Re: CHAT: fiery spirits (was: THE WORLD OF THE JINN)

Quoting Ray Brown <ray.brown@...>:

> On Wednesday, October 15, 2003, at 10:16 , Wesley Parish wrote:
>
> > I had read it through the points about the Jinn as fire spirits and
> > thought,
> > that since elves are often referred to on this list  (Elves who in
> > Tolkien's
> > world shared a good many features of fire spirits, with the greatest of
> > the
> > Noldor craftsmen, Feanaro, being named thus for his fiery spirit),
>
> But Tolkien's elves, surely, were not spirits or 'invisible beings' that
> could reveal themselves on occasion.  They seem basically flesh & blood,
> tho
> fairer than us homines sapientes.
Is pluralizing species names like that kosher? I thought they were supposed to
be treated as collectives?

> > people
> > _might_ be interested in reading about such fire spirits from a different
> > religious and cultural viewpoint.
>
> Maybe - Paracelsus, I seem to recall, posited beings for each of the 'four
> elements'; 'salamanders' (not the amphibians thus names) IIRC were the
> fire-spirits,
> sylphs the air-spirits, ondines the water spirits and gnomes the earth
> spirits.
I believe the spelling's _undines_, but otherwise, that would be correct.

> I would guess all religions (certainly most) have beliefs in spirit beings
> of
> one sort or another.  They are interesting per_se.
What's arguably problematic here is that "spirit being" is a very vague concept.

> And obviously a parallel non-material universe with intelligent beings is
> an
> interesting idea for a conworld (or con-universe) and conlanguages.
> Presumably
> such beings wouldn't speak, at least as we material beings do.  Maybe they
> communicate by some form of telepathy. Now that would be something to get
> one's
> mind around. How do you represent such a language?
The coniverse hosting Meghean and Yargish feature a kind of
immaterial "parallel plane of existance" inhabited by, among other beings, the
souls of the dead. These, in certain circumstances, can manipulate objects in
the "real", material, world, and so communicate with the living by manipulating
air to form soundwaves recognizable as speech. I do knot now how the
inhabitants of this plane communicate among one another.

                                                                 Andreas

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