Origins of the Aether
Aether (αἰθήρ aithḗr „[blue] sky“ or in latin aethereus is in ancient greek cosmology the fifth element or quintessence and is thought of the substance the observable universe is made of.
Aither as mythological being is a primordeal titan, son of Erebos, the darkness and Nyx, the night. He is representing the upper sky in which the home of the light and the Olympians. In the orphic hymnae Aither is the place of the spirit of the world and of all life.
Orphic Hymn to fire
The Fumigation from Saffron.
O Ever untam'd Fire [Aither], who reign'st on high in Jove's [Zeus'] dominions ruler of the sky;
The glorious sun with dazzling lustre bright, and moon and stars from thee derive their light;
All taming pow'r, ætherial shining fire, whose vivid blasts the heat of life inspire:
The world's best element, light-bearing pow'r, with starry radiance shining, splendid flow'r,
O hear my suppliant pray'r, and may thy frame be ever innocent, serene, and tame.
Source: http://www.Theoi.com
Mythological the word in homeric greek means "pure, fresh air" or "clear sky" and it was thought to be the pure essence that the gods breathed, filling the space where they lived, analogous to the air breathed by mortals.
In ancient European cosmologies inspired by the works of Aristotle, the empyrean heaven was the place in the highest of all heavens which was supposed to be occupied by the element of fire or Aether as in Aristotle´s natural philosophy. Empyreus is an latin adaption of the ancient greek empyros (ἔμπυρος), meaning "in or on the fire (pyr)".
The renessaince of the Aether
In the 18th and 19th century the Aether was thought of the substance in which gravitation or light moves in form of waves. Rene Descartes thought of the Aether as a substance in which like in water floating objects move towards the center of an rotating medium, which he resumes would explain gravity. In this gravitational model it was necessary that objects like planets rotate within the Aether to attract substance to their center.
The luminiferous Aether was an idea which assumes that light moves in waves through the necessary medium Aether which was proven wrong by the Micheslon-Morley-Experiment in which the effect of the Aetherwinds on lightrays was tested. The Aether as medium of light could not proven right, there is no such evidence.
Until now we speak about "sending a message through the Aether" which comes from the 19th century when this idea was still debated.
The Aether as a philosophical concept
The concept of the Aether I am talking about is not meant to be understood as a kind of physical or metaphysical field, a substance or a energy of a kind.
I concentrated in my definition on the mythological meaning but from a modern point of view. The Aether is the heavens in where the gods live. And I will go further it is also the space of ideas, of forms, of concepts. I you go a little bit through Plato and his theory of ideas, if you read Nietzsche and also Richard Dawkins, Susan Blackmoor and Yuval Noah Harari you get some idea that everything in the universe is nothing but noise, stuff being here or being absent. But within this noise there are pattern that represent for ideas, concepts and information.
For example this pile of organic matter, it represents the idea we have of a book. There are billions of books and every book is complete different from the other, but for us they all represent more or less the idea of a book. Within the book is stored information. In form of particles upon the single sides within the book in form of symbols or diagrams or representations of ideas or if you like pictures. The symbols combined can represent words which transport ideas and informations, so can the diagrams as abstractions of ideas and the pictures as another form of symbolic communication.
All that pattern I told about is not there physically. It is just stuff being present but the arrangement in that context represent ideas, forms, informations, symbols. How is that? Where comes this structures from? I describe the Aether as a form of existence for non-physical entities. Don´t get me wrong, we are not speaking of the paranormal, a form of hyperspace or something occult. It is just a form of existince what runs through the physical world. When you look into a mirror you will propbably see the image or better said reflection of a human being. But the idea, the humanlikness, the pattern is not in the substance of your body but only within the context in time and space. It is a non-substancial part of reality that runs through all reality. It is that the pattern-recognition within our mammal brains make us point out when we see something familiar.