Nymphs: The Nature Spirits of the Ancient World, Daughters of Gods and Wild Places
Hylas and the Nymphs by John William Waterhouse (1896) — the young hero is surrounded by water nymphs who will draw him beneath the surface, a meeting between the human world and the living intelligence of wild nature. Before there were angels and elementals, before there were fairies and spirits formulated in the language of Paracelsus or the Kabbalists, the ancient Greeks already had their own elaborate and beautiful taxonomy of nature spirits: the nymphs . These were the living presences of the natural world — the intelligence inhabiting every spring, river, mountain, and forest, the beings who animated the landscape and made it sacred, who stood at the threshold between the fully divine and the mortal human, partaking of both without belonging entirely to either. The nymph was not merely a metaphor. In the religious life of ancient Greece, nymphs received genuine worship — offerings were left at springs, caves, and groves sacred to them, oracles were sought from nymph-inhabi...