Word-Built World: heliogabalus

June 13, 2025 Mike Zonta Leave a comment

Medal of Elagabalus, Louvre Museum. Photo: PHGCOM / Wikimedia

A.Word.A.Daywith Anu Garg

heliogabalus

PRONUNCIATION:

(hee-lee-uh/oh-GAB-uh-luhs)

MEANING:

noun: A wildly extravagant, foolish, and self-indulgent person.

ETYMOLOGY:

After the Roman emperor Heliogabalus/Elagabalus (CE 204-222) who ruled 218-222 CE. Earliest documented use: 1589.

NOTES:

When it comes to imperial excess, Heliogabalus didn’t just raise the bar. He had it gilded, perfumed, and carried in procession. Crowned at 14 and assassinated by 18, he crammed a lifetime’s worth of scandal into four turbulent years. He married three women (and one man), held elaborate feasts where guests dined on fake food, and reportedly released wild animals into banquet halls, for ambiance, of course.

Fake hair? Yes. Makeup? Certainly. Dignity? Not so much.

The historian B.G. Niebuhr said that Heliogabalus had “nothing at all to make up for his vices, which are of such a kind that it is too disgusting even to allude to them.” And historian Adrian Goldsworthy was more blunt: “He was an incompetent, probably the least able emperor Rome ever had.”

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“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”
— George Bernard Shaw

“. . . the only difference between you and God is that you have forgotten that you are divine.”
— Peter Solomon in The Lost Symbol

“Have an open-mind, but don’t let your brains fall out.”
— Jacob Needleman

“When thought races ahead of Being, a civilization is racing towards destruction.”
— Jacob Needleman in his new book What is God?

“A great man knows he is not God, and the greater he is the better he knows it.”
— G.K. Chesterton

“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only at night.”
— Edgar Allan Poe

“Give thanks to unknown blessings already on their way.”
— Native American proverb at cafe in San Francisco

“To be nobody but yourself in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you like everybody else means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.”
–e.e. cummings

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Word-Built World: heliogabalus

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Consciousness, sexuality, androgyny, futurism, space, the arts, science, astrology, democracy, humor, books, movies and more