Origin of 'mellontolatry.'

In the collection of essays, God in the Dock, C. S. Lewis uses the word "mellontolatry," which is defined as "worship of the future." This is the first instance of the word I can find.

In other places, Lewis makes up words, but he explicitly says that he is coining a term. E.g, "Bulverism." But he uses "mellontolatry" as if it were a known, but rare, word.

A few years ago, I went on a determined hunt for the origin of this word. OED had nothing. The UT Austin library had a 7 or 8 volume dictionary and it had nothing. I enlisted one of the senior librarians (whose eyes lit up at the challenge) in the hunt. We found nothing preceding Lewis.

Today, Google have me this hit:

http://worship.wikia.com/wiki/Mellontolatry

which also lists:

Pareltholatry – worship of the past

Nynolatry – worship of the present

Chronolatry – worship of time

and, frankly, I file that website under "too silly." All other hits derive from Lewis.

So that's my question: Did Lewis coin this word? If not, where did it come from?

Solution 1:

One doesn't need to get verbose in an answer to this one. The simplest and most direct is to examine C.S. Lewis himself. He made up 1000s of words in writing his children's stories, and gave credit for their creation to many of his characters or simply imbedded them in the setting of his works. Each of his creations are vividly constructed as this one of his is (mellontolatry) - this idolatry of worship of the future as a god. The greek examination reveals the depth of Lewis - he was well read in Samuel Johnson, to Plutarch and read many literary works in their original language, including Medieval English.