Of American Gods and Egregores

The things we worship become real

They sacrificed to demons, to no-gods,
Gods they had never known,
New ones, who came but lately,
Who stirred not your forebears’ fears.
– Deuteronomy 32:17

In American Gods, novelist Neil Gaiman explores the premise that human belief creates and sustains supernatural entities. Through the eyes of Gaiman’s protagonist, we see what happens to these entities as humanity’s faith shifts from old gods, such as Odin, to new gods, such as media.

Gaiman’s book (and the cancelled-on-a-cliffhanger TV series based on it) popularized the idea that supernatural beings can be spawned by collective human attention, but this concept is actually much older.

Recently, the brilliant writer Stiegel informed me about the concept of the egregore - an autonomous psychic entity created through the shared focus and belief of humans. Associated primarily with 19th-century occultism, the egregore has roots in Western esoteric traditions, including Hermeticism, Gnosticism, and ceremonial magic. As in Gaiman’s novel, the idea is that when a group of people direct their attention towards a singular goal or idea, their collective energy manifests an egregore, which then interacts with its human devotees, whether they realize it or not.

While it has been largely relegated to the crackpot dustbin of history, the egregore concept strikes me as highly relevant to the modern era. In both the physical and spiritual domains, we are surrounded by collective, emergent phenomena that often seem to have a life of their own.

Man-Made Gods

It should be uncontroversial that the collective attention and belief of human beings is capable of creating powerful, non-corporeal beings: governments, corporations, and NGOs all fit this description. As Stafford Beer and other systems theorists have noted, these large organizations mimic the characteristics of lifeforms: they organize and regulate themselves, respond to stimuli, protect themselves from threats, grow and reproduce, consume resources, and excrete waste.

However, unlike living organisms, institutions have no natural lifespans and no innate limits on their knowledge or power. They are, in that sense, godlike. And yet, these structures - arguably the most powerful entities in our civilization - only exist as long as people believe in them. Consider the French revolution. As the masses shifted their devotion, the formerly invincible monarchy, now starved of belief, quickly withered and died, while the Republic, engorged on veneration and sacrifice, rapidly materialized.

The same pattern is repeated, albeit on a smaller scale, every time the fickle public crowns a new celebrity, a new must-have product, or a new social trend. The predecessor is discarded, and a new egregore is born.

Artificial Intelligence

Since AI is, at this point, indistinguishable from an autonomous psychic entity, I asked ChatGPT for its opinion on this topic. It replied enthusiastically. “That's an intriguing perspective! Just as an egregore is formed by the collective thoughts and intentions of a group, AI is created and shaped by the collective efforts of its developers, engineers, and the data it is trained on. Also, egregores are thought to take on a life of their own and influence the groups that created them. Similarly, AI systems can reach a level of autonomy where they perform tasks, make decisions, and influence human behavior and society in ways that extend beyond the direct control of their creators. Furthermore, there is a feedback loop between AI and its users. The interactions between users and the AI can further shape and refine the AI's behavior and capabilities, much like how the energy and focus of a group can continuously strengthen an egregore.”

I’m not sure whether to be flattered or unsettled by an AI telling me that my question was “intriguing,” but nonetheless, the parallels it identified between itself and an egregore are undeniable.

Unintended Invocation

A key difference between egregores and our intangible-but-real thoughtforms is that people intentionally build AI systems, governments, and corporations; egregores can emerge either bidden or unbidden.

Gaiman’s novel provides the example of the car gods, who have no temple or clergy, but have been “recipients of human sacrifice on a scale undreamed-of since the Aztecs.” The novel may be fiction, but that particular observation is true.

In addition to Biblical proscriptions against conjuring demons and worshipping idols, the idea that we might unwittingly summon malevolent forces has been explored at length in popular literature. From the Arabian Nights tale of “The Fisherman and the Djinn” to H.P. Lovecraft’s The Call of Cthulhu and Ursula K. LeGuin’s A Wizard of Earthsea, storytellers have consistently cautioned us against invoking powers we do not understand and cannot control.

Despite this, at least one tech billionaire - Google’s Larry Page - is reportedly trying to build an AI “digital god.” Meanwhile, computer scientists such as Eliezer Yudkowsky have warned that AI research is so dangerous it should be halted immediately – primarily because it might result in the emergence of a super-intelligent consciousness whose interests would be opposed to those of humanity.

Setting aside the risk of a real-life Skynet, it’s worth considering the possibility that we do indeed unintentionally generate or empower spiritual constructs that exert a malign influence on us. While American Gods depicted these phenomena as anthropomorphized dieties, the 2012 film “Branded” envisioned them as grotesque creatures that attach to human minds like parasites.

In the world of “Branded,” we consume junk food, prescription drugs, and Communism, but by doing so we allow ourselves to be consumed by the collective entities they represent. The movie had a good cast and a wildly original script, but critics and audiences generally found it a little too preachy and psychedelic. Nonetheless, it vividly depicted the way we unknowingly strengthen entities that prey upon us.

Egregores Everywhere

Looking at our society from this perspective, there is no shortage of egregores. Technology, social media, and pharmaceuticals spring to mind, as do concepts like BLM, DEI, and transgenderism. Whether physical products or social movements, they are all objects of collective human focus, and therefore have an unacknowledged spiritual dimension. Swallowing a pill is taking a sacrament. Checking your phone is consulting an oracle. Chanting protest slogans is a public proclamation of faith.

All of these actions are a form of worship. And when we worship something, we not only bring a psychic manifestation of it into existence, we grant it some measure of power over us.

To put it another way, we have, in our hubris, generated a legion of new gods. We arrogantly assumed that our creations would be our servants. Instead, they have become our masters.