Nymphs

Open the Dictionnaire Infernal to the letter N and you find the nymphs filed under demonology, in three flat words: Nymphes, démons femelles. Female demons. The Greeks who built shrines to the spirits of their springs and rivers would not have known the woman in the water was a devil. Collin de Plancy’s book is the record of the moment the label changed.

From goddess to demon

To the Greeks the nymphs were honored powers, the living presences of particular places and functions. Collin de Plancy names some of their classes even as he demonizes them. The meliae attached themselves to the people they meant to favor or to deceive, and ran with a speed the eye could not follow. The genetyllides presided over birth and the cradle, serving as midwives and even nursing the newborn; the god Jupiter himself, the tradition said, was nursed by the nymph Melissa.

Then comes the demonologist’s turn of the screw. His proof that the nymphs are demons is a piece of Greek idiom: to say a woman was “full of nymphs,” the Greeks meant she was possessed. What had been a way of describing inspiration or ecstasy is read, centuries later, as a confession that the nymphs were unclean spirits all along. The figure is left intact and the meaning is inverted. A goddess of the spring becomes a demon of the water.

The waters, the fire, the air, the earth

The nymph did not become a free-floating devil. The occult tradition gave her a fixed address. Following the Renaissance physician Paracelsus, the cabalists sorted the spirits by element: the nymphs or undines belong to water, as the salamanders belong to fire, the sylphs to air, and the gnomes to earth. The Dictionnaire places its demon-nymphs squarely in this scheme and sends the reader on to its entry for the ondines. The seductive woman rising from the pool is, in this reading, the water element given a face.

The nymph of the Elbe

The clearest case the Dictionnaire offers is German. Citing the folklorist Praetorius, it describes the nymph of the river Elbe sitting on the bank to comb her hair in the manner of the sirens, and ties her to the legends the Brothers Grimm gathered and to the drowned-bride story Walter Scott built into The Bride of Lammermoor. Here the demonological reading turns hard. However beautiful the ondines and nixes appear, Collin de Plancy writes, the diabolical principle is always part of their essence: the spirit of evil is covered only by a more or less transparent veil, and sooner or later the kinship of these mysterious beauties with Satan shows through. Death, he adds, is the certain lot of any man who lets himself be seduced by them.

In the compendium

The nymphs sit in the bestiary as a clean specimen of a process rather than a single monster. They are what happens to a pagan god when a new religion keeps the story and swaps the meaning. The Greek nymph of the spring and the cradle survives in the Dictionnaire, but relabeled as a demon, her beauty recast as bait and her old title of possession read as proof. She keeps the company of Pan, the goat-god the same book files as the prince of the incubus-demons, and of Artemis, the huntress the nymphs once followed through the woods. What Collin de Plancy records, without quite meaning to, is how a demon gets made.

Sources

Bibliography. The same list is held in the article’s frontmatter for the citation tools that read it programmatically.

• Jacques Collin de Plancy, Dictionnaire Infernal, 6th ed. (1863), the entry ‘Nymphes’ (illustration by Louis Le Breton)
• Paracelsus, Liber de nymphis, sylphis, pygmaeis et salamandris (published 1566), the four elemental spirits
• Johannes Praetorius, on the nymph of the Elbe (as cited by Collin de Plancy)
• Brothers Grimm, Deutsche Sagen (German Legends, 1816-1818)
• Walter Scott, The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), the literary parallel Collin de Plancy names