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Undine Rising From the Waters, by Chauncey Bradley Ives Rococo set of personification figurines of the Four Elements, 1760s, Chelsea porcelain. An elemental is a mythic supernatural being that is described in occult and alchemical works from around the time of the European Renaissance, and particularly elaborated in the 16th century works of Paracelsus.
In particular, Lévi-Strauss believed that the elements of a myth could be organized into binary oppositions (raw vs. cooked, nature vs. culture, etc.). He thought that the myth's purpose was to "mediate" these oppositions, thereby resolving basic tensions or contradictions found in human life or culture. [11]
A Greek dryad depicted in a painting. In religion, a nature deity is a deity in charge of forces of nature, such as water, biological processes, or weather.These deities can also govern natural features such as mountains, trees, or volcanoes.
Several notable Celtic scholars, including Joseph Loth and Kuno Meyer, have preferred to derive it rather from Old Irish bolc "gap, breach, notch" (cognate with Welsh bwlch), suggesting a linguistic link with the second element in the name of Fergus mac Róich's sword, Caladbolg and King Arthur's sword Caledfwlch.
The Swiss German physician and alchemist Paracelsus first coined the term sylph in the 16th century to describe an air spirit in his overarching scheme of elemental spirits associated with the four Classical elements. Paracelsus drew from earlier sources, but his systematic treatment of the idea was definitive, with the names of three of the ...
The classical elements typically refer to earth, water, air, fire, and (later) aether which were proposed to explain the nature and complexity of all matter in terms of simpler substances. [ 1 ] [ 2 ] Ancient cultures in Greece , Angola , Tibet , India , and Mali had similar lists which sometimes referred, in local languages, to "air" as "wind ...
Greek mythology has changed over time to accommodate the evolution of their culture, of which mythology, both overtly and in its unspoken assumptions, is an index of the changes. In Greek mythology's surviving literary forms, as found mostly at the end of the progressive changes, it is inherently political, as Gilbert Cuthbertson (1975) has argued.
The nature–culture divide is the notion of a dichotomy between humans and the environment. [1] It is a theoretical foundation of contemporary anthropology that considers whether nature and culture function separately from one another, or if they are in a continuous biotic relationship with each other.