A sylph 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. 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".
La Sylphide Bourbon, A.M. Bininger & Co. Bourbon advertising label in the shape of a glass showing a man pursuing three sylphs
Marie Taglioni in La Sylphide
Paracelsus, born Theophrastus von Hohenheim, was a Swiss physician, alchemist, lay theologian, and philosopher of the German Renaissance.
1538 portrait by Augustin Hirschvogel
The Louvre copy of the lost portrait by Quentin Matsys, source of the iconographic tradition of "fat" Paracelsus
The University of Basel, where Paracelsus started working as a professor in 1527
Monument to Paracelsus in Beratzhausen, Bavaria
