Reblogged from deadbutdreaming:

There is a long tradition of metaphysical entities becoming manifest in our consensus reality as distinctive attributes of nature. They interact with the material world but they are never fully consolidated within it. They are deemed essential to the propagation of nature but their presence remains supernatural and beyond the bounds of relativistic inquiry. They are usually termed nature spirits, or sometimes elementals, and while they are frequently equated with the faeries of folklore there is a disparity between these classes of beings, which has, however, become increasingly enmeshed, to the point where they are often seen as the same thing. Are they the same thing? Are nature spirits faeries and vice versa? This post investigates the, sometimes complex, entanglements of these metaphysical entities beginning with the 16th-century progenitor of the concept of nature spirits: Philippus Aureolus Theophrastus Bombastus von Hohenheim, more often (and conveniently) known as Paracelsus.

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