Has there been any previous mentions of these Lesser Ministries before?

Question

On page 122 of the Mage: the Awakening 2nd Edition sourcebook Signs of Sorcery, there is a sidebar that introduces Prelacy bonuses for members of Lesser Ministries of the Seers of the Throne mage order.

In it is includes the following information:

The Raptor (Sycorian) grants the Crown of Instinct. The character may ignore surrenders without spending Willpower, is immune to the Beaten Down Tilt and wound penalties and increases his own Doors in Social Maneuvering by his Life dots.

The Prophet (Kyrian and Horologian) grants the Crown of Agency. When she or another character uses Temporal Sympathy on a spell with her as the subject, the character counts as having a Strong Temporal Sympathy to any point in her own past. If a supernatural effect (including Time spells) alters history such that the character’s past is changed, she does not change immediately but only after her Time dots in turns, allowing her the opportunity to do something about it.

The only other place in the book that these Ministries are mentioned is in the descriptions of the ten Iron Seals (the major Exarchs who represent the Arcana), which each have a final sentence to the effect of "He is served by the X and Y Ministries," with no further description.

I've checked the Mage the Awakening Second Edition corebook as well as the Seers of the Throne sourcebook for Mage the Awakening First Edition, and I can't find any mention of the Sycorians, Kyrians, or Horologians, and I can't find anything about them on Google, either. Is this the first time that these Lesser Ministries have been mentioned in a Mage book, or have they been mentioned in other (first edition) sourcebooks or official short stories that I haven't checked?

Answer 1

Dave (the Developer) here - I and Meghan Fitzgerald invented most of the new Ministries mentioned during the writing of the next Mage book, an antagonist sourcebook called Night Horrors: Nameless and Accursed, and there was just enough time post-editing of Signs to slip their names in. A writer wanted to do a Seer from a new Ministry, we came up with it, we kind of found ourselves on a roll and ended up with multiple Ministries per Iron Seal.

The exceptions are Geryon (who were on the backstory of Angrboda, the 1e Scelesti iconic character, and most visibly called out in Left Hand Path), Mammon (who go all the way back to Reign of the Exarchs) and Pantechnicon (who were named a couple of times but have their most material in Mage Noir).

We don't know where they'll eventually be written up, but we do know what they're about in broad terms. They're not just names. Herodian, the minor Ministry of the General, for example, focus on stoking racism, class inequality and paranoia into causing preemptive strikes. They're the guys encouraging gated communities where you get shot for wearing a hoodie, militias to occupy reservations and tech millionaires to buy bunkers guarded by private armies.