Building Religions 27: Priesthood

A little while ago, my friend Mike asked if I'd go into a bit more detail here on the varieties of priesthood and how they might be used in created worlds. Since I'm always willing to take requests, here's my answer.

Because 'priest' is a word whose meaning is primarily drawn from European Christian experience, it can be difficult to apply completely to other religions without bringing along certain expectations and baggage. You can, though, establish a minimum definition and use that to decide whether or not it's the best word to use to describe a type of practitioner, so that's what I'd do here: a priest is a religious specialist whose primary function is the performance of ritual in a fixed location.

To unpack that: by religious specialist, I mean someone who has received training in the religious practices of the community above and beyond that learned by its other members. Among rituals, I include sacrifice, divination, healing, and exorcism, along with life-cycle rituals (birth, coming of age, death) and similar community-oriented practices. By a fixed location, I mean a temple, or at the very least an altar.

Entrance into priesthood can be either hereditary or vocational. Hereditary priesthoods are family, clan, or caste lineages that are considered eligible to become priests; instruction is usually passed down from parent to child, although in some cases (Zoroastrian priesthood, for example) a whole generation could produce no priests without the family losing its status. These hereditary priesthoods are likely to be strongly attached to a single temple, acting as caretakers and perhaps the preservers of specialized rituals attached to that temple.

Vocational priesthoods are those that people enter into through training and selection. They may, for that reason, be challenged with additional restrictions on their behaviour (e.g., celibacy, which is unsurprisingly not a requirement of hereditary priests) or be required to undergo a more thorough training in non-ritual areas such as theology, religious law, and so on. Family status is, for vocational priesthoods, replaced with lineages of teachers and students. In order to be recognized as a valid religious authority, it's often important for the priest to be able to trace a proper line of instruction back to a respected source.

The education of a priest can be seen as having three components: ritual expertise, theology, and discipline. Because ritual is the main function of the priesthood, it's the one that is shared equally across all types of priests. It can be that a priest specializes in one ritual only, or even in acting as an assistant to others during collective rituals; in Vedic Hinduism, sacrifices could require more than a dozen priests working together, each with their part to play. In later Hinduism, less specialized forms of priesthood started to develop, ones in which priests could make offerings to the gods, perform astrological calculations, provide healing, and officiate over local religious events. This is probably closer to the kind of priest who appears in most fantasy settings, an all-purpose ritualist rather than a character with a narrow purview.

Theological training is something that becomes more important in a secularized world in which priests feel an increasing pressure to justify the tenets of their religion. A ritualist might only need to be familiar with basic myth and cosmology—the framework of an unchallenged religious world—but with increasing encounters with other religions, the ability to reinforce one's values turns into a necessity. The advantage of this development is that it can lead to progress in the theology itself, as new generations raise and answer new problems.

Discipline, I use here as a catch-all term for both the strictures placed on a priest before initiation (fasting, vigils, ritual bathing, vision quests, etc.) and those that apply forever after (ritual purity, celibacy, modes of dress or bodily decoration, etc.). The purpose of discipline is to set the priest apart as a sacred being, and is more commonly seen in religions in which being a priest is a permanent, full-time occupation distinct from the lay population.

Now, what's interesting for worldbuilders is that you could quite reasonably have religious specialists who don't focus on all three of these areas. Remove ritual, but keep theology and discipline, and you have the basic definition of a monk. Ritual and discipline without theology could describe a village shaman. Ritual and theology without discipline is a little trickier, although it does more or less describe Protestant ministry. Stretching it further, theology alone could include religious scholars, including the legalists of Jewish and Muslim traditions. Discipline alone could encompass the temporarily sacred state of people undergoing rites of passage, or the semi-sacred nature of the Irish geas.

The fact that I mentioned the possibility of priesthood as a full-time occupation implies that there are cases in which it can be otherwise. These tend to crop up at the two extremes of social organization: the family and the state. Within a family, the head of the household may be responsible for that family's private rituals, such as sacrifices to ancestors or to local deities. By its nature, it would count as a form of hereditary priesthood, but without any real social status to accompany it. On the level of the state, the ruler might perform important rituals for the renewal of the year and preside over sacrifices to the god or goddess who embodies the entire community. Members of the royal family might also be expected to tend to royal temples or shrines, carrying out the same sort of rituals as household priests on a grander scale. (In that case, the dedicated priest is also a form of sacrifice, giving up political life for religious life.)

The royal aspect leads naturally into the political role of the priesthood. Historically, it's been more common for priests to act as a part of government than to be separate from it. In religions with a strong legal component, they act as judges and interpreters of the law. Even without that role, priests as diviners, oracles, or astrologers can lend their support to the ruling government by giving it the divine stamp of approval, so to speak. Priests who perform those functions outside of the government, such as the Biblical prophets, can gain influence as critics and reformers. In either case, religion and the state act upon each other—something to remember when you're building the politics of a world.

So, Mike, that's the short answer to your question. Anyone else wanting to ask something or make a request for a topic, chime in through the comments or over on Google+.