South Asian beings attached to forests, water and buried wealth, neither good nor evil, and capable of considerable benevolence or danger depending on how they are treated. Like brownies, they are defined by locality and reciprocity rather than by species.
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.
R: living religion
Source code
An element of a religion currently practised by large numbers of people, not a folklore curiosity, and handled here accordingly.
Element of a living religion
Tradition-side
Held by very large numbers of people as religious truth rather than folklore. The appropriate approach is the tradition's own, through its own scholars and practitioners, not entity-collecting.
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.
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.