Undines, the Beings of Water

The human-elemental marriage motif Paracelsus attached to undines was already an old and well developed literary tradition by his own time. Jean d'Arras's Roman de Melusine, written in French around 1393, gave the fullest and most influential medieval telling of a water-spirit who marries a human nobleman on condition he never see her on a particular day, a condition he eventually breaks, precipitating her transformation and departure; the House of Lusignan in France claimed actual descent from Melusine, treating the legend as real family history rather than mere folklore. Paracelsus, writing more than a century later, drew on this already substantial body of Melusine-type stories circulating across French, German and other European folk traditions rather than inventing the marriage motif himself, and simply gave the general type a place within his own systematic four-element scheme of elemental beings.

The Golden Dawn later assigned undines their own ruling king, Nichsa, within the fourfold system it built on top of Paracelsus's original scheme, a name, like the kings assigned to the other three elements, without any documented source earlier than the Order's own late nineteenth-century ceremonial material.