Of egregores and cultural memory

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[J. Péladan, unpublished notes for an autobiography written in the third person, Péladan archives, Bibliothéque de l’Arsenal.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 Romantic “Egyptomania” ¹ or Parnassian philhellenism.² 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 preservation and reembodiment.³

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, icons, symbols, [and] landscapes]’⁴ 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 Turner,¹ 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.

.¹Victor Turner, ‘Social Dramas and Stories about them,’ in On Narrative, ed. By W.J.T. Mitchell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981), p. 164