hierophant

Noun

hierophant (plural hierophants or hierophantes)

1. (Ancient Greece) An ancient Greek priest who interpreted sacred mysteries, especially the priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries.
   • 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
   • 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. An interpreter of sacred mysteries or arcane knowledge.
   • 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....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...1894, Arthur Machen, Memoirs of Jacques Casanova de Seingalt
3. One who explains or makes a commentary.