Phantoms

Phantoms
Class	made, not born — see the note on the two kinds below
Dwells	wherever the projection that cast them is still being cast
Feeds on	nothing; a phantom does not want
Approach	none; it has no will with which to approach anything
Earliest account	unknown, and probably unknowable — they are too common to have been noticed
Consensus among us Real, ubiquitous, and harmless in themselves. What matters about them is what they can become. unverified

Phantoms are projections of Psychic Energy. They have no internal will to them and exist as lesser copies of other beings. inherited

That inherited line is the whole of the old entry and it is accurate. What follows is what it implies, which nobody had written down.

The two kinds of Other

This is a distinction the wiki has needed for years and only reached recently, and it belongs here because phantoms are the clearest case of the second kind. contested

Others describes the displaced: those that came before man, that lost the material world to us, and that can only reach it through us. Djinn, fey, spirits. They have a grievance, they have an age, and they existed before anyone was here to make them.

Phantoms are not that. They have no grievance because they lost nothing. They have no age. They were made — by a mind, recently, often accidentally, and frequently by someone who never knew they had done it. A phantom is not an inhabitant of The Dark that came to us. It is something we cast into the Dark, that the Dark keeps. unverified

The wiki has been using one word, Other, for both categories, and they have almost nothing in common. The displaced want in. The made were never out.

Harmless, and the reason to care anyway

A phantom in isolation does nothing. It has no will, no appetite and no capacity to act; it is a copy, cast and persisting, in the way a shadow persists while the thing casting it stands still. Nobody has ever been harmed by a phantom as such. unverified

They matter because they are the first rung. Every made thing on this wiki that does have a will started here. A phantom replicated enough, held by enough minds, attended to for long enough, acquires one — and what it becomes is set out under Ghosts, Egregore and Gods. See Meme Wars for the ladder stated as a sequence, and for the fact that the first rung is reachable on purpose. contested

The uncomfortable corollary: phantoms are being made constantly, by everyone, without intent, and always have been. The question was never how to avoid casting them. It is which ones get attended to. unverified

How this entry was assembled

Drawn from: The inherited line, the Psychic Energy entry, and the ladder assembled under Meme Wars.

Compiled by: Gershon.

Known weaknesses: The made/displaced distinction is ours and is recent. It tidies the category of Others considerably, and we have noticed that it does, which is a reason to hold it loosely.

Wanted: An account of a phantom that acquired will where someone was watching, and can say what the threshold was.