The Origins of the Tulpa & Thoughtform

In the realm of occult praxis and mythology, the boundaries of reality and imagination often intertwine. But as we saw on May 31st 2014 when two 12 year old girls in Waukesha Wisconsin lured their friend into a forest and brutally stabbed her in an act of ritual sacrifice attempting to contact and become Proxies of the Creepypasta sensation Slenderman, this isn’t always a good thing. 

A few years before that shocking stabbing in Wisconsin, I started seeing an idea making the rounds in occult forums online that pop culture Creepypastas such as Slenderman & the Rake might have become living, real creatures through a process of focused attention. While the character of Slendy might have originated in the imagination of Eric Knudsen in 2009, through the collective belief, intention and attention of thousands of internet users, there was growing belief that it had taken on literal existence as a kind of pseudo spirit. People were quick to invoke the “legendary” idea of a Tulpa from Tibetan tradition, warning, that

“Has anyone thought about the possibility that we are creating a tulpa? It's a thought form that is realised through the efforts of a group of people. We might be creating the Slender Man, making him real.”

This isn’t the first time the idea of pop culture spirits or thoughtforms have come up in discourse. Thoughtforms have been a staple of Western Esotericism since the late 19th century where the Theosophists invoked the Tibetan concept of the Tulpa, claiming that in Tibet imagined entities can become real and even turn on their creators. Since then, the idea has flooded into Chaos Magic circles in the form of servitors and egregores with discussions of being able to create your own spirits, complete with sigils and a “fatal flaw” if it starts to rebel. 

But as an academic, I find myself asking what the origins of this tradition are, and how much of the Western Tradition of Thoughtforms actually lines up with the historical Tibetan Tulpa, or what a Tulpa even is. As it turns out, after doing some research, linguistic and archival evidence shows that the encounter between Tibetan Buddhism and Theosophy shifted the meaning of certain Buddhist terms and concepts. As a result, concepts of “emanations'' found in Mahäyäna Buddhism were misinterpreted through the lens of Theosophical metaphysics. When we really unpack things, the modern western thoughtform is not only misunderstood, but also has nothing really to do with the Tibetan tulpa.

The earliest English mention I can find of the word “tulpa” appears in 1929 in Alexandra David Neele’s book Magic and Mystery in Tibet, in which she recounts her journey studying meditation techniques with monks and defines it as a kind of “phantom”. 

She likens the word to another, similar -but different, tibetan word, “tulku”, which she identifies as “a kind of  form created by magic”. By her own admission, the difference between a tulpa and a tulku is confusing and not well understood, but she claims that a tulpa is created by a magician whereas a tulku is created as an emanation of an enlightened being such as a buddha, and are therefore longer lasting. 

Tulku is itself a Tibetan transliteration of the sanskrit and buddhism technical term Nirmanakhaya, which describes the third Emanation Body of a Buddha. In traditional Mahayana Doctrine formally codified in the fourth century CE Yogäcära treatises, we learn that Buddhas (and sometimes bodhisattvas) have three “bodies” or forms: a cosmic “truth” body (dharmakdya), an “enjoyment body (sambhogakâya), and a Nirmanakaya, Emanation Body that they can manifest into the physical world to help suffering beings.

Through techniques that Neele supposedly learnt from monks and native Tibetans, she claims in her book that she was able to create a Tulpa through “prescribed concentration of thought and other rites”. She explains that she created a Tulpa in the form of a western monk so as not to confuse it with other buddhist deities. In her description she vividly explains the process and experience she went through:

“I shut myself in tsams (meditative seclusion) and proceeded to perform the prescribed concentration of thought and other rites. After a few months the phantom Monk was formed. His form grew gradually fixed and lifelike looking. He became a kind of guest, living in my apartment. I then broke my seclusion and started for a tour, with my servants and tents. The monk included himself in the party.

Though I lived in the open, riding on horseback for miles each day, the illusion persisted. I saw the fat tulpa; now and then it was not necessary for me to think of him to make him appear. The phantom performed various actions of the kind that are natural to travellers and that I had not commanded. For instance, he walked, stopped, and looked around him. The illusion was mostly visual, but sometimes I felt as if a robe was lightly rubbing against me, and once a hand seemed to touch my shoulder.

The features which I had imagined, when building my phantom, gradually underwent a change. The fat, chubby-cheeked fellow grew leaner, his face assumed a vaguely mocking, sly, malignant look. He became more troublesome and bold. In brief, he escaped my control. Once, a herdsman who brought me a present of butter saw the tulpa in my tent and took it for a living lama.

I ought to have let the phenomenon follow its course, but the presence of that unwanted companion began to prove trying to my nerves; it turned into a "day-nightmare”.... so I decided to dissolve the phantom. I succeeded, but only after six months of hard struggle. My mind-creature was tenacious of life."

Both Tulpas and Tulkus also appear in Evans Wentz’ translation of the Tibetan Book of Great Liberation, published in 1954 in which he built on Neele’s ideas, claiming that “an incarnate deity, like the Dalai or Tashi Lama is called a Tulku by tibetans, and that of a magician a Tulpa (sprulpa), meaning a magically produced illusion or creation.” 

Interestingly,, both Neele and Wentz seem to have relied on the translation efforts and interpretation services of the same man, Kazi Dawa Samdup. Samdup was an important interpreter for the British and an influential translator out of a school in Darjeeling. Although he wasn’t a monk, he apparently had an interest in religion and esotericism, Neele even refers to him as “almost a mystic” at one point. 

In fact, there’s a chance the core groundwork for the Western idea of the Tulpa was laid by Samdup and Wentz a few years earlier in 1927 in their translation of the Tibetan Book of the Dead. While he doesn’t use the word Tulpa directly, the terms “thought-form” and “elemental” do appear in his translation which he wrote while working closely with Wentz.

While Neele claims her idea of the Tulpa was grounded on “Tibetan principles”, the way she describes it bears far more resemblance in practice to the Thought Forms and Elements discussed by Theosophists Annine Besant and Charles Leadbeater in the early 20th century. In Tibetan Buddhism, buddhas and advanced practitioners can create emanations which then act as extensions of their creator. By contrast, the thought-forms discussed by Theosophists, tulpas described by Néel, and pop culture servitors like Slender Man described by modern occultists often are created unintentionally and can turn on their creators. 

In other words, the modern idea of a tulpa or thoughtform/servitor that you hear about in modern esoteric circles seems to have originated with 19th-century theosophists, was disproportionately attributed to Tibetan Buddhism by early-twentieth-century adventurers, and then rediscovered by modern paranormal lore as a “Tibetan” concept.

One of the first pop culture references to a tulpa I can find is in the work of John Keele in his infamous 1975 book “The Mothman Prophecies”. He talks about a supposed haunting in New York in a house formerly owned by Walter Gibson, author of the popular Shadow series of novels. Apparently… People living in the house complained that they were terrified by a ghost that looked an awful lot like the main character of the Shadow. In his account, Keel invokes the tulpa saying that “the Tibetans believe that advanced human minds can manipulate invisible energies into visible forms called tulpas, and create thought projections…. Is it possible that Gibson’s intense concentration on his novel inadvertently brought his character to life?”

Back in 2010, Brad Steiger also seems to have talked about the idea, using Keel as a source in his book “Real Zombies: The Living Dead and Creatures of the Apocalypse”, again saying that “According to certain eastern metaphysicans, thoughts, emotions and mental emanations add to the strength of a tulpa, enabling it to accumulate power and grow… sometimes though, even the most accomplished adepts and magicians confess that their tulpa becomes rebellious”. 

A year before this in 2009, famous catholic demonologists Ed and Loraine Warren, famous for the conjuring horror movie series, were interviewed about their occult museum and Ed presented a halloween mask to the camera saying that it was used in “black magic” rituals to “create a physical manifestation of a Tulpa”. Outside of these occurrences, ideas about a tulpa have appeared in everything from Supernatural to the X Files. Given the prevalence of books out there in the occult community on including a fatal flaw in your thoughtform/tulpa, we can characterise the common understanding of thoughtforms right now to be creatures or spirits that can be created by anyone, even without thinking about it consciously. They can be created through simply enough attention on them, even by the general public. Thoughtforms are often considered conscious beings that exist independent of their creator and are capable of rebellion or are even dangerous if you’re not careful.  

This idea has absolutely no precedence in Tibetan Tradition. So let’s unpack it. To start with, Tibetan is hard… the way it’s transliterated into English is with something known as the Wylie Transliteration system. The word tulpa is transliterated in this system as “sprul-pa” in English, and its the noun form of the verb “sprul-ba”. That root “sprul” is the same stem that’s used in the word “sprul sku”, which we mentioned earlier as the word tulku in english. As I mentioned earlier, tulku is the tibetan translation of the Sanskrit Nirmanakhaya, the third emanation body of a Buddha. Interestingly, the modern Dalai Lama is often referred to as a Tulku since he is the reincarnation of the previous Dalai Lama. In this way, any enlightened being who reincarnates for the sake of teaching or helping others is referred to as a Tulku, since the Incarnation is believed to be an “emanation” of that being’s cosmic consciousness/Atman.

Tibetanist Jeffrey Hopkins has argued that sprul pa and sprul sku have a similar usage in Buddhist literature, so advanced spiritual practitioners can theoretically “make an emanation/manifestation”.

Tibetan Archivist Nawang Thomkey has emphasized however, that sprul pa’s were never thought of as arising from thought or belief alone, but rather result from a magician’s craft, a non corporeal spirit or a buddha. The reason being, is that the stem sprul and the noun sprul pa are closely tied in buddhist literature to the compassionate action of a divine being manifesting in the world. There are several instances of the word appearing in the Derge Catalogue of Kangyur, all of which relate the word to biographies of a buddhist teacher who is presented as an emanation of a cosmic buddha. 

The noun sprul pa appears 84 times in a catalogue of the Nyingma Gyubum, the esoteric canon of the Nyingma Gyubum school and it seems to have the same context of being an action of emanation that a powerful being performs to save all others. In fact, in some buddhist texts, sprul pa is even used as a point of comparison to say that something (often the world) is an illusion, likening it to a magician’s trick. This is the core issue with Evanz Wents and Neele’s interpretation of the tulpa. In its original form, it appears to have been portrayed in two ways: 1) as a manifestation or emanation of a divine being brought about intentionally and with love to incarnate or teach and 2) as a metaphor to liken the world to an emanated illusion. By arguing that a tulpa is a scientific or created concept or being, they divorce it from the soteriological context of buddhism. We must recognise the entire world is a Tulpa, an illusionary emanation. 

It seems to have been Neele that came up with the idea that tulpas can be created unintentionally or through collective belief. This cannot be the case in tibetan. The Tibetan language makes a distinction between voluntary and involuntary verbs. “I broke the glass” and “the glass broke” use different verbs for “broke” to show the difference of intent and activity. The seminal Tibetan dictionary, the bod rgya tshig mdzod chen mo, tells us that the verb sprul ba is active, meaning that it is an intentional verb, i.e someone has to intentionally emanate or manifest something when using it. 

See, decades before Wentz and Neele travelled to tibet, the theosophists were talking about thoughtforms, entirely separately to the idea of the tulpa. Annie Besant describes thought forms as “mental images, created or moulded by the mind out of subtle matter of the higher psychic plane”. In her seminal work on Thoughtforms, she argued that ideas and thoughts had a kind of matter of their own that could be seen or recorded by clairvoyants or pendulums. In theory, our thoughts had consequences because they were a subtle matter that was created and dwelled in our aura, influencing it and, as we (and our ideas) travel through space, they have a kind of magnetism to them that attracts like thoughts. Therefore, everyone creates thoughtforms all the time (which are effectively, clumped together masses of etheric energy or matter) which can then influence our aura.

In 1865, she seems to have added the idea of Ensoulment to her argument, claiming that astral elementals could occupy our thoughtform and “play the part of its soul” and thus effectively create an independent entity or spirit. She claimed that positive elementals were attracted to positive thoughts and negative to negative ones. She also seems to have laid the groundwork for the modern idea of an egregore, claiming that:

“When a man sends out a thoughtform, it not only keeps up a magnetic link with him but is drawn towards other thoughtforms of a similar type, and these congregating together on the astral plane form a good or evil force, as the case may be, embodied in a kind of collective entity”

Westerners have long held notions of exoticism about Vedic and Tibetan culture, Blavatsky herself even located her Masters of Ancient Wisdom around the region. It seems then, that the early theosophists appropriated the term tulpa from Tibetan culture to give their own ideas an Orientalist precedent. However, we also can’t forget the role that Tibetans themselves played in the transmission of ideas to the West. Kazi Dawa Samdump was a vital part of the term’s transmission, and it appears that the contemporary idea of the tulpa takes its concept from theosophy and its name from tibet, but is the result of a complex East-West dialogue that resulted in a fusion of theosophical concepts and tibetan nomenclature, one that may very well have begun with Samdup and Evanz Wents. 

Sources

Miles, N, Laycock, J. 2015: Tracking the Tulpa: Exploring the Tibetan Origins of a Contemporary Paranormal Idea. Nova Religio: The Journal of Alternative and Emergent Religions, Volume 19, Issue 1.

David-Neel, A. 1971: Magic and Mystery in Tibet. New York: Dover Publications

Evans-Wentz, W. 2000: The Tibetan Book of Great Liberation. New York: Oxford University Press

Keel, J. 1975: The Mothman Prophecies. New York: Tor, Signet

Steiger, B. 2010: Real Zombies: The Living Dead and Creatures of the Apocalypse Canton, Mich: Visible Ink Press

Hopkins, J. Tibetan-English Dictionary. 

Besant, A. Leadbeater, C. 2005: Thought-Forms. Whitefish, Mont: Kessinger Publishing

Vincent, I. 2015: The Tulpa in the West. Institute for Atemporal Studies. [Lecture]. Delivered at the Fandom and Religion conference at the University of Leicester on 29 August