Historically a spirit, an elf, a small supernatural being, often attached to water or air; later occult systems narrowed it toward nature and elemental beings. There is also a genuine coincidence worth keeping straight: atmospheric sprites are a real electrical phenomenon named after the folkloric creature, and are not the same category of thing at all.
Sharing the world with us, ordinarily imperceptible, able to become briefly visible. The oldest and largest branch.
Degree of embodiment: 2 to 3, energetic or subtle to 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.
Atmospheric sprites
Real phenomenon
Transient luminous events: enormous, extremely brief electrical discharges roughly 50 to 90 km above thunderstorms, photographed since 1989. Physicists named them after the folkloric creature because both are luminous and gone in an instant. They are not alive, and the coincidence is only a coincidence.
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.