Two things called salamander should be told apart. The first is a widespread ancient and medieval belief about a real animal: the European fire salamander (Salamandra salamandra), whose habit of sheltering in damp, rotten logs meant it sometimes crawled out when the wood was thrown on a fire, giving rise to the persistent claim, reported by Aristotle and Pliny, elaborated in the bestiaries, that the creature is born of fire, lives in it and can put it out, its cold, moist skin resisting flame.
Cloth said to be woven from "salamander wool" and cleaned by throwing it in the fire was in fact asbestos. The second is the occult elemental: in the treatise on nymphs, sylphs, pygmies and salamanders attributed to Paracelsus, four kinds of being inhabit the four elements, salamanders in fire, undines in water, sylphs in air, gnomes in earth, and the salamander becomes the living spirit or personification of the element of fire. This second, systematic salamander, taken up by later ceremonial magic, derives from the first, the fireproof lizard, but has been abstracted into a piece of cosmology.