Sylphs are Steiner's air-and-light elementals: the light-bearers of the plant world, living in the moving air and kindled to selfhood by the flight of birds.
Sylphs in Anthroposophy are the elemental beings of the air-and-warmth element, the light-bearers Rudolf Steiner describes in Man as Symphony of the Creative Word (GA 230, 1923). They live where the atmosphere is everywhere imbued with light, and they press toward that light, carrying it lovingly into the growing plant. While gnomes work at the root and undines weave through the leaf as the chemists of plant life, the sylph belongs to the blossom-ward region, weaving the archetypal plant-form from light above the leaf. Steiner connects the sylphs intimately with the flight of birds: a sylph kindles its sense of self when a bird wings through the air, and it is the sylph that inspires the bird to sing. In Steiner's fourfold reading of plant growth, the sylph is the agent of the light-ether, the bearer of warmth-borne love that draws light down to the earth.
Sylphs are the elemental beings of the air in Rudolf Steiner's spiritual science, the spirits of the airy-warmth element who bear light into the growing plant. Steiner places them above the gnomes of the root and the undines of the leaf, working in the region toward the blossom. They feel most at home where birds wing through the air, and from the bird they receive a kindling of their own sense of self.
In Steiner's Own Words
Thus we behold the deepest sympathy between the sylphs and the bird-world. Whereas the gnome hates the amphibian world, whereas the undine is unpleasantly sensitive to fishes, is unwilling to approach them, tries to avoid them, feels a kind of horror for them, the sylph, on the other hand, is attracted towards birds, and has a sense of well-being when it can waft towards their plumage the swaying, love-filled waves of the air. And were you to ask a bird from whom it learns to sing, you would hear that its inspirer is the sylph. Sylphs feel a sense of pleasure in the bird's form. They are, however, prevented by the cosmic ordering from becoming birds, for they have another task. Their task is lovingly to convey light to the plant. And just as the undine is the chemist for the plant, so is the sylph the light-bearer.
What it Means Today
Steiner gave his clearest practical application of the elemental beings the following summer, in the Agriculture Course delivered at Koberwitz in June 1924 (GA 327), the founding lectures of biodynamics. There he asked farmers to read the plant not as a self-contained machine but as a being held between forces working up from the soil and forces working down from the light and air. The sylph belongs to that second stream. What a grower learns to attend to is the plant's whole relation to its atmosphere: the quality of light it stands in, the movement of air around the leaf and flower, the way blossom and seed form under the descending influence of light rather than from the root alone. Biodynamic practitioners since 1924 have worked with this picture directly, treating light and warmth as formative agencies rather than mere conditions, and timing cultivation to the rhythms of sun and sky. Steiner's link between the sylphs and birds carries the same lesson in image form. The bird that sings above the field and the light that pours onto the leaf are, for him, two faces of one airy region, the region the sylph inhabits and serves. To grow a plant well, in this reading, is to honour what reaches it from above as much as what feeds it from below.
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