hierophant

plural hierophants · plural hierophantes

1. Ancient GreeceAn ancient Greek priest who interpreted sacred mysteries, especially the priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries.

   If books are as provocative as you suggest, one would expect every librarian to utter the shrill screams of a hierophant, to clash ecstatic castanets in his silent alcoves!

   1919, Christopher Morley, “(please specify the page)”, in The Haunted Bookshop, Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, Page & Company, →OCLC

   2 more examples

   The exhibition of ancient statues, relics, and symbols, concealed from daily adoration (as in the Catholic festivals of this day), probably, made a main duty of the Hierophant.

   1837, Edward Lytton Bulwer [i.e., Edward Bulwer-Lytton], Athens: Its Rise and Fall: […], volume I, London: Saunders and Otley, […], →OCLC, book I, page 59

   Most scholars name the rectangular enclosure anaktoron, locate in it the throne of the hierophant, and suppose that from it emanated the central revelation which occurred, in Plutarch's phrase, ‘when the anaktora were opened’.

   2005, Robert Parker, Polytheism and Society at Athens, Oxford University Press, →ISBN, page 351

2. An interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge.

   No, I must play creator / And make them up, these hierophants.

   1987, Peter Porter, “A Tribute to my enemies”, in The Automatic Oracle

   4 more examples

   Poets are the hierophants of an unapprehended inspiration; the mirrors of the gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present; the words which express what they understand not; the trumpets which sing to battle and feel not what they inspire; the influence which is moved not, but moves. Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

   1840, Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry

   Thus I became the hierophant of those three worthy and talented men, who, in spite of their literary accomplishments, were not wise, since they were infatuated with occult and fabulous sciences, and believed in the existence of phenomena impossible in the moral as well as in the physical order of things.

   1894, Arthur Machen, Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt

   What did even the hierophants of science know of the potencies of, for them, unvintageable evil?

   1947, Malcolm Lowry, Under the Volcano, New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, page 145

   Ambassadors of northern countries stand / Impassive while our hierophants intone / Long canticles of Christ the Contraband: / Our grandees' hearts are shrunk to kidney stones.

   1975, Peter Porter, “Baroque Quatrains Dedicated to James Fenton”, in Living in a Calm Country

3. One who explains or makes a commentary.