Shell

Shell is a technical term used in Theosophy to refer to the psychic remnants left behind by an Ego when entering into Devachan, consisting the fourth and the personal aspect of the fifth principles.

H. P. Blavatsky defined it as follows:

Shells. A Kabbalistic name for the phantoms of the dead, the “spirits” of the Spiritualists, figuring in physical phenomena; so named on account of their being simply illusive forms, empty of their higher principles.

These shells may show a resemblance of self-consciousness:

And even the shells of those good men whose page will not be found missing in the great Book of Lives at the threshold of the Great Nirvana, even they will regain their remembrance and an appearance of Self-consciousness, only after the sixth and seventh principles with the essence of the 5th (the latter having to furnish the material for even that partial recollection of personality which is necessary for the object in Devachan) — have gone to their gestation period, not before.

Further reading

• Shell(s) at Theosopedia