Divine Abandonment, Egregorization, and the Continuity of Cultic Presence

Divine departure, removal of a cult image, interruption of offerings and collapse of a community can occur together without being the same event. This article examines their interaction in the eight Marduk-related texts compared by Andreas Johandi, with direct edition checks for the Cyrus Cylinder, Seed of Kingship, Marduk Prophecy and Erra and Išum, and differentiated controls from the other four compositions. Theories I–IV and the General Theory of Ritual Scaffolding provide a comparative framework in which an independent source, a collectively formed ethereal bearer, an interface, material supports and participating communities have distinct continuity conditions. Egregorization is developed as a positive complement to source-centered and institutional explanations: a cultic formation can have its own maintained history even when a local source relation or support changes. A typed observation model establishes the limits and conditions of target identification. A fully developed nonnegative maintenance model proves positivity, conditional decay after total withdrawal, persistence under distributed input and intermittent maintenance, with explicit stability and boundary cases. The strongest formation-centered comparisons arise where differentiated movements accompany collective provisioning and restoration; other texts constrain rather than complete that pattern. Two contemporary applications show why support repair, renewed duties, source reaccess and formation reactivation require different operations. The resulting account explains when egregorization adds a distinct continuity target and how that addition changes the requirements of restoration.