Egregores: bad vibes & getting high
I don't mean high as in drugs. Unless you count the drugs your brain creates itself.
Egregores: an esoteric concept representing a non-physical entity that arises from the collective thoughts of a distinct group of people (Source: Wikipedia)
You know that feeling when you walk into a room and the vibes are just off?
Or when you go to a new cafe or bookstore and you can just tell that happy people have spent time here?
As a smutty urban magic writer, my favorite thing is to take woo-woo concepts, mesh them with real-life events, and write fiction so relatable that you question how the events couldn’t be real.
I flip-flop between my hard numbers/analytical mindset and my woo-woo/spiritual mindset. (Blame my capricorn sun and my pisces moon.) Even if I can’t always buy into the spiritual wisdom of tarot cards and astrology, I can still respect that they offer us a chance to reflect on our own mental state.
If you pull a tower, an ace of cups, and the star—there are so many ways to interpret that combination. Rather than believing it’s telling the future (which is probably a plotline I could run with), you can acknowledge it’s informing you a lot about your own current mindset by how you are telling the story of those cards to yourself.
I’d invite you to look at the concept of egregores in the same way.
The Bad Vibe
Amanda Yates Garcia’s book Initiated, Memoir of a Witch introduced me to the egregore. She lived in an apartment with a group of people who were less than savory. Just bad vibes, if you will. The repeated exposure to the negativity of the people she was living with affected her mental health and outlook on life.
The negative energy continued to collect in her home until one day an egregore was created.
It’s not as woo-woo as it sounds though, is it? Haven’t you been around a group of people who were just unpleasant, and only after you left that space you realized your energy started to change as well?
According to Dr. Travis Bradberry, these bad vibes affect our brain.
“Exposure to even a few days of stress compromises the effectiveness of the neurons in the hippocampus—an important area of the brain responsible for reasoning and memory.”
My note: This quote was in regard to rodents, though the article explained new MRI technology has also shown something similar for humans.
The concepts of an egregore is just shorthand to describe what is happening around us and in our brains. It also gives us a way of stepping back from the situation and naming what is happening.
The first step in problem solving is recognizing there is a problem.
After Amanda recognized an egregore was created, she was able to take actions to clear her space of the negative energy (the spiritual) and external actions to find a new place to live (the tangible).
But (in my opinion) she wouldn’t have been able to do that, or it would have come with a lot more mental drama, if she hadn’t been able to name what was happening and make concrete in her own mind of the vibes she was feeling.
When we name something, give it shape, give it meaning, we start to take away the power it has over us.
Concert Egregores
Egregores aren’t all bad.
There is a very special kind of egregore that is created at live music events.
Belting out your favorite songs at the top of your lungs surrounded by hundreds of people doing the exact same thing creates a special kind of energy.
An egregore of communal joy and expression.
The science backs this up too. The happy hormones: endorphins, dopamine, and oxytocin all increase.
People attending concerts show increased levels of endorphins, which are hormones that can intensify positive emotions. The dancing, clapping and poses people do at concerts can result in the neural transmission of dopamine, making us feel good. And singing out loud with others can release oxytocin, leading to increased satisfaction.
When I leave the concert venue, I always feel a special kind of kinship with the concert goers walking beside me to their cars. We have this deeply intense thing in common (love for a band or musician) and we had this incredible experience together.
That’s basically the formula for a romance novel to start. (Huh, another plotline I could run with.)
Conclusion
Egregores are a mystical concept. It’s an external entity that is created from the repeated exposure of people’s energies. This concept can be applied to your life, even if you don’t buy into occult beliefs. When you recognize and name something, it gives you the mental distance to see problems from a new perspective. Or gives you the ability to appreciate a positive situation as it is happening.
Acknowledge those feelings, good or bad, to start to metabolize the experience.
"When a word is properly defined," Simone Weil says, it helps "us to grasp some concrete reality or concrete objective, or method of activity." (The Power of Words)
This is what fascinates me. This is what I love exploring in my books.
Mystical concepts that are grounded in reality. Everyday things that happen to me and you, based on true life scientific research, but explored through a magical fictional lens, which provides the distance we need to see hard topics from a new light.
Do you like the intersection of magic, smut, and realistic mental health portrayals?
You should read the Dark Perceptions series, which follows an empath as she fights shadows (both the shadows inside her head and the magical ones in the city streets).
Dark Perceptions Series: Ascend from the Shadows (anxiety), Descend into the Void (depression), and Seize the Power (Inner Strength)
Start with book one:
Reflection Questions
Journal & Reflect—leave your thoughts or questions in the comments. I’d love to hear from you and make a little internet egregore of our own :)
Where have you encountered (or co-created) egregores in your life?
Does the concept of egregores resonant with you?
What situations in your life could be seen through this lens? (Think of the groups in your life—friends, family, coworkers)
What are some things that help dispel negative egregores or bring in positive egregores? (Ex. music, candles, soft lighting, putting up boundaries)
For those negative egregores that you feel like you “have” to hang out with, I’d invite you to question the truth of that. As women, we like to “should” ourselves up and down when it’s really just societal conditioning. Where are you “should-ing” yourself?
What would type of egregore would you like to create? (Book clubs, sister get-togethers, fall festivals, library events)
Does thinking of the negative situation as an egregore help you detach and see it from a new perspective?
Does thinking of a positive group as an egregore help you appreciate it more?