Pliny the Elder, one of the ancient sources most responsible for spreading the fire-resistant salamander legend, was not entirely credulous about it himself; even as he records the popular belief that salamander secretions could extinguish fire, he notes that when the claim was actually put to a direct test, the salamander he describes did not survive contact with flame, an early, half buried moment of scepticism embedded within the very text that helped the legend spread through the following fifteen centuries of natural history writing.
Francis I's adoption of the salamander as his personal emblem, with the motto I nourish and extinguish, left a permanent mark on French royal architecture: the creature appears carved and painted by the hundreds throughout the Chateau de Chambord, the vast hunting lodge he began building in the Loire Valley in 1519, along with his other residences, so that visitors today encounter Paracelsus's future fire-elemental already established as a royal French symbol decades before Paracelsus wrote about it. The Golden Dawn later assigned salamanders their own ruling king, Djin, completing the set of four elemental rulers, Paralda, Nichsa, Djin and Ghob, that the order attached to Paracelsus's air, water, fire and earth beings respectively.
Sources Naturalis Historia (Natural History)Pliny the Elder with The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie