page_title: Sylph
section_title: Paracelsus' conception
hierarchical_section_title: Sylph / Paracelsus' conception
caption_attribution_description: La Sylphide Bourbon, A.M. Bininger &amp; Co. Bourbon advertising label in the shape of a glass showing a man pursuing three sylphs.
context_page_description: Sylph is a mythological air spirit. The term originates in the 16th-century works of Paracelsus, who describes sylphs as beings of the air, his elementals of air.
  Since the term sylph itself originates with Paracelsus, there is relatively little pre-Paracelsian legend and mythology that can be confidently associated with it, but a significant number of subsequent literary and occult works have been inspired by the idea. Robert Alfred Vaughan noted that "the wild but poetical fantasies" of Paracelsus had probably exercised a larger influence over his age and the subsequent one than is generally supposed, particularly on the Rosicrucians, but that through the 18th century they had become reduced to "machinery for the playwright" and "opera figurantes with wings of gauze and spangles".
context_section_description: The Swiss German physician and alchemist Paracelsus first coined the term sylph in the 16th century to describe an air spirit in his overarching scheme of elemental spirits associated with the four Classical elements. Paracelsus drew from earlier sources, but his systematic treatment of the idea was definitive, with the names of three of the four types having originated in his works. The other three elemental spirits named were Gnomes (earth), Salamanders (fire), and Undines (water). These ideas were adopted in Rosicrucianism and were widely encountered in subsequent hermetic literature.
  In the Liber de Nymphis of the Philosophia Magna, Paracelsus discusses the characteristics of the elementals at length. Sylphs, he says, are rougher, coarser, taller, and stronger than humans. The elementals are said to be able to move through their own elements as human beings move through air. Because of this, sylphs are the closest to humans in his conception because they move through air like we do, while in fire they burn, in water they drown, and in earth, they get stuck.
caption: La Sylphide Bourbon, A.M. Bininger & Co. Bourbon advertising label in the shape of a glass showing a man pursuing three sylphs
exif: {"Image ImageWidth": "4658", "Image ImageLength": "3821", "Image BitsPerSample": "[8, 8, 8]", "Image Compression": "Uncompressed", "Image PhotometricInterpretation": "2", "Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image SamplesPerPixel": "3", "Image XResolution": "1000", "Image YResolution": "1000", "Image PlanarConfiguration": "1", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS2 Windows", "Image DateTime": "2008:10:24 17:04:15", "Image Artist": "Library of Congress", "Image ExifOffset": "284", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "422", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "6781", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "3630", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "2954"}