If You Go Looking

Astral entities

EL/1/O

Non-human consciousness without bodies

Defined mainly by what it lacks.

A catch-all in Western esoteric systems for intelligences said to exist on a plane adjacent to the physical, with no persistent form of their own. Almost anything can be assigned to it, which is why it explains very little: the same objection that applies to the ultraterrestrial umbrella, but without the argument behind it.

If you go looking

Tradition warns against contactEngaged through channelling

This is where attachment is most directly claimed, and where practitioners in those traditions are most insistent on preparation and closing. If you take the framework seriously at all, this is the part it warns about.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

EL/1/O

Earth-native, liminal · embodiment 1 of 5, consciousness with no persistent form · source: occult system · key

Dates

Esoteric usage: 19th century onward

Related

The Earth-native mirror of the unembodied branch: same claim about substance, different claim about address.

Devas →Higher-dimensional collectives →Ultraterrestrials →

Terms used on this page

EL: Earth-native, liminal

Origin code

Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.

Degree of embodiment: 1, consciousness with no persistent form

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.

O: occult system

Source code

Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.

Tradition warns against contact

Tradition-side

The tradition's own practitioners advise against seeking this out deliberately. Worth weighing on its own terms: the people closest to the material are the ones counselling distance.

Engaged through channelling

Practice-side

Contact in this tradition means trance, mediumship or automatic writing. The risks are the practice's, not the entity's: dissociation, sustained altered states, and the difficulty of telling one's own material from something external. Least suitable for anyone with a history of psychosis, mania or dissociation.

Attachment

Belief within the tradition

Spiritualist and Western esoteric practice holds that contact can leave something behind: an influence that persists after the session and degrades the person's health, mood or judgement. It is a belief rather than a demonstrated mechanism, but it is a serious and internally consistent one, and it is the reason practitioners in those traditions insist on preparation and closing. Reported experiences of it are real experiences whatever their cause, and distressing ones.

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.

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