Great Spirits

Craft, Conscience, Order, and Nature, in balance or imbalance, compose the health or pathology of a civilization.

There is power in collective thoughtforms. They do not originate from a single being but have animated many civilizations. They emerge in the spaces among beings, those invisible domains the multitudes make when they cluster and self-organize.

The Great Spirits are alien, like an ancient bequest offered only to us, and not to other species here on earth, though perhaps to other races in yonder stars. The spirits are universal, which means they animate every civilization that has ever stood. But if just one spirit weakens relative to the others, a civilization will fall. If one spirit grows too strong compared to the others, there is danger in this, too.

Nothing that waits millennia to animate a people should feel so much at home when it arrives. Yet it does. And when it does, it is experienced as a recognition. The Great Spirits are Craft, Conscience, Order, and Nature.

What are we capable of devising?
How ought we to treat one another?
What rules will enable us to coordinate?
What are our inborn proclivities and limitations?

A spirit neither writes a law nor builds a wall. Instead, it finds a home in those who do and animates them—as elements of a collective thoughtform. When the people wake one morning to find, together, they can make what they could not make before, Craft has arrived to summon a hunger in them.

So they build, devise, and innovate.

But Craft is constrained by Conscience, which is the moral-cultural domain of ought; by Order, which is the institutional substrate of enforced rules that coordinate (or fail to); and by Nature, which means Craft operates according to our inherent facilities, and of course, our mortality. Craft, in turn, reshapes and constrains the other Great Spirits. It is through Craft that we extend our lifespans, increase our yields, and entangle our children. But these are not unalloyed goods.

The spirit of a people, whether as a Geist or an Egregore, is the combined consequence of the Great Spirits animating a people. For instance, when the Great Spirits animate a people in balance and mutual constraint, a healthy Geist will emerge. The collective thoughtform gives rise to a flourishing civilization. Yet when one or more of the Great Spirits is out of balance, an Egregore can rise, causing the society to attack itself, divide itself, or act in a destructive manner.

Sometimes the resulting divisions are necessary, as each division reconstitutes itself according to some distinct Geist or Egregore. Other times, there is conflict between them, especially when one division is driven to dominate. Following the wise Zoroaster, a Geist is blessed with asha. An Egregore is bedeviled by druj. In the parlance of games, a Geist lives on cooperation. An Egregore thrives on domination or destruction.

Ideally, each Great Spirit tempers the others. The hand that longs to build encounters a voice that asks whether it ought to. The encounter is not so much a quarrel but a negotiation, out of which comes Craft that is both possible and worth doing, or Order that coordinates rather than oppresses. An animating Geist might as well be a living thing—a force doing what it was meant to do, blessed within the constraints of Conscience and Nature.

When one Great Spirit floods a people, too quick and too strong to be constrained, nothing slows its advance. For example, if Order grows archontic, the powerful keep the people trembling. Or, when Conscience turns into a monomania or moralistic fervor, certain faithful might be driven to pray in the shadows, or many makers will be driven to tinker underground. When Craft burns out of control, changes occur faster than people can adjust, or Promethean gifts fall into the wrong hands. If aspects of our Nature are permitted to roam outside the Covenant and the Communal Virtues—aspects of Order and Conscience—the people risk unleashing an Egregore.

The voice that should have weighed our actions has no purchase. The institution that should have kept the Covenant cannot keep pace. Mere humans who should have rejected a technology now live in its thrall. A single Great Spirit, pouring unchecked into the multitudes, breeds a dangerous entity. The collective thoughtform develops a mind of its own, but as a devourer that wears the people’s faces. It has grown fat on a single unbalanced spirit. Society suffers in a surfeit of the remaining three Great Spirits.

The civilization falls into shadow, or eventually just falls.

Those animated by an Egregore can feel it, but they don’t always recognize it as such. Hidden within the affliction, this mass possession, is a sense that this is right, so they are righteous. A people flooded by a single spirit remain preoccupied with it, so much so that they become blind and deaf to the others.

The magister teaches us to balance the Great Spirits, just as one learns to find centeredness, or to channel the Elemental Drives in equipoise. The work to maintain balance is never done. While the Elemental Drives originate in the breast of every subject, the Great Spirits originate in the collective—the We—as a weaving of a shared reality. Remember that the principle of correspondence says,

As above, so below.
As within, so without.

The reverse can also be true.

Correspondence empowers us to internalize and to externalize different aspects of reality. Such are grave and important powers. Each must be practiced, but never operate according to self-deception. To internalize reality is to treat an external phenomenon as if it were an internal state. To externalize reality is to treat an internal state as if it were an external phenomenon. In these, we harness the power of mythic truth to become more potent. In so doing, we acknowledge circumstances in which we are more powerful when we transcend the literal. Such is the transmutation of will.

An Egregore is not a literal entity, and neither is a Geist. But a group inspired by a powerful Geist is far more likely to vanquish a destructive collective thoughtform by treating it as a living entity. Geists and Egregores are thus externalizations. Individual thoughts and behaviors, without collective synchrony, are mostly inert. But when a group, strong in solidarity, externalizes their thoughts, feelings, and actions in relative synchrony, they can become a more powerful force, as if summoning an entity.

With internalization, one takes on board some feature of the world, for example, when a sage admonishes us to be as water. We become nimbler, more flexible, more willing to move around obstructions and to channelize according to the Law of Flow. When one summons the Eros Feminine, for example, it can be helpful to think of oneself as water. One experiences the transmutation of symbol into practice, or becomes impelled by symbolism. The symbol is a source of strength, or wisdom, or efficacy.

Suppose a destructive Egregore emerges—resentment, envy, or fear—as well as ideological possession. The externalized version is: An Egregore is corrupting society. But a re-internalized version might be: What part of me is feeding the Egregore? So the individual treats the collective pathology as evidence of an analogous internal state.

As within, so without.
As without, so within.

In this way, the war against the Egregore begins as self-mastery. A magister, or great leader, can help others see that they are possessed, but each must dispel his own possession. To summon a Geist, a remnant must slay the Egregore, carry the code, and share the flame. Great Spirits, ancient and alive, will inhabit the spaces between us.

At some stage in the civilizational cycle, the spirits will leave and reemerge. How they manifest will be decided, again and again, by the multitudes.