Sylph
 |
|
| Grouping | Mythological |
|---|---|
| Sub grouping | Air spirit, Elemental |
| Similar creatures | Angels, Fairies |
| Mythology | Western tradition |
| Other name(s) | Sylphid |
| Habitat | Air |
Sylph (also called sylphid) is a mythological spirit of the air. The term originates in the 16th century works of Paracelsus, who describes sylphs as invisible 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."
The word is possibly a portmanteau from Latin and ,sylvestris being a common synonym for sylph in Paracelsus. Anthon and Trollope note a similar usage in the Aeneid, where silvestris is taken as an elliptical form of nympha silvestris ("forest nymph"). Jacob Grimm uses this phrase as a gloss for the Anglo-Saxon wudu-mær (roughly equivalent to "woodmare"), which he also takes as a metaphorical name for an echo.Jan Baptist van Helmont, a near contemporary of Paracelsus and coiner of the word "gas," uses sylvestris in the sense of "wild" to describe gaseous emissions, which may be connected to the Paracelsian usage. Thorpe's Northern Mythology connects the adjective sylvestres and the related silvaticas to European wild man legends. A related idea is that "sylph" is from a hyper-urbane respelling of a Latin neologism silves, but in either case this connection to the Latin root silva ("forest") is supported by Paracelsus' use of sylphes as a synonym for schrötlein, a German word for a tree spirit or especially an earth spirit in his Liber de Sanguine ultra Mortem.
An alternative theory is that it derives from the Ancient Greek σίλφη (silphē), which a number of etymological sources gloss as "moth," though the most authoritative reference for Ancient Greek, A Greek–English Lexicon, is unaware of this sense and defines it as a "cockroach" or "book worm." French etymological sources often derive it from a Latin word sylphus, glossed as "genius" (in the Latin sense, a type of spirit) and only known from inscriptions rather than literary Latin. The Deutsches Wörterbuch however indicates that this idea arises from a 19th-century misreading of the inscription in question. Similarly, the σίλφη etymology can be dismissed from the lack of an objective historical and thus semantic connection. The idea of an intentional portmanteau is also considered doubtful, though extensive evidence can be found that indicates that Paracelsus considered the various sylvan spirits and wild men of legend to be examples of sylphs, which he occasionally took to be earth elementals rather than air elementals.
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