Ordo Velum Mundi · Historical Archives Division
The Codex
The world has rules. The supernatural operates according to documented principles: belief-based power systems, Progenitor lineages, the seven societies, and the mechanisms the Velum Institute has spent seven hundred years mapping.
Selected records have been cleared for external distribution. Additional documentation remains classified pending mandatory review cycles.
Bestiary: Restless Spirit (14)
Banshee
The Banshee represents the restless spirit lineage's most dignified entity type: an entity that has transformed its attachment into a stable, functional identity rather than a destructive or chaotic force. The Banshee is not suffering in the acute sense. It is performing a role. This distinction places it at the opposite end of the restless spirit lineage's...
Domovoi
The Domovoi presents the rarest transmission variant in the restless spirit lineage: an entity that is not primarily in distress. The dominant cultural belief that produced the Domovoi type held that the spirit of the family patriarch remained with the household after death to protect the lineage he had founded. This is, at root, the Obligation Unfulfilled...
Douen
The Douen is the restless spirit lineage's most complex post-colonial manifestation in the Caribbean record: a creature whose very existence is shaped by the collision of multiple belief systems, African, indigenous, and European Catholic, in a context of colonial violence and spiritual disruption. The Douen is specifically the spirit of a child who died...
Duppy
The Duppy represents the restless spirit lineage's expression in a cultural tradition that was itself violently disrupted: the African spiritual practices brought to the Caribbean through the Middle Passage, which could not be fully maintained under colonial conditions and which consequently produced exactly the ritual failure conditions that generate...
Iele
The Iele represent the restless spirit lineage's expression in young women who died suspended in the threshold state between girlhood and full adult womanhood: not through romantic betrayal specifically, but through the denial of the full arc of feminine life. Their eternal dancing is not grief expressed as movement. It is the thing they never stopped doing...
Jiangshi and Hungry Ghosts
The Jiangshi and the Hungry Ghost represent two distinct expressions of the restless spirit lineage in Chinese tradition that differ in an important way: the Jiangshi is formed through external circumstances (improper death, failed rites), while the Hungry Ghost is formed through the entity's own prior choices (selfish and greedy living producing karmic...
Mavka
The Mavka shares the Rusalka's origin mechanics, the restless spirit lineage activating through the Incomplete Transitions transmission pathway in young women who died before marriage, before full social integration, before the life stages that their culture held as essential to spiritual completion. The distinction between the two entity types reflects...
Nav
The word Nav derives from the Proto-Slavic root meaning "the dead." In the cosmological framework of the pre-Christian Slavic tradition, Nav was both the underworld realm ruled by Veles and the category of entity that inhabited the space between proper death and proper arrival in that realm. The Nav entity is the restless spirit lineage's expression through...
Onryō
The Japanese Onryō represents the restless spirit lineage's expression through the Betrayal transmission pathway taken to its cosmological extreme. Where the Rusalka is anchored to the personal moment of romantic betrayal, the Onryō's scope of grievance is not bounded by the personal: it encompasses the cosmic imbalance that injustice creates. An Onryō is...
Poltergeist
The Poltergeist is the restless spirit lineage's least specific and most broadly distributed expression: an entity created when intense emotional trauma at the moment of death, particularly rage and the refusal to accept the injustice of the death, produces a persistent kinetic manifestation with no specific attachment to a person, relationship, or location...
Rusalka
The Rusalka is the restless spirit lineage's clearest expression of the Severed Bonds transmission pathway, specifically the transmission variant involving romantic betrayal. In the Slavic belief tradition that shaped this entity type, a Rusalka is the spirit of a young woman who drowned following betrayal: the lover who abandoned her, the family that cast...
Vanapagan
The Vanapagan (literally "Old Pagan" or "Old Devil") sits at an unusual position in the restless spirit lineage: it is the most trickster-oriented entity type in this bestiary, and its connection to the restless spirit lineage mechanism is less through romantic or maternal attachment and more through the Accumulated Guilt and Obligation Unfulfilled pathways acting...
Vodník
The Vodník represents a disturbing variant within the restless spirit lineage: an entity that has transformed its own original attachment into a mechanism for creating the same condition in others. The Vodník collects drowned souls in covered porcelain cups, displayed as a hoard, as status symbols among other water spirits of its type.
Wraith
The Wraith occupies the transition point between the restless spirit lineage and the most dangerous expressions of what happens when specific attachment transforms over time into generalized malevolence. The Wraith begins its existence as an omen, the soul-double appearing at the moment of impending death, liminal and warning-oriented. But the Wraith that is...