They furnish the children of the Sages with as much money, as they have need of and never ask any other reward of their services, than the glory of being commanded. They are ingenious, friends of men, and easie (sic) to be commandded (sic). "The Earth is filled almost to the center with Gnomes or Pharyes, a people of small stature, the guardians of treasures, of mines, and of precious stones. ![]() Pope's stated source, the 1670 French satire Comte de Gabalis by Nicolas-Pierre-Henri de Montfaucon de Villars, the abbot of Villars, describes gnomes as such: Other uses of the term gnome remain obscure until the early 19th century, when it is taken up by authors of Romanticist collections of fairy tales and becomes mostly synonymous with the older word goblin. The creatures from this mock-epic are small, celestial creatures which were prudish women in their past lives, and now spend all of eternity looking out for prudish women (in parallel to the guardian angels in Catholic belief). Gnomes are used in Alexander Pope's " The Rape of the Lock". The English word is attested from the early 18th century. Cultural references In Romanticism and modern fairy tales Gnome Watching Railway Train, Carl Spitzweg, 1848 The gnomes of Swiss folklore follow this template, as they are said to have caused the landslide that destroyed the Swiss village of Plurs in 1618 - the villagers had become wealthy from a local gold mine created by the gnomes, who poured liquid gold down into a vein for the benefit of humans, and were corrupted by this newfound prosperity, which greatly offended the gnomes. The chthonic or earth-dwelling spirit has precedents in numerous ancient and medieval mythologies, often guarding mines and precious underground treasures, notably in the Germanic dwarfs and the Greek Chalybes, Telchines or Dactyls. He describes them as two spans high, very reluctant to interact with humans and able to move through solid earth as easily as humans move through air. ![]() Paracelsus uses Gnomi as a synonym of Pygmæi and classifies them as earth elementals. In this case, the omission of the ē is referred to as a blunder by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED). The term may be an original invention of Paracelsus, possibly deriving the term from Latin gēnomos (itself representing a Greek γη-νομος, approximately "gē-nomos", literally "earth-dweller"). The word comes from Renaissance Latin gnomus, which first appears in A Book on Nymphs, Sylphs, Pygmies, and Salamanders, and on the Other Spirits by Paracelsus, published posthumously in Nysa in 1566 (and again in the Johannes Huser edition of 1589–1591 from an autograph by Paracelsus). Lawn ornaments crafted as gnomes were introduced during the 19th century, growing in popularity during the 20th century as garden gnomes. Typically small humanoids who live underground, gnome characteristics are reinterpreted to suit various storytellers and artists. While The Alchemist’s promised new world blows up with Subtle’s lab, at least one enduring new creature is invented: the mercurial Face, drama’s homunculus.Gnom mit Zeitung und Tabakspfeife (English: Gnome with newspaper and tobacco pipe) by Heinrich Schlitt (1923)Ī gnome / n oʊ m/ is a mythological creature and diminutive spirit in Renaissance magic and alchemy, introduced by Paracelsus in the 16th century and widely adopted by authors including those of modern fantasy literature. ![]() Adapting ideas from Paracelsian alchemy-particularly the process of creating a homunculus, or artificial man-Jonson creates his own artificial humans: the play’s characters. It serves as Jonson’s attempt to describe a world reinvented by human action and the creatures of art that would inhabit it. The Alchemist is a product of the wide dissemination of alchemical practices and modes of thought in Jacobean London. The refinement and creation of human beings and other living things, rather than gold, was the pinnacle of this art. Paracelsian chymistry was a considerable expansion of alchemy’s domain, arguing that all substances-not just the metals traditionally manipulated by alchemists-could be transformed through alchemy. To describe a London besotted with transformative arts, Ben Jonson’s The Alchemist (1610) appropriates practices and modes of thought from alchemy, particularly ideas about the generation and renement of life derived from the work of the Ger- man alchemist Paracelsus.
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