Nymph

Also Known As: Greek nymphē, plural nymphai; Latin nympha, plural nymphae
Region/Culture: Southern Europe
Mythos: Greek Mythology, Roman Mythology
Primary Type/Nature: Fairy Folk and Spirit Beings
Mythical Attributes: A nymph is the living presence of a particular spring, tree, cave, mountain or stretch of sea, long-lived but not deathless, and bound to the thing she inhabits.
Role in Mythos: Nymphs populate the Greek landscape as its resident divinities, nursing gods and heroes, attending greater deities, and forming the class of beings most often encountered by ordinary people at the water they drank from.
Relation to Humans: They received small, constant, unofficial worship at springs and in caves across the Greek world, and they were credited with fertility, healing water and prophetic inspiration. They were also dangerous in a local way, capable of taking a person into the water or of striking one with the possessed state the Greeks called nympholepsy.

On the dry southeastern flank of Mount Hymettos, above the plain of Athens, a man from the island of Thera spent years of the late fifth century BC cutting a cave into shape with hand tools. He widened it into two chambers, carved steps and a basin and a rough standing figure out of the rock, planted a garden, and left an inscription explaining himself. Archedemos the Theraian, the nympholept, made this grotto at the direction of the Nymphs. He was not a poet reaching for an image. He was a man who believed the spirits of that hillside had taken hold of him, and he gave what looks like the rest of his life to their cave.

That is the part most easily lost. Centuries of European painting turned nymphs into decorative girls in wet drapery, arranged around pools for the benefit of the viewer, and the word came out the other side of that process meaning something close to nothing. In Greece they were the objects of ordinary, continuous, low-budget worship. Not temple religion with priesthoods and calendars, but oil and cheese and a coin left on a wet ledge by somebody who wanted the spring to keep running.

The word itself repays a moment. Nymphē is not a technical term for a category of spirit. It is the everyday Greek word for a young woman of marriageable age, a bride, and it goes on meaning that throughout the whole period in which it also means these beings. The same noun covers the girl at her wedding and the immortal power in the water, and Greek never fully pulled the two apart. Where it came from before that is genuinely unclear. The old derivation linking it to Latin nubo, to marry, fails to explain the nasal sitting in the middle of the word, and Beekes argued the thing is Pre-Greek, a survival from whatever was being spoken there before Greek arrived.

They were classified by address rather than by rank. Naiads held springs, rivers and fountains. Nereids were the fifty daughters of Nereus in the salt Aegean, and the Oceanids the three thousand daughters of Oceanus and Tethys. Oreads belonged to the mountains, Dryads and Hamadryads to trees, the Meliae to ash trees specifically, having sprung according to Hesiod from the blood of the mutilated Ouranos where it fell on the earth. Lampades carried torches for Hecate. There is no organising hierarchy in this and no attempt at one. A nymph is not a rank in a bureaucracy. She is an answer to the question of who owns this water.

The clearest statement of what they actually are sits in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, where the goddess, pregnant with Aeneas and now thoroughly regretting the whole affair, tells Anchises who will bring up their son. The nymphs of Ida will raise him, she says, and then she explains them: they associate neither with mortals nor with immortals, they live a long time and eat immortal food, they dance well enough that the gods take notice, and they lie with the Seilenoi and with Hermes in the recesses of caves. Then comes the passage that gives the whole class its shape. At the birth of each of them a fir or a high-crowned oak comes up out of the ground, a beautiful tree standing on the mountain, and people call such trees the sacred places of the immortals, and mortals may not cut them with iron. But when the appointed death is near, the tree dries first. The bark wastes. The branches come down. And the life goes out of the nymph and the tree together, leaving the light of the sun at the same moment.

So they die. That single fact separates them from every Olympian and explains almost everything else about them. Hesiod put a number on it in a line preserved by Plutarch: a chattering crow outlives nine generations of men, a stag four crows, a raven three stags, the phoenix nine ravens, and the nymphs ten phoenixes. It is an enormous piece of arithmetic that still, at the end of it, arrives at a stop.

A spring at night, then, somewhere in Mysia or Arcadia or on Parnassus. The water goes on running over stone in the dark with the particular flat sound that running water makes in a hollow place, and the local girls of the water come up out of it and dance for their own reasons, and the cattle come down to drink and are not troubled, and none of this requires an audience or produces a story.

What produces a story is a human being arriving. Hylas, the young companion of Heracles, went inland from the beached Argo with a bronze pitcher to find water for the evening meal, and found the spring called Pegae. The nymph of that spring was rising through the water at the time, on her way to the moonlit dances her sisters held for Artemis. She saw him kneeling at the edge with the moon on his face and the pitcher already tipping, and she came up and put her left arm around his neck to kiss him and her right hand on his elbow, and pulled him under. The pitcher went on filling and sank. Heracles spent the night going up and down that shore shouting a name into the dark, and the Argo sailed without him.

Cut the other way, the same bond makes them victims. Callimachus tells of Erysichthon of Thessaly walking into Demeter’s grove with twenty men and axes, going for a poplar that grew up to the sky and that the nymphs used to dance around at noon. The tree took the first stroke and cried out to the others. Ovid gives the same crime as a vast oak hung with votive wreaths and tablets from people whose prayers it had answered, and has blood run from the cut, and a voice come out of the wood saying that a nymph dear to Ceres lives in this tree and forecasts with her dying breath that his punishment is close behind. He was given a hunger nothing could satisfy, and ate himself.

Their powers are unglamorous and specific. They make water rise and keep rising, which in a limestone country with a long dry summer is not a small thing. They give increase to flocks and to trees. They nursed Zeus in the Cretan cave and Dionysus at Nysa, which means the two most consequential infancies in Greek myth were both handled by the childcare of the countryside. And they seize people. The Greeks had a word for the person taken this way, nympholeptos, and it covered both the inspired and the unhinged; Plato has Socrates break off beside the Ilissos to say that the place has got hold of him and he is nymph-struck. Archedemos cut his cave under that condition.

The limitation is the same fact turned over. A nymph’s authority is total within a few paces of the thing she is and absent everywhere else. She cannot follow, cannot relocate, cannot appeal to a higher court. Fell the tree and she goes down with it. Let the spring fail and there is nothing left to worship. The offerings on those wet ledges were never really insurance against the nymph. They were insurance against the summer.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a nymph in Greek mythology?

A nymph is a female nature spirit tied to a specific feature of the landscape, such as a spring, river, tree, mountain, cave or stretch of sea. Nymphs were long-lived and divine but not fully immortal, and the Greek word for them, nymphē, is also the ordinary word for a bride or young woman.

What are the different types of nymphs?

Nymphs are grouped by where they live rather than by rank. Naiads inhabit fresh water, Nereids and Oceanids the sea and the waters of Oceanus, Oreads the mountains, Dryads and Hamadryads the trees, the Meliae the ash trees, and the Lampades carry torches for Hecate.

Are nymphs immortal?

No. The Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite states that nymphs belong with neither mortals nor immortals, and that each is born with a fir or oak that withers as her death approaches, so that the nymph and her tree leave the sunlight together. A fragment of Hesiod quoted by Plutarch reckons a nymph’s life at ten times that of the phoenix, which is vast but finite.

Were nymphs actually worshipped?

Yes, and widely. Nymphs received modest, everyday offerings at springs and in caves throughout the Greek world, including the Corycian Cave on Parnassus, where their worship predates that of Pan, and the cave at Vari on Mount Hymettos, which a man named Archedemos of Thera carved out in the late fifth century BC because he believed the nymphs had seized him.

What happened to Hylas?

Hylas, the young companion of Heracles, was taken by a nymph while filling a pitcher at the spring Pegae in Mysia during the voyage of the Argonauts. She pulled him beneath the water, and Heracles searched the shore for him through the night while the Argo eventually sailed on without either of them.