Beings identified with a specific living thing rather than a category of thing. In the case of the hamadryad, so tightly that she dies when the tree does. The purest form of the spirit-of-place idea anywhere in the catalogue.
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
Degree of embodiment: 2, energetic or subtle
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.
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.
Hamadryads
Greek tradition
Nymphs bound so tightly to a specific tree that they die when it does. The purest form of the spirit-of-place idea: the being is identified with one living thing, not a category of thing.
Reciprocal obligation
Tradition-side
The relationship is framed as exchange rather than encounter. Something is owed, offence has consequences, and the arrangement can be broken by carelessness, which makes casual experimentation a category error within the tradition itself.
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.