Hiero-people

The Urth list — 2 messages, 2 voices, 09 Jan 2008
https://urth.darkrealm.vip/thread/urth/4969

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com09 Jan 2008, 12:36
Following just fwiw. "Hierogrammate" seems like an odd title for a being which purports to be in charge of the universe or whatever Tzadkiel's claim is. The Greek is hierogrammateus/plural hierogrammateis. It means "holy scribe" and seems to have been used most commonly as the Greek term for a class of mid-high ranking Egyptian priests, staffers of the "House of Life". I guess Thotmatkef (sp?) in SoS would have been called a hierogrammateus in Greek. Part of the elite but not the top rung, for which a different term was used. (In Greek cults it seems not to have been such a high status thing: any job title within a cult or temple bureaucracy could take the "hiero-" prefix, it seems, and "hierogrammate" doesn't appear to have necessarily meant much more than "temple clerk", in the same way that there was sometimes a "holy debt collector". I would guess that Wolfe was thinking of the Egyptian context, to the extent the titles are supposed to have any connection with the historical usage.) The common term for priest was hiereus/plural hiereis. (For both job titles, the "-eus" as like in "Zeus"). I suppose that this is where Wolfe's term "hieros" comes from. It was also apparently a term early Christians used for themselves. "Hierarch" was the term for a cult official responsible for overseeeing execution of ritual practices and so on. I get a picture of an organization with hieros (now disappeared) at the board level, so to speak; hierogrammates as senior execs; hierarchs as middle management and hierodules as the blue collars.
brunians at brunians.org09 Jan 2008, 13:13

↳ in reply to thalassocrat at nym.hush.com

And there's a court of heaven with various officers and so on. You can figure out which archangel is taking which office in which aeon and so forth (by this system, it may interest some to know, the entity filling the office of 'ha-Satan' at the time of the book of Job (and still today) is the Aa Gabriel, who is also held to be (under his Arabic name of Jibrail) responsible for dictating the Quran to Muhammed)). The Biblical/Christian stuff seems to be (ulitmately) based upon the Persian empire when it isn't based upon the Egyptian stuff, and didn't the Persians crib heavily from the Assyrians and Babylonians? And thence into the middle distant and distant past.... It gets even more interesting in the Indian literature, where various gods etc are explicitly said to be in/on various 'lokas' (loka is usually translated 'world' or 'planet'). The big question is, what if all of this mythology/theology is more or less dimly remembered history? This is a question Wolfe plays with very often. .
14 quoted lines
Following just fwiw. "Hierogrammate" seems like an odd title for a being which purports to be in charge of the universe or whatever Tzadkiel's claim is. The Greek is hierogrammateus/plural hierogrammateis. It means "holy scribe" and seems to have been used most commonly as the Greek term for a class of mid-high ranking Egyptian priests, staffers of the "House of Life". I guess Thotmatkef (sp?) in SoS would have been called a hierogrammateus in Greek. Part of the elite but not the top rung, for which a different term was used. (In Greek cults it seems not to have been such a high status thing: any job title within a cult or temple bureaucracy could take the "hiero-" prefix, it seems, and "hierogrammate" doesn't appear to have necessarily meant much more than "temple clerk", in the same way that there was sometimes a "holy debt collector". I would guess that Wolfe was thinking of the Egyptian context, to the extent the titles are supposed to have any connection with the historical usage.) The common term for priest was hiereus/plural hiereis. (For both job titles, the "-eus" as like in "Zeus"). I suppose that this is where Wolfe's term "hieros" comes from. It was also apparently a term early Christians used for themselves. "Hierarch" was the term for a cult official responsible for overseeeing execution of ritual practices and so on. I get a picture of an organization with hieros (now disappeared) at the board level, so to speak; hierogrammates as senior execs; hierarchs as middle management and hierodules as the blue collars. _______________________________________________

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