About this guide
A field guide to non-human intelligence traditions: what each one claims, where the description came from, and whether anyone else arrived at it independently.
The approach
This catalogues traditions and how they arose. Nothing here asserts that any of these beings exist. The useful question is not “is it real?” but “where did this description come from, and did anyone arrive at it independently?” The cautions are recorded on the same basis: what a tradition warns is a fact about the tradition, and the risks worth taking seriously here belong to the practices, not to the beings.
Compiled as a comparative catalogue of claims and their sources. Dates refer to publication or to the first fixed account, not to any event. Where a tradition has a single identifiable origin, that is stated; where it does not, that absence is itself the finding. Several traditions here (djinn, kami, nāgas, yakshas) are elements of living religions rather than curiosities, and are treated accordingly.
What counts as non-human
The guide covers intelligences described as something other than human: beings that are met, reported, channelled or theorised, and a few that people say they made. It leaves out ghosts and the spirits of the dead, because by definition they were human, and figures such as the Ascended Masters, who are described as former humans. Animal minds and artificial intelligence are separate subjects and are not covered here.
Not advice
For information only. This is a record of what traditions claim and where those claims came from, not instruction for practice, and not medical, psychological or spiritual advice. If you have had an experience that is frightening you, or you are finding that contact work is affecting your sleep, your mood, or your grip on things, this is the wrong resource. Speak to your GP, and to someone who knows you well.
How to use the guide
Open any entry to read it in full; the dotted words carry an ⓘ (hover on a desktop, tap on a phone), and the related names at the bottom of each entry will take you straight there. Each open entry also carries an If you go looking note: what the tradition itself says about approach, and what harm is actually documented. Every entry also has its own page (“Open full page” in each open card), which you can bookmark or link to.
Reading the codes
Every entry carries a code such as XT/5/E: origin / degree of embodiment / source. A “+” means both sources apply; “→” means a tradition moved from one kind of source to another.
Origin
XT: extraterrestrial, biological
Origin code
Claimed to have travelled here from another star system in an ordinary physical body.
UN: origin uncertain
Origin code
Reported with some consistency but carrying no origin claim in the encounters themselves. Filing these as alien is an assumption the listener adds.
EN: Earth-native, biological
Origin code
Ordinary bodies and ordinary evolutionary history. Not us, but never anywhere else either.
EL: Earth-native, liminal
Origin code
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
XD: extraterrestrial, unembodied
Origin code
Said to come from outside the Earth, whether another star system or another dimension, and to have no physical body now. A few traditions say they once had one; most never say.
META: outside the system
Origin code
Not a being to sit alongside the others. A framework that reframes the whole catalogue, a tradition that travelled in the opposite direction from the rest, or an intelligence people say they made rather than met.
Embodiment
Degree of embodiment
Scale, 1 to 5
5 is an ordinary biological body. 4 is physical but manifests oddly. 3 comes and goes. 2 is energetic or subtle. 1 is consciousness with no persistent form. Note that this tends to fall as a tradition ages.
Source
E: recurring reports
Source code
Described by many apparently unconnected witnesses. The strongest category in the guide, and the smallest.
C: contactee tradition
Source code
Traceable to one named person's claimed meetings. Detailed, often internally consistent, and rarely corroborated by anyone who did not read the first account.
N: channelled material
Source code
Received by a medium speaking on behalf of the intelligence. The content is generally ethical and cosmological rather than descriptive: instruction, not testimony.
F: pre-modern folklore
Source code
Inherited oral tradition with no author and no publication date, in several cases continuous to the present.
R: living religion
Source code
An element of a religion currently practised by large numbers of people, not a folklore curiosity, and handled here accordingly.
O: occult system
Source code
Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.
D: disputed documents
Source code
Founded on texts of contested or admitted authorship rather than on witnesses.
S: speculative hypothesis
Source code
Offered explicitly as a proposal rather than a report. Rare in this field, and worth noticing when it happens.
W: official testimony
Source code
Claims made on the record by named officials, service personnel or contractors, usually about evidence they say others hold. The speaker is real and accountable; the evidence is not yet public.
If you go looking
Deliberate contact work
Read this first
The hazard in this subject attaches to the method, not to which name you aim it at. Ouija work, invocation, sustained channelling, induced hypnagogia, deliberate sleep deprivation and hypnotic regression are the practices associated with difficulty, and a session aimed at a benevolent civilisation is not safer than one aimed at something considered lower. What raises risk is doing it alone, doing it repeatedly, doing it while sleep-deprived, and doing it with an existing vulnerability to psychosis, mania or dissociation. People who get into trouble here overwhelmingly got there through practice, not through reading.
Who should be careful
Practice-side
Anyone with a personal or family history of psychosis, bipolar disorder or dissociative conditions, anyone in acute crisis, and anyone isolated from people who would notice a change in them. Intensive contact practice is destabilising by design (that is what it is for), and destabilisation lands hardest on people already close to an edge.
Contact
Corrections and sources are welcome: email (shown when you click).