The Spirits of the Four Elements

Elementals are the spirits assigned to the four classical elements: gnomes to earth, undines to water, sylphs to air and salamanders to fire. This particular quartet, with these names, comes from Paracelsus, whose Liber de Nymphis was published in 1566, though earlier traditions had their own nature-spirits of the elements, nymphs, genii and the fairy folk of folklore.

Each kind of elemental is held to embody the qualities of its element and to inhabit its realm, and in the Western magical tradition they are the beings a practitioner may contact when working with a given element.