Subject: (urth) Hiero-people

From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com <thalassocrat at nym.hush.com>
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 12:36:34 +0000

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.

---

From: brunians at brunians.org <brunians at brunians.org>
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 13:13:26 +0000

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.

.

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