality star. “Donald” was “trumped,” possessed by “The Trump,” even as Bobby Zimmerman was—by his own confession—taken over by a “Bob Dylan” egregore that was blowing in the wind and was sure to attach to some dude toting a guitar. That the egregore is larger than its creator is incidental until it isn’t.
Personal flaws and deficits are boons for a magician who knows how to use sound and mudras. Trump fed off the psychic energy of his fans as he ignited egregores. That virtually nothing he said was true was of no import to him or them. A fan of his own speech rhythms, mesmerized and seduced by the mantra of mindless chanting, he raised his words to the adulation and response of loyalists. Egregores flew like crows, turning him into Orange Jesus.
After POTUS 45 woke from his month-long post-Election snit, he appeared at a December 2020 rally for the two Republican candidates in Georgia’s Senatorial runoff. From the pulpit, he claimed accomplishments he either never accomplished or did pasquinades of, such as “building the wall and securing the border like nobody’s business.” There were nonexistent factories saved, phantom jobs created, Mara Salvatrucha-13 gangs dispatched (“bad guys—guys who will cut you with a knife ’cause knives cause more pain than guns—we’ve taken care of them [cheers], in prison or deported. America’s never been safe like this”).
It was free association in blank verse. It was an admission that all politics is nonsense. A birther egregore was incubating a Stop the Steal egregore.
As Trump’s speechifying crescendoed, suburban moms were rescued from unsavory neighbors, Georgia’s arborists reimbursed after a hurricane: “the one that came from Florida—great state, great people—it ruined the best peaches ever, destroyed them, a crop they had waited for their whole lives. Those farmers were real patriots, they didn’t want the government’s money, just a level playing field; we took care of them anyway.”
None of this was true. He was blowing soap bubbles. He knew what he was doing; he had always known. He may have conducted fuckery in prior lifetimes. No rival politician could come close.
During the waning days of his Presidency when MAGA crowds shouted, “Stop the steal,” it could have been “Hold that line” or “Pass the biscuits.” It was call and response.Behind a playboy who tired of pornographic confections was a recreational assassin, so his slogans and sigils instinctually turned lethal: “Lock her up.,” “Build the wall” or his Proud Boys’ pleaser, “Stand back and stand by.” To outsiders, they may have sounded either idiotic or like agitprop, but they were black magic.
If it had been a different crowd or agenda, his oversoul would have been just as pumped: a Miss World pageant, a WWF bout, or an AFL-CIO rally if fate had made him a union demagogue. He was the Little Drummer Boy (or Girl) who went on drumming like the pied piper, “so follow me, and I’ll show you where it’s at.”78
He went from groping or fucking unwilling women and paid sluts to fucking an entire nation and holding the party of Abe Lincoln and Ronald Reagan in politico-erotic bondage, blurring, then eliding the toggle between “willing” and “unwilling.”
You might say that these are opposite meanings of the word “fuck”; I say they are the same for a chaos-magic sociopath on the Asperger’s spectrum for whom sexual kink and dominatrix tantra morph into power opiates and spanking monkeys because erotic capacity eventually runs through its consummation in strumpets and golden showers. Without a Presidency to extend sadism and necrophilia to a global scale, Trump faced only “Jeffrey Epstein” cul de sacs on Little Jeff Islands.
Not enough attention is paid to how Trump’s whole deal was evasion of his own tedium, terror, and loneliness. He had to keep the band playing and the props coming because, otherwise, he would fall into the black hole of his own nihilism, a hollowness of empty wealth, facile power, and stale charisma. These are whiplash energies for any practitioner, and the Donald may not even have been at the service of his own will.
Instead, he put his badonkadonk on the world, Melania as his Ghislaine. In place of underage girls, he seduced ambitious politicians, turning their horny zealotry against them with a more royal randiness. How else to describe what he did to Marco Rubio, Kevin McCarthy, and Ted Cruz? He fucked them, and they came willingly, power and sex fused in chaos magic.
Mini-Trump Matt Gaetz should have been warned: Trumpism has no friends, no true disciples, no scruples, no endgame.
Trump fucked a planet, enemies and devotees alike. The Republican Party folded. His staunchest foes—Lindsay Graham and Rand Paul among them—were smitten in both senses. Hulk Hogan and André the Giant couldn’t have played it better.
ubio, Cruz, Mike Pence, J. D. Vance, Elise Stefanik, and the rest behaved as if they had seen a ghost. This was no longer Trump the knucklehead and golfer. Satanic energies were working through him, seeking their new Reich.
You can regard the Republican Party as a personality cult, a bunch of wimps and pansies, even a nascent, neo-Fascist coup, but I see a bunch of people who looked at Mephistopheles and flinched. They wanted his patronage and now are in his service like other aspirants who sold their souls for a taste of power and mafia protection.
While I was driving from Portland to Somesville, Maine, in September 2020, candidate Trump was in the hospital with COVID-19. The bridge over the Sheepscott River at Wiscasset was on Mona Lisa Overdrive, young people on the west end running back and forth with giant American flags, then on the bridge itself mostly women marching with equally huge flags costumed in Trump-Pence red, white, and blue, waving and smiling at cars with the-rapture-is-underway stares.
It didn't look political. It looked millenarian, zombie, orgiastic. It suggested, in its energy and ceremony (not its content), Hare Krishna dancers or, in its Endtime surety, Jehovah's Witnesses, or in apotheosis, Jim Jones and a Kool-Aid bacchanal.
Before driving through this cabaret, I thought of “Donald Trump” as a cult more than a political platform. By the time, I reached the other side of that bridge, I was aware that states of possession that depraved turn into interahamwes before they get cooled.
Endnotes
75. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 151.
76. Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, The Morning of the Magicians, p. 180.
77. Gary Lachman, Dark Star Rising, p. 138.
78. Steve Duboff and Artie Kornfeld, “The Pied Piper,” Decca, 1966
Comments
Peter Marin, author, educator, and social activist:
For me, at this point, the elevation of abstraction to the status of realities as opposed to (kant's) antinomian theories, results in a level of near-fiction that becomes all the more bothersome because of the absence of doubt or prudence with which it is presented. The advantage of "science' as praxis is that at its best it involves a skepticism which requires a level of doubt and skepticism prior to all finality. I miss that here, where tentative theory or speculative reason (Freud, for exmple, was extremely good at doubting his own conlcusions, tho his followers were not, as opposed to Jung, for whom abstractions all too quickly became realities at a totally different and questionable level, though of course the post-Freudians made similar errors)).
I think you lose the reader, or at least me, where assertionism runs wild, treating descriptive speculations as ultimate and unquestionable fact. This is a trifle odd, because when examining what others believe or claim your skepticism is pronounced and justifiable, tho when it comes to your own theorizing, all of a sudden you present it as unquestionable fact, final and not tentative. It's almost as if every one of your pronouncements should be preceded by the word "possibly" or even Probably" if not "perhaps." As speculation your work is REALLY interesting to me; presented as it is here, it loses the power it might have had.
You probably fight this tendency, but here it seems to take over. Much of your subject resist interpretation or requires a level of comprehnsion still beyond us, but you treat it as if the knowledge is already ours, or at least that of a special few. I think the startt of this work far more interesting, compelling and useful than where it is now.
I write that, I hope you understand, with both sympathy and frustration. I admire your high-flying acts of abstract thought, assemblage and structuring, but not when it becomes "the truth" of things.
P
Me: Peter, I’m not sure what part of the piece this refers to, or all of it. You probably note the difference in general these days from when you and I wrote books as monuments or as serious documents and now when language is corrupt and words have generally lesser purposes. The place of literature, let alone scientific or philosophically valid, literature has dwindled to a fraction of the book market, whereas self-published confessions and screeds can be published freely with available technology.
For me, this substack book is a genre piece, or a series of genre pieces. If you were more in sympathy with the earlier sections, where I made a greater attempt to frame realities, you hopefully will find the forthcoming chapters on the January 6th march on the Capitol and Ukraine somewhat more skeptical. Actually the Saturnalia (Jan. 6 chapter) has its occult section., In the Chaos Magic chapter—& I am fundamentally a mystic—I am considering the power of thoughtforms to shape realities, something that lies outside any scientific tradition. I believe ghosts, past lives, and states of demonic possession. The COVID-19 chapter was more carefully reasoned. You might disagree with that for political, not philosophical, reasons. I don’t know how committed an ideological Leftist you are; I tend not to think of it as your main thing, but I also don’t see you letting go as much as I have. I never put in anything like the time you did on the firing line.
I work in three genres, I think, though they overlap. This is the most ephemeral and fungible. Then there are the books on healing, cosmology, embryology, and consciousness, which represent my largest audience by far. And the nonfiction novels that more closely match some of your work.
By the way, I think pretty much everything you write these days is not so much great as exquisite. You are writing to the wind, but it is completely true.
Richard
Peter Marin:
I am talking mainly about the last 2 or 3 pieces, which turn in a different direction than the earlier ones. The problem may lie in relation to mysticism, the attempt to translate what appears as truth in a particular and perhaps unique setting into more or less everyday or quasi-scientific terms, which, in my experience, the experience resists.
It isn't just that language is "corrupt." I think it is that language and words create or refer to experience in certain terms that certain experiences render to a large extent meaningless or at least incosequential, even or especially using language -- "thoughtforms." "realities." "ghosts," "demonic," are too specifc, too limited, too orecise and also vague, to really register ecstatic experience of any kind, by which I don't just mean religious or sexual but the common out-of-self or maybe truest-self experience of playing basketball on a team or in fact with nine coopertaive others creating a form in time that cannot be comprehended by anyone not in it as it comes into being and vanishes with the whistle but also remains echoing in the being of the beings who "played."
I do think, maybe, beyond all else, we're or rather you’re just pointing -- all you can do -- at or to mysteries that can only be known directly thru participation, what Hegel call enumendiated immediacy which is of course an abstract step or several away from what he mean to mean...
It may be what Merton's overseers told him essentially to simmer down or maybe shut up, if he was to get where he wanted to go...
Of course mysticism is itself as various and divergent as those who pursue it, so I can only draw on my own sporadic immersions in, ah, otherness, and the consequent erasue of certainties and a merging of opposites as well as the sense of beyond beginning where language stops, or that may indeed be present and almost hidden in the spaces between words and even letters and even in the letters themselves in the pockets of emtiness, say, in the p or b, where an immensity resides in which the letter drifts, meaningless......
But then I have always been pretty much totally uncomfortable in almosr every realm, beginning -- believe it -- with intellectual and political life and extending even into mysticism programmed or explained or imposing or superimposing on the inward-outward journies we make beyond everything, EVERYTHING, offered by others -- even or especially the maps or guides...
Radical, maybe. Or maybe arrogance or hubris. But I really don't think so.
Now. how or why did I get there? O yeah the rejection of abstractions and even, yes, magic, which to be truthful I do not see as an alternative or antidote to reason or science or abstractions but simpler another version of them, not necessarily prior but parallel, more sets of constructions to net and web and grab at the mind as it makes its necessary way -- to where? Ah, I can't say I know or believe those who claim to describe. Maybe it's different for each of us, and why not?No problem in imagining an infinite in which
we are never in the same territory -- not matter how huge or infinite -- within it...
Ah, sorry Richard. For this probably incoherence. I've run errands while writing this note and welcomed my visiting beloved daughter -- Katya Antigone -- and taken care of my heart- and stroke-endangered wife... Now 89. I'm 87. I know much less than before but sense far more... I've taken up too much of your time. Read this kindly, please.
I'm just a Brooklyn guy muddling through... through It. P
Very useful explanation of egregores. A concept that needs a much broader penetration of our culture if we are to understand how this world actually works. And I'm so glad to see the Inner Traditions will be publishing Elena Freeland. Her work deserves a much larger platform as well.
Very useful explanation of egregores. A concept that needs a much broader penetration of our culture if we are to understand how this world actually works. And I'm so glad to see the Inner Traditions will be publishing Elena Freeland. Her work deserves a much larger platform as well.