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The Tulpa

added04 September 2026

A practice Russian-language imageboards picked up from English-language ones around 2012: an imagined companion, grown over months of daily exercises until it answers on its own and becomes visible to the person who made it. The word is taken from Tibetan Buddhism, where it means something quite different; its present sense was given to it by Western occultists in the early twentieth century. The frightening part of the legend is not the practice but its retellings: the tulpa that stopped obeying, the tulpa that refused to go, and the tulpa that was there first.

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