NB: When writing a history, the hours spent in research tend to outweigh those spent shaping the narrative itself. Along the way, you collect all kinds of material — primary sources, theoretical reflections, marginalia — that never make it into the final cut. These “Chapter Notes” are for readers who want to know more about the people and events behind the story, and who don’t mind wandering down a few adjacent corridors.
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Notes for Chapter 2 include four extracts from texts and primary sources — going back nearly 200 years, and presented in chronological order:
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Anyone looking to get a head start on the themes of Chapter 3 could do worse than spending a little time with nineteenth-century occultist Eliphas Levi, pen name of Alphonse Louis Constant.
Here are a couple excerpts worth chewing on — but not too hard:
From “Le grand arcane, ou l'occultisme devoile (The Great Secret, or Occultism Unveiled)” — Eliphas Levy, 1868:
“These colossal forces have sometimes taken a shape and have appeared in the guise of giants: these are the egregore of the book of Enoch; terrible beings to whom we resemble the infusoria or microscopic insects which breed between our teeth and on our epidermis. The egregores crush us without pity because they are unaware of our existence; they are too big to see us and too limited to guess that we are there…
“We observe astonishing contradictions when contemplating nature. Everywhere there are the evidences of an infinite intelligence, but we have also to recognize the action of completely blind forces. Plagues are but disorders which can be attributed to no principle of eternal order… So where do disorders really come from? From the errors of second causes. But if these second causes are capable of error, they must be intelligent and autonomous, and here we have the full doctrine of egregores.”
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Here’s a chilling sequence that shows how collective “energies” — is that the best term? — were generated by the system, presumably feeding into Vale’s egregore (Da’at):
From FBI Transcript 279A-DV—12643-D12, Subject: Nadia Bennett, March 24, 2027:
AGENT: You mentioned something called a “daily unification sequence.” Can you walk us through it?
BENNETT: (pause) It’s... I mean, I don’t know if I remember all of it. We did it every morning. Night was a different meditation.
(pause)