Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 19.djvu/750

Rh 726 PRIEST under the strongest form of despotism, where the sovereign is head of the church as well as of the state. Among the Zoroastrian Iranians, as among the Indian Aryans, the aid of a priest to recite the sacrificial liturgy was necessary at every offering (Herod., i. 132), and the Iranian priests (athravans, later Magi] claimed, like the Brahmans, to be the highest order of society ; but a variety of conditions were lacking to give them the full place of their Indian brethren. Zoroastrianism is not a nature religion, but the result of a reform which never, under the old empire, thoroughly penetrated the masses; and the priesthood, as it was not based on family tradition, did not form a strict hereditary caste. Under the Sasanians, however, Zoroastrianism was a state religion in the strictest sense, and the priests attained very great power, their assistance being absolutely necessary not only in the public ritual of the fire-temple but for the constant guidance of every individual in the minute details of ceremonial observance, which make up the chief body of the religious system of the sacred books, and every breach of which involved penance. It is thus easily understood that the clergy formed a compact hierarchy not inferior in influence to the clergy of the Christian Middle Ages, had great power in the state, and were often irksome even to the great king. But the best established hierarchy is not so powerful as a caste, and the monarchs had one strong hold on the clergy by retaining the patronage of great ecclesi astical places, and another in the fact that the Semitic provinces on the Tigris, where the capital lay, were mainly inhabited by men of other faith. 1 In this rapid glance at some of the chief priesthoods of antiquity we have hitherto passed over the pure Semites, whose priesthoods call for closer examination because of the profound influence which one of them that of the Jews has exercised on Christianity, and so on the whole history of the modern world. But before we proceed to this it may be well to note one or two things that come out by comparison of the systems already before us. Priestly acts that is, acts done by one and accepted by the gods on behalf of many are common to all antique religions, and cannot be lacking where the primary subject of religion is not the individual but the natural community. But the origin of a separate priestly class, distinct from the natural heads of the community, cannot be explained by any such broad general principle ; in some cases, as in Greece, it is little more than a matter of convenience that part of the religious duties of the state should be con fided to special ministers charged with the care of particu lar temples, while in others the intervention of a special priesthood is indispensable to the validity of every religious act, so that the priest ultimately becomes a mediator and the vehicle of all divine grace. This position, we see, can be reached by various paths : the priest may become in dispensable through the growth of ritual observances and precautions too complicated for a layman to master, or he may lay claim to special nearness to the gods on the ground, it may be, of his race, or it may be of habitual practices of purity and asceticism which cannot be com bined with the duties of ordinary life, as, for example, celibacy was required of priestesses of Vesta at Rome. But the highest developments of priestly influence are hardly separable from something of magical superstition ; the opus operatum of the priest has the power of a sorcerer s spell. The strength of the priesthood in Chaldsea and in Egypt stands plainly in the closest connexion with the survival of a magical element in the state religion, and Rome, in like manner, is more priestly than Greece because it is more superstitious. In most cases, however, where an ancient civilization shows us a strong priestly system 1 Compare especially Noldeke s Tabari, p. 450 sq. we are unable to make out in any detail the steps by which that system was elaborated ; the clearest case per haps is the priesthood of the Jews, which is not less interesting from its origin and growth than from the influ ence exerted by the system long after the priests were dispersed and their sanctuary laid in ruins. Among the nomadic Semites, to whom the Hebrews be longed before they settled in Canaan, there has never been any developed priesthood. The acts of religion partake of the general simplicity of desert life ; apart from the private worship of household gods and the oblations and salutations offered at the graves of departed kinsmen, the ritual observances of the ancient Arabs were visits to the tribal sanctuary to salute the god with a gift of milk first-fruits or the like, the sacrifice of firstlings and vows (see NAZAR- ITE and PASSOVER), and an occasional pilgrimage to dis charge a vow at the annual feast and fair of one of the more distant holy places (see MECCA). These acts required no priestly aid ; each man slew his own victim and divided the sacrifice in his own circle ; the share of the god was the blood which was smeared upon or poured out beside a stone (nosb, ghabghab) set up as an altar or perhaps as a symbol of the deity. It does not appear that any portion of the sacrifice was burned on the altar, or that any part of the victim was the due of the sanctuary. We find therefore no trace of a sacrificial priesthood, but each temple had one or more doorkeepers (sddin, hdjib], whose office was usually hereditary in a certain family and who had the charge of the temple and its treasures. The sacrifices and offerings were acknowledgments of divine bounty and means used to insure its continuance ; the Arab was the &quot; slave &quot; of his god and paid him tribute, as slaves used to do to their masters, or subjects to their lords ; and the free Bedouin, trained in the solitude of the desert to habits of absolute self-reliance, knew no master except his god, and acknowledged no other will before which his own should bend. Hence the other side of Arab religion was to look for divine direction in every grave or difficult concern of life ; what could not be settled in the free council of the tribesmen, or by the unenforced award of an umpire, was referred to the command of the god, and the oracle was the only authority by which dissen sions could be healed, lawsuits determined, and judgment authoritatively spoken. The voice of the god might be uttered in omens which the skilled could read, or con veyed in the inspired rhymes of soothsayers, but frequently it was sought in the oracle of the sanctuary, where the sacred lot was administered for a fee by the sadin. The sanctuary thus became a seat of judgment, and here too compacts were sealed by oaths and sacrificial ceremonies. These institutions, though known to us only from sources belonging to an age when the old faith was falling to pieces, are certainly very ancient. Their whole stamp is primitive, and they correspond in the closest way with what we know of the earliest religion of the Israelites, the only other Semitic people whose history can be traced back to a time when they had not fully emerged from nomad life. And, in fact, the fundamental type of the Arabic sanctuary can be traced through all the Semitic lands, and so appears to be older than the Semitic disper sion ; even the technical terms are mainly the same, so that we may justly assume that the more developed ritual and priesthoods of the settled Semites sprang from a state of things not very remote from what we find among the heathen Arabs. Now among the Arabs, as we have seen, ritual service is the affair of the individual, or of a mass of individuals gathered in a great feast, but still doing worship each for himself and his own private circle ; the only public aspect of religion is found in connexion with divination and the oracle to which the affairs of the com-