Astral entities are beings reportedly encountered in out-of-body, near-death, deep meditative, and trance states — the intelligences inhabiting or traversing what various traditions call the astral plane, the subtle body, the non-physical reality, or the intermediate state. Unlike entities that enter physical reality from elsewhere, astral entities are encountered primarily when the experiencer's consciousness has temporarily departed ordinary physical-reality orientation — during the out-of-body state, near-death experience, deep dream, or meditative absorption. The category is ancient and cross-cultural, documented in systematic detail by traditions spanning Hinduism, Buddhism, Theosophy, and 20th-century experimental out-of-body research, and is the most extensively mapped of the non-corporeal entity sub-types.
Vedic and Puranic cosmology provides an elaborate taxonomy of non-physical beings operating in subtle reality planes (lokas). The Devas (shining ones) inhabit the higher planes; Gandharvas are described as celestial musicians in an intermediate plane; Yakshas and Nagas occupy closer-to-physical subtler domains; Pretas and Pisachas are described as lower-plane entities associated with confusion and harm. The seven-plane model of reality in Hindu cosmology — from the densest physical plane through increasingly subtle planes to the plane of pure consciousness — is one of the earliest systematic maps of non-physical reality and its inhabitants.
The Bardo Thodol (Tibetan Book of the Dead, compiled 8th century CE, attributed to Padmasambhava) provides the most detailed pre-modern map of the post-mortem non-physical state and its entities. The Bardo — the intermediate state between death and rebirth — is described as populated by peaceful and wrathful deities, whose appearances correspond to the qualities of consciousness projected by the deceased. The Bardo Thodol's phenomenological specificity — including the characteristic colour sequences, deity appearances, and experiential states — correlates significantly with NDE and OBE phenomenology in ways noted by researchers including Kenneth Ring and Carl Jung.
The Theosophical Society (founded 1875 by Helena Blavatsky and Henry Steel Olcott) developed an elaborate taxonomy of astral entities based on claimed direct astral observation by trained practitioners. Key categories in Theosophical literature include elementals (entities composed of and animated by a single elemental force — earth, water, fire, or air — without individualised consciousness), nature spirits (gnomes, sylphs, undines, salamanders — collective consciousness forms associated with natural processes), and kamic beings or "shells" (the surviving astral remnants of deceased humans, which persist for a period before dispersing). C.W. Leadbeater's The Astral Plane (1895) and Annie Besant's works systematised Theosophical astral entity taxonomy into its most accessible form.
Robert Monroe (1915–1995) began spontaneous out-of-body experiences in 1958, spent three decades systematically exploring non-physical environments through controlled OBE states, and founded the Monroe Institute in 1974 to research and develop reproducible OBE access through binaural audio technology (Hemi-Sync). Monroe's three-volume account — Journeys Out of the Body (1971), Far Journeys (1985), Ultimate Journey (1994) — remains the most systematic first-person cartography of non-physical reality and its entities from a modern Western researcher.
Monroe's entity taxonomy, derived from thousands of documented OBE sessions, distinguishes:
The Monroe Institute has since collected tens of thousands of structured OBE reports from trained practitioners, providing a large phenomenological dataset on astral entity types that is systematically categorised but not publicly released in full.
The most frequently reported entity type in OBE and NDE states is a recognisably human consciousness — typically a deceased relative, acquaintance, or in some accounts a complete stranger who provides information later confirmed by the experiencer. This category overlaps with the survival of consciousness literature (NDEs, mediumship, terminal lucidity) and is considered by some researchers to represent a separate phenomenon from genuinely non-human astral entities.
Across OBE, NDE, shamanic, and deep meditative traditions, a category of beings presents itself as specifically oriented toward assisting the experiencer — providing navigation assistance in non-physical environments, offering information, and in many accounts conveying a sense of personal relationship across multiple encounters. These "guide" beings are described with varying morphologies (some humanoid, some entirely luminous, some without definable form) but with a consistent functional profile.
Entities with no apparent relationship to human consciousness — not deceased humans, not guides oriented toward the experiencer, but apparently autonomous intelligences with their own agendas and characteristics. These range from entities described as benign and ancient to entities described as hostile, predatory, or territorial within non-physical environments. The hostile astral entity literature — "astral parasites," "loosh-harvesting entities" (Monroe's terminology for non-physical beings that feed on human negative emotional states), and the entity types described in Castaneda's don Juan tradition — represents a significant subset of the astral entity literature with implications for spiritual hygiene and psychic self-defense frameworks.
Jung's concept of the collective unconscious and its archetypal contents — universal patterns of meaning shared across human consciousness — has been applied to the astral entity literature to explain the cross-cultural consistency of certain entity types. In this framework, astral entities represent autonomous complexes of the collective psyche rather than independently existing beings. The Jungian interpretation accounts well for cross-cultural consistency but struggles with the physical effects, OBE verification data, and cases where entities convey verifiable unknown information.
The relationship between astral entities and the UAP/NHI contact phenomenon is theoretically contested but phenomenologically suggestive. Several areas of overlap:
This page presents astral entity phenomena through the lens of traditional cosmological frameworks, Monroe Institute research, NDE literature, and cross-cultural spiritual tradition. No claims about the ontological status of astral entities are made by this archive. All research cited (Monroe, Ring, van Lommel, Strassman) is real and independently verifiable.