Ummo · the letters
A complete alien civilisation, built entirely on paper.
Typed letters circulating in Spain from 1966 ran to thousands of pages of physics, sociology and cosmology. Worth keeping in the catalogue precisely as a documented case of how a whole civilisation gets constructed in text, with no witnesses required.
Origin code
Claimed to have travelled here from another star system in an ordinary physical body.
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
Founded on texts of contested or admitted authorship rather than on witnesses.
From 1966
Thousands of pages of alien physics and sociology circulated in Spain. In 1993 the psychologist José Luis Jordán Peña claimed he had written them.
Documented harm
The founding documents have contested authorship, or someone has claimed to have written them. Treat anything built on top as built on sand.
Tradition-side
There is nothing to do here: no inherited method of engagement, whether the tradition is a text, an argument or a set of reports. Anyone offering you one has invented it.
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.