I just learned this word. It means related to the firmament, celestial, and the example sentence I found it in was Night after night, the comet shone brightly against the empyreal tapestry of the sky. But if the tapestry is empyreal, doesn't it mean it is in the sky? I think this is rather tautological.
Anyway, cognates are Portuguese empíreo, Spanish empíreo, Italian empireo and French empyrée.
Empyreal is ultimately from a Greek word "fiery". Fiery tapestry doesn't have a very strange ring to it.
ReplyDeleteFor the Christian interpretation of the word as "the highest heaven," Dante's [i]Paragiso[/i] may be referred to:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paradiso_(Dante)#The_Spheres_of_Heaven