Hiero-people

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com · 09 Jan 2008, 12:36 · from 2008-January.txt.gz

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From: thalassocrat at nym.hush.com (thalassocrat at nym.hush.com)
Date: Wed, 09 Jan 2008 23:36:34 +1100
Subject: (urth) Hiero-people
Message-ID: <20080109123635.2ED6750038 at mailserver9.hushmail.com>

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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