The Cauldron: A Pagan Forum

I'm pretty sure I have a long history of unintentionally creating tulpas of the unsavory sort, and wondering if anyone else has experience with them or stories to share?

My earliest memories coincide around the time that I remember having out-of-body experiences (or, as I'm probably sure they were, minor epileptic episodes). I was always deathly afraid of the dark as a kid, but it wasn't until around then that I actually started feeling like I wasn't alone in empty rooms or houses at times, rather than just being scared of the dark itself.

Of course there were always strange noises and sometimes things touching me while I was falling asleep. It was about a year of that in an apartment before moving into a house that was very much haunted. Things moving of their own accord, discernible whispering, and very clear noises whose locations could be pinpointed. I experienced these things alone and with others as well. I was still a young kid: in grade school. As it so happens, though, my mother's new marriage was turning very openly abusive, and only when things started getting very heated did the "hauntings" happen more frequently and more concretely as well. The marriage only lasted for a couple more years, though, and when the son of a gun was gone, my mom had the house cleansed and blessed, and things started to wind down. I started pursuing Wicca a little while later, doing house protection rituals myself while simultaneously experimenting with the spirit world.

By the time I was in high school, the oppressive and dark feelings in the house had completely gone, even though a presence was still detectable and the occasional noise was still heard (like the clicking of high heels along the wood floors at night), but it was a peaceful presence. I stopped studying Wicca when I was in HS, and while I sometimes still feel things in places, I've never encountered anything quite like the experiences I had at home in my early teen years. But when I started going to college, I began having horrible dreams... almost all the time, actually.

Most of the time I'm being pursued or my life is in grave danger, somehow. I could normally write most of it off as leftover anxiety, but I started having dreams where I felt like I wasn't alone. Like maybe I was lucid dreaming, but the antagonist in the dream was sentient and lucid as well and able to react to what I was doing rather than feeling "scripted", you know? And to be honest, I woke up from those feeling just as scared as the time that I saw a shadow in the living room as a child.

It hasn't happened in a number of months (since May, to be precise), but it's only now occurred to me that it might actually be a thoughtform of my own making, somehow. If it isn't, I'm not sure what else it could be. What clued me in was (well, after I learned about tulpas) that I heard someplace that high-emotion households have a tendency to manifest poltergeist-like phenomena, especially if there are children involved. And I can safely say, from first-hand experience, that that's true. Another thing that clued me in was after having several stressful and distressing dreams in a short period of time, I was actually afraid of falling asleep, and so began looking for a magical solution after trying all sorts of conventional methods (meal regulation, melatonin, limiting computer usage before bed, etc). My knee-jerk was to look for dream and sleep rituals, but after a long while browsing, I got the very distinct feeling that focusing on the dreams themselves wouldn't solve the underlying problem, or do anything, for that matter.

I'm just wondering if I need to do something much more intense and involved to identify what this entity might be, if it's something that's following me, and how to get rid of it? I haven't done any actual dedicated magick work in almost a decade, so maybe this is something that's beyond my skill level right now and might be better consulting a group with? Any thoughts would be great~

Have you tried a dreamcatcher? They are "simple" but they often work quite well.

I liked them as a kid, but don't remember feeling anything other than that they were pretty. Perhaps it's time to give them another go~

I'd start by doing something like the Lesser Banishing Ritual of the Pentagram morning and evening. It's easy and quick to do (once you learn it). And it should help no matter if it is a independent entity, something you created yourself, or just general "negativity".

Welp, just tried it (as in, tried to do it)... that was interesting. I was browsing for variations on the standard Golden Dawn one and simultaneously getting my setup together, and when it came high time to do the thing, my internet cut out, leaving me only with notes on the ritual and not the ritual itself. So I ended up pulling something together from memory; I always felt most comfortable working in circles/sacred space, so I did that and some white light visualizations, and added in things from the LBR ritual that I could remember, demanded the thing leave me alone, and closed up shop. As soon as I put everything away, my internet came back.

Suffice to say, I think I'll be doing this much more often. Thanks for the tip!

Suffice to say, I think I'll be doing this much more often. Thanks for the tip!

I think the LBRP (in some form) is a tool that everyone interested in magic/paranormal/etc should know.

Oh and forgot to add that this process will likely take a very long time as it's been something of an issue for about 15 years, and when something does happen because of it, it doesn't happen very often. Like I said, the last horrible dream I had was about 6 months ago, and before that it would only happen maybe once a month or every other month. So I expect the changes to be slow... but steady. :]

To be honest I'm torn about the Judeo-Christian focus of it, and while I don't particularly mind the cross/prayer part, the visualization of the archangels is what rubs me the wrong way. Not to mention that I've never been very good at visualization (I'm somewhat incapable of even sexually fantasizing for this very reason), but I can synthesize sensations very well, and can "visualize" on paper even better. So think I'm going to continue doing this and perhaps tweak it as I go, as well as do more research about the best ways to replace the mental imagery with things that work for me better.

Now if only I knew enough about the old Mayan religion and mythology to be able replace the archangels with the Bacabs, that would be interesting. Unfortunately, in addition to there not being too much scholarly information about them and their roles beyond the calendar, they have a completely different system of directional correspondences and my brain still operates under the western symbology for the most part. :T

 
If it's any help to your tweaking, here are some things I found in TC's Articles Library:
The Star Ruby - a less Abrahamic Thelemite banishing ritual
a Wiccan, or at least Wiccish, LBRP variant
Gnostic Pentagram Ritual from Peter Carroll's Liber Kaos
An article on why the LBRP only uses the banishing Earth pentagram - I've included this because, by examining the LBRP at a deeper level, it may include things you can use

FYI, this is the Articles Library at ecauldron.net (same domain as the archive forum), which isn't the same as what you get to using the Articles link in the navigation bar at the top of the ecauldron.com pages - the only link I can find to the old Articles Library on the current pages is the one on the front page (left-hand sidebar, and you'll have to scroll down a bit).

Sunflower

If it's any help to your tweaking, here are some things I found in TC's Articles Library:
The Star Ruby - a less Abrahamic Thelemite banishing ritual
a Wiccan, or at least Wiccish, LBRP variant
Gnostic Pentagram Ritual from Peter Carroll's Liber Kaos
An article on why the LBRP only uses the banishing Earth pentagram - I've included this because, by examining the LBRP at a deeper level, it may include things you can use

FYI, this is the Articles Library at ecauldron.net (same domain as the archive forum), which isn't the same as what you get to using the Articles link in the navigation bar at the top of the ecauldron.com pages - the only link I can find to the old Articles Library on the current pages is the one on the front page (left-hand sidebar, and you'll have to scroll down a bit).

Sunflower

Thanks! Looks I've got some reading to do. :
 

I agree with Randall that I think the LBRP is an excellent tool to know.

But I agree with you that there are parts that don't work for me. (In my case, because my family is Jewish and Catholic in recent generations, and I take both of those religious seriously and respect their cosmologies, even though they're not my religion. Doing the LBRP gets the wrong set of beings trying to be helpful, and even though they do help, it's not the right people, as it were.)

What I do instead is banishing and protection rituals based in my tradition's practices, and have experimented over the years with different methods (as well as breaking down the LBRP and figuring out why it works the way it does.)

I've generally found it more personally successful to deconstruct and reconstruct than simply try to slide a practice over to a different use - but that's partly because of how my brain is wired. (In the case of banishing/protective work, it mostly slid sideways into a song popping into my head. It's not one I share broadly, but every time I've used it, amazingly successful results. But I couldn't have gotten there without the deconstruction first.)

Now if only I knew enough about the old Mayan religion and mythology to be able replace the archangels with the Bacabs, that would be interesting. Unfortunately, in addition to there not being too much scholarly information about them and their roles beyond the calendar, they have a completely different system of directional correspondences and my brain still operates under the western symbology for the most part. :T

 
Yeah, I agree with you completely. I would never appropriate the ritual superficially to something else like that. I was mostly lamenting the fact that there wasn't a lot available for me to deconstruct on the Mayan end (okay, that's a misnomer, as there is a lot, but I don't think it's of a sort that is specifically helpful for ritual)... and for trying to mesh a banishing technique that's so rooted in western magical traditions with something completely different* is nigh impossible without knowing much about the Mayan breakdown of the quarters, let alone what their philosophy had to say about the elements. In fact, I don't think I could appropriate this even if I wanted to! The subject deserves no less than a dissertation, it seems.

As for the Abrahamic cosmology part, I especially agree with that and would like to say thanks for putting into words the feeling I was getting.

*Their directional colors, as a really basic example, are white/north, red/east, yellow/south, and black/west