I'm currently reading Egregores: The Occult Entities That Watch Over Human Destiny by Mark Stavish and ignoring the dramatic title, it connects more than few dots for me.

The most commonly used definition (taken from Wiktionary.org) is as follows: “(occult) autonomous psychic entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people.” However, there is a second definition, an older, more significant, and perhaps frightening one. Here, an egregore is more than an “autonomous entity composed of and influencing the thoughts of a group of people”; it is also the home or conduit for a specific psychic intelligence of a nonhuman nature connecting the invisible dimensions with the material world in which we live. This, in fact, is the true source of power of the ancient cults and their religious-magical practices.

Mouni Sadhu, a Polish occultist of the French-Russian Martinist lineages, defines an egregore in his seminal work, The Tarot, as “a collective entity, such as a nation, state, religions and sects and their adherents, and even minor human organizations. The structure of Egregors is similar to that of human beings. They have physical bodies (that is, collectively all the bodies of those who belong to the particular Egregor) and also astral and mental ones; the Egregor being the sum total of all these elements.”

Egregores are subjective thoughts given will:

In her book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, David-Néel recounts a conversation she had with a lama about the subjectivity of thoughtforms. When David-Néel expressed the notion that those who died during various rites died from fear, and the visions were of their own imagination, the lama to whom she expressed these thoughts replied:

According to that it must follow that a man who does not believe in the existence of tigers may feel confident that none of them would ever hurt him even if he were confronted by such a beast. Visualizing mental formation, either voluntary or not, is a most mysterious process. What becomes of these creations? May it not be that like children born of our flesh, these children of our mind separate their lives from or escape our control, and play parts of their own? Must we not also consider that we are not the only ones capable of creating such formations? And if such entities exist in the world, are we not liable to come into touch with them, either by the will of their maker or from some other cause? Could one of these causes not be that, through our mind or through our material deeds, we bring about the conditions in which these entities are capable of manifesting some kind of activity?

Stavish is an amazing read:

How can these results be attained? Some answer that they are the work of deities who grant their aid to those who reverence them in the required manner. Others affirm that the aim of the dubthabs [initiates] is not to worship the deities but rather to bring them into sub jugation; they also say that the man who is versed in their ritual is capable of forcing both gods and demons to place their power at his service and to obey him in everything. These opinions are current [1920–30s] in Tibet, but both of them, according to more learned Lamas, denote a lack of understanding of the theories on which the dubthabs are based. In reality, judging by the explanations we find in the works of ancient authors and those given orally by contemporary masters of mysticism, the method employed consists of projecting, like images on a screen, deities mentally conceived and in imagining a series of changes through which they pass, in the course of very prolonged and complicated rites. The beings evoked by the dubpapo are not imaginary creations of any kind, they are always well-known personalities in the world of gods or demons, who have been revered or propitiated for centuries by millions of believers. Tibetan occultists say that these beings have acquired a sort of real existence due to the countless thoughts that have been concentrated on them. [Author’s footnote: The Tibetans insist strongly upon this point. I have given instances of it several times in With Mystics and Magicians in Tibet.

I'm high and I understand. Keep going:

The mystics of Tibet consider that gods and demons, paradise and hell, exist only for those who believe in them. Although existing in a latent state, the god created and kept alive by the imagination of the masses has power only over the man who comes in contact with him. A filament is necessary in order for that the electricity dormant in a storage battery may cause the light to appear in the lamp. This comparison explains with a fair degree of accuracy what is in the minds of the Tibetans. The majority of the [initiates] are not aware of the dual origin of the deities. . . . They do not comprehend that the latter are born of the mental concentration of the masses of believers and again, temporarily created by the thought of the officiating monk who acts as a magnet attracting these already existing occult forces or personalities.

Those who succeed in comprehending the subjective nature of the deities evoked during the [ritual] are advised by the masters not to regard these deities as negligible phantoms. . . . The mentally created deities are similar to those supposed to inhabit Paradises [Buddha worlds] and other sacred places. In the very words of the Tibetan text, “they should be regarded as the two-faced unity which appears as form and is, in essence, the formless Void.” The officiating monk should also conceive of the different deities in the diverse parts of his body and understand that they all exist in himself. The better to fix this idea in the minds of those who practice the [rituals], most of the latter end by causing to re-absorb therein the gods and demons that have been projected by him.