Jan Baptist van Helmont, a near contemporary of Paracelsus and coiner of the word 'gas', uses sylvestris in the sense of 'wild' to describe gaseous emissions, which may be connected to the Paracelsian usage. Jacob Grimm uses this phrase as a gloss for the Anglo-Saxon wudu-mær (roughly equivalent to 'woodmare'), which he also takes as a metaphorical name for an echo. Anthon and Trollope note a similar usage in the Aeneid, where silvestris is taken as an elliptical form of nympha silvestris ('forest nymph'). 'Sylph' is possibly a blend of from Latin sylvestris and nympha, sylvestris being a common synonym for sylph in Paracelsus.
A significant number of subsequent literary and occult works have been inspired by Paracelsus's concept: Robert Alfred Vaughan noted that 'the wild but poetical fantasies' of Paracelsus had probably exercised a larger influence over his age and the subsequent one than is generally supposed, particularly on the Rosicrucians, but that through the 18th century they had become reduced to 'machinery for the playwright' and 'opera figurantes with wings of gauze and spangles'. For other uses, see Sylph (disambiguation).Ī sylph (also called sylphid) is an air spirit stemming from the 16th-century works of Paracelsus, who describes sylphs as (invisible) beings of the air, his elementals of air.
