Sylphs, the Beings of Air

The later occult tradition attached a named ruler to each of Paracelsus's four elemental orders, kings first set out by the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn rather than by Paracelsus himself: Paralda for the sylphs, Nichsa for the undines, Djin for the salamanders and Ghob for the gnomes, names with no basis in Paracelsus's own sixteenth-century text and no clear derivation from any earlier source, functioning within Golden Dawn ceremonial practice as the beings invoked when working specifically with the element of air.

Sylphs also had a considerable independent literary afterlife in English long before modern occultism took them up. Alexander Pope's mock-epic poem The Rape of the Lock, published in 1712 and expanded in 1714, populated its miniature high-society world with sylphs as the guardian spirits of vain, flirtatious young women, drawing explicitly on Paracelsus's elemental scheme, which Pope encountered through a popular French occult work, for his poem's supernatural machinery. The poem's enormous popularity in the eighteenth century did more than any strictly occult source to fix sylph in general English usage as a word for a slender, graceful, almost weightless woman, a sense that now circulates far more widely than Paracelsus's original air-elemental ever did.