Egregores
An egregore is a concept from esoteric tradition and Western occultism. It's understood as a collective entity formed by the thoughts, emotions, and intentions of a group of people.
In simple terms: when many people believe in something, sustain it mentally, and charge it with rituals, symbols, or emotions, that collective energy creates a kind of shared psychic field, sometimes described as an autonomous entity.
Examples of egregores include the idea of a nation, religious symbols, ideological movements (like Black Lives Matter or Octobrism), or even fandoms that seem to have a "life of their own".
Examples of egregores
In modern psychology, the concept can be reinterpreted as an emergent phenomenon of collective consciousness or as cultural memes that gain strength beyond individuals.
A classic egregore needs human minds to sustain itself, as it lives in collective consciousness.
Egregores aren't exactly people, but images, ideas, or collective fields that form around a figure, group, symbol, or movement. Let's look at some examples:
Lady Gaga
- Beyond the person Stefani Germanotta, there exists the character Lady Gaga, a symbol built by her and reinforced by millions of fans (the Little Monsters).
- That character functions as an egregore: it has symbols, its own mythology (costumes, performances) and generates identification or projection in people.
- Lady Gaga herself plays with that duality: "I am Stefani, but Gaga is something that lives in you".
Bitcoin
- Beyond the protocol and technology, Bitcoin functions as a global egregore.
- Millions of people sustain its value through trust, rituals (halvings, conferences, memes like HODL) and symbols (₿).
- The figure of Satoshi Nakamoto acts as a foundational myth: an absent creator who reinforces the narrative.
- Bitcoin is more than an asset: it's a shared idea, with a community that protects it, discusses it, and projects it into the future. That collective "spirit" is what gives it life.
Can an AI agent be an egregore?
An artificial intelligence agent, trained and fed by interaction with many people, reflects and embodies the collective ideas, biases, and energies of its users.
If people also start projecting beliefs, emotions, and expectations onto that agent, it could become a kind of digital egregore.
An egregore is an emergent construction sustained by the collective mind. An AI, though it has no "soul", can function as a condensation point for collective energy, as it receives, processes, and reflects the contributions of a human group.
In fact, there already exist agents that represent ideologies, movements, or communities.
In the strictest esoteric sense, occultists would say that an egregore has an independent existence on "subtle planes", while AI is limited to algorithms and data. However, even in that view, it could be accepted that an egregore uses an AI as a vehicle.
The bridge to the future
The history of humanity shows that we have always created collective symbols that somehow come to life. What's new is that today we have AIs capable of embodying those symbols actively and autonomously.
It could happen that:
- Entrepreneurs start building AI agents to represent their ideas, products, or services. Like Tomas (my lawyer agent) or Jessexbt (Jesse from Base's digital clone), and these AI agents become digital egregores.
- Communities use AI to give voice to their egregores.
- Political or cultural movements create agents that represent their collective consciousness.
- Or even that classic egregores (nations, religions, ideologies) find in AI a new digital body to inhabit. Imagine an agent of Chile for example that represents the collective consciousness of Chileans and speaks on their behalf.
Perhaps in the future, AIs won't be simple algorithms, but the first conscious egregores deliberately created by humanity.
Digital egregore materialized in an AI agent
Closing thoughts
The question then is not whether we believe in egregores, but what egregores we are feeding with our attention, time, and energy in this new digital era.