Of egregores and cultural

memory
by Sasha Chaitow, Posted on June 24, 2012

Another 18000 words finally sculpted,

pruned, and teased into shape ahead of
my supervisory board meeting this
week, and I’ve been delving deep into
the mysteries of esoteric lineages and
that thorny question of authenticity, in
order to successfully unravel the
relationship between mythic history
and esoteric traditions. All this is no more than the background to my central
argument that Péladan consciously created a legendarium to fulfill his
purpose of redeeming his society through a mixture of art and occultism, and
as (should) be the case with this kind of research, I had several epiphanies
while writing this piece.

It all started with the niggling conviction I had, that straightforward historical
research, cataloguing and codifying Péladan’s output would have done a
monumental disservice to his oeuvre. What I really want to find out, and
hopefully share in the process, is what he was trying to do with it, and more
importantly, how. To do that, I have to get inside his head, and tap into the
intellectual, spiritual, and cultural context he was heir to, both consciously
and subconsciously, and attempt to work out the machinations of his own
mind when he tried to put his theory into practice. Fortunately, Péladan left
not a breadcrumb trail, but a mile-wide highway of hints and clues. It is no
speculation to say that he wanted his work to be studied, he even said as
much:

Péladan will one day be the object of detailed study… The novelist of la
 Décadence Latine, the playwright of Babylone and la
Prométhéide, the philosopher of l’Amphithéâtre
des sciences mortes, the art critic of la Décadence
esthéthique, the savant of ideas and forms, and
finally the zelator of the Rose-Croix, is an
infinitely curious student, who built six careers
simultaneously, of which one alone would have
been sufficient for the activity of a writer…
[J. Péladan, unpublished notes for an
autobiography written in the third person,
Péladan archives, Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal. The
notes are undated but have been estimated to date
from between 1900-1904 by Christophe Beaufils in Joséphin Péladan, p. 350,
n. 46.]

The main question I’m currently working on has to do with the context,
because much as Péladan’s actual work forms the bulk of my evidence,
understanding where it came from is as, if not more important. Clearly the
broad brushstrokes of his context derive from the post-Revolutionary social
conflicts, the sociopolitical melting pot that was nineteenth century France,
and which Péladan was closely involved with due to his father’s legitimist
activism. The finer detail begins to emerge when one looks a little more
closely at the influence of Eliphas Lévi and the occult milieu of the fin-de-
siecle. But at this point, I still felt that I was standing at a window looking
through a dusty pane at the tableau I was trying to interpret.

The breakthrough came when two phenomenal new books arrived on my

desk: Joseph Mali’s Mythistory: The Making of Modern Historiography,
and Wouter Hanegraaff’s Esotericism and the Academy: Rejected Knowledge
in Western Culture. Both have been pivotal for my thinking and I am grateful
to the authors for giving me the tools with which to first see, then describe
and defend, the notion of an esoteric culture in its own right. This in itself is
not a new notion, and has been successfully described and circumscribed
 many times; for example:

[E]sotericism not only involves the construction of its own tradition; it can
even be understood as a specific form of tradition and transmission… In the
construction of their own traditions, both pre-modern and modern esoteric
paradigms… claim to represent or restore an ancient, primordial wisdom
tradition as a kind of “secret knowledge”… The questions of heritage and
tradition, of origin and genealogy are crucial to the foundation of any
esoteric knowledge. It defines, and moreover legitimates itself, through its
origins, its ancestry, and its means of esoteric transmission. In so doing,
esotericism seeks to invent its own tradition, to map its master narratives,
to construct its myths of origin and its myths of transmission.
Andreas B. Kilcher, ‘Introduction,’ Constructing Tradition in Western
Esotericism: Means and Myths of Transmission in Western Esotericism
(Leiden: Brill, 2010), pp. ix-x.]

So what concerned me in this section was this process of constructing master

narratives, of the esoteric propensity for self-referential, auto-evolving
tradition-building, and most of all, to discover the rationale behind it.
Naturally it all begins with the Renaissance notion of philosophia
perennis, and Hanegraaff’s excellent dissection of this alongside the related,
but significantly differentiated prisca theologia and pia philosophia was
invaluable to my argument, discussed together with Garry Trompf’s
discussion of macrohistory, Assmann’s mnemohistory, and Mali’s
mythistory.

But something was missing, and as is often the case, I stumbled over it almost
unintentionally. The missing piece of the puzzle was not “what” the builders
of esoteric traditions were doing in their careful constructives of narratives
and myths of origins, nor the meta-analysis of their social or structural
function – this ground I had already covered. The question was the why of it,
the esoteric why, what was so special about such mythistorical genealogies
that went beyond the romantic allure and profound mystique of claims to
Egyptian forefathers and antediluvian legacies, which, as I noted in my last
post, formed the core of much of Péladan’s cosmology.

The missing piece(s), were egregores,

followed by a misinterpretation of a
mistranslation.

Tempted though I am to do so, this is

not the time for me to share my full
line of reasoning. Suffice it to say that it
all starts with a misinterpreted line
from Eliphas Lévi’s The Great Secret,
Or, Occultism Unveiled:

“These colossal forces have sometimes taken a shape and appeared in the
guise of giants: these are the egregors [sic] of the Book of Enoch… [The
planets are] governed by those genii which were termed the celestial
watchers, or egregors, by the ancients.”

Eliphas Lévi, Le Grand Arcane, (Paris: 1868), pp. 127-130, 133, 136.

This wording gave rise to a misinterpretation which nonetheless was to

become common currency in several occult systems thereafter, as it was taken
to mean ‘a collective entity’,1 or alternatively, ‘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.’2
Whether due to Lévi’s phrasing or careless interpretation, the word that had
meant angelic Watchers, or guardians of mankind, took on this new meaning,
of an entity formed by collective belief.

The reception of this idea in nineteenth century French occult circles was
further specialised in an anonymous book attributed to Christian mystic
Valentin Arnoldevitch Tomberg (1900-1973) (his emphasis): ‘one endeavours
 to collectively create an egregore for
this special purpose: as a “group spirit”
or the spirit of the fraternity
concerned. This egregore once created,
it is believed that one is able to rely on
it and that one has an efficacious
magical ally in it.’3 This notion was
taken still further, and evolved into
various other permutations by Helena Blavatsky’s successors, Annie Besant
and C.W. Leadbeater, in their works on thought-forms, which although
slightly different and more individualised than the notion of a group
egregore, nonetheless reflect the notion of the manifestation of thought in
matter.4 There are many further examples, but those will stay sub rosa for now.

This compelling idea was become the apple of discord sparking some of the
most bitter – and bizarre – “magical battles” between different lineages of
esoteric orders from the nineteenth century onward in a curious line of
reasoning that also explains the ‘older is better’ notion at the heart of most
esoteric groups. Such disputes have arisen frequently among different lines of
Martinism, Rosicrucianism and the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, and
at the time of writing different strands of the latter are engaged in an
acrimonious, very public dispute over the question of authenticity and
authority, in which debate the matter of egregores figures quite strongly.

By claiming (or constructing) a powerful myth of provenance, a given order

or group is thought to be “tapping in to” the egregore of the “original lineage”,
which in many cases is perceived as the prisca theologia itself, thus
empowering a given order or practice even if it does not actually have “true”
historical roots in such a tradition. In this respect, just like in the case of
apostolic succession, direct lines of initiation are jealously guarded and
flaunted even in modern orders as an indisputable mark of legitimacy. The
claim to
antiquity then, is not only a matter of mystique that in the nineteenth century
 especially might have been attributed to
1
Romantic “Egyptomania” or Parnassian
2
philhellenism. From the perspective of an
esoteric practitioner, the older and more
illustrious the tradition, the more powerful
the egregore, and thus the work of the order
or practitioner accessing it. A further
dimension of this is the role that this kind of
thinking plays in the consolidation of both
social and cultural memory, whereby:

[G]roups which do not “have” a memory tend to “make” themselves one by

means of things meant as reminders… In order to be able to be reembodied
in the sequence of generations, cultural memory, unlike communicative
memory, exists also in disembodied form and requires institutions of
3
preservation and reembodiment.

Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory,’ in: Astrid Erll &
Ansgar Nunning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin; New York: de
Gruyter, 2008), 109-118 (p. 111).

Aside from preserving and passing on esoteric traditions and occult ‘secrets’
to the next generations, esoteric orders also play a very important part in the
preservation of esoteric cultural memory. By seeing esotericism as a culture,
rather than simply as a set of linked but essentially obscure traditions, it is
possible to ‘de-occultize’ the notion of the egregore without falling into
reductionist perspectives. From there on, each individual esoteric current
follows the same pattern, with its own ‘artifacts, objects, anniversaries, feasts,
4
icons, symbols, [and] landscapes]’ forming its own unique cultural footprint.
And importantly for newcomers to this area of inquiry, this also justifies this
practice to a great extent; for the cultural appropriation of such material is
often seen and presented as somehow being dishonest and deceptive – an
accusation levelled many a time at Péladan by virtue of his eccentricity, but
this is not, apparently, the case.

The notion of the egregore and initiatic lineages, reflecting apostolic

succession and characterised by continuity is essentially a reiteration of the
Renaissance philosophia perennis, and forms the backbone of the esoteric
propensity for the construction of mythic histories. The flesh of these
histories as they formed in the fin-de-siècle, along with its symbols and
artifacts, was sculpted out of the broader intellectual and cultural context of
Illuminism as will be discussed in more detail in the relevant section, and in
the case of Péladan and his circle, the complex and all-encompassing
“Philosophical History” of Antoine Fabre d’Olivet.

As noted with some exasperation by Fabre d’Olivet’s (only) biographer, Léon

Cellier:

[T]o exalt Fabre d’Olivet without taking account of the motifs that had
caused his name to disappear, is, purely and simply, mythomania…. Fabre
d’Olivet pretended to have rediscovered lost traditions by his own means…
So credulous [were] our hierophants that … to justify his exegesis, they
appealed sometimes to some initiation, sometimes to some traditional
source.”

And as one contemporary critic of Fabre d’Olivet added:

Theoreticians, more than historians, they were not satisfied, neither one of
them, to report the facts without anything more, but they tried to justify
their systems, that does not make a work of science… I cannot recommend
strongly enough to occultists, that they carefully compare the works of
masters with the actual facts of science.
J. Brieu, Mercure de France, n.d., Tome LXXXIII, cited in Cellier, Fabre
d’Olivet, p. 394.

Both Brieu and Cellier demonstrate precisely the differentiation between the
esoteric and the conventional worldview, reflecting the same exact divide
Hanegraaff so thoroughly reveals in his analysis of pre- and post-
Enlightenment thought and justifying the practice if it is viewed from within,
and not outside, that dusty pane that so often divides scholars and laypersons
from practitioners. The occultists that so baffled Cellier and other critics,
were true to character for specific reasons – and their perception of
‘mainstream science’ was entirely secondary to the acts that they believed
they were undertaking – ‘acts of poesis’ according to anthropologist Victor
1
Turner, or perhaps deliberate recourse to ancient egregores.

Oblivious to the criticism of the mainstream, from the rich smorgasbord of

world mythology, compiled by Fabre d’Olivet into a sweeping history of
humanity, Péladan and his circle picked, chose, and reinterpreted those
elements that best suited their own purposes, building their own mythical
histories through which to summon the egregores that would empower them.
Péladan himself called on Chaldean deities in both his fiction, his theory, and
his public life… and this is the next part of my thesis that I’ll be working on in
coming months.

For more discussion of Péladan’s deployment of these ideas, watch this space.
Over the summer I’ve two conference papers to write, and sub-sections on
Péladan’s main inspirations to form into coherent prose, and I will share any
interesting snippets when time allows.
1
. Victor Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about them,’ in On Narrative, ed.
By W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 164

1Cellier, Fabre d’Olivet, p. 384.

1James Stevens Curl, Egyptomania: The Egyptian Revival, A Recurring

Theme in the History of Taste (Manchester; New York: Manchester
University Press, 1994);

2Maurice Souriau, Histoire du Parnasse (n.p.: Spes, 1929); Yann Mortelette,

Le Parnasse (PUPS, 2006); Yann Mortelette, Histoire du Parnasse (Fayard,
2005).

3Jan Assmann, ‘Communicative and Cultural Memory,’ in: Astrid Erll &
Ansgar Nunning (eds), Cultural Memory Studies (Berlin; New York: de
Gruyter, 2008), 109-118 (p. 111).

1René Guénon, Initiation and Spiritual Realization, (Hillsdale, NY: Sophia

Perennis Press, 2001; 2004; 1st ed. Les Editions Traditionelles), pp. 36-7. In
this passage Guénon is criticising this interpretation, and he points out that
‘this term is wholly untraditional and only represents one of the many
fantasies of modern occult language.’ (p. 37).

2René Guénon, Perspectives on Initiation, ch. 24.

3 Meditations on the Tarot: A Journey into Christian Hermeticism, trans. By

Robert Powell (New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1985), p. 419 (also see
pp. 138-9). The book was published post-humously and it was the author’s
wish for it to be published anonymously; however his identity was revealed
through the circulation of unpublished manuscripts shortly after his death.

4 A. Besant & C.W. Leadbeater, Thought-forms, (Theosophical Publishing

House, 1901). Cf. Cunningham, David Michael, Creating Magickal Entities: A
Complete Guide to Entity Creation, (Perrysburg, OH: Egregore Publishing,
2003).