• We have updated the guidelines regarding posting political content: please see the stickied thread on Website Issues.

Tulpas

Review

EGREGORES: THE OCCULT ENTITIES THAT WATCH OVER HUMAN DESTINY
Mark Stavish | 160 pages | Inner Traditions | ISBN: 9781620555781 | (price not available)


I don’t usually review books of mysticism and New Age philosophy, but I make an exception where such books cross over into territory familiar to me, especially when they touch on either the Watcher angels from the Book of Enoch or H. P. Lovecraft. Occasionally, we find a book that mixes together both. Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny (Inner Traditions, 2018) is one such book, and author Mark Stavish provides some confounding ideas about the relationship between Fallen Angels and the Cthulhu Mythos in a confusing book that is half book report and half New Age instruction manual. The book is due out in July, and this is an early review.

Here we run into an oddball problem that is worth less than the time it takes to explain but is nevertheless necessary to understand what is going on in Egregores.The term “Egregore” has two distinct meanings, which have become conflated. Originally, the egregores were the Greek translation of the Watchers from the Book of Enoch, the Sons of God from Genesis 6:4, which the author of Enoch had called by the name of the observant angels from the Book of Daniel. But in Le Grand Arcane in 1868 the occultist Eliphas Lévi merged the Watchers and their sons, the Nephilim, with an idiosyncratic idea that there were autonomous psychic phenomena that could be remnants of these monsters. Afterward, occultists from the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn and the Rosicrucians took up the term and used it to describe any sort of emergent symbol or collective action that seems to behave autonomously of its creators. Thus, everything from the General Will of Rousseau to the Golden Arches of McDonalds is an egregore.

It is in this confounded and conflated modern form that we find the egregoresappear in Stavish’s book, for Stavish is an alchemist, Hermeticist, and all-around believer in the esoteric. Thus, this is the kind of book that opens with a quotation from the Corpus Hermeticum 16:12-14, 19, without introduction or explanation, and expects the reader to know what the obscure language is talking about. But it is also the kind of book where the author is so enamored of the occult that he lacks functional knowledge of the actual history of the subjects he seeks to address. Thus, for example, he starts by alleging of the Book of Enoch’s section on the descent of the Watchers that the “only extant version that exists is in the South Semitic language of Ge’ez.” That is true of the book as a whole, but the sections on the Watchers and their crimes are also preserved in Greek by George Syncellus, and in epitome by other authors. If your goal is to extract divine truths form the text, knowing this would seem like it should be a priority.

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/r...that-watch-over-human-destiny-by-mark-stavish
 
Back
Top