Elemental (tradition)

In Paracelsian natural philosophy elementals are classificatory inhabitants of the four classical elemental 'chaoses' rather than products of a single mythic creation tale. Paracelsus framed them as distinct ontological classes—gnomus (earth), undina (water), sylph (air), salamander (fire)—drawing on older elemental theory (Empedoclean fourfold cosmology) and Renaissance alchemical thought. Later writers and commentators (parallel taxonomies in Agrippa; popularization and elaboration in Comte de Gabalis; Rosicrucian claims about perceiving elementals) adopted and adapted this Paracelsian framework, but Paracelsus himself supplied the core tripartite anthropology and the fourfold elemental taxonomy.

Paracelsus described elementals as commonly humanoid in body with ordinary life functions: they eat, sleep, and wear clothes like humans. He gave comparative physical notes for the types: gnomes short; undines similar to humans in size; sylphs 'rougher, coarser, longer, and stronger' than humans; salamanders long, narrow, and lean. Later commentators vary in descriptive detail, and some later sources add gendered or romanticized traits not presented systematically by Paracelsus.

Each elemental moves through and is at home in its native element in the way humans move through air: gnomes through earth and rocks, undines through water, sylphs through air, salamanders through fire. Paracelsus asserted that they are 'healthy' in their own chaos and suffer or die in other elements (for example, sylphs are harmed by fire or drowned by water). Paracelsus also located them ontologically as lacking the immortal divine soul; he discussed the possibility that an elemental could obtain a soul by marrying a human, producing offspring and thereby crossing the boundary between elemental life and human immortality. Normally invisible to mankind, later Rosicrucian and related practices describe alchemical/initiatory procedures that purportedly enable vision of these beings.