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Evoland 2 sylph forest stuck5/1/2023 ![]() Sylphs, he says, are rougher, coarser, taller, and stronger than humans. In the Liber de Nymphis of the Philosophia Magna, Paracelsus discusses the characteristics of the elementals at length. ![]() These ideas were adopted in Rosicrucianism and were widely encountered in subsequent hermetic literature. The other three elemental spirits named were Gnomes (earth), Salamanders (fire), and Undines (water). 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 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. Bourbon advertising label in the shape of a glass showing a man pursuing three sylphs 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. Similarly, the σίλφη etymology can be dismissed from the lack of an objective historical and thus semantic connection. The Deutsches Wörterbuch however indicates that this idea arises from a 19th-century misreading of the inscription in question. 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 an inscription rather than literary Latin. Īn alternative theory is that it derives from the Ancient Greek σίλφη (silphē), which a number of etymological sources gloss as "moth". 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. Thorpe's Northern Mythology connects the adjective sylvestres and the related silvaticas to European wild man legends. 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. 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. Anthon and Trollope note a similar usage in the Aeneid, where silvestris is taken as an elliptical form of nympha silvestris ("forest nymph"). "Sylph" is possibly a blend of from Latin sylvestris and nympha, sylvestris being a common synonym for sylph in Paracelsus.
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