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