If You Go Looking

Elementals

EL/2/O

Gnomes · sylphs · undines · salamanders

A sixteenth-century taxonomy, not a folk tradition.

The four-fold scheme comes from Paracelsus, who systematised scattered folk beings into a tidy classification. That is worth noticing: this is an early attempt at exactly what this guide is doing. Theosophy later described them as inhabiting subtler grades of matter.

If you go looking

Protocol existsTradition warns against contact

The Western esoteric systems that formalised these also formalised warnings about summoning, preparation and closing, the origin of the attachment concern in modern practice.

Who should be careful

Reading the code

EL/2/O

Earth-native, liminal · embodiment 2 of 5, energetic or subtle · source: occult system · key

Dates

Systematised: 16th century

Reworked: late 19th century

Related

A tidying-up of gnomes, sprites and nymphs into a scheme, not a discovery of four species.

Sprites →Nature spirits →Devas →The fae →

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: 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.

O: occult system

Source code

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

Paracelsus

16th century

Sorted scattered folk beings into a four-element scheme of gnomes, sylphs, undines and salamanders. Worth noticing that this is not a folk tradition but an early attempt at exactly what this guide is doing.

Theosophy

Movement, from 1875

Introduced planes of subtler matter, hierarchies of nature intelligences and inhabited planets on the spiritual rather than physical level. Supplied the vocabulary (vibration, density, ascended teachers) that channelled ufology runs on eighty years later.

Protocol exists

Tradition-side

The tradition carries specific rules for approach: things not to accept, say, take or give. Long lists of do-nots usually mean a long history of people treating the encounter as consequential, whatever was actually being encountered.

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.

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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