Greetings from the Xyphokonic Order and Ordinance. The start of Lord Pharuuii’s 1st Period of Watching, Augrussé, is upon us yet again. Thus, with the mandate to seek inspiration from the Lord’s Realmly Knowledge, we’re breaking out the questions accumulated over the last few months and answering some questions submitted to us from email and other sources.
Today’s selection of questions, as the title makes quite clear, are about the very authors and staff of these Commentary and question posts, and the officials who run this very Ordinance—yours truly, we Arch-Hayle Grandurates. We’ve selected a few reoccurring questions and brainstormed a few others that might solicit curiosity for this series of questions, so let us begin.
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Question: Who are the Arch-Hayle Grandurates outside of this role? Do you have occupations other than this one?
Answer: While we won’t divulge our exact identities and legal names, both for security reasons and for philosophical ones, we AHGs do, in fact, exist outside of this space you’ve come to know our Commentary from. All nine of us have professional and personal lives, and we dabble in various fields. Some of us work in higher education, others work independently or in the market, at least one of us works in the area of psychology, and others work in various other occupations.
While we give this role as AHGs high priority and treat it both as a job but also a moral and religious duty, the reality is that we, too, require jobs to fund our own living expenses, families, and other parts of our lives. In the planned event that this Ordinance expands globally and the Sacred Hill Project is crafted into a foundation, it is very likely we will still keep our non-Ordinance occupations to some degree if possible. This role as an AHG is not about money, power, or prominence; we are tied to and devoted to the Lords and believe in the mission that the Order has set forth more than any other aspect of our lives.
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Question: Why do you use pennames and conceal your identities?
Answer: As mentioned before in a previous entry, it serves a procedural and philosophical purpose. In order to prevent forming a cult of personality around named figureheads, to cast away Self and ego, we refuse to tie our personal Selfs to the grander scale of the Ordinance’s duties and mission. This Commentary explains part of that issue and why we seek to avoid it.
Often, in other religious organizations, you see quite a bit of pomp and circumstance given to the high officials of those organizations. You see grandiose anointments and living accompaniments for positions like the Pope, or lavish salaries and high praise given to presidents of other various denominations. In many cases, you will see leaders of whole nations be de facto heads of theocratic systems and live in luxury while others may live in squalor under their rule. Many groups await some spiritual arrival of a new messiah every so often and will prop this individual upon a pedestal to be paraded around like a god. Finally, in the most depraved of cases, you may see cults that rally around single and often authoritative or abusive figureheads that lead the group into miserable obligations or conditions. We AHGs explicitly seek to reject and avoid all those circumstances by not allowing the ego of the Self to overcome the Ordinance’s purpose and sully the Order’s message.
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Question: What does the average day of an AHG look like?
Answer: A typical work session for an AHG is, surprisingly, independent for much of each week. We have our given religious duties written in the Xyphokron, but in terms of our administrative work, it various. As the About Us page notes, we all have areas of the Philosophy that we have specialized in, and much of that reflects what other roles we play in the Ordinance. For example, this very post is—and for that matter, nearly all the Q&A posts on the website, are compiled and penned by myself, “Phox” or phX. But each post is reviewed by each of the nine AHGs and some edits are made in that process before being published. Likewise, I, “Phox”, am more or less assigned to actually manage the edits and archiving of the website, as well as the general web mastering for how the website should be organized. I have experience in building websites and editing, and so I volunteered to help edit.
Others such as ruX tend to work on goal-planning for the Ordinance. Much of the cultural organization is done by erX, nearly all theological practices, hymns and contextual scriptural analysis are penned or composed by kyX, ceremonial duties, customs, and procedures tend to fall into crX’s hands, voX and jzX are privy to handling posts that deal with current events or relate to active circumstances and how the Ordinance responds or commentates on them, and much of the technical or graphical arts are handled by whX, and lnX is the primary official working on our environmental goals with the Sacred Hill Project. We all have various side roles that we play in the organization.
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Question: How do you guys work on publishing Commentary each week?
Answer: In terms of how the penning of official Commentary works, at set intervals within the Xyphojinamic Calendar Year, we meet to plan out and discuss what we will be focusing on for our various Period(s) assignments and layout what topics or Commentary focuses we will be covering. From there, we all begin toiling away writing our rough drafts for each Commentary. Once those are written, we shall seek out other collaborating AHGs for each post to review them, add in their areas of expertise or knowledge, and proof our own writing. Once the posts have all their contributors added in to the mix, the posts are sent to another AHG, typically crX or kyX, to analyze the posts to make sure they are consistent with the doctrine of the Philosophy and accurately quote or reference the Xyphokron.
Once done, all the posts are sent to single editor AHG to homogenize the posts into official Ordinance voice and style guide; typically, I, Phox, am that editor that puts everything into a single lane while still leaving individual voices in the writing to shine through. I mostly focus on making sure each post is without errors, formatted neatly, and meets our internal style guide standards on how we write certain phrases or terms.
Once the final edits and proofing are done, each post is then put up to be reviewed by the whole group and discussed both on its merit and purpose but also on the message of the post. We often lob our own questions towards those posts, test them for holes, and scrutinize them as a group. Upon the post(s) facing the firing squad and passing, we put them in waiting for their various Period and date of posting. Now, all of this doesn’t happen in a single day or even a week, this process goes on over several months on a revolving schedule; we often break them down into four quarters and handle each quarter’s workload as such.
It goes without saying that at least three of we AHGs must pen more posts than the rest due to there being three Lords who have two Periods of Watching each in our Xyphojinamic Calendar. AHGs crX, kyX, and myself phX each must oversee two Periods of Watching, and so our workload is a bit heftier. However, we offset that in various ways.
For my case, instead of penning longform Commentaries that dive deep into the Philosophy, I like to field questions instead, which are a bit easier to post in rapid succession—particularly since I am handling a bulk of editorial and web management as well.
Our colleague kyX has been blessed by having both their Periods of Watching back-to-back, and often pens conjoined series posts on a single topic that tend to analyze scriptural or theological aspects of each Xyphozon per Sacred Day post, and that convenient circumstance makes managing their workload easier.
Finally, crX is probably the most fortunate of us three, as the Periods they manage are significantly separated and allow for time to pen each post with incredible care and focus. Since both crX and kyX tend to focus on producing a high volume of Commentary on the scriptural understanding of the Philosophy, it makes them perfect to be the go-to AHGs to review each official Commentary post for doctrinal consistency.
Overall, the process is highly dependent on both individual reliability and group integrity and collaboration. We schedule out the whole process, and have others to help cover any gaps we may not be able to fill among the nine of us.
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Question: What does the Xyphokron say about the role of an AHG?
Answer: The recount of Daetos and the Xyphokron state that the main role of an Arch-Hayle Grandurate is to conduct unending Prayer on behalf of all of mortal existence in a special room called the Courtance Hall—a smaller Praying Chamber located at the lowest level of a Zhourghei Temple. Essentially, the ancient role and expectation was that, upon the construction of nine great temples for each Xyphozon, that the AHGs would spend much of their time taking upon the burden of praying for all of mortality against Deceptuary’s corruption in that particular room, which is set to be equip with an alter to the Lords and a comfortable place to sit or kneel and pray in for several hours at a time.
The expectation wasn’t that an AHG was expected to never leave this room, but to devote several hours a day praying, writing, and discussing the state of the world with the other Granduate Officials—that being the Prinstedt and Deitonian Grandurates. In modern times, the role of AHG is morphed into a leadership and administrative role while still upholding the ancient expectations of lengthy periods of praying and contemplating on behalf of mortal existence.
We, in our personal time, often take breaks away from the secular life to sit alone by ourselves and pray and think to ourselves about the various issues that face humanity. This is, for a lot of us, how we decide what we write in our Commentaries. Many of us spend time focusing on an issue that we believe should be approached from a Xyphoist perspective and then pray and think about it ad nauseum until we can comprehensively pen several posts that revolving around that focus.
As mentioned in this entry, all Xyphoist Prayer must be focused on mitigating worldly suffering; however, in the case of the Arch-Hayle Grandurates, we are expected to take that a step further and bathe our very beings in those topics and produce Commentary and analysis of them once our lengthy prayers and meditations have completed.
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Question: Do you assert that you are the ancient Xyphoites in the Prophecy that would return as Daetos Idols in the future?
Answer: We believe we are some of them, yes. The Prophecy merely says that those remaining ancient Xyphoites committed ritual suicide to preserve the Prophecy in their souls and be reincarnated as Daetos Idols in a time where their Realmly Truths would be needed most. The Prophecy never explicitly states how many shall be reincarnated, and we take that to mean there are numerous others who are waiting to be awoken by this knowledge. We just so happen to be nine people who came together and agreed to kick things off.
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Question: Why do you reject the title of being prophets or the founders of Xyphoism?
Answer: We reject those titles because we don’t believe we founded anything. The Philosophy, if following the timeline of Daetos’s recount, far predates our discovery of the Realmly Knowledge we are now dedicated to teaching here. We are not founders of a Philosophy that we assert has always existed; we simply are teaching this Knowledge locked in every being. We also reject the title of prophet for the same reason; the Prophecy is encoded in all reincarnated Xyphoites, of which we believe there are numerous others, and so to say that we solely are prophets is arrogant, inflates the ego and Self, and commits the Immoral Act of Worldly Self-Obsession. We are simply nine of many, and need no high status or title other than AHG. We write about this in this earlier entry.
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Question: How did you experience your faith and find each? Were you raised under different religions beforehand?
Answer: Each of us had our own personal visions of the Lords and of spiritual existence throughout our lives, and upon slowly meeting each other on online forums focusing on religion, spirituality, and philosophy, discovered we all had very similar sets of experience and circumstances that aligned. Some of us had various revelations as young as the age of 5, while the experience came later in life for others. One thing, however, that remained consistent is that we all envisioned multiple pillars of power or structure that seemed to be key to all of existence, and through our shared conversation and meditation, envisioned images of the nine Lords and Their Order while also receiving the hidden inner revelation of the Prophecy and of Deceptuary’s wickedness. The planning for the Ordinance started from there, and we removed our presence from those forums and moved to building this very website.
In terms of our various upbringings, many of us were raised in moderately religious households but ultimately felt those messages were insincere or an improper understanding of existence throughout that upbringing. Others were raised agnostically and never had any other affiliation to any religious influence until finding the Xyphoist Philosophy compelling.
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Question: Are you all in the same country together?
Answer: No, we are not all based in the same country. Many of us are in the United States and Canada, but others exist in Europe and Asia. This expansive range does make collaborating on work a bit tedious at times, but ultimately through the power of the digital space, we all work and run the Ordinance and pen Commentary in a regulated manner, although our posting times tend to vary because of this, as it is the responsibility of each AHG to actually log in and hit the post button for their posts on their given Period(s) as well as make the adjacent social media posts for that Period.
And that will round up this selection of questions regarding we Arch-Hayle Grandurates. We hope that satisfied the questions submitted by a few of our readers, and implore you to seek other forms of revelation or curiosity as we explore and reach out for Realmly Truths this period. As always, have a wonderful rest of your Sacred Day from the Order and Ordinance.
—AHG, et al