The Protective Spirits of Place.

In Soft Drive we are looking at ways of reading and interpreting our relationship with place.  We've looked at pictorial maps, artefacts and images, pyschogeographical exploration and the historical and folkloric accounts of incidents and interactions between people and place.The photograph at the top of the page is by Dennis Metcalfe, recorder of quiet corners and unconsidered spaces.

Alex is looking at land and community as source and repository for story, in order to explore the idea that a regions stories may constitute a means of transmitting and propagating an essence of locality through the creation of Egregore, meaning Wakefull, or Watcher  -  a being or energy complex whose existence is prompted by  the repeated telling and tracing over of a story, a legend or an accepted account or series of accounts.

Egregore can be seen as an embodiment of consensus on place, particularly on unadopted junctions and crossing points, common land and unmarked but accepted meeting places.

If you have problems with the idea of egregore as a being or a god, try 'object'.  An object can be said to exist if it causes an effect in another. Or look to  recent ontology, where reality is viewed as non-hierarchical and irreducible, and where everything which exists does so on an equal footing and doesn't need a mediator through which to relate.

Here are Alex's notes and more here on the nature of Egregore.

https://crypticchroniclespodcast.com/entity-of-the-week-the-egregore/

 Genius Loci..the protective spirits of place.

“People ask where is Nessy, no one asks how is Nessy”

Egregore from the Greek egregoros, means wakeful or watcher.

The word traces its origin to the animistic believes of Greece & Rome where every aspect of life, personal, family, community were ruled over by the little gods.

This concept worked its way into the western occult traditions lasting long after the end of pagan Rome.

Undoubtedly the meaning has developed over time.

By means of a explanation, I will borrow a 20^th century description of the formation of  egregore, from Martinist scholar Mouni Sadhu.

“ imagine that an intelligent & well disposed man, who is able to concentrate, is thinking about a good idea, giving it a certain form.

He may find others, who have the same or similar ideas, & a circle of men may come into being, who are all thinking along the same lines but in a different form. It is as if every one of them is repeating the drawing of a plan, placing the pencil again & again on the same contours.”

From his book Tarot

It is this repeated tracing that was thought to form the little god or egregore.

From this definition of how egregores are formed we can see that the world should be full of egregores, though most of them quite trivial creations, linked say to the effects of a advertising campaign or fad, that may have garnered the attention of thousands.

Some however will be much grander things, the personifications of nations or religions with millions at least casually aware of there presence.

I would like to contribute the idea that stories are functionally memes for propagating egregors.

In telling and re-telling  a story we “placing the pencil again & again on the same contours.”

We live in a landscape full of stories: that time there was a fight in the neighbours garden, the witch that's scared the kids down the canal, The house Wordsworth lived in once, the ghostly hitcher by the roadside, feeding the swans, the treasure in the lake.

Its been called folk memory.

Some of these stories will not reach further than a family or street, some of them will have national reach or have broken free there moorings & become part of the global heritage.

If we were to consider that each story functions as an egregore

to one degree or another, then this is world ensouled by storytelling, en-canted, wrapped in words.