The modern esoteric synthesis
A container, not a being.
A nineteenth and twentieth-century umbrella that collapsed fae, elementals, nymphs and local spirits into one category of consciousness associated with places and ecosystems. Useful as a bridge term; misleading if taken as evidence that all those traditions were describing the same thing.
A container term produced by nineteenth-century synthesis; the cautions belong to the traditions it absorbed.
Origin code
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
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 code
Produced by an esoteric school that organised inherited material into a scheme: Paracelsus, Theosophy and their descendants.
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.
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.