As I approached the top of this [orbital] arc, it was as if time stood still, and I was flooded with both emotion and awareness. But as I looked down at the Earth—this stunning, fragile oasis, this island that has been given to us, and that has protected all life from the harshness of space—a sadness came over me, and I was hit in the gut with an undeniable, sobering contradiction. In spite of the overwhelming beauty of this scene, serious inequity exists on the apparent paradise we have been given. I couldn’t help thinking of the nearly one billion people who don’t have clean water to drink, the countless number who go to bed hungry every night, the social injustice, conflicts, and poverty that remain pervasive across the planet.

However, astronaut engagements with moments of cosmic sublime go beyond spiritual experiences and approach the realm of ritualized behaviors that would seem familiar to Malinowski and other anthropologists that study symbol, myth, and ritual. Many of these ritual forms of magic come from the ancestors of spaceflight. For American astronauts on launch day, the entire crew must complete a series of rituals before proceeding to the launch pad. First, they must eat a meal of steak and eggs, the Mercury astronaut’s food of choice before a mission. Many contemporary astronauts report that they only pick at the hearty meal due to nerves, but it is never refused for fear that it will jinx the mission. After the meal, the crew participates in a simple card game and must continue playing until the crew’s commander loses.

Malinowski—in his seminal work Magic, Science and Religion and Other Essays— argued that people usually engaged in magical and ritualized behaviors when they were placed in stressful situations, or found themselves with limited control over situations. Despite his colonial generalizations, if we apply these criteria to human spaceflight, I do not believe it is too far-fetched to assert that those who ride automated rockets into the vacuum of outer space are engaging with magic and ritual in order to grasp at a certain amount of control absent within the launch itself.

Magical and ritualized behavior in spaceflight is not only restricted to American astronauts; Soviet—and now Russian—cosmonauts also participate(d) in ritual prior to launching into outer space. On April 12, 1961, as Yuri Gagarin was being driven to the launchpad prior to his mission, he was overcome with a human urge that often manifests itself when one is nervous—or drinks too much coffee. Gagarin charged the driver to pull to the side of the road where he relieved himself on the rear passenger bus tire before re-boarding and rocketing his way into the history books. Due to his mission being successful—and for fear of being jinxed should they not perform the same ritual—every cosmonaut after Gagarin has also had the bus driver pull over so that they may micturate on the rear passenger bus tire prior to launch; women are not exempt from this, carrying vials of their own urine to splash on the bus wheel (Weibel and Swanson 2006). Cosmonauts and NASA astronauts launching on Soyuz to the International Space Station today still perform this ritualized urination. Furthermore, all those who wish to board a Russian spacecraft must watch the 1969 Soviet film Белое солнце пустыни (Beloye solntse pustyni—White Sun of the Desert) the night before launch.

Further afield, during the Space Race, there was also a battle between the two superpowers over the predominantly Christian United States and the state-atheism of the Soviet Union. One prominent Soviet propaganda poster after Gagarin’s flight featured a grinning cosmonaut on a spacewalk, orbiting above a Catholic church, a Russian Orthodox church, and a mosque, with two bold words separating the spacewalker and the houses of worship: бога нет! (boga nyet—There is no god!). Conversely, United States astronauts on Apollo 8 read from the Book of Genesis after becoming the first humans to circle around the moon. Furthermore, after Apollo 11 successfully landed on the surface of the moon, Buzz Aldrin asked for a moment of silence so that he might partake in the ritual consumption of bread and wine. Communion, therefore, became the first food and drink consumed by humans on another celestial body (Weibel and Swanson 2006).

Lastly, there exists many Earthly and extra-planetary memorials and ritualistic remembrances of those who have lost their lives in the name of space travel, including one on the moon. On Mars, the Pathfinder spacecraft—which brought Sojourner, the first rover on Mars—was renamed the Carl Sagan Memorial Station after it had landed. In popular culture, Carl Sagan’s son helped write an episode of Star Trek: Enterprise in which the crew visits the Memorial Station, which was imagined as being inscribed with a quote from Sagan: “Whatever the reason you’re on Mars, I’m glad you’re there, and I wish I was with you.”

Magic and ritual is deeply engrained in both the practice and imaginaries of technoscientific endeavors. The more that anthropologists shift their gaze toward the so-called “hard” sciences—as well as the scientists that perform their duties—the more we can reveal the illusion of pure objectivity within laboratory sciences. Perhaps when science is viewed as a human practice—wrapped up with all the imperfections inherent within any human endeavor—as opposed to some outside force able to impart supernatural objectivity upon an expert class, we can begin to leverage science as an exercise for liberation and mutual aid rather than a practice that today tends to first benefit the forces of colonialism and imperialism.

Further reading & cited:
Weibel, Deana L., and Glen E. Swanson. 2006. “Malinowski In Orbit: ‘Magical Thinking’ in Human Spaceflight.” Quest: The History of Spaceflight Quarterly 13 (3): 53–61.

Field Notes – September 8, 2016 (Cape Canaveral, Florida):

I see the light and smoke first. The radiant fuel pours out of the rocket’s engines and the glow is absolutely blinding—like the brilliant ball of light at the end of a welding tool. I have to squint and look away from the base of the rocket as if I am staring directly into the sun. Then the sound comes. Roaring ripples of sound, reflecting off the Banana River and ricocheting off of buildings before finally kicking me square in the chest. The reverberations rock through my body as this asteroid-interceptor spacecraft, nestled on top of a cylinder of explosives begins to pick up speed—punching through the thick atmosphere of our planet. Within a few seconds, it is nothing but a small point of light high in the eastern sky—in a few more seconds, it has vanished.

I walk down the observation gantry and sit in the cool grass while other spectators begin to file out of the enclosure. I look up into the reverent afterglow of the rocket’s exhaust—the contrails swirling and slithering into sublimely beautiful colored shapes in the high winds of the stratosphere.

A mother and her son walk by. The mother asks her child what he thought of the launch. Clutching a toy rocket, he looks up at his mother and replies unabashedly and honestly:

“I have never seen quite a beautiful sight.”

These were my initial thoughts and feelings while experiencing my first rocket launch last summer. I scribbled these words down quickly and haphazardly, like the furious sketches of an artist attempting to capture a street scene that is moving quicker than their hand ever could. My hurried writing defiantly disobeyed the straight lines in my notebook; I didn’t want to look away from the rocket’s splendor. This was the first time I felt I had participated in a magical or religious encounter. In this two-part post, I would like to engage with magic, witchcraft, and ritual in human spaceflight—not only in a reflexive manner from my own field experience (Part 1), but also by historically and anthropologically analyzing the recorded rituals of astronauts and cosmonauts (Part 2).

Before I get into that, however, I feel that it is important to disclose that the terms “magic” and “witchcraft” are loaded with colonial baggage, as well as Western suppositions about what these terms mean within the dominant Judeo-Christian theology. In these posts, I do not mean to appropriate or dilute the intensely real experiences that blossom out of what some anthropologists in the past labeled as magic and witchcraft (and sometimes these labels were accompanied by a skeptical sneer). In fact, I hope for the opposite: to show that even those steeped heavily in the scientific method—a perceived objective practice supposedly removed from magical actions—are participating in what anthropologists have outlined as ritualistic behavior.

But first—to the eastern coast of Florida in the beginning of September . . .

I watch as a bead of sweat slips slowly down off the tip of my nose and spirals wildly—its death throes—until the poor, salty little pearl impacts the ground. I stare down at its resting place among the wilted blades of grass in which I’m sitting cross-legged. God, it’s hot. Actually, as a native Arizonan, I’m used to the heat. It’s the damn humidity that’s the culprit. I feel like I’m encapsulated in cellophane. Like I have a plastic grocery bag over my head and tied around my neck—humidity’s executioner hood. After a big sigh, I squint painfully through the sting of sweat on my eyelids down the line. Next to me in the grass, stretching back hundreds of feet, are at least two hundred fellow space enthusiasts, waiting to board the buses to take us to the exclusive LC-39 Observation Gantry. Months prior, I sat at my computer, waiting for the LC-39 tickets to go on sale. The LC-39 site is the closest you can get to a rocket when it launches from Cape Canaveral—as such, the tickets are highly sought after. In fact, the tickets sold out in two hours, but I managed to secure one. However, the only thing that mattered now was that I get into that air-conditioned bus as fast as I could. As the line surged forward, my obsession to arrive early to everything paid off as I boarded the first bus and was greeted by that familiar blast of artificially cool air.

The bus surged forward after a few minutes. I began to listen to the conversations happening around me and I heard a variety of different languages and dialects of English: British, Australian, German, Dutch, Russian. Did they all come to the United States just for this rocket launch? Is this a technoscientific pilgrimage? I was sitting on a bus with 50 other people—behind us, there were five other buses to cart the rest of us—all to witness a fleeting moment of awe together.

The bus drove over the Banana River on human-made causeways built to support NASA’s infrastructure. It drove past the press areas with leering reporters scribbling in their notebooks and holding cameras with massive lenses. It drove past the enormous crawler-transporters that were used to carry the Saturn V moon rockets and Space Shuttles from the Vehicle Assembly Building to the launchpads. Sitting behind barbed wire fences amidst piles of trash, these machines looked like sad, lethargic prisoners—colossal dormant monsters that may have made an admirable foe for Don Quixote before their imprisonment.

We finally reached the LC-39 Observation Gantry. We disembarked from the bus and were greeted with a large banner hanging down off of the gantry advertising SpaceX—the new gods, the new religion—as we walked into the exclusive area, the shrine we had all waited to get to. Inside, there was a feast for the hungry pilgrims—a spread of fruit, vegetables, hot dogs, hamburgers, sodas, water. I grabbed a bottle of water and skipped the food, opting to fast for this experience—my first time witnessing a rocket launch in person. I climbed the gantry and claimed my space on Level 3 in the stairwell. Straight ahead of me was the launch pad—wisps of water vapor streamed off the rocket like ghostly tendrils trying to cling to the thick air. My heart was racing.

A man set up his camera tripod next to me. He told me he lives nearby and tries to photograph every launch he can. I told him I’m a poor graduate student pilgrim here for my first launch. He didn’t seem to understand me and ordered his wife to fetch him several hot dogs—no ketchup. We cannot all be pious in the illustrative majesty of rocket technoscience.

Suddenly, I heard cries from down below.

“Here we go!”
“Quick! Look!”

Across the river, smoke and vapor began to erupt from the base of the rocket. The rocket started to rise from the ground atop a brilliant flame. Television cameras and photographs cannot capture the blinding brilliance of rocket’s fire. It hurt my eyes and I had to avert them from the rocket’s image—looking just the left or right of the tortured missile as it began to pick up speed. The pilgrims began cheering and clapping—the only noise that could be heard—we hadn’t been hit by the sound yet. Then the deafening roar of the rocket slams into us. The sound modulated as it bounced off the river and the buildings. It sounded like waves—deep and ripping, tearing the atmosphere apart. It only took half-a-minute for the rocket to become a point of light in the sky—the sound began to dampen.

Suddenly, I realized that my mouth was hanging open and I had tears in my eyes. I had transitioned beyond the limen; I was different from this experience, this ritual, this rite of passage. I never had a religious or spiritual experience before in my life, but I think that I had just experienced my first. I walked down from the gantry slowly, and watched everyone begin to line up to leave on the buses—the experience was over, now it was time to get back to the “real world.” Like the pilgrims shuffling back to their “real world,” Part 2 will take us away from my reflexive account of an uncrewed rocket launch and into the “real world” of crewed astronautics. In the next post, I will discuss some of the magical and ritualistic behaviors performed by astronauts, cosmonauts, and the scientific community.

Proceed to Part 2

Acknowledgements: I would like to thank Martin Pfeiffer and Ryan Anderson for reading drafts of this two-parter and providing vital feedback. I would also like to thank Michael Oman-Reagan, Grant W. Trent, Lisa Messeri, Alice Gorman, Dick Powis and Bree Blakeman for the excellent Twitter brainstorming sessions that led me to some of my conclusions. My thanks also to Fritz Lampe for guiding me through the incredible world of the anthropologies of symbol, myth, and ritual.

Tulpamancers are people who, through extended bouts of concentration and visualization, produce a special kind of imaginary friend that they call a tulpa. Tulpas are understood to be distinct sentient beings with their own personalities, inclinations and (relative) autonomy. Through various active and passive processes known as ‘forcing’ tulpamancers spend hours solidifying their impressions of their creations as something more than just an ordinary inner voice. (Active forcing means concentrating single-pointedly on the tulpa’s form and features, passive forcing is when the tulpamancer finds ways to bring tulpas into more regular routines, such as through ‘narrating’, where tulpamancers chat with or read stories to their creations). Tulpamancers meet tulpas in imagined environments called ‘wonderlands’, dream or mind-scapes that more fully contextualize interactions and provide a place for tulpas to ‘hang out’ when idle. They also work to perfect ‘imposition’ -seeing, hearing, or feeling tulpas in the ‘real world’ – and may practice tulpa-possession or even ‘switching’, where the tulpa takes over the host’s body and the host temporarily occupies the tulpa’s form in the wonderland.

If this is news for you, you might be wondering where this all comes from. The deceptively simple answer is: Tibet. Tulpa (sprul pa, སྤྲུལ་པ) is a Tibetan word meaning ’emanation’, ‘apparition’ or ‘magical illusion’, and the practices of contemporary tulpamancers are supposedly modeled on the esoteric procedures of Tibetan mystics, who we are often told, have been producing sentient mental-entities through meditation for centuries. Except they haven’t. Well, sort of.

Before the advent of online tulpamancer communities, and notwithstanding its Tibetan name, the concept of the tulpa as a semi-autonomous entity created by one or more individuals’ focused thought or belief was primarily a mainstay in Western esoteric and parapsychological circles. Western occultists inherited their version of tulpas from early non-Tibetan interpreters of Tibetan Buddhism like French explorer Alexandra David-Neel (1868-1969) and American Walter Evans-Wentz (1878-1965). David-Neel’s description of how she experimented with making a tulpa in the form of a ‘jolly monk’ while in Tibet – and her account of how this ‘mind-creature’ was subsequently seen by others who mistook it for an actual person, and how it became more and more sinister, self-motivated and unruly which obliged her to dissolve it – helped set the tone and terms of subsequent representations of tulpas. Further, as Natasha Mikles and Joseph Laycock have laid out nicely in a recent article, both David-Neel and Evan-Wentz’s understanding of Tibetan tulpas was in turn strongly influenced by Theosophical teachings related to the possibilities and dangers of ‘thought-forms’ and ‘elementals’. These ideas were already in circulation in Europe and America long before either David-Neel or Evan-Wentz ever went to the Himalayas to study with Tibetans. Thus, as Mikles and Laycock put it (paralleling my own earlier arguments here on Savage Minds about both Tibetan aliens and Tibetan singing bowls, popular ideas about tulpas today are a product of complex dialogues or cross-fertilizations between ‘East and West’, and, to be fair, probably owe more to Theosophy than to Tibetan Buddhism.

The tulpa concept has evolved and circulated to the point where it has escaped far beyond any specifically Tibetan cultural, social or linguistic moorings. During the last two decades or so, the idea of tulpas has migrated from Western esotericism and parapsychology to enter online forums and global pop culture. Tulpas have featured in episodes of hit shows like the X-files and Supernatural over the last seven years or so. In October of 2013, anthropologist Tanya Luhrmann wrote about tulpamancers in an op-ed for the New York Times. She compared tulpamancers to evangelical Christians who put in serious cognitive-emotional elbow grease to experience God as a sensory reality in their everyday lives, and argued that tulpamancers’ experiences with tulpas supports anthropologists’ and evolutionary psychologists’ claims that “the idea of an invisible agent is basic to our psyche”. I started writing this piece a week or few ago after I discovered that Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time had, as recently as a month ago, devoted a whole episode to the tulpa concept. As someone who has studied and practiced Western magical traditions for many years, I was familiar with talk about tulpas, and had been tracking with interest how representations of the entities periodically surfaced in popular culture. Watching the Adventure Time episode though, the fact that an occult concept like tulpas was now receiving treatment in one of the biggest ‘kid’s’ cartoons on TV today (even after the advent of online tulpamancers), was just too much for my feverish little anthropologist brain.

Since the appearance of Nathan Thompson’s 2014 Vice article, scholars, Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, Western occultists, and tulpamancers have debated the extent to which tulpas are and aren’t Tibetan. I decided I should gather my thoughts and say something at least vaguely meaningful about the popularization of the tulpa concept. That I should give an overview, a back-and-forth for readers about the ‘East-West tulpa dialogue’, and try to say something new and interesting on the topic, at least as far as my unique expertise might allow.

And then, just on Monday, February 8th, the latest episode of the X-Files Season 10 re-boot aired, and scooped me, kind of.

In many ways, the episode referenced the very material I was working on in this piece. With discussions about the relative (in)accessibility of academic writing and the unbearable slowness of publishing ongoing, anthropologists certainly appreciate whatever chance they can get to feel topical and up-to-the-minute. Monday’s X Files episode gave me all that and more. Not only could I pat myself on the head about being on the money, but the episode’s treatment of the subject seemed to validate many of the points I had already written down. For not only has the tulpa gone viral, but as I’ll try to show and argue, it has come to embody both fantasies and fears about virality itself, about mass cultural production and consumption in the digital age, in a manner very different to when a tulpa first trended in an X Files ‘monster of the week’ episode in 1999.

As an anthropologist doing research on both contemporary Tibetan societies and contemporary Western esotericism it’s naturally tempting for me to jump in and offer my own two cents about what a tulpa ‘really’ is. Rather than only focus on what distinguishes different kinds of tulpa though, I also want to pause and reflect on what they might have in common. In Monday’s new X Files episode FBI agent Fox Mulder offers a rejoinder to his own previous take on Tibetan tulpas from the earlier episode in the franchise. This recent episode’s presentation (which I discuss more fully below) confirms my suspicions that Tibetan and non-Tibetan tulpas alike can offer equally rich material for thinking about topics like the popularizing and secularizing of esoteric knowledge, mass mediation and collective affect, and the policing of the imagination and the ‘imaginary’.

So if tulpas aren’t exactly Tibetan, what are Tibetan tulpas? To her credit, even if her presentation of tulpas was idiosyncratic, hybrid or misleading, in addition to describing her own experiments, David-Neel did discuss many of the broader connotations of tulpa in Tibetan contexts. While there are no explicit instructions in Tibetan tantric Buddhism for ‘manifesting a tulpa’, various advanced meditative practices do exist which involve intensive concentration on and visualization of imagined entities. The ‘dream yoga’ practices that fall under the umbrella of the ‘Six Dharmas of Naropa’ in particular involve training in the intentional production of mental forms while in a lucid dream-state, and the the so-called ‘generation’ or ‘creation’ stage (bsked rim) of Tibetan tantric yogas requires the meditator to imagine, call upon and then ‘animate’ various yidams (yid dam) or ‘mind-bound’ meditational deities so as to draw near to them, experience them and attain their blessings. Accordingly, both Tibetan Buddhists and Western occultists have argued that yid dam represent a better analog for Western esotericists’ and tulpamancers’ ideas about sentient mental entities than the actual Tibetan word sprul pa.

One commentator on a Reddit tulpa feed who identified themself as a longstanding practitioner of Tibetan Buddhism celebrates what tulpamancers are doing, and points out that their practices are “all very much in line with the spiritual ‘development’ stages in Tibetan Buddhism’. “Tulpa is an accurate description of these daemons” (i.e. Yidams) the poster says. Yet another practitioner of both Western ceremonial magic and Tibetan Buddhism called Kalagni, taking a more exasperated tone and reiterating Mikles and Laycock’s misgivings about David-Neel’s presentation of tulpa, explains in a blog post entitled “Tulpa: Not What You Think” that “a tulpa is something used all the time in Vajrayana (i.e. Tibetan tantric) Buddhism, though the word is almost never used.” This poster equates tulpas with the dam tshig sems dpa’ or ‘tantric vow/commitment being’, an imagined, inner form of the tantric meditational deity into which the ye shes sems dpa’ (or gnosis-being), the actual deity itself, is invited.

Despite these comparisons, tulpamancers’ use of tulpas as friends, companions, confidants and psycho-therapeutic tools has next to nothing in common with the specifics of yid dam and their complex role in Tibetan culture and tantric Buddhist soteriology. For the most part, online tulpamancers are not Tibetan, are not converts to Tibetan religions, and are not necessarily particularly informed about or even interested in Tibet and its cultural practices either. Yet despite this, and non-Tibetan blogger Kalagni’s claim that the Tibetan word sprul pa is not widely used or known by Tibetans, the term sprul pa in fact plays a key role in one of the most important and controversial issues facing Tibetans both inside and outside of Tibet today, namely the question of the current Dalai Lama’s succession.

The Tibetan word sprul pa is generally used to refer to an emanation or magical projection that is sent forth by a Buddha, a Bodhisattva, a god, demi-god, demon, or accomplished yogi to serve some particular mediating function. As a concept, sprul pa is strongly linked to if not synonymous with the term tulku (sprul sku). Sprul sku (a typical Tibetan contraction for sprul pa’i sku gzugs, or ’emanational body’) is the name commonly given to a reincarnate lama, such as the Dalai Lama. High lamas and accomplished yogis like the Dalai Lama are understood to be able to consciously decide when they will die, as well as how (and whether) they will take rebirth in order to help beings. (The current Dalai Lama is not only the re-incarnation of the 13th Dalai Lama, he is also a sprul pa of Chenrezig, the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the Buddha being who according to scripture helped father the Tibetan people via another of his emanational bodies, that of a mild-mannered monkey – see this previous post for more on that story).

‘Sprul sku’ was initially coined as the Tibetan translation for nirmanakaya, a Sanskrit word connected to the Buddhist doctrine of the sku gsum, the three bodies of the Buddha, or three dimensions of existence. This Buddhist ‘Trinity’ provided a way to account for the Buddha’s manifestation within a (seemingly) perishable body, ‘within’ history. It served to explain the relationship between the person of the historical Buddha, the timeless ultimate nature of reality and enlightened mind, and a plethora of a- or trans-historical ‘celestial’ Buddhas and Bodhisattvas which came to feature so strongly in Mahayana Buddhism. Emanation and emanational bodies in Tibetan Buddhism are thus associated with the compassionate agency of higher beings. Emanation is a process of mediation whereby transcendent powers secure beneficial channels for communicating with and acting for the benefit of beings orientated differently in consciousness. Although most strongly associated with enlightened beings, worldly, unrealized beings like mountain gods or even influential human political figures can either send out their own sprul pa or be seen as sprul pa themselves. (A list of political figures recognized as tulpas of Buddhas and Bodhisattvas includes, depending on who you ask, the early Tibetan kings, Bill Clinton and Queen Victoria).

In 2011, in tandem with his devolving of political power to a democratically elected exile prime minister, the Dalai Lama released a public statement where he stressed that the Chinese government had no jurisdiction to interfere in the matter of his succession. In statements over the years, the leader has suggested that given the current political climate in Communist Chinese occupied Tibet, as well as China’s track record of attempting to co-opt identified reincarnate lamas or to install their own substitute candidates, he would most probably reincarnate outside of Chinese territory. In the 2011 statement he also noted that it was completely feasible that his successor could appear via emanation (i.e. sprul pa) and thus be identified before his own death. To clarify this distinction the Dalai Lama quoted the great 19th century Tibetan scholar Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo:

“As Jamyang Khyentse Wangpo stated: “[The reincarnation of a lama] is said to be when they take their rebirth after the bodily display/arrangement of the previous life has dissolved; emanation is the manifesting of other emanations without the (current) emanation-basis having dissolved.””
འཇམ་དབྱངས་མཁྱེན་བརྩེ་དབང་པོས། སྐུ་ཡི་བཀོད་པ་སྔ་མ་བསྡུས་ནས་ཕྱི་མ་བཟུང་བར་སྐྱེ་བ་དང། སྤྲུལ་གཞི་མ་བསྡུས་པར་སྤྲུལ་པ་གཞན་དག་སྟོན་པ་སྤྲུལ་པ་ཞེས་བཞེད། ཅེས་གསུངས།

What this would mean is that the next Dalai Lama would probably be recognized before the current one passes away, and could well be identified as an adult and not a child. This move would strategically cut out the typically unstable interregnum period that normally precedes the successor’s coming of age, and would further exclude Chinese authorities from the succession process. The Dalai Lama also stated that he has decided that when he reaches about 90 years old, he will re-open the question of the future of his lineage (and whether or how he should reincarnate) ‘for discussion by the great lamas of the (various) dharma lineages and the Tibetan people’. The Dalai Lama has thus not only used the creative tension and complexity implicit in the rather recondite relationship between emanations and emanation bodies to his strategic and political advantage, he has also allowed for the possibility that the typically esoteric and private workings of the trained yogi skilled in the practice of conscious transference from one body to the next (‘pho ba) might be submitted for consideration to a wider, vaguely more democratic audience.

To call this a secularization of reincarnation/emanation processes would be wrong-headed. The Dalai Lama himself has stressed that reincarnation is above all else a religious matter. His future referendum is a far cry from the secularizing of reincarnation politics that has taken place in China, where the CCP has required lamas to get bureaucratic permission to reincarnate since 2007 and has just recently set up an online data-base of authentic (state-approved, of course) ‘Living Buddhas’ as part of its regulation and ‘protection’ of the integrity of the faith. The matter of finding the Dalai Lama’s successor will still primarily involve a select group of spiritual detectives – of uniquely qualified Tibetan lamas, deities, and diviners. Still, the Dalai Lama’s statements are at the very least a gesture towards the de-privatizing and democratizing of esoteric emanation procedures typically associated with the inner psychic workings of an individual yogi-transmigrator.

With tulpamancers we see a somewhat different popularizing and secularizing of the esoteric at work. Although tulpamancers acknowledge a split between ‘metaphysical’ and psychological/neurological explanations for tulpas, much of tulpamancer discourse has a decidedly secular flavor. The approaches of today’s tulpamancers undoubtedly owe a lot to earlier developments in Western esotericism, and chaos magic(k) in particular (see here, for example) (In contrast to a lot of tulpamancer methodology, Western magical approaches for making ‘artificial spirits’ have often, although not always, involved the use of sexual fluids and orgasm as part of sex magic practices). An agnostic-experimental orientation to supernatural entities, more ‘science-y’ frameworks for magic, the online dissemination of esoterica, and working with ‘fabricated’ gods and spirits permitted chaos magicians to go beyond the methodologies and religious-moral baggage of more traditional magical systems. Still, despite the precedent set by such ‘post-modern’ occultists, tulpamancers rarely seem to claim that what they are doing is based on particularly specialized esoteric knowledge or access. Just as David-Neel did with her trial-and-error Friar-Tuck-Frankenstein, tulpamancers use whatever concentration and visualization techniques they may have learned in experimental and idiosyncratic ways. No one method works, tulpamancers often say, and firm effort, as well as trusting that producing sentience is possible, are ultimately more important factors than cleaving to any specific approach. Tulpamancers thus present a case of individuals who, though they are not practitioners of spiritual disciplines or members of initiated esoteric lineages, choose to engage in degrees of mental ‘asceticism’ usually associated with these other contexts. More than this, where ritual magicians typically make tulpas (or what are called servitors, thought-forms, bud-wills, psychogones and so on) to fulfill specific magical tasks (and while Tibetan Buddhists visualize yidam as part of specific religious practices), tulpamancers actively distinguish their tulpa companions from what they see as dumb, de-individualized servitor ‘slaves’. Instead, for the most part, tulpamancers describe making tulpas out of curiosity and loneliness, or to bring fictional characters they’d previously imagined as part of personal creative projects to greater life.

In contrast to this picture of individual, focused psychic and affective labor, popular representations often frame tulpas as both unintentional and uncontrollable. Popular media tulpas are powered primarily by collective thought and belief. Appearing unexpectedly and almost too easily, they bring terror and/or murder in their wake. In the 1999 ‘monster of the week’ X-Files episode (“Arcadia”, Season 6, Episode 15) FBI agents Mulder and Scully discover that the president of a plush planned community in California has used Tibetan magic to create a tulpa with which to menace and ultimately murder any resident who fails to abide by his exhaustive list of rules. In an apt embodiment of Kathleen Stewart’s ‘failed miracle’ of American suburbia, the tulpa, taking temporary corporeal form as a vaguely humanoid, living embodiment of the mud and lawns around the gated community, murders its creator, following which it too expires. In an episode of CW’s Supernatural (“Hell House”, Season 1, episode 17), internet users who read stories on a website about a haunted house in Texas, will a ghost from fabricated legend into existence, and this spirit begins to actually murder people in the house in question. In another episode (“Thinman”, Season 9, Episode 15), the show’s protagonists, demon-hunting brothers Dean and Sam, investigate a series of murders that appear to have been perpetrated by the ‘Thinman’, another figure from online urban legend, who the brothers suspect may have been brought to life through focused belief. In the end, they discover that human killers are impersonating the Thinman to perpetuate belief in him.

Supernatural’s Thinman character and his online fans were inspired by the Slender Man, a ‘real-world’ internet bogieman and meme whose mythos has been elaborated extensively via fanfiction, web serials, online games, and other media ever since its first dramatic appearance on a Something Awful forum thread in 2009. Digital folklore relating to the Slender Man includes theories that this tall, faceless entity is in fact a tulpa, created by collective belief. Disturbingly, Supernatural’s Thinman episode weirdly foreshadowed actual events relating to Slender Man that took place in Waukesha, Wisconsin two and a half months after the show aired. On March 31, 2014, two 12 year old girls in Waukesha attempted to stab a 12 year old schoolmate to death as a sacrifice to Slender Man. The two girls, who had read about Slender Man on the horror short-story site Creepypasta.com, said they hoped that this act would not only impress Slender Man and allow them to serve as his ‘proxies’, but would also convince skeptics that the being was real. The attempted murder saw a spate of commentary on the influence of the internet and popular culture on child psychology. Retired FBI agent John Egelhof, for example, opined that the internet had become a ‘blackhole’ of sinister influences and urged parents to better surveil and control their children’s browsing habits.

Contemporary descriptions of tulpas draw on a wide-ranging archive of ideas and images relating to human consciousness, creativity, and the paranormal. They hover in the grey areas between fantasy and reality, legend and fact, juvenile and adult affinities, and individual, ‘inner’ experience and mass-mediated culture. In being popularized, tulpas have come to embody the mysteries and dangers of popularism itself, of collective belief, mass-attention and virtual mediation. To put a twist on the old anthropological chestnut, ‘the tulpa is good to think with – and not good to think too much about’. As Mikles and Laycock note, tulpa-theory ‘para-normalizes’ cultural explanations for paranormal trends. Rather than explaining away the persistance of particular paranormal phenomena, consensual belief becomes the magic itself. Tulpas both provide an ‘answer’ to the recursivity of reality and representation, to the circularity of cultural influence (culture-produces-thought-produces-culture?) and float like an uneasy question mark over ever-fidgety boundaries between inside and out, self and other.

Tulpas of whatever variety point primarily to issues of mediation, affect and imagination. The Chinese Communist Party seeking to regulate ‘illusionary’ processes of emanational manifestation – illusory both in the official atheist sense of ‘not really, but culturally true’ and in the ‘impermanent forms as magical display’ Buddhist one; parents and lawmakers fretting over the migration of concepts and images from computer screens, through their children’s minds out into the world – each represent attempts to police the imaginary, to regulate, channel and contain collective affect and its powers. As William Mazzarella has recently shown, classic anthropological thinking about magic lends itself especially well to theorising mass media and censorship (indeed, the sympathies between ’emanations’, new technologies and magic are suggested by sprul itself, whose related form ‘phrul appears in Tibetan in words to do with ‘supernatural’ magic, legerdemain, machines and technology). In lines to make any sorceror proud, Mazzarella defines the ‘mana of mass publicity’ as being about “strategically deployed constitutive resonance via a magnetizer that may or may not be human – and who may or may not become a fetish – that is to say, come to embody the charismatic source of that resonance. The substance is our collective mimetic archive: the residue, embedded not only in the explicity articulated forms commonly recognized as cultural discourses, but also in our built environment and our material forms, in the concrete history of our senses, and in the habits of our shared embodiment.”

Tulpa could be said to partake of these processes. Concerns about the regulating of the ‘imaginary’, about censorship and violence, fears and fantasies about the private becoming public, about being watched and influenced by shadowy others shaped in our own image, about the dark recesses of cyberspace, speak to Mazzarella’s ideas about the mana of mass publicity as something ‘extimate’ in the Lacanian sense. “The other is something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me”, the French psychoanalyst tells us. This tension is as present for Tibetans orientating their sense of individual being-in-the-world in relation to the emanated form of a reincarnate lama-cum-national hero as it is for tulpamancers, whose mental companions are at once intensely intimate and in need of constant investment and care, yet live beyond them in the virtual spaces of the imagination and online and journalistic mediation.

To say that tulpamancers, the X Files and Adventure Time have ‘secularized’ the esoteric is perhaps somewhat misleading. As Lancaster University sociologist Christopher Partridge has observed, the popularization of magic and occultism is arguably as much about the sacralization or re-enchantment of the contemporary as about the secularizing of time-honoured esoteric traditions. As Patridge has argued recently, since the 1960s we have witnessed a global situation where the occult is no longer truly ‘hidden’, where the meaning of ‘privileged’ or ‘initiated’ knowledge has shifted. As Partridge puts it “(global) society is witnessing a confluence of secularization and sacralization, at the heart of which is the deceptively influential (concept of) ‘occulture'”. For Patridge, occulture refers to the particular environments in which ideas relating to the occult, the esoteric, and the conspiratorial emerge, are disseminated, and become influential. Today, pop culture is both an agent and a site for occultural discourse.

With the turn away from organized religiosity and ‘traditional modes of authority’, spirituality has come to replace religion as a category of choice in post-industrial, affluent, information-rich contexts. It is not so much then, that as Weber predicted, modernity means less religious societies, but that today the sacred is differently positioned and enacted. For the demographics most interested in tulpamancy, reliance on organized religion has been replaced by increased investment in personal experience and authority. The contemporary pursuit of illuminated knowledge, of human self-actualization, transformation, or gnosis, while driven by an interest in transcendence, nonetheless also ties into neo-liberal forms of affect and production. This turn to and sacralization of the self is predicated on post-industrial values, on having the time, money and wherewithal to focus on self-exploration, on the construction of new selves. The popularizing of discourse about tulpas exemplifies Patridge’s argument about occulture being both ordinary and everyday. While the broader public (or tulpamancers for that matter) may not necessarily credit occultists’ claims about tulpas, the dissemination of these can influence new patterns of thought and behavior. Previously, in my discussion of Tibetan singing bowls, I likened the rapid back-and-forth between the popular and the esoteric to ‘resonating feedback loops’. By being turned on through popular dissemination to potentially more initiated esoteric material, occultural consumers can do further research, only to subsequently re-project their new understandings and ideas yet again into the popular domain. In the 1990s Buffy the Vampire Slayer dramatized (and normalized) modern witchcraft. Encouraged by such popular representation, teenagers sought out real-world information on witchcraft, and became witches themselves. They then went on to produce their own expert and emic knowledge, knowledge that continues to inform contemporary popular representations as much as ethnographic ones. Adventure Time’s representations of tulpas may yet lead viewers to read up on or even practice tulpamancy. Popular culture animates occult and esoteric ideas, Partridge says, and here it does so literally.

Stories about the Thinman as Slender Man, Slender Man as tulpa, about the made-up ghost called Philip paranormal experimenters imagined into wider circulation in the 70s, capture the allure and alarm of trying to study and categorize the charged spaces of urban legend and conspiracy theory, of dream-made-flesh. They alert us to the difficulties of tracking trajectories of affect and attention in the digital age, of capturing the virtual and imaginary ethnographically . As Kathleen Stewart says so nicely in Ordinary Affects, writing about affect and urban legends, “scenes of public attention routinely drift over the fence of official news into eccentric circulation”. Arguments for my clairvoyant abilities aside, Monday’s episode of the X Files brings her poetic insights to life.

In “Home Again” agents Mulder and Scully investigate a series of murders connected to the forcible removal of homeless people and the gentrification of urban neighbourhoods in Philadelphia. We learn that, as IndieWire’s reviewer sums it up “Scully’s mom died. It was sad. A trash Golem murdered a bunch of not-great people. Mulder and Scully hugged some and talked about the baby they gave up for adoption. Again, it was sad.” This ‘trash golem’, a malodorous spirit avenger for the homeless who travels in a garbage truck and tears apart city officials, art thieves, and school board presidents, is called the ‘Band-aid nose man’, and turns out to have been conjured up by the angry creative impulses of a Banksy-esque graffiti artist and activist known by the tag ‘Trashman’. As details about the killings unfold, we are treated to an at times painfully forced overlaying of the Band-aid nose man plot with Scully’s experiences dealing with the death of her mother and her guilt and regret about giving up her and Mulder’s son for adoption.Towards the climax of the episode, the agents discover Trashman’s hide-out. After a brief run in with some ‘glitchy’ tulpas, they break into the Trashman’s dark basement studio, where a clay and trash bag sculpture of the Band-aid nose man is housed. The Trashman, after telling the agents that guns won’t work on the spirits and that “if they don’t see me and I don’t see them they can’t hurt me”, offers the following diatribe:

Trashman: (pontificating, looking Banksy-esque, surrounded by stencils, art supplies and  candles) The streets, the homeless, the street people, they ain’t got no voice, right? They get treated like trash- I mean, actual trash. It’s like this: you throw your grande cup, or your pop barn in the right trash been under the sink, recycling is here, there, you tie it in a bag, you take it out, put it in the right dumpsters, you pat yourself on the head, you are a good person, yeah? You do the good thing, you fuck all the women, you love all the little animals. Friday come, Wednesday maybe, guys will come to take the trash away, it’s not your problem anymore. Magic! But it is your problem-because it piles up in a landfill, and plastic leaks toxins into the water and the sky, but if you don’t see a problem there is no problem. People treat people like trash.

Mulder then asks if the Trashman was responsible for the killings.

Trashman: Nah, I was just trying to give those people voice, the only way I know how. Through art. Not violence. Something I could put around town, so it wouldn’t be forgotten. A stencil that looked over the bad suit building man, looked down on the long nosed suburban lady.

Mulder: Well, why’d you put up the art after the fact, the morning of Cuttler’s murder?

Trashman: I didn’t… That… That wasn’t me.I only thought em up, you know? Those people that got killed, that was only him.

Mulder: Him? Who’s him?

Trashman: You saw those things in the hall…(referring to the glitchy vanishing-and-reappearing monsters that walked blindly past the agents and into a wall)

Mulder: Yeah.

Trashman: I made them. I didn’t mean to, but I made ’em. They’ll go away eventually, they’re fading. But the Band aid nose man (pointing at sculpture, zoom in, ominous music) He’s different. (Cut to Scully). (Glibly now) Tibetan Buddhists call’em a tulpa, a thought form, using mind and energy to will consciousness (now placing hands on bald, tattooed head) into existence.

Mulder: Tulpa is a 1929 Theosophist mis-translation of the Tibetan word Tulku meaning ‘a manifestation body’. There is no idea in Tibetan Buddhism of a ‘thought-form’ or ‘thought-as-form’ and a realized Tulku would never harm anyone let alone kill.

Trashman: Ok. But I’m telling you. I spend a lot of energy in my art. I uh meditated on it. I willed it. (Flashback to Trashman sketching). What I wanted him to look like, what I wanted him to be, and why I wanted him (Scully’s flashback of her own labour) I didn’t bring him here, he came to me! (Scully stares into the distance, hallucinates a baby mobile, Scully’s baby in crib crying) But in the end, he told me what he wanted to be. All we do is hold the pencil, all we do is hold the clay. I think there must be spirits or souls, (Over-the-shoulder shot of Trashman sketching the Band-aid nose man), floating all around us. And if you think real hard, and you want them so bad (Mulder and Scully cradling their crying baby) they come to you, and then they become alive with a life of their own. (Scully’s mother’s death scene, Scully crying, “Our son, I gave him up!”) This, this is what came to me, in my dreams, or some other place, yeah? But now it’s alive, and it’s out there, down to the band-aid I used to hold the clay in place. Who would copy this? And did you smell that? That smells like nothing on this earth. It has its own life, it does what it wants. I just want to scare ’em, scare anyone that took the [indistinct] away from the homeless, that’s when the violent idea popped in my head. It was just an emotion that ran through my head. An idea is dangerous, even a small one, but now it uses that violent idea (close up on Scully, overcome). He thinks that’s what he is supposed to do.

Scully: (At last speaking up, in a revelatory tone) You’re responsible! (Trashman looks quizzically at Mulder) If you made the problem, if it was your idea, then you’re responsible. You put it out of sight so that it wouldn’t be your problem (whether talking to him or herself unclear) but you’re just as bad as the people that you hate.

Here Mulder’s objection is a little over-zealous. As we have seen, there ARE Tibetan tulpas. Even if they aren’t born of angsty art and don’t ride around in trash vans, they are nonetheless manifestations of yogis’, gods’ and lamas’ focused intention. What is interesting however, is how “Home Again”‘s update of its own tulpa discourse speaks to a current occultural moment. Whereas the tulpa of 1999’s ‘Arcadia’ embodied the contradictions and sublimated desires of a suburban elite, 2016’s incarnation is a truly popular tulpa, a champion of the unwashed masses, of the victims of gentrification who live beyond insular, gated worlds of privilege. Made of and for human waste, Band-aid nose man is the hero in a modern-day cautionary tale about commoditized attention, dehumanization and issues of climate and urban change denialism that are global in scope. Moreover, an increase in the circulation and availability of information about both tulpa creation and Tibetan Buddhism has conspired to give us a wiser, more cautious Mulder. Whereas in 1999, Mulder could gloss a tulpa as “a Tibetan thought-form…a living, breathing creature willed into existence by someone who possesses that ability”, now in 2016 he refutes his own earlier claims as simplistic and misinformed. Whereas in 1999 Mulder is required merely to cite exotic esoteric ideas to make sense of the supernatural, in 2016 his paranormal expertise rests on being able to critically evaluate and even refute ’emic’ claims.

Mapping occultural, popular flows is challenging work. As Patridge has noted, by the time we scholars research, write and disseminate our reifications of pop occultural phenomena we are already out of date. Reddit and Facebook users have beat me to discussing and dissecting Monday’s X Files episode. Back-and-forths happen faster than can be tracked, let alone academically digested. And yet I believe that at least attempting to digest such flows is important. Tulpamancers, modern occultists, the representatives of affluent, information rich, self-oriented societies on which Partridge focuses may all be motivated by very different interests and problems to Tibetan refugees. And yet in today’s more informed milieu, dialogues between traditions and the shifting between vocabularies and frameworks is ongoing and complex. Trashman may not be sure or persuasive about the Tibetan-ness of his creations (or that tulpas are even ‘creations’ at all), but he knows what has worked and what he has experienced. Likewise, whether or not Tibetans and Tibetan Buddhists know or care about Western-style tulpas they too can access and contribute to discussions about them. Both occultists and non-occultists watch Adventure Time’s casual invocations of Aleister Crowley’s esoteric religion, both Tibetans and non-Tibetans watch its sneaky references to esoteric Buddhist concepts like the ‘rainbow body’ (‘ja’ lus).

In yet another example of reverberating feed-back loops, professional writer and sorcerer Jason Miller, who is an initiate of both Western and Tibetan Buddhist esoteric lineages, recently discussed with me a chapbook he is preparing on tulpa creation. Jason is well aware that ‘tulpa’ means something very different in Tibetan contexts compared to non-Tibetan ones. Yet as he explained to me, his book is based on the premise: “Tulpas dont work like that…. But what if they did? How WOULD Tibetans do such a thing?” By drawing on his familiarity with multiple ritual-meditative traditions, Jason has developed approaches to making Western magic-style ‘thought forms’ or servitors that draw inspiration from Tibetan Mahayoga bskyed rim structures without claiming to be synonymous with or equivalent to them. This kind of informed syncretism, like 2016’s Mulder, is arguably a product of a different, ‘wiser and more cautious’ moment, a time of greater information and greater discernment than David-Neel’s own period. It remains to be seen how much a new generation of Tibetans may engage with occultural discourses around tulpas. In the end, cultural production itself, like tulpas and magical emanations, appears solid and graspable one minute and mutates the next. And like all magical and phantasmagoric things, it can appear alternatively terrifying, absurd, or beautiful depending on how you look.