Do Our Beliefs Take on a Life of Their Own?

We’ve all heard the phrase “the power of belief,” but what if belief itself could sprout a kind of imaginary friend? What if an idea, fed by many minds, could take on a life of its own? In occult parlance, such a creature is called an egregore; in Tibetan mysticism (and internet forums) it might be a tulpa. These terms come from different cultures – one from Western esotericism, the other from Himalayan Buddhism – yet they both describe the bizarre notion of a thoughtform: an entity created by imagination and collective will​. It sounds like fiction (and often is), but people throughout history – from mystics and monks to modern meme-makers – have taken it quite seriously. Are egregores and tulpas just mythological metaphors for group psychology, or do they hint at real phenomena in our minds and societies? To explore that, we’ll need to dive into some ancient lore, a bit of psychology, and even Slender Man’s origin story. Don’t worry – we’ll come back in one piece (unlike some characters in these stories).

The idea that a thought could become an entity has surprisingly old roots. The word egregore comes from a Greek term meaning “watchful” and originally referred to the Watchers – fallen angels in the apocryphal Book of Enoch​. In that ancient story, the Watchers rebelled, descended to Earth, and caused all kinds of trouble (perhaps the earliest case of bad ideas manifesting badly). For centuries, “egregore” just meant those angelic beings. But in the 19th century, French occultists and esoteric scholars gave the term a new twist. The French poet Victor Hugo used égrégore in 1859 to refer to a kind of demon or specter​. Soon after, magician Éliphas Lévi (a kind of Victorian-era Aleister Crowley) picked it up and connected it back to the Watchers of Enoch​. This fusion of biblical spookiness and occult theory planted the seed for the modern meaning of egregore. By the early 20th century, occult circles (like French Martinists and Russian Theosophists) were describing egregores as psychic entities fueled by the shared thoughts of groups​. In other words, if enough people poured mental energy into the same idea or image, something like a group spirit could form.

Notably, H.P. Blavatsky, the mother of Theosophy, wrote in 1892 that egregores were “beings” made of the subtle “astral light,” essentially shadows of spiritual forces​. Later occult authors got more pragmatic: by the mid-20th century an egregore was usually described as an “artificial group soul” created (often unintentionally) whenever people united in thought​. Occultist John Michael Greer noted it’s like an “astral (i.e. non-physical) entity” that both arises from and influences the group that spawned it​. A modern witch might even say every tight-knit group has an egregore – your yoga class, your D&D club, maybe even your Twitter fandom could be brewing one. The concept shifted from heavenly angels to a kind of hive mind with a ghostly twist. In fact, the egregore idea is often compared to more familiar concepts like the corporate “personhood” of a company or a viral meme – something abstract that, through collective belief, gains real influence​.

Meanwhile, in the mountains of Tibet, another branch of this idea was developing. Tibetan Buddhism speaks of “sprul-pa”, magical emanations or manifestation bodies that enlightened beings can project​. These aren’t exactly meant to be Pokemon conjured by ordinary people; they’re more like purposeful illusions created by advanced spiritual masters to teach or help others. Enter Alexandra David-Néel, a French-Belgian explorer who journeyed to Tibet in the early 20th century and became fascinated by its mysticism. In her 1929 book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, David-Néel claimed that Tibetan lamas could create “tulpas”, which she described as “magic formations generated by a powerful concentration of thought”​. She even said she made one herself – a chubby, jolly monk-like figure – through intense visualization, only to find the tulpa eventually developed a mind of its own and had to be destroyed because it got a little creepy​. (Yes, this is a purported true story by a respected explorer. The 1920s were wild.) David-Néel did wonder if she had hallucinated the whole thing, but she also noted other people supposedly saw her phantom monk too​. Her reports introduced the word tulpa to the Western world, where it mingled with the Theosophical idea of thought-forms. In fact, recent scholarship suggests the modern tulpa concept owes more to Theosophy than to Tibetan tradition​. David-Néel and others took Tibetan terms and, perhaps unknowingly, gave them a Western occult spin. A researcher of comparative religion dryly noted that “the idea of the tulpa is more indebted to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism”, being a product of cross-cultural interpretation and a dash of Western imagination​. Even Mulder on The X-Files gets this: in one episode, he explains that “tulpa” was something Theosophists stole from Tibetan lore and perverted​. In other words, the tulpa we talk about today is kind of a spiritual Franken-concept – part Tibetan, part Victorian occultist, with a pinch of French adventurer’s flair.

By the mid-20th century, Western occultists and mystics were freely exchanging these ideas. Annie Besant and C.W. Leadbeater, prominent Theosophists, wrote Thought-Forms (1905) with beautiful color plates of psychic forms generated by emotions and music (see the image above of an organ music thoughtform blooming out of a cathedral). They classified thought-forms into types – some looked like the person who created them; others could assume shapes and even be “ensouled” by nature spirits or the dead​. It’s a short leap from their theories to saying, “hey, maybe a group of people thinking the same thing could cook up a bigger thought-form together.” And that’s basically the egregore. Occult authors in the 1960s like Mouni Sadhu and Valentin Tomberg wrote about egregores explicitly as collective entities​. Sadhu felt there could be good and bad egregores; Tomberg pessimistically argued all egregores eventually enslave their creators​. (He likened the concept to the Devil in Tarot – an allegory for becoming chained by one’s own creation​.) They gave examples: nations, religions, political parties, even sports teams or fandoms could generate an egregore​. If you’ve ever felt the eerie unity of a crowd at a concert or the collective rage of a mob, you get the idea: it feels like a new entity is moving the group, more than any single person.

Before we jump to modern times, one more historical twist: some occultists believed egregores could literally connect to supernatural beings. Occult author Mark Stavish notes that an egregore might serve as a kind of astral vessel for a non-human intelligence – basically a spirit hitchhiker riding the wave of group energy​. He cites a startling example: an Italian occult journal in 1929 claimed a ritual was done to resurrect the ancient Roman Empire’s egregore, and that this somehow inspired Benito Mussolini’s rise​. (Supposedly, a prophecy delivered via this egregore led Mussolini to adopt the fasces symbol and seize power​. It’s one of those stories that sounds too weird to be true – and it probably is – but the fact occultists were talking about egregores in the context of fascist movements shows how real they considered these thought-forms.) That leads us to an important point: whether or not egregores and tulpas are “real” as independent entities, people’s belief in them can definitely influence real-world events. For that, we need look no further than Slender Man and some internet-age strangeness.

So, do our collective beliefs create monsters or at least memorable characters? History and pop culture offer plenty of winks and nods to this idea. Let’s start with a modern myth: Slender Man, the faceless, lanky suited figure who lurks in photoshopped forests and children’s nightmares​. Slender Man was born in 2009 on an internet forum as a pure work of fiction – a contestant in a paranormal image contest​. Users like Eric Knudsen (screen name “Victor Surge”) doctored images to insert a creepy tall man and spun little tales around them​. The character snowballed: other people added their own fake photos and stories​, a YouTube series called Marble Hornets turned him into an indie horror icon, and soon Slender Man was as close to an actual folklore figure as an internet meme can get​. Here’s where it gets eerie – some fans and writers started speculating that maybe Slender Man had become a “tulpa” or egregore, willed into pseudo-existence by the mass attention on him​. It was tongue-in-cheek… until it wasn’t. In 2014, two 12-year-old girls in Wisconsin brutally stabbed a friend, later claiming they did it to appease Slender Man so he wouldn’t harm their families​. A psychologist testified that the girls were caught in a “shared delusion” about this fictional figure​. In their young minds, Slender Man had become real enough to kill for. This tragedy sparked a mini moral panic, and Slender Man went from internet campfire tale to the subject of news reports, a HBO documentary, and endless analysis​. Was Slender Man “real”? Obviously not in a physical sense – but the belief in him had real, horrific consequences. In a way, the collective idea took on a life of its own in those girls’ psyches. Some folklorists even described Slender Man as a “digital tulpa”, an idea willed into our world by shared imagination​.

Slender Man’s case might be extreme, but it’s not unique. Pop culture is full of the premise that belief can animate things. In the horror film Candyman (1992), an urban legend killer gains power as more people believe in him. Freddy Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street operates on a similar rule – the more the kids fear/remember him, the stronger he becomes. The Ghostbusters famously battled a giant marshmallow man inadvertently summoned by their own thoughts. On TV, The X-Files had at least two episodes about tulpas: one (“Arcadia”) features a HOA neighborhood’s collective fear manifesting a literal trash monster; another (“Home Again”) involves a street artist’s angry creation coming to life to wreak vengeance (Mulder explicitly calls it a tulpa)​. The show Supernatural did it too – in an episode aptly titled “Hell House,” teens invent a fake ghost online for kicks, and the sheer volume of belief causes a real entity to form and haunt a house. These stories tap into an archetype: the imaginary friend or foe that becomes tangible through belief. It’s like society’s collective unconscious sometimes burps up a monster and says “booo!” just to make us reckon with our own fears. As a culture, we find the idea compelling (and terrifying) that we might be haunted by our own mental creations.

But tulpas aren’t all spooky and malicious. In fact, one of the strangest modern movements related to this concept is quite wholesome on the surface: the online tulpa communities. Starting around the 2000s, niche forums on 4chan and Reddit spawned groups of people calling themselves “tulpamancers.” These are typically ordinary folks (often teenagers or young adults) who read about tulpas (maybe in anime, creepypasta, or obscure corners of the internet) and thought, “Hey, I’d like an imaginary friend – but, like, a really vivid one”​. They set out to will into existence a sentient other being in their own minds through meditation, visualization, and sheer concentration. It sounds like intense daydreaming – and it is – but many swear it works. Their tulpas, they report, become independent personalities within their consciousness, able to talk, joke, offer companionship, and yes, sometimes even romance​. A lot of tulpamancers were inspired by pop culture characters (there was a wave of My Little Pony fans creating pony tulpas, for example)​. Vice and a several other outlets ran bemused articles about these folks “imagining friends into existence”​. It’s easy to chuckle, but researchers have taken an interest too. Anthropologist Samuel Veissière conducted surveys of the tulpa community and found some striking stats. These practitioners know their companions are self-created, and 76.5% of them believe tulpas are a psychological phenomenon (only 8.5% think something metaphysical is happening)​. Many in the community are tech-savvy, lonely, neurodivergent individuals who consciously use tulpamancy as a coping mechanism for anxiety or isolation​. And get this – about 93% of respondents said having a tulpa made their condition better and gave them unusual sensory experiences (like hallucinations that they enjoy)​. In other words, for most tulpamancers, this is a quirky form of self-therapy or creativity, not a delusion they get lost in. One could argue it’s similar to an author so deeply imagining a character that the character “feels alive” in the author’s head – except they take it a step further and interact with that character in daily life. There are even documented cases where people without any psychosis managed to experience their tulpas visually or audibly, essentially a benign, controlled hallucination​.

Of course, this raises eyebrows in the psychiatric community. Are these people nurturing a healthy imaginative hobby, or flirting with dissociation? The jury’s out. Some psychologists see parallels with dissociative identity disorder or maladaptive daydreaming, though the key difference is tulpamancers want and cultivate the experience, and it usually doesn’t cause them distress. Critics (and some Buddhists) also point out that calling this practice “Tibetan” is misleading. A scholar of Tibetan religion noted he’s “never heard of a Tibetan creating, ex nihilo, a being with its own consciousness that only lives in the host’s mind” – suggesting that Westerners took a complex spiritual idea and turned it into something else entirely​. Traditional Tibetan lamas might raise an eyebrow at fans summoning cartoon ponies in their heads and calling it tulpa-making. But cultural misappropriation aside, the tulpa community today is a fascinating experiment in collective belief shaping subjective reality on an individual scale. They’re basically saying: “I know this is ‘just in my head’, but I choose to believe in it enough that it becomes real to me.” It’s belief as a tool, almost as a kind of technology.

At this point you might be wondering, what’s actually happening with all this egregore/tulpa business? Are we dealing with supernatural entities, psychological phenomena, or elaborate metaphors run amok? The interpretations span a spectrum. On one extreme, occultists and spiritualists truly believe egregores and tulpas can attain independent reality on some plane of existence. They’ll cite centuries of mystical experience, David-Néel’s rogue monk, séance experiments, etc., as evidence that under certain conditions a thoughtform becomes a kind of ghost. In the 1970s, a group of Canadian researchers even tried to test this: the famous Philip Experiment assembled a group to invent a fictional ghost and then hold séances to communicate with him. Lo and behold, after weeks of group focus, strange knocks and phenomena started occurring as if “Philip” were responding​. The participants theorized that their collective mind produced the effects. To a believer, this was proof humans can conjure spirits with imagination. To a skeptic, it was proof that people can subconsciously engage in a bit of table faking or ideomotor trickery.

Most psychologists and scientists approach tulpas and egregores as explanatory fictions – useful perhaps to describe group psychology or unusual subjective experiences, but not literal spooks. The secular view is that an egregore is basically a poetic way to describe collective mindset or mass hysteria. For example, when a nation is whipped into a frenzy – consider Nazi Germany under Hitler – it can appear as if some dark intelligent force has possessed the population. In fact, Carl Jung in 1936 wrote an essay saying the old Norse god Wotan (Odin) had seized the German psyche, implying that an archetypal “psychic force” was at work in the collective mind​. Jung was speaking metaphorically (mostly), but he tapped into the same idea: a mass movement develops its own autonomy, whether you call it an archetype, an egregore, or a social contagion. Critics of Jung noted that this view could dangerously excuse human agency – as if Wotan made them do it​. Indeed, one has to be careful in assigning too much agency to an idea; it might let the people behind the idea off the hook. Nonetheless, we often talk about group behavior as if a separate being were in charge (“mob mentality took over,” “the crowd went wild,” etc.). Sociologists and crowd psychologists like Gustave Le Bon have long noted that individuals in a group can lose their sense of self and respond almost automatically to the shared mood – a phenomenon of collective psychology rather than black magic, but the end result can look eerily like an independent force.

In more recent times, we’ve seen the rise of massive conspiracy theories and movements (from QAnon to certain political cults of personality) that outsiders struggle to understand. Here the concept of an egregore as a “collective thought-form with a life of its own” feels apt. For instance, the QAnon conspiracy web – an unfounded belief system about evil cabals and savior figures – grew into a sprawling, adaptive narrative that no single person controlled. It’s sustained by the collective energy of its believers and it influences their actions in the real world (sometimes violently, as seen on January 6, 2021). Journalists at BuzzFeed even decided to label QAnon a “collective delusion” rather than a mere conspiracy theory, to emphasize that it functions like a shared alternate reality adhered to by a mass of people​. That’s basically calling it an egregore in plain English. The movement behaves like a living thing, morphing to survive contradictions, pulling in new recruits, motivating people to do things (wear t-shirts, attend rallies, storm capitols) on its behalf. And yet, “Q” doesn’t objectively exist – it’s a shadowy persona on the internet coupled with a vast mythology maintained in believers’ minds. Sound familiar? It’s Slender Man on steroids, with far greater stakes.

There are dissenters and skeptics who think using terms like egregore and tulpa muddies the waters. Some Tibetan lamas laugh at the Western penchant to literalize these mind-made illusions; they’d say the purpose of such practices was always to understand the illusory nature of reality, not to indulge in fantasy. Many psychologists caution that while imagination is generally healthy, glorifying what could be seen as hallucinations or delusions might backfire for vulnerable people. And some hard-nosed rationalists simply prefer to talk about crowd behavior, memetics, and cognitive psychology without invoking any mystical terminology. To them, an egregore is just a fancy word for the social constructs and narratives that we humans create. The only “spirits” at work are our cognitive biases and the emergent properties of networked minds. From that view, saying “MAGA is an egregore” or “the stock market is ruled by an egregore of greed and fear” is a colorful metaphor – useful for literary effect but not literally true. Yet, even the skeptics often end up anthropomorphizing these phenomena (“the market is panicking”; “social media has a mind of its own”), proving how natural it is to describe collective phenomena as if they were single entities.

The Social Implications of Our Collective Thought Creatures

Whether we take egregores and tulpas as metaphors or real entities, thinking about them shines a light on how our collective beliefs operate. If nothing else, they remind us that belief is powerful. A nation convinced of a grand destiny can achieve great things – or commit great atrocities. A populace gripped by fear of witches (or communists, or terrorists, or insert bogeyman du jour) can manifest very real witch hunts and injustices, even if the feared entity wasn’t real or as widespread. These are essentially moral panics – episodes of collective belief creating a distorted reality. In the 1980s, for instance, the Satanic Panic had parents convinced that daycare centers were run by devil-worshipers; no such nationwide cult existed, but lives were ruined by the mere belief in it. The “entity” in that case was an egregore of societal fear – not a literal demon, but it might as well have been given the damage it caused. Similarly, one could argue that Nazi Germany was driven by an egregore of racial ideology and militaristic fervor that took on a life beyond any one individual Nazi – a toxic group spirit, if you will, that led to catastrophic outcomes. On a much smaller scale, even something like a sports team fandom can behave like an egregore: ever notice how fans say “we won” as if they (the spectators) were part of the team, deriving a shared identity and emotional high from the group? The collective emotion can be intense – riots have happened when “their” team loses or wins. It’s as if the egregore of Team Spirit demands expression, sometimes destructively​.

Interestingly, the internet has supercharged egregore-like phenomena. Memes spread ideas and inside jokes at lightning speed, creating online “hive minds” that can mobilize in the real world. The 2016 rise of the alt-right featured a bizarre meme-based quasi-religion around the cartoon Pepe the Frog and a faux-deity called Kek – essentially a group of trolls half-ironically believing their meme magic helped elect Donald Trump​. It started as an elaborate joke, but some participants really did act as if this collective meme had power, thanking “God Emperor Trump” and Kek for their victories. This was an egregore born in a message board, willed into semi-reality by repetition, ritual (posting memes at certain times), and belief (ironic or not) in the “meme magic”​. It doesn’t get more postmodern than that – a deliberately created tongue-in-cheek egregore that nonetheless motivated real political propaganda. We’re basically living in a world where spontaneously-arising egregores (QAnon, mass movements) and deliberately engineered egregores (brand cults, internet fandoms) surround us. Advertisers certainly hope to create egregores around brands – think of the almost zealous community around Apple products, which one writer explicitly cited as akin to an egregore maintained by shared admiration and ritual line-waiting for new iPhones​. And consider social media “mobs” – a viral outrage can form an ad-hoc egregore of anger that “takes over” and starts doxxing or canceling someone, even though no single person might have started it intentionally.

All this has serious implications. It means that managing our collective narratives and beliefs is crucial. If we let negative egregores run rampant – say, a conspiracy theory that a certain group of people is evil – the result can be violence, oppression, even genocide. On the flip side, positive collective belief can be harnessed for good – civil rights movements, humanitarian causes, and community solidarity often have at their core a shared belief in justice or compassion that becomes a driving force greater than any individual. One might poetically call that a benevolent egregore (even if “the spirit of democracy” is just a metaphor, it’s a powerful one that has inspired real change).

So, are egregores and tulpas merely myth, or do they describe something real about us? After this journey through history, mysticism, and modern memes, the most grounded answer is: they’re a bit of both. No, we probably aren’t summoning literal ghostly beings with our minds alone – but we are constantly creating stories, identities, and shared ideas that influence reality. In a very real sense, our beliefs do take on a life of their own in our social world and in our psyches. Recognizing this doesn’t mean we have to imagine phantoms lurking about; rather, it’s a way to remember that what we believe together matters. Our collective thoughts can be constructive or destructive, liberating or limiting.

Acknowledging the power of these collective thoughtforms can actually help us. It encourages a healthy self-awareness: we can ask, “Am I being carried away by a group ideology or fear that isn’t entirely my own?” It’s a reminder to stay critical of mass movements and moral panics – to see when the “egregore” of the moment is leading us down a dark path. It also suggests that by consciously choosing our shared beliefs, we might cultivate positive egregores (call them shared visions or guiding ideals) that lead to progress. In a way, understanding egregores and tulpas is empowering. It tells us that our minds, especially together, have immense creative force. We spin webs of meaning – myths, religions, political movements, subcultures – and those webs can catch us like flies if we’re not careful, or support us like safety nets if woven with wisdom.

Perhaps the best approach is to treat egregores and tulpas as useful poetic truths. They personify the notion that ideas can control us if we let them. When we see a whole community enthralled by an idea (good or bad), we can say, “Ah, there’s an egregore at work” – meaning, let’s step back and evaluate this collective passion objectively. At the same time, we can appreciate the wonder of human imagination that underlies it. We are the species that can dream up an imaginary friend to soothe our loneliness, or conjure a monster that makes our heart race, or unite millions under an invisible banner of shared belief. That capacity for collective imagination is what gives us culture, art, religion, and social movements. It’s intrinsically neither good nor bad – it’s all about how we use it.

Are we controlling our ideas, or are they controlling us? In a world where misinformation and mass hysteria can spread faster than ever, that question is vital.

In the end, understanding these “creatures of the mind” gives us a chance to reclaim our power. If our collective thoughts helped create the problems, our collective thoughts can also solve them. We can dispel the harmful egregores – the specters of hate, fear, and falsehood – by withdrawing our energy from them and investing it in narratives of truth and empathy. We can be mindful builders of our shared reality, rather than unwitting hosts to thoughtforms that don’t serve us. It might sound like magic, but it’s really just consciousness and collaboration. And if enough of us believe that, who knows what benevolent realities we might bring forth? After all, an egregore is only as strong as the minds that feed it – so we might as well feed our world with the best ideas we’ve got, and watch goodness take on a life of its own.