Elemental: Encyclopedia - Elemental

Elemental

In mysticism, mythology and alchemy, an elemental is a creature (usually a spirit) that is attuned with, or composed of, one of the classical elements: air, earth, fire and water. The elements balance each other out through opposites: water quenches fire, fire boils water, earth contains air, air erodes earth. The concept of elementals seems to have been conceived by Paracelsus in the 16th century. Paracelsus' elementals were:

Antroposophy is also known to have knowledge of elementals.

Elementals are commonly mentioned in grimoires dealing with alchemy and sorcery and are usually called by summoning.

In fantasy role-playing, computer and trading card games, elementals often appear, usually as difficult opponents. They can often only be defeated by an element of a conflicting type (for example, fire elementals beaten by water), although in some games they are instead immune to that element and only that element. Many games use elementals composed of non-standard elements — elementals made of darkness, ice, life energy, light, electricity, magical energy, magma, mana, mud, plants, smoke, temporal energy, weather phenomena and spirit are all relatively common.

In modern occultism the word Elemental can also be used to mean any simple or only partly sentient spiritual entity. These entities can be entirely natural (ie the spirit of a group of trees) or can be created by magicians or sorcerers to perform a task for them. The latter type are called Servitors. This kind of "subservient" or "man-made" elemental can be found mentioned in the works of Austin Osman Spare or Aleister Crowley. They are a vital concept in modern Chaos Magic.

In the Battletech sci-fi universe, elemental is used to describe suits of powered armour employed by Kerensky's "Clans" as well as their pilots, geneticallty engineered to be significantly larger and stronger than ordinary men. There are various kinds of these armour, being suited to combat in various types of battlefield, some known as Sylph, Undine, Salamander, Gnome, as such drawing on the writings of Paracelsus.

In the Mega Man Zero games, the titular character's weapons can be endowed with elemental chips. Thunder (Electric) beats Ice-based foes, Ice weapons beat Fire-based enemies, and Fire beats Thunder.

In Final Fantasy, the elements of Fire, Ice, Thunder, and Holy characterize magic spells. Holy-element characterizes healing magic (Such as Cure), and "Holy" (aka "White" or "Pearl") is the most powerful, and one of the few, White Mage attack spells. While the four elements listed above appear in most Final Fantasy games, some games feature additional elements (Earth, Gravity, Darkness, Water, Poison, Aero (wind), etc.) In addition to the elements and spells, Final Fantasy games feature some sort of powerful summonable creatures. These creatures use elemental attacks. While each game has different summonable creatures, the three that represent the first three elements above are almost always present and are usually obtained first. They are Ifrit (Fire), Ramuh (Thunder), and Shiva (Ice).

Categories: Legendary creatures | Numerology

Adapted from the Wikipedia article "Elemental", under the G.N U Free Docmentation License. Please also see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki