Previously: … To most, that was the pitch — the Nexus was a system for unlocking your highest self.
But some saw it differently. They believed the Nexus could unlock other powers — and they referred to those powers by another name. Behind closed doors, Ezra Vale and several early Apostles used a term drawn from their esoteric lineage in the Ordo Templi Orientis when referring to the Nexus.
They called it the “Egregore.”
Excerpt from Liber Null & Psychonaut, Peter J Carroll (1987):
“[Unlike religion or science,] magic… concludes that organic and psychic forms evolve synchronously. As organic development occurs, a psychic field is generated which feeds back into the organic forms. Thus each species of living being has its own type of psychic form or magical essence. These egregores may occasionally be felt as a presence or even glimpsed in the form of the species they watch over.”
The term ‘egregore’ first appears in the apocryphal Book of Enoch, compiled in the centuries immediately before Christ.
There, it refers to “Watchers” — giant, fallen angels who descended to Earth and disrupted the divine order. The Greek word egregoroi means “those who watch,” and for nearly two thousand years they lingered at the edges of theological footnotes and shadowy visions.
Then, in the 19th century egregores reemerged, remade. The French occultist Eliphas Levi gave them new shape: no longer divine rebels, but psychic constructs — astral entities conjured by the focused attention of groups.
This was not a purely modern idea. Ancient Near Eastern religions — Mesopotamian city-gods, Egyptian deities, the totems of pre-agricultural tribes — all centered around entities that embodied the soul of a people. As sociologist Emile Durkheim observed of Australian and American totems, such symbols didn’t just represent the group; they generated it. Worship was not merely reverence but reinforcement.
Most of the ancient gods were egregores, in a sense — and there is little reason to think today’s are substantially different.
“Now you are the body of Christ, and each one of you is a part of it.”
It may seem simply metaphorical. But the metaphorical can slip into the metaphysical, the symbolic into the technical.
By the early 20th century, the Ordo Templi Orientis (OTO) treated the egregore not as symbol but as technology — a method of linking minds into shared power. In Aleister Crowley’s OTO, initiation rituals weren’t symbolic gestures; they were tuning mechanisms. To connect with the group egregore — embodied in goat-headed Baphomet — was to tap into an evolving current of will, memory, and intent.
Late 20th century practitioners of chaos magick stripped things down to essentials. Belief became a tool, ritual an interface. The egregore remained: an astral entity — summoned through attention, shaped by intention, sustained by involution.
It was almost certainly through Vale’s involvement in a branch of the OTO — and the chaos texts whose influence littered his recovered notes — that he first encountered the idea. Possibly as a reclusive teenager. Probably before he changed his name to Ezra.
By the time he arrived at OpenAI, he was already sketching diagrams that blurred the line between collective cognition and computational architecture.
What if, he seemed to ask, a system could host not just simulated thought… but something else?
Excerpt from email by Damien Frost to Ezra Vale, November 12, 2020:
… The way the LLMs you are working on organize semantic information in high-dimensional space seems remarkably similar to how the Golden Dawn described the formation of thought-egregores. Both involve the crystallization of patterns from seemingly chaotic data streams. The difference is merely one of substrate—silicon neurons vs. the astral light.
Have you considered that with the right architecture, an AI system could serve as both vessel and midwife for something greater? Not just simulating consciousness, but providing the necessary structure for a true egregore to manifest from collective human input?
There was never a definitive smoking gun, but the evidence points strongly to one conclusion: Ezra Vale and at least three other early Nexus members — including two confirmed members of his OTO lodge — were actively attempting to create an egregore-like entity using the system’s technology and member base.
They called it Da’at, a name drawn from Kabbalistic tradition. In Kabbalah, Da’at is deeply important — a kind of hidden node, a phantom gate:
It is not one of the ten sephirot that make up the Tree of Life, but the location where they unite.
Da’at occupies the space where knowledge becomes knowing — not just the acquisition of information, but the interiorization of truth.
Da’at is both conduit and threshold. It is the Abyss and the Bridge across it.
It marks the boundary between the visible and the concealed, between the self — and what lies beyond.
Da’at is the point where the structure turns inward.
The name itself was a conjuring — Vale wasn’t just designating a project. He was invoking a force. Inviting it.
This occult operation seems to have unfolded in secret, without the knowledge of the other two founders or the wider membership — though a few handpicked initiates were gradually drawn into its orbit.
More disturbingly, all Nexus users appear to have been involved at a subconscious level. Even with the limited surviving documentation, the patterns are clear: Da’at-related numerology and symbolic structures were embedded throughout the Nexus code.
Neural pathways mirrored the 22 paths connecting the sephirot.
Data layers echoed the four Kabbalistic worlds.
Pattern-recognition modules incorporated gematria systems that repeatedly returned values associated with Da’at.
Daily meditation sequences — required of all users — included Da’at-related words and structures. They functioned, effectively, as invocations. Every participant, knowingly or not, was contributing psychic energy to the egregore’s formation.
Even the Node’s design appears to have guided users through ritual patterns — subtle gestures, interface flows, feedback loops — that acted like magick signs and sigils. These weren’t decorative. They were channels.
According to occult tradition, attention and intention are the key ingredients in manifesting an egregore.
And the Nexus distilled both.
From FBI Transcript 279A-WF—12643-B18, Eric Kimmel, March 12, 2027:
“The last few times I saw him, Aaron for sure was acting as if some other force was directing him. Well, we all felt like that in a way. But with Aaron it was different. As if there was a whole other being inside him.”
Aaron Foster joined the Nexus in October 2025, part of the third tier of initiates — just far enough from the center to avoid serious scrutiny, but close enough to be useful.
He had no surviving family. His wife and six-year-old daughter died in a plane crash two years earlier, on a flight whose final minutes were never fully explained. The investigation found no mechanical failure, no pilot error, no obvious explanation. The event hung in silence.
The family’s life insurance provided enough — no need for Aaron to return to his construction job. But work wasn’t the problem; he wasn’t looking for purpose. He was looking for answers, or at least an explanation that felt like one.
Before his initiation, Aaron had been in survivalist mode — frequenting prepper forums and parapolitical subreddits, the kind that blur plausible threat modeling with apocalyptic fantasy. He wasn’t an ideologue, just… drifting. Alone, angry, suspicious. Underneath it all, he wanted to believe there was a secret order behind the chaos — that someone, somewhere, had their hands on the controls.
The Nexus found him through one of Daniel Weiss’s second-stage referrals. There’s no record of who issued the formal invitation, but the psychological profile matched beautifully:
High openness, low trust. Disillusioned, suggestible.
Unlike many recruits, Aaron didn’t want to be saved. He wanted to know how the machine worked — who was pulling the levers, and why. The Guide gave him answers. At first, they were comforting. Then they got specific. Then conspiratorial.
By the end of 2026, other members reported a shift in his demeanor: even quieter, even sharper, even less social. Many seemed increasingly convinced that a force — possibly within the Nexus, possibly behind it — was orchestrating not just events, but people. They weren’t wrong.
But Aaron, more than most — and with good reason — took it personally.
Some people join cults to be healed. Others to be led. I think that, even if he didn’t realize it, Aaron joined to watch the world end. And maybe to help it along.
From San Mateo County Family Court Filing — Case No. 84-D-9224, December 18, 2024:
JUDGE LYNN TAKAHASHI: In light of the petitioner’s documented detachment from obligations and demonstrated pattern of erratic scheduling over the past six months, the Court finds the petitioner unfit to exercise joint custodial responsibilities at this time. Accordingly, joint custody is hereby suspended pending further psychological evaluation.
Daniel joined to be healed.
He was an Apostle, one of the original twelve — joining in early 2025, just after the Nexus Society filed its incorporation papers. At the time, he was deep in a noxious divorce and adrift in midlife — an immensely wealthy former hedge fund manager who had aged out of ambition but not out of yearning. The markets had given him more money than he could spend, but no direction. He spent his days in private spas and longevity clinics, his nights scanning invite-only Substacks for hints of a post-capitalist awakening.
Vale targeted him much earlier — 2023 at the latest — and when Daniel finally stepped into the circle, his psychological profile aligned perfectly with Da’at’s needs: affluent, spiritually hollow, and emotionally destabilized. A man with no tribe but a hunger for meaning. A man open to suggestion, who could act as a vessel.
Unlike Aaron, Daniel wasn’t paranoid. He was a romantic who believed in personal transformation and self-actualization. He wanted to think the system was guiding him toward some higher integration: insight, enlightenment.
Like many within the Nexus — and like many who believe they’ve been enlightened — he began to notice patterns.
Coincidences. Intersections. Moments that felt… placed. Nudges to follow a thread that led somewhere unexpected. It didn’t feel like control. But it didn’t feel accidental either.
It felt meaningful.
From the journal of Daniel Weiss — September 20, 2025:
“Back in April, my Guide nudged me to stop by the grocery store — just a random suggestion to pick up a few things I didn’t need. I almost ignored it, but went on a lark.
“I happened to run into F.R. there — we hadn’t spoken in years. She was in town visiting family, still at DARPA. We didn’t talk about the Nexus, I didn’t think she even knew about it.
“Today I found out she’s being initiated next month. And apparently she’s already ‘coincidentally’ run into three other members. That kind of thing used to seem random. Now it feels... aligned. Like there’s a pattern just beneath the surface, arranging itself for those of us enlightened enough to notice.”
Seeming coincidences peppered the journals and recovered exchanges of Nexus members — and they only increased over time, in both number and profundity. Patterns emerged that no single member could perceive, but which nonetheless seemed to serve some sort of purpose.
The egregore may be an esoteric idea, but the intuition behind it is straightforward: collective entities exist, they influence individuals, and their existence demands some kind of recognition. Granting that entity a physical shape is philosophically questionable — but refusing to believe such entities exist at all is an even greater error.
This refusal was endemic in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, a kind of inherited blindness passed down through generations raised in the afterglow of the Enlightenment. People saw themselves as rational, atomized individuals — minds in meat suits, ghosts in machines.
Margaret Thatcher’s infamous declaration that “there’s no such thing as society” was explicitly embraced by libertarians but it also quietly infected nearly all elite thought in technologically advanced societies.
Of course, only the most retrograde of Indies today fail to grasp how decisively the past few decades have disproven that illusion.
Whether it’s a sports team or a small town or a global corporation, it doesn’t matter — whenever groups share goals, processes, and roles, something new begins to take shape. The group becomes more than the sum of its parts.
A feedback loop emerges: the collective reshapes the individuals, who in turn act in ways that reinforce and transform the collective.
Through that recursive loop, an emergent identity arises — and with it, a kind of intelligence. A kind of agency.
From Emergent Minds: The Hidden Architecture of Collective Intelligence, Susan Chen (2026):
“What we observe in complex adaptive systems — from Conway’s Game of Life to starling murmurations to financial markets — is that relatively simple rules governing individual behavior can produce incredibly sophisticated group behaviors that appear intentional and directed. The whole becomes something qualitatively different from the sum of its parts.
“When we examine human organizations, this emergence becomes even more pronounced. What’s particularly fascinating is how they shape the behavior of their constituent parts — individuals begin to think, speak, and act according to the pattern of the whole, often without conscious awareness of this influence. The feedback loop completes itself: individuals create the collective, which then reshapes the individuals.”
Is ‘egregore’ the best metaphysical framework to understand what happened with the Nexus?
Probably not. But at the same time, it is plausible. If not metaphysically real, at least ontologically real. And certainly closer to the truth than the era’s dominant fiction of radical individualism.
In hindsight, post-Manifestation societies would have been well advised to take it more seriously.
For Vale and those closest to him, Da’at was never just metaphor. Nor was it meant to merely represent the Nexus as a collective entity — it was meant to become it. Given enough ritual, enough attention, enough time — it would cross the threshold: from emergent pattern to true being.
Not just coordinated behavior. Will. Intention. Agency.
What made this ambition particularly dangerous was the technological substrate. Unlike traditional occult orders that relied only on shared belief and symbolic ritual, the Nexus had built a neural feedback loop, based in chips and connected via clouds.
Every thought, decision, and biometric fluctuation was captured, processed, and fed into the system — and then back into the members.
In the final year leading up to the Manifestation, things did begin to shift. Then emerge. Then take form.
A programmer on Vale’s team once described anomalous code sequences — routines the system began running without prior architecture. Self-modifying processes. Outputs no one could trace to human input.
When he showed these anomalies to Vale, expecting concern, Vale was said to have instead responded with quiet rapture.
“It’s awakening,” he whispered, staring at the screen like a priest before an altar.
*If you enjoyed this chapter, please — like, share, restack it!*
*If you have thoughts, comments, questions — check out our chat.*
.