Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/749

Rh PRIEST 725 to be done towards the gods &quot; (see Aristotle, Pol., vi. 8), and remunerated from the revenues of the temple, or by the gifts of worshippers and sacrificial dues. The position was often lucrative and always honourable, and the priests were under the special protection of the gods they served. But their purely ritual functions gave them no means of establishing a considerable influence on the minds of men, and the technical knowledge which they possessed as to the way in which the gods could be acceptably approached was neither so intricate nor so mysterious as to give the class a special importance. The funds of the temples were not in their control, but were treated as public moneys. Above all, where, as at Athens, the decision of questions of sacred law fell not to the priests but to the college of e^y^rcu, one great source of priestly power was wholly lacking. There remains, indeed, one other sacred function of great importance in the ancient world in which the Greek priests had a share. As man approached the gods in sacrifice and prayers, so too the gods declared themselves to men by divers signs and tokens, which it was possible to read by the art of DIVINATION (q.v.). In many nations divination and priesthood have always gone hand in hand ; at Rome, for example, the augurs and the X Vviri sacrorum, who interpreted the Sibylline books, were priestly colleges. In Greece, on the other hand, divina tion was not generally a priestly function, but it did belong to the priests of the Oracles (see ORACLE). The great oracles, however, were of Panhellenic celebrity and did not serve each a particular state, and so in this direction also the risk of an independent priestly power within the state was avoided. 1 In Rome, again, where the functions of the priesthood were politically much more weighty, where the techni calities of religion were more complicated, where priests interpreted the will of the gods, and where the pontiffs had a most important jurisdiction in sacred things, the state was much too strong to suffer these powers to escape from its own immediate control : the old monarchy of the king in sacred things descended to the inheritors of his temporal power ; the highest civil and religious functions met in the same persons (comp. Cic., De Dom., i. 1) ; and every priest was subject to the state exactly as the magistrates were, referring all weighty matters to state decision and then executing what the one supreme power decreed. And it is instructive to observe that when the plebeians extorted their full share of political power they also demanded and obtained admission to every priestly college of political importance, to those, namely, of the pontiffs, the augurs, and the X Vviri sacrorum. The Romans, it need hardly be said, did not have hereditary priests. 2 The same close connexion between state and religion meets us, under the forms of Oriental despotism, in the great civilizations of Egypt and Babylonia. Here all civil and religious power has its source in the king, and he is therefore himself the centre and head of the priesthood. Nowhere is religion more thoroughly a part of statecraft than in ancient Egypt ; the official religion of the united monarchy is plainly an artificial structure built up by priestly fable and speculation out of the old religions of the several nomes and dedicated to the service of the monarchy. The priesthood accordingly has large functions, including, besides the service of the temples, astrology and divination, and the development and preservation of a sort of official theology and ritual theory, by which the conflict- 1 For the Greek priests, see, besides Schomann and other works on Greek antiquities, Newton, Essays on Art and Archaeology, p. 136 sq. (from epigraphic material). 2 On the Roman priests, see in general Marquardt, Romische Staats- rerwaltung, vol. iii., and for the pontiffs in particular PONTIFEX, supra, p. 455. ing elements of local religion and mythology were recon ciled. It has a strict bureaucratic organization, like any other branch of the administration ; the higher priests are great officers of state, with civil and even military power ; under Smendes (XXIst Dynasty) the priests of Amon at Thebes actually ascended the throne. An absolute mon archy, in which the king is revered as himself a divine person and in which the ministers of religion are the organs of a comprehensive and mysterious statecraft, obviously offers to sacerdotalism a far greater career than was pos sible among the free peoples of Greece and Rome; and the priests held in their hands the whole wisdom of the Egyptians, and so kept all parts of culture in such strict subservience, alike to the gods and to the monarchy, as to make the empire of the Nile the ideal type of absolutism based on divine right. In this respect, however, the Babylonian system, of which we have less ample details, probably fell little short of the Egyptian. Here also we find, as in Egypt, a state religion built on a priestly fusion of older cults, and therefore also a mythological theology which is not folk-lore but priest-lore. The older elements of religion are worked into a theoretic system of astral powers, and this in turn gives rise to a priestly study of astrology containing elements of real science. This com plicated and many-sided lore gave to the priesthoods of Chaldsea and the Nile the character of a learned class, which is quite wanting in Greece and Rome, and it also produced a sacred and sacerdotal literature quite different in range and importance from such Western analogues as the Sibylline books or the libri augurales. Against the genuine intellectual achievements of the Chaldean and Egyptian priests must be set the incorpora tion of magic and sorcery in the circle of priestly sciences. The ordinary functions of religion are directed to conciliate or persuade the gods, but magic pretends to constrain the supernatural powers, and belongs, as we have seen, to super stition rather than to religion. But in Egypt and Baby Ionia the state religion was an artificial mosaic of old beliefs, in which the crassest superstitions had their place, and thus magical arts received a state recognition and were part of the business of the state priests in a way unknown in the West. Occult arts, in fact, are part of the machinery of government. Now when we go still farther east to the Aryans of India we again find the idea prominent that certain formulas have the power of con straining the gods, but in a form somewhat different from that of mere sorcery, and less primitive. All ancient peoples sought victory from the gods, and they sought it by sacrifice and prayer ; but nowhere is the power of sacrifice more strongly felt than among the ancient Aryans ; it was Agni, the sacrificial flame, as ancient legend has it, that led the conquerors of India from victory to victory. But there were also bloody struggles among the Aryans themselves, between men who invoked the same deity, and here the issue was not whether Indra was stronger than the gods of the non-Aryans, but which of the rival sacrifices he would accept. Now the priests accompanied sacrifice with songs of invocation, and so it became essential to have the most powerful song, which the god could not resist. The knowledge of these songs and of all that accompanied their use was handed down in priestly families, whose aid became indispensable to every sovereign, and at last out of these families there grew up the great and privileged caste of Brahmans. For further details as to the development of the priestly caste and wisdom in India the reader must refer to BRAHMANISM ; here it is enough to observe that among a religious people a priesthood which forms a close and still more an hereditary corporation, and the assistance of which is indispensable in all religious acts, must rise to practical supremacy in society except