Little people of Spain and Latin America, the Maya lands and Hawaiʻi.
Duendes are the household and field sprites of Spain, carried to Latin America and the Philippines. Aluxes are small, usually unseen guardians of Maya fields and forest in the Yucatán, where farmers still build little houses for them and offerings may be made before land is cleared. The menehune of Hawaiʻi are credited with building fishponds, walls and temples, in some stories in a single night. They matter here as a test of the small-folk archetype. Duendes travelled with Spanish colonists, and aluxes may have mixed with them, so the menehune are the clearest case independent of Europe. Even there, one scholarly reading makes them a memory of commoners whose work was later credited to a separate people.
Aluxes in particular are part of living practice in the Yucatán, where asking permission and making offerings is the expected conduct. Treat the custom as local belief, not as entertainment.
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
Degree of embodiment: 3, comes and goes
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.
F: pre-modern folklore
Source code
Inherited oral tradition with no author and no publication date, in several cases continuous to the present.
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.
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.
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.