[Ads-l] tulpa

[Benjamin Barrett]

There is a character known as Slender Man (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slender_Man>) that came into existence online and grew as others expanded it.

According to Patricia Hernandez in her article "For Five Years, One Woman Chronicled Her Boyfriend's Fixation With Slender Man On YouTube” (http://bit.ly/2ehnzCd <http://bit.ly/2ehnzCd>, 24 October 2016), Marissa has created a Blair Witch-esque video project (https://www.youtube.com/user/tulpaeffect/videos) that claims to document her boyfriend’s obsession with Slender Man.

This video channel with the series is named “Tulpa Effect”. The first video is July 29, 2011 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YACv8UcpsdY <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YACv8UcpsdY>).

According to Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tulpa>), a tulpa is a mystic concept in which spiritual or mental efforts are used to create a living being or an object. Wiktionary (https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tulpa <https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/tulpa>) extends this to “a modern type of imaginary friend inspired by traditional tulpa”.

Both the Wikipedia and Wiktionary pages have both “tulpa” with no article and “a tulpa”.

Wikipedia and Wiktionary have Tibetan སྤྲུལ་པ as the source.

This word is on in the online Oxford Dictionaries.

Benjamin Barrett
Formerly of Seattle, WA



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