Egregoroi

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. Occult beings believed to be psychic group entities formed from shared thought and emotion ; in apocryphal writings, the watchers, angels who descended to earth and fell
2. Mystical collective spirits said to arise from the combined will of a group ; in the Book of Enoch, the celestial watchers who abandoned heaven and sinned
3. Hypothetical psychic constructs that take on a life of their own from communal belief ; the heavenly sentinels of apocryphal lore who fell from grace

Etymology: Its roots lie in waking. In Greek, "egrēgoros" meant "watchful" or "wakeful," formed from "egeirein," "to wake" or "to rouse." The plural "egrēgoroi" became the Greek name for the Watchers, a class of angels in the Book of Enoch who were said to have descended to earth. The Greek version of the Book of Daniel uses the same word for heavenly watchers in its account of Nebuchadnezzar's dream. Much later, occult writers borrowed the term for a different idea: a collective thought-form, a kind of spiritual entity sustained by the shared attention or belief of a group. The English form "egregore" is the usual modern spelling, while "egregoroi" keeps the Greek plural and is used mainly by writers who want to point back to the angels.