Hylaea

First Appearance and Context

Hylaea is invoked as "our mother" in the Hylaean Anathem, the choral piece sung during Provener inside the Mynster. In the Rotunda of the Hylaean Way, a marble statue of Hylaea stands opposite the older figure of Cnous, paired with a companion statue of Deat beneath a triangular oculus; this arrangement introduces visitors to the exhibit’s account of Cnoüs’s vision and its interpretations.

Roles/Actions and Affiliations

According to the account presented along the Hylaean Way, Hylaea explains that Cnoüs’s moment of “Light” concerned geometry: not a physical idol but a pure isosceles triangle in a higher plane of theorics. This teaching later lends its name to the Hylaean Theoric World, and in early eras drew followers known as Physiologers. The two exits in the Rotunda symbolize a later forking between her way and the path associated with the Deolaters.

Relationships

• Parent: Cnoüs.
• Sibling: Deät.
• Counterpart tradition: Deolaters (followers of Deät).

Descriptions/Characteristics

In sculpture, Hylaea is depicted standing erect, drawing back her cloak to bare her head and pointing upward into the light, lips parted as if beginning to speak. A long‑standing legend says the two companion statues were commissioned as matches to the older statue of Cnoüs; the sculptor is said to have refused to reveal what Hylaea was about to say, and later scholars doubt the story. The epithet “Our Mother Hylaea” appears both in liturgy and in ordinary speech when avout refer to abstractions. In everyday speech, Hylaea’s name is also used idiomatically—as in the rebuke “worship at Hylaea’s feet”—to characterize strict devotion to precise semantics and theoric purity.

Current Status/Location

Hylaea remains a mythic and liturgical figure rather than a living person. She is invoked in the Hylaean Anathem and represented prominently at the entrance to the Hylaean Way.