SPIRITUAL INFLUENCES & 'EGREGORES'
In a review devoted to our Perspectives on Initiation we were recently a bit surprised to read the following statement, presented in such a way as to give the impression that it sums up what we ourselves said in that book: 'Certainly initiation dispenses with neither meditation nor study, but it places the adept on a particular plane; it puts him in contact with the egregore of an initiatic organization, which has itself emanated from the supreme egregore of a universal initiation, one and multiform.' We will not dwell on the abuse here of the word 'adept,' although, since we have explicitly denounced this usage when explaining the true meaning of the word, some astonishment is permitted; from initiation properly so called to the state of an adept, major or even minor, is a long way. But what is most important is this: since the review in question makes not the slightest allusion to the role of spiritual influences, it seems to labor under a rather grave error, which others may equally have committed despite all the care we have taken to explain things as clearly as possible, for it definitely seems that it is often very difficult to make oneself understood exactly. We think, therefore, that a restatement will not be without use; moreover, these precise details will provide a natural follow-up to those we made in our latest articles in response to different questions that we were asked on the subject of initiatic affiliation.
First of all, we must point out that we have never used the word 'egregore' to designate what could properly be called a 'collective
entity'; the reason for this is that this term is wholly untraditional and only represents one of the many fantasies of modern occultist language. The first person to use it in this way was Eliphas Levi, and if our memory is exact, it was also he who, to justify this meaning, gave it an improbable Latin etymology, deriving it from grex, 'flock,' whereas the word is purely Greek and has never signified anything but 'watcher.' Moreover, this term is known to be found in the book of Enoch where it designates entities of a rather enigmatic character that, whatever they may be, seem to belong to the 'intermediary world'; this is all that they have in common with the collective entities to which the same name has been applied. These latter are in fact of an essentially psychic order, and it is above all this that makes the error we noted so serious, for the sentence we quoted appears in the final analysis to be a new example of the confusion of the psychic with the spiritual.
Indeed, we have spoken of these collective entities, and we think that we sufficiently explained their role when we wrote the following on the subject of traditional organizations, religious or otherwise, that belong to the domain that can be called exoteric in the widest sense of the word, in order to distinguish it from the initiatic domain:
Each collectivity can thus be regarded as possessing a subtle force made up in a way of the contributions of all its members past and present, and which is consequently all the more considerable and able to produce greater effects as the collectivity is older and is composed of a greater number of members. It is evident, moreover, that this 'quantitative' consideration essentially indicates that it is a question of the individual domain, beyond which this force could not in any way intervene. [1]
In this connection we will recall that the collective, in its psychic as well as its corporeal aspects, is nothing but a simple extension of the individual, and thus has absolutely nothing transcendent with respect to it, as opposed to spiritual influences, which are of a wholly different order. To use the customary terms of geometrical
symbolism once again, the horizontal direction must not be confused with the vertical. This leads us incidentally to answer another question we have been asked, which is not unrelated to the question under discussion. It would be an error to consider as supra-individual the state that results from identification with a collective psychic entity of whatever kind, or indeed with any other psychic entity; participation in such a collective entity at any degree can be regarded, as it were, as constituting a sort of 'enlargement' of the individuality, but nothing more. Thus it is solely to obtain certain advantages of an individual order that the members of a collectivity can use the subtle force at its disposal, in conformity with the rules established to this end by the collectivity in question; and even if there is the additional intervention of a spiritual influence in obtaining these advantages, as happens particularly with religious collectivities, this spiritual influence no longer acts in its own domain, which is of a supra-individual order, and, as we have already said, must be seen as 'descending' into the individual domain and exercising its action there by means of the collective force which it takes as its support. This is why prayer, consciously or not, addresses itself most immediately to the collective entity, and it is only by the intermediary of this latter that it also addresses the spiritual influence that works through it. The conditions arranged for its efficacy by the religious organization cannot be explained otherwise.
The case is wholly different with initiatic organizations by the very fact that these, and these alone, have the essential goal of going beyond the individual domain, and that even what relates more directly to the development of the individuality constitutes in the final analysis only a preliminary stage for finally surpassing the limitations of that domain. It goes without saying that these organizations, like all the others, also include a psychic element that can play an effective role in certain respects, for example to establish a 'defense' toward the outer world and to protect members from various dangers arising from the latter, for it is evident that such results cannot be obtained by means of a spiritual order, but only by means that are as it were on the same level as those posed by the outer world; but this is something very secondary and purely contingent that has nothing to do with initiation itself. Initiation is entirely
independent of the action of any psychic force since it consists strictly and essentially in the direct transmission of a spiritual influence that must produce effects whether immediate or deferred, that depend equally on the spiritual order itself, and not, as in the case discussed earlier, to a lower order; in this case, therefore, the spiritual influence no longer acts by the intermediary of a psychic element. Thus an initiatic organization as such must not be envisaged as a mere collectivity, for the collectivity can never provide that which enables it to fulfill the function that is its whole raison d'être. Since in the final analysis a collectivity is only a union of individuals, it cannot by itself produce anything of a supra-individual order, for the higher can never proceed from the lower. If affiliation with an initiatic organization can have effects of a supra-individual order, this is solely to the extent that the initiatic organization is the depository of something that is itself supra-individual and transcendent with respect to the collectivity, that is, of a spiritual influence, the conservation and transmission of which it must ensure without any discontinuity. Thus initiatic affiliation must not be thought of as affiliation with an 'egregore' or with any collective psychic entity, for this is only a completely accidental aspect in which initiatic organizations do not differ at all from exoteric organizations. What essentially constitutes the 'chain', let it be said again, is the uninterrupted transmission of the spiritual influence across successive generations. [2] Likewise, the link between the different initiatic forms is not a mere filiation of 'egregores,' as one might be led to believe from the text which formed the starting-point of these reflections; in reality, it results from the presence in all these forms of one and the same spiritual influence, one as to its essence and as to the ends in view of which it acts, if not as to the more or less particular modalities by which it acts. And it is only as a result of this that, step by step and in different degrees, a communication, effective or virtual as the case may be, can be established with the supreme spiritual center.
We will add to these considerations another remark that also has its importance from the same point of view. When an initiatic organization finds itself in a more or less marked state of degeneration, although the spiritual influence always remains present, its action is necessarily diminished, while the psychic influences, on the contrary, can act in a more visible and sometimes almost independent fashion. The extreme case of this can be seen when an initiatic form has ceased to exist as such and the spiritual influence has been entirely withdrawn, leaving behind the psychic influences alone as harmful and even particularly dangerous residues, as we have explained elsewhere. [3] Of course, as long as initiation really exists, even if reduced to something purely virtual, things cannot go so far. But it remains true that a preponderance of psychic influences in an initiatic form constitutes an unfavorable sign as to its actual state, and this again shows how far from the truth those are who would relate initiation itself to influences of this order.