Tulpa
| Tulpa | |
|---|---|
| Coined by | Alexandra David-Néel (Western usage) |
| Related concepts | Egregore, Network Spirituality |
| Field | Occultism; internet culture |
Tulpa is a concept describing a being or object created through concentrated mental attention, held to take on a degree of autonomous existence independent of its creator. Derived from Tibetan Buddhist notions of emanation and popularized in the West by the French explorer Alexandra David-Néel, the term passed through twentieth-century occultism and, in the 2010s, became the basis of "tulpamancy," an internet subculture built around the deliberate cultivation of imagined companions. It belongs to the same family of thoughtform concepts as the egregore, differing chiefly in that a tulpa is produced by a single individual rather than a collective.
Origins in Tibetan Buddhism
The English word derives from the Tibetan sprul-pa (Wylie transliteration), meaning "emanation" or "magical creation," a concept related to the Sanskrit nirmāṇa and to Buddhist teachings on the mind-made body. In its original context the term describes an emanation produced by an enlightened being or an accomplished practitioner, illustrating Buddhist doctrines about the constructed and mind-dependent nature of perceived reality.
The concept entered Western awareness chiefly through Alexandra David-Néel, whose Magic and Mystery in Tibet (1929) recounted the Tibetan practice of conjuring a tulpa through prolonged visualization and ritual concentration.[1] David-Néel claimed to have created a tulpa in the form of a jolly monk, which over months of practice took on a life of its own, grew leaner and more sinister, and could be glimpsed by others, until she found it necessary to dissolve the figure through a lengthy effort of reabsorption. Her account established the two features that define the Western concept: that sustained attention can generate an apparently independent entity, and that such an entity may escape its creator's control.
Western esotericism
David-Néel's account merged with an existing occult vocabulary of "thoughtforms." Theosophical writers Annie Besant and C. W. Leadbeater had described and illustrated thought-forms as visible mental and emotional emanations in their 1905 book of that name, and the tulpa was readily assimilated to this framework.[2] In twentieth-century Western occultism the tulpa became a general term for an entity deliberately created by focused will and imagination, closely associated with the egregore and with the broader magical premise that mental activity can produce autonomous forms. Paranormal literature extended the idea to explanations of hauntings and apparitions as unintended thoughtforms.
Internet culture and tulpamancy
In the early 2010s the tulpa was taken up by online communities that reframed it as a secular psychological practice. Discussion coalesced on 4chan's paranormal board and, notably, within the My Little Pony fandom, before migrating to dedicated forums and the Reddit community r/Tulpas.[2] Practitioners, who call themselves tulpamancers, describe deliberately developing an imagined companion — a "tulpa" — through sustained visualization and narration, a process termed "forcing," until the tulpa is experienced as having its own personality, autonomy, and inner voice. Advanced practitioners describe phenomena such as imposition (perceiving the tulpa in the environment) and switching (allowing the tulpa to control the body).
Academic and journalistic study has generally approached tulpamancy as a contemporary practice of imaginative absorption and self-directed companionship rather than a supernatural claim, situating it within a longer history of vivid imaginary companions and dissociative experience. Within internet culture the term also circulates loosely as a byword for any idea or persona that seems to take on a life of its own once collectively willed into being.
Relation to Remilia
The tulpa belongs to the same family of thoughtform concepts as the egregore, which is part of Remilia Corporation's theoretical vocabulary. Where an egregore is generated collectively by a group, a tulpa is produced by a single individual's sustained concentration; both describe an autonomous entity brought into being through directed mental attention. Remilia's interest in personas that acquire independent life — its treatment of Milady as a distributed persona, and its account of the Miya persona as functioning less as a single operator than as an egregore-like distributed intelligence — engages the same conceptual territory as the tulpa. Both concepts also belong to the occult-inflected internet culture, spanning imageboards and esoteric forums, from which Remilia's network spirituality draws.