Found in Translation: Exploring a Curious Portuguese Word With No English Translation

The Mythology and Etymology of “Nefelibata”

You have probably come across those memes on social sites illuminating very cool foreign words that don’t have literal translations in English.

Words like these…

• Komorebi (Japanese) — When the sun goes through the trees and the leaves filter the light.
• Meraki (Greek) — To do something with love or soul, or equivalently, to put something of yourself into your work.
• Wabi-sabi (Japanese) — Often described as a beauty that is imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete.

And then there’s this one…

• Nefelibata (Portuguese) — A cloud-walker who lives in their dreams and not the real world.

Nefelibata is a Portuguese and Spanish term for someone who daydreams or otherwise lives outside ordinary reality. A colloquial interpretation is "Cloudwalker." I quite like that word.

Digging Deeper

As a citizen etymologist and Spanish speaker, I had to dig deeper. I had never heard of this word before, but as a student of all things imagination and dreamy, it immediately caught my attention. I wanted to know more about the word’s origins.

Googling the word “nefelibata” brings up a bunch of articles on fun non-English words, but from what I could tell on the first page of search results, didn't show any etymological reasoning behind the word. So in my wordsmithing manner, I broke the word down and searched Nefeli. It sounded like a Spanish name to me, and one I’d heard while living in Mexico years ago.

I found out that there is a Greek goddess named Nephele, the goddess of the clouds. Ha, our cloud connection! The etymology of nephele indicates a cloud or mass of clouds.

The Myth of Nephele

The backstory starts with Ixion, who had married Dia, daughter of Deioneus. Ixion found that his new father-in-law had stolen his horses because Ixion hadn’t paid the agreed-upon bride price. In the spirit of “one turn deserves another” that fuels modern stories from the Hatfields and the McCoys to John Wick, Ixion invites Deioneus to a feast, pushing him into a bed of flaming wood and coals and killing him, thus violating the Greek concept of hospitality known as xenia.

This sin against hospitality was nigh unforgivable, and local princes decided not to exonerate Ixion, instead labeling him an outlaw and shunning him. Zeus, the primary god of the Greek pantheon not only takes pity on Ixion but brings him to Olympus, offering him a place at the gods' table. (In a subsequent post, I’ll break this myth down in digestible bites.)

When Ixion grows lustful for Zeus’s wife Hera, the god has to find a way to thwart Ixion’s lack of gratitude and respect. To protect his wife, and to test the loyalty of his protege, Zeus creates from the clouds a replica of his beautiful goddess and calls her Nephele.

Nephele

Ixion is overcome by desire upon seeing her and does indeed mate with Nephele, this cloud goddess, thinking her to be Hera. From this union, Centaurus is born making Nephele the (grand)mother of the Centaur race. Although many of the centaurs were violent and barbaric, one named Chiron turned out to be the exception, both helpful and wise. Astrology fans will recognize Chiron as the “wounded healer” or shaman of the birth chart.

Nephele becomes a goddess in her own right, as the goddess of hospitality, generosity, loyalty, peace, and shyness.

From Nephele to Nefelibata

The most direct correlation I could find between the mythology of the goddess Nephele and the term “cloudwalker” is in the use of the imagination to create. An image is, by etymological roots, a copy. (As I mentioned previously, Zeus had made a copy or replica of his wife Hera in the clouds to test Ixion.)

The etymology implies that our imaginations simply make copies of pre-existing things and ideas. After all, according to the Bible, there is nothing new under the sun. The creative and powerful part comes from our ability to merge and morph those copies into endless variations.

The mythological correlation to mating with a cloud being is that we can directly engage with our images (our imagination), even if they are only made of vapor. Thoreau told us in Walden to build foundations under these castles we have built in the air.

Back to Nephele, a beautiful creature, made of the stuff of stars, an image of Hera, queen of the gods. The goddess made of the stuff of dreams? She was, in a sense, dreamed up by Zeus.

Walking the Clouds

Clouds are associated with dreams and daydreams because they represent the unknown or the subconscious mind. Because they are fleeting and often illusory, not to mention shapeshifting, they have an ethereal nature as dreams do. The sky and stars are often associated with lofty (high) thinking and dreaming, where we can seem to be reaching for what is out of our grasp.

If our space program has proved anything at all, it is that we can indeed attain the unattainable “dreams,” and indeed the metaphor of sky and clouds proves apt.

Side note: Etymologically "cloud" is related to "clod." That's right a hunk of dirt. The Old English clud means "mass of rock," or "hill". I can imagine for people whose language was still in early development, a mass in the sky, especially if seen on the horizon, could look like a mass of rock.

Nube, which is “cloud” in Spanish, is probably a more accurate linguistic link to Nephele, possibly also being related to nebula, but the Old English reference seems to fit if only on the edges. Wikipedia says that it comes from the PIE (proto-indo-european) *(s)newdh- meaning "to cover." A deeper investigation shows that the word nuptials shares the same or similar roots, and indicates the veil or head covering of the bride at the ceremony.

Perhaps the biggest takeaway for me, a dreamwork practitioner, is that Nephele was real enough to mate, bear children, and further interact with the pantheon in other stories. Our thoughts and dreams, called clouds in meditation and illustrations, have much more power than our modern materialistic society gives them credit for. Scientific studies have shown that our brains and bodies often can’t distinguish a real event from one that happens in waking or REM dreams.

So, while Nefelibata might be considered less than complimentary, I’d claim to be a Cloud Walker any day! How about you?

https://www.etymonline.com/word/cloud#etymonline_v_13846

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/nube

https://www.etymonline.com/search?q=nuptial

Find out more about the mythology of Nephele in the following article!

Runa Heilung is the founder of Old Soul Alchemy. She uses imagery and imagination in meditative formats for healing, illumination, and transformation.