Sylphs

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.

Paracelsus (Theophrastus von Hohenheim, 1493-1541) was a physician, alchemist and reformer whose work on minerals, mining diseases and chemical remedies had a genuine and lasting effect on medicine, and whose cosmology is inseparable from it. The elemental beings belong to that cosmology and are presented in the treatise as a matter of natural philosophy, part of a full account of what God made, rather than as folklore.

The scheme was taken up in the Rosicrucian literature of the seventeenth century, satirised at length in the Abbe de Villars's Comte de Gabalis (1670), from which most later occult writers actually got it, and absorbed into the ritual system of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn in the nineteenth century, where the four orders were assigned to the quarters and used in elemental workings. The route from a Swiss physician's treatise to a Victorian magical order is direct and traceable.

Sources Paracelsus: An Introduction to Philosophical Medicine in the Era of the RenaissanceWalter Pagel with Dictionary of Gnosis and Western EsotericismWouter J. Hanegraaff (editor), The Golden Dawn: The Original Account of the Teachings, Rites, and Ceremonies of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, 6th editionIsrael Regardie