Egregores
... Think of a flock of birds foraging in a field. One bird sees something suspicious, it flies up, and in a moment all the birds are flying away... The flock is endowed with a certain degree of intelligence. It can process a signal and act on it. ~
(hyperlinks added by me)
... You start out with dumb, unintelligent sigils ---these just represent something, but don't actually think. Charge a sigil long enough, and you'll end up with a servitor, which is usually either completely stupid but capable of doing complexe tasks, all the way up to being able to think onits own and deduce things in its operation.
But when a servitor gets really big, what happens to it? The moment it becomes more than one person can handle, I consider it an egregore. At this point, it becomes capable of making some of its own demands, guiding its own work (though usually along the lines of the original goal of the people who created it) and in general "taking on a life of its own".
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An egregore could be said to be the emergent intelligence of a given group of people across space (so called "team spirit") or time (so called traditions and culture ). Different ways of tapping into this emergent intelligence have been proposed and is the central problem of organizational theory , and a branch of magickal practice .