There is a certain mechanism that egregores use to further their influence on reality. This mechanism is hyperstition. Originally coined by the fantastically deranged lemurian time mage Nick Land, hyperstition combines ”hyper” with ”superstition” (and implies ”hype”) to produce a concept that refers to fictions or narratives that make themselves happen. This is very close to the quite mainstream sociological concept of ”self-fulfilling prophecy”.
The idea of a self-fulfilling prophecy is quite simple: a phenomenon may become manifest if the people relevant to it believe that it will happen. For example, the expectation of an economic crisis might lead to a run on banks, therefore triggering an economic crisis. Before the First World War, a sentiment where a major war was viewed as inevitable filled Europe, and this led to the Great Powers shifting to a war footing, eventually making the war happen. Because Moore's Law ”predicted” that the performance of integrated circuits will double every two years, circuit manufacturers scrambled to make it true lest their competitors make it true before they do. Telling yourself that you will always feel bad and nothing good will ever happen to you is a great way to ensure that you will always feel bad and nothing good will ever happen to you.
While the concept of hyperstition holds self-fulfilling prophecy at its heart, it sees these narratives-making-themselves-true as self-reinforcing. They generate positive feedback loops (a la Moore's law) and cause ”future shocks” which destabilize social and belief structures that further allow them to reinforce their influence and eventual reality. Nick Land gives hyperstitions outright esoteric qualifiers, seeing them as ”coincidence intensifiers” and ”great Old Ones”. One could of course see these as metaphorical. The change of culture and technology creates possibilities for all kinds of happenstances, which people enraptured by hyperstitions can use to further them. The destructive influence of hyperstitions comes to be seen as some kind of a dark influence lurking behind reality...then again...Land and his clique did commune with nonhuman entities by their own admission, so perhaps they are not just vivid metaphors...
A prime example of hyperstitions is the realm of science fiction. For some reason fanciful speculations and extrapolations of present day trends have started to be seen as guidelines for creating the future. This is of course popularized in the ”don't build the Torment Matrix” meme, but this process has a well over hundred year old history at this point. At first the idea of sending people to the Moon was a fantasy. This fantasy started haunting some of the most brilliant minds of their generation. They developed rocketry (which also got used for warfare). Soon enough humanity could reach the orbit of this planet, and the possibility of going to the Moon became first a tantalizing possibility, then a source of pride and competition for the two superpowers. And then the fiction made itself real on July 20th, 1969 when the United States successfully sent the first men to the Moon. (And possibly made the Moon spirits very upset, but that (moon) rabbit hole is beside the point for now.)
Beyond fiction, the realm of economics has offered some fantastic and terrifying examples of very successful hyperstitions. A prime example of these is the ”dating market”. Economics is the art of reducing every human interaction into impersonal, ahistorical, contextless series of ”exchanges” that can be expressed through some kind of measurable ”value”. While human behaviour has certain elements that are in line with this worldview (especially the actions of sociopaths), much of even trade and market activity falls outside of the economic view of the world. The purest of exchange mechanisms, the stock market, is also the one most prone to panics, euphorias, fictions, manipulations, hyperstitions and outright magical operations.
The complexity and messiness of the human world is deeply frustrating to the economist priestly class that justified the existence of our modern day financial aristocracy. So over time mechanisms that steer the human world towards more economic forms of behaviour had to emerge. Since there was no perfect instantaneous mechanism of exchange, it had to emerge in the form of modern stock exchange. While the idea of ”dating market” has existed for a very long time, the reality of human pair-bonding was a nebulous mix of happenstance and tradition. So the ”dating markets” had to emerge as the form of dating apps. The results of such a thing becoming manifest have been utterly destructive, as are every manifestation of anti-human ideas that manage to become manifest...
Hyperfiction
For the purpose of demonstrating how egregores make themselves more rooted to material reality using hyperstitions the Cthulhu Mythos is a prime example. Emerging from the circle of writer's surrounding the reclusive writer-shaman Howard Philips Lovecraft who was tormented in his nightmares by visions of an unseen (and horrible) world, the Cthulhu Mythos received little attention during his lifetime but went to greatly shape Western popular culture after his passing into grave.
Much of the potency of Cthulhu Mythos comes from its alleged realness. The various events and numerous tomes of forbidden knowledge are presented as if they were real. Of course they were not, not in a literal, historical sense. The name of the most famous of these forbidden tomes, Necronomicon, makes no sense in the Greek language it's supposed to be. Then again, garbled foreign, ancient languages are a hallmark of very real Western magical traditions, such as the Greek Magical Papyri and Solomonic magic, to the extent that some scholars consider it a defining feature of Western magical tradition...
Real or not, the Necronomicon had enough magical potency in it that some people felt it necessary to make it real. In the late 1970s, James Wasserman, Larry Barnes and a mysterious ”Simon” felt compelled to create the Necronomicon, as a funny joke of course, for Avon Books. Since it was published in 1978 this ”Simon edition” has been continuously in print. It has found it's hand into countless fledgling and not-so fledgling magicians. And the funny thing about this funny joke is that many of those who have used it report genuine experiences. These experiencers include Wasserman and his circle (all very real and serious magicians) who reported numerous anomalous experiences during the writing process. The people who visited his loft would constantly have minor accidents resulting in shed blood. Rats burst through the walls. The locked door of his magical workspace was opened from the inside. Wasserman describes the production period as ”loony” (funny joke!).
The funniest joke related to the Cthulhu Mythos goes something like this: A British social scientist on a rather normal, quite respectable career track becomes interested in amphetamines and occultism. He has perhaps always had a soft spot for Lovecraft's fiction. He discovers the ”Simon edition” of Necronomicon. His clique of likeminded amphetamine and occultism enjoyers use it. They contact the Old Ones. The Old Ones give them the concept of ”hyperstition” and thus one of the most horrifying hyperstitions ever conceived, ”accelerationism”, is born. Their frenetic writings find themselves into the hands and screens of the coming tech-elite, including figures like Peter Thiel and Elon Musk along with the numerous stimulant burnouts that populate the ecosystem of the Silicon Valley. In the span of a few years the tech-utopian dreams are subverted into techno-social systems engineered to be as horrible and damaging as possible.
Is it cultural or esoteric?
So did Lovecraft come up with something that just made itself real in a way, or was he actually in contact with some non-human form of intelligence? It might be a bit of both. He might have very well been in contact with something, but there is always an element of projection in human perception, especially when it comes to the supernatural. H.P Lovecraft lived a traumatizing childhood and was given a very shattered lens to view both the material and immaterial world. Such individuals very easily draw in negative entities, and then interpret them in overwhelmingly fearful ways due to their predispositions. Whatever the case, Lovecraft gave the vessel for something and it compelled people to make it real – or more real.
Lovecraft was an artist, and throughout the centuries it has been thought that artists can channel spiritual forces. The Ancient Greeks went as far as to attribute all human creativity to the Muses. While I don't think all creative works are spiritually inspired, I think some are. And those which are often have a far more enduring character than those which don't. But the key work here is inspired. The artist interprets the inspiration using their expectations, previous experiences and tools they have. In turn, this might lead into a feedback cycle where the newfound inspiration compels one to search for its source.
One can imagine that, for example, someone who was deeply steeped in the doujin culture of 90s could make some rather colourful interpretations of spirit influence which they might have drawn in by, say, repeatedly calling themselves the head priest of a fictional shrine...perhaps this shrine is something inspired by a real location, too... One could also imagine such might result in a need to take a bit of a creative break, to reorient themselves and to further study whatever this new source of inspiration seems to be whispering about... It's also quite easy to imagine that if this particular artists' medium of choice was video games it might become very difficult to immediately spot such influence. After all, all ”serious” ”spiritual” people overlook such artificial phantasms, and the type of person interested in them might struggle to articulate the numinous. We might hear such descriptions as ”souled”, ”pure”, ”archetypal” and ”fairy-tale like” instead.
A keen-witted reader might then ask, has ZUN's creation then too started compelling people to make it real – or more real?
I have no definitive answer to that question.
Spirit Feedback
As one can see from the examples of Lovecraftian fiction and sci-fi, popular culture can feed back into egregores, or perhaps more broadly spirit entities, by giving as frameworks for our perception. The UFO phenomenon has interacted with pop culture in fascinating ways. While some see the trend of UFOs and ufonauts taking the shape of cultural expectations as an evidence for them being entirely fabricated, the people who experience such anomalous things are genuinely impacted by them. Some of such experiences are even life-shattering.
Another example of paranormal fiction becoming unnervingly real was the Slenderman phenomenon, which became real enough to result in murders. There might not have been an exact Slenderman that existed or was conjured forth, but it might have been an image fit for some sinister intelligence to take it as its skin.
It might be that there is a process by which our expectations, hence projections, shaped by our surrounding culture interact with the phenomena to determine its exact appearance. Let's lend ZUN's habit of using sound-related metaphors and call it ”spirit feedback”.
The esoteric world and popular culture have had a very messy history. As long as popular culture has existed, tales of gods, spirits and magic have been part of it. Modern popular culture constantly flirts with occult symbolism. The Chaos magic of the 90s took a vigorous interest in popular culture, since some of its biggest luminaries were also big popular culture figures. If belief is all that matters, then if one believed enough in John Constantine, he would become real (as allegedly happened).
There has been a backlash against such ideas in the present times. It appears that sheer belief can manifest something (humans are spirits too, remember), but more and more people in the occult community believe that there are spirits that are independent of human existence. Praying to a god that is believed to be a god can therefore yield more substantial results than trying to will your favorite fictional characters into existence.
Some people in the occult sphere thus have extremely negative perceptions of popular culture and people claiming to interact with spirit entities in the form of popular culture characters. There have been laments over how the newly-developing ”scriptural character” of fan culture, now using terms like ”canon”, reflects ”psychic and spiritual weakness” of contemporary culture. Some of such people even feel compelled to conjure the ghost of Julius Evola who was already in the early 20th century complaining about how ”mirages, idols and phantasms” were replacing spirituality.
But mirages, idols and phantasms have always been part of spirituality. The numinous comes in incomprehensible forms and we are left to interpret it and piece it together. Human interests comingle and corrupt the message. Curious onlookers come and weave their own myths, and in turn these myths may just become part of canon, start shaping the phenomena via spirit feedback. The mystics speak in metaphors, maybe not to hide something, but because they don't understand either. Maybe one in a thousand or a million or billion gets it. The rich tapestries of worship of mythologies of an institution like the Catholic church are no less full of mirages, idols and phantasms than popular culture. Same goes for many ”serious” esoteric organizations. The very word esoteric means ”hidden”. And what do mirages, phantasms and idols do? Hide things.
And even among the most hardcore, purist occultists are those who think egregores can be revived and modified. If an egregore, a spirit, or a complex of spirit entities, can ”die” or go dormant and then be revived and modified, what exactly is their core essence? It most certainly is not the trappings of some particular religion or spiritual tradition. This is not to say that there are not entities that aren't exclusively responsive to certain forms of worship and interaction, there most certainly are. There are also most certainly entities that are highly responsive to prayers and rituals of specific kind, but are willing to lend their ear, even some of their power to those who approach them in a divergent way.
What I am getting at is that spirits and egregores might have a deeper, more high-level core essence that survives the ravages of time and whimsies and ulterior motives of humanity. A core essence which can have one of its manifestations ”die”, only to be ”reborn” in a different form as times, culture and forms of human expressions change. Let's think of the spirit or egregore of the Roman Empire that Evola and his clique supposedly revived. Did it look anything like the Roman Empire of the old? Not really. It manifested differently in a different time. It's an interesting example because it failed. Its hyperstition of an Imperial restoration raptured an entire nation, but it and its host were woefully unprepared for the new reality. Succesful or not, there was some core essence carried over from the ages.
And what would this core essence then be made out of?
Thankfully the task of naming and conceptualizing such things has already been done.
They are known as archetypes.
