Astral Entities and Beings

Astral entities are the non-physical beings encountered during out-of-body experience, lucid dreaming, psychic perception, and other forms of subtle-realm contact. Reports of such encounters are among the most consistent features of these experiences across cultures and historical periods, and the beings described range from apparently impersonal energies and thought-form constructs to what seem to be independently existing intelligences with their own purposes and personalities.

Understanding the range of what practitioners report encountering in the astral plane requires holding multiple interpretive possibilities simultaneously. The nature of astral entities is one of the genuinely open questions in metaphysical and consciousness research, and the accounts themselves are the most reliable starting point for developing a working understanding.

History and origins

Non-physical beings as inhabitants of intermediate realms appear in essentially every culture’s cosmological worldview. Greek daimones, the djinn of Islamic tradition, the devas and asuras of Hindu cosmology, the spirits of Shinto, and the various orders of angels and demons in Abrahamic traditions all represent cultural attempts to describe and systematize non-physical presences perceived through mediumship, vision, dreams, and altered states.

The Theosophical tradition of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries developed a systematic taxonomy of astral beings that became highly influential in Western metaphysical practice. Charles Webster Leadbeater described in considerable detail the various orders of beings inhabiting the astral plane, including nature spirits, devas, thought forms, discarnate human souls, and evolved non-human intelligences. This framework, though rooted in Leadbeater’s reported clairvoyant observations, shaped subsequent occult understanding of the astral population significantly.

Robert Monroe, approaching the question empirically through his own OBE research from the 1950s onward, encountered beings he could not categorize within existing frameworks and developed his own working taxonomy based on their apparent nature and behavior, which he described in his trilogy. Contemporary practitioners draw from both of these streams and from their own direct experience.

Types of beings reported

Thought forms: These are entities that appear to have been created by concentrated mental or emotional energy rather than existing as independent intelligences. Individual thought forms arise from intense sustained emotion or visualization; collective thought forms (egregores) develop around groups, ideologies, or religious devotion over time. In the astral or subtle realms, powerful thought forms can appear as quasi-independent entities with their own apparent momentum and behavior, though they lack the depth and responsiveness of more complex beings.

Discarnate human souls: Many out-of-body travelers and mediums report encounters with the consciousness of people who have died and not yet moved on to further stages of the afterlife process. Traditional teachings describe a period after death in which the soul remains in astral states associated with its earthly attachments before progressing to further realms. Encounters with such souls vary widely: some appear confused and unaware of their situation, while others appear peaceful and purposeful.

Guides and helpers: Across traditions, practitioners report beings whose consistent function is to assist, guide, or protect humans during non-ordinary states. These appear as ancestors, angelic presences, wise figures, or beings of light, depending on the perceiver’s cultural and religious context. Many experienced practitioners develop stable, ongoing relationships with specific guides whose presence becomes familiar and whose guidance proves reliable over time.

Nature spirits and elemental beings: Certain practitioners report perception of non-human intelligences associated with natural phenomena and places: beings tied to landscapes, bodies of water, plants, and elemental forces. These appear across cultures under names including faeries, djinn, devas, elementals, and land spirits. Their relationship to the astral plane specifically varies by tradition; some frameworks place them in the etheric rather than the astral.

Independent intelligences: Some OBE accounts describe encounters with highly intelligent, apparently non-human beings whose purpose and origin are unclear. Monroe described several categories of such beings in his accounts, and other experienced projectors report similar encounters. These are the most difficult to interpret and the most resistant to existing taxonomic frameworks.

Constructs and residues: The astral plane in many traditional descriptions also contains what might be called emotional residues or psychic impressions: the accumulated emotional charge of events, places, and interactions that has not yet dissipated. These can appear as apparent beings with repetitive behavior, or simply as atmospheric qualities associated with particular locations or states.

In practice

How you encounter astral entities and what you do with the encounters depends significantly on your own state of mind and intention during projection or other subtle contact.

The general principle among experienced practitioners is to approach all encounters with calm curiosity rather than fear or aggression. Fear tends to attract and magnify frightening forms, which is one reason early projections that begin in anxiety often feature alarming entities. Maintaining a steady, grounded, and purposeful state reduces the frequency of troubling encounters and increases the quality of meaningful ones.

Calling on guides, using protective intent, or demanding clarity from any entity about its nature and purpose are all reported as effective practices for managing encounters. Some practitioners establish a clear working protocol before projecting: calling on protection, setting intention, and asking any entity they encounter to identify itself clearly.

The question of whether astral entities are objectively existing beings in a non-physical realm, projections of the traveler’s own unconscious, or something in between remains genuinely open. Whatever their ultimate nature, the encounters are real as experiences and can carry genuine information, challenge, and meaning. Engaging with them thoughtfully and without either credulity or dismissal serves the practitioner best.

In myth and popular culture

The populations attributed to intermediate non-physical realms are among the most consistent features of religious and mythological traditions worldwide. Greek daimones, intermediate beings between gods and humans described by Plato in the Symposium as the carriers of prayers and offerings between the divine and mortal realms, represent one of the earliest systematic attempts to describe beneficial astral beings with ongoing relationships to humans. Plato’s Symposium places the famous speech about daimones in the mouth of Socrates, who attributes his philosophical guidance to a personal daimon.

The djinn of Islamic tradition, described in the Quran as a distinct class of beings created from smokeless fire and capable of both good and evil, have generated an extensive literature of encounter accounts and ritual protocols across the Islamic world. Their recognition in canonical scripture gives them a different status from the purely folkloric beings of many other traditions, and their continued relevance in contemporary Islamic magical practice is well documented by scholars including Amira El-Azhary Sonbol.

C.W. Leadbeater’s The Astral Plane (1895) remains one of the most detailed taxonomies of astral beings ever produced, describing nature spirits, elementals, thought forms, artificial elementals, shells of the deceased, and various orders of non-human intelligences with the systematic detail of a naturalist’s field guide. The book’s influence on subsequent Western occult taxonomy of inner beings is considerable and direct.

Robert Monroe’s accounts in his trilogy are notable for their empirical approach to entity encounter: Monroe described beings he could not classify and refused to force his observations into pre-existing frameworks. His description of beings who farm human emotional energy, which he called “Loosh,” became one of the more discussed and disputed passages in the OBE literature, illustrating how encounter accounts can generate their own sub-traditions of interpretation.

Myths and facts

Several common beliefs about astral entities and beings invite careful examination.

• The idea that all frightening entities encountered during astral projection are genuinely malevolent beings intending harm is not supported by the broad body of practitioner accounts. Most experienced projectors report that frightening encounters, particularly at the onset of projection, are strongly influenced by the projector’s own fear state and typically dissolve or transform when met with calm rather than fear.
• Some practitioners believe that calling on protective figures before projection prevents all difficult encounters. Protection practices do appear to reduce the frequency of challenging encounters and improve the quality of the experience for most practitioners, but they do not create an absolute guarantee. Discernment remains necessary throughout.
• Thought forms are sometimes described as harmless psychological phenomena with no real existence. In most esoteric frameworks, thought forms can take on genuine quasi-independent existence in the astral or subtle realms, particularly when charged by strong emotion or by the sustained attention of a group. Treating them as entirely without consequence overlooks a significant body of practice aimed specifically at working with and dissolving these constructs.
• The belief that encountering a deceased relative on the astral plane constitutes definitive proof of survival after death is a stronger claim than the experience itself supports. The encounter is real as an experience and may carry genuine meaning; whether it involves the actual ongoing consciousness of the deceased person rather than a memory-form or projection of the practitioner’s psyche cannot be determined from the experience alone.
• Some sources describe astral entities as belonging to a fixed hierarchy that is the same across all traditions. The various classification systems, Theosophical, Enochian, shamanic, and others, are each internally consistent but not mutually compatible. They represent different mapping attempts of what may be the same underlying reality, seen from different cultural vantage points.