Religions of Rome: part 4

I'll get back to how much I disagree with Dusek soon, honest- but first, quick post to get the last bit of 'Religions of Rome' out of the way.


The rest of the book is pretty much about elective cults. This a good phrase which I don't think I've specifically seen used anywhere else- basically, an elective cult seems to mean 'a religion in which a substantial number of worshippers have consciously opted-in', rather than a religion which is just the default option for anyone who grows up in a particular culture. So early Christianity was an elective cult, but Judaism was not (not sure whether I'd count medieval European Christianity as an elective cult or not, since for most people choosing to stop participating in worship was presumably not really an option. I guess it was elective in the sense that Jews were theoretically allowed to convert, at least in some nations and periods, and maybe the Reformation made it elective in the sense that people in many nations had to choose which side they were on, denomination-wise. So it's obviously not a completely hard and fast distinction, but it at least articulates that variation exists here, so that's better than nothing).


Quick note on the word 'cult': it's not being used in the pejorative sense of "an organisation which brainwashes its followers", or anything like that. It's just the word which seems to get used by historians and social scientists to refer to groups of worshippers which are a subset of that culture's greater religious system. So I guess that in a pagan Roman context, you could say that pretty much everyone 'believes in' Jupiter to some extent, but not everyone is necessarily part of the 'Jupiter cult' in that they're going out and actively worshipping him by making offerings at his temple, or whatever. I think it's sort of weird that the word 'cult' is used this way in this context when its associations in other contexts seem uniformly negative. I assume it's a holdover from the Bad Old Days of nineteenth-century comparative theology, but I can't think of a more convenient term so I guess we'll just have to stick with the caveats.

Another necessary caveat is that what's 'elective' for some people in a society isn't necessarily 'elective' for everyone- a nice example of how this could work is found on a second century AD inscription honouring an upper-class woman named Agrippinilla (see p. 271). Under her name are the names of 420 devotees to Dionysus, arranged in a system of either 25 or 26 grades of initiation (not sure why there's uncertainty over the number; maybe the inscription is damaged or something). Many of the names sound Oriental (as in, from the bit of the Meditteranean east of Rome, not as in what we'd now call east Asian). This could be interpreted as evidence that Oriental migrants to Rome had established their own Dionysus cult within the city, perhaps in order to preserve some aspects of their home culture.

However, Beard et al. think it's more likely that something else was going on. Agrippinilla's family traced their ancestry to Lesbos, where Dionysus-worship was important. The 420 people on the list were probably neither born in the Orient nor voluntary converts to the cult: it's more likely that they were the family's slaves and ex-slaves, who were subject to compulsory initiation.


Obviously, either explanation would seem to imply that Dionysus-worship wasn't exactly elective in this case (since neither a family cult nor a cult that was the default for a particular ethnic minority sounds very 'elective' to me). But it highlights the fact that you could hypothetically have an upper-class Roman who made a conscious choice to worship some god and then insisted that their family and slaves did so too. I don't know if that actually happened much, but the fact that it's theoretically possible suggests a need to be careful about how we use the terminology.

On the other hand, some cults were apparently more elective than we'd normally assume (and also more elective than the Roman establishment would have liked). Tacitus condemns the wickedness of Jewish prosletytes- people who weren't ethnically Jewish, but who committed themselves to Judaism as much as they were able, going further than those referred to as merely "god-fearing gentiles"). Tacitus felt these people were abandoning their ancestral religion. Later, Cassius Dio records that Domitian executed his cousin and exiled his wife on charges of 'atheism', because both had allegedly "drifted into Judaism". Beard et al. argue that the Roman authorities were more or less ok with the Jews having their own religious practices, but felt very threatened by the possibility of Jews recruiting Roman citizens to their religion (p.276).

Under those circumstances, it's not surprising that the authorities took an even dimmer view of Christianity's active attempts to convert people. It sounds as though the type of evangelism seen as most dangerous was not the soapbox-preaching which I've usually imagined Paul engaging in, but the attempts by less prominent Christians to share testimonies with others in private. Non-Christians writer seem to have gotten a mental image of Christians as people who were so low-status as to be almost invisible, allowing them to insinuate themselves into people's households and secretly corrupt the women and children (p.276).

Another interesting thing (p.284) is that the 'alternative' cults seem to have been more reliant on written texts than the standard civic religion of Rome (presumably because adult converts had to be brought up to speed on some relatively specific doctrine or worship practice, whereas one could just pick up the necessary basics of the civic religion from childhood socialisation. Some Roman intellectuals DID spend quite a lot of time trying to write out and study explicit systems of exegesis for the Roman civic religion, but this seems to have been an emically optional aspect of worship which most Romans presumably ignored, if they were even aware of its existence).It also sounds as if most of these sacred texts were for the benefit of priests who were teaching/ initiating the convert, not for the converts themselves (which I guess makes sense in a context where literacy was presumably pretty low).

The obvious examples of sacred texts in this period are the Christian ones (which hadn't yet been collated into the Bible) and Jewish scriptures (especially the Pentateuch, which synagogues read out to worshippers over the course of a year). But there were also other texts which might have played quite different roles in their respective cults- for instance, the Isis cult apparently put great stress on the importance of their sacred texts, which allegedly originated in Egypt. But from the description given it sounds a bit like the basic fact that priests could say "we have sacred writings from Egypt, you know! Written in Egyptian and everything!" might have been more important to the average worshipper than any actual translation or exegesis of the texts (could be wrong about that, though).

Interestingly, Christianity also seems to be the only religion in this area which had a proliferation of different texts, with people actively trying to weed out the 'true' from the 'heretical' accounts (see p.284). They also seem to have been the only people who spent a substantial amount of time trying to systematically argue against the validity of other people's worship (p.310). Mithras-worshippers don't seem likely to have had particularly high opinions of Isis worship, but they don't seem to have felt it was something worth writing polemics about either. Additionally, Christians seem to have been the only elective cult to put substantial effort into building their owncentralised hierarchies of religious authority. Groups like Mithras-worshippers had internal hierarchies in the sense that there were different grades of initiation, but it sounds as though they weren't especially interested in establishing a system where there was one central body which all Mithras cults everywhere accepted as leader (p.304).

The elective cults seem to have often emphasised the issue of the afterlife more than the civic religion did (p.289-90). In The Golden Ass (the best-known example of fiction written from an Isis-worshipper's perspective), Isis tells Apuleius that if he devotes himself to her, she'll extend his life beyond that granted to him by fate, and after death he'll find her shining in the darkness of the underworld. The Mithras cult linked the different stages of initiation to different planets. It seems like they believed that the initiate's soul rose up and away, eventually achieving 'apogenesis' somewhere far from the material world. And obviously Christianity stressed spiritual immortality in a somewhat different sense. But not all the elective cults did this: worshippers of Attis and Jupiter Dolichenus (an aspect of Jupiter with Syrian influences) don't seem to have thought about the afterlife any more than worshippers of the civic religion did.

There's some indication that elective cults gave rise to emically identifiable subcultures. Being part of a distinct religious minority group didn't normally cut you off from the structures of normal Roman society (except in the case of Christianity). However, it DOES seem to have shaped identities in a way that the civic religion didn't (except for natives in the provinces, where the question of one's attitude towards gods with Roman names was a bit more of a self-conscious and politically tense decision- see p.339). If 99% of the people you know sacrifice to a particular collection of gods, then it's hard to define your identity in terms of being yet another person who does that too. People seem to define themselves in opposition to other things- you can't really get excited about defining yourself as a 'Roman pagan' until there are significant numbers of Christians or non-Roman pagans in your immediate social world. Likewise, it sounds as though it was hard to strongly self-identify as 'a worshipper of Jupiter' in pagan Rome, because it doesn't sound like there was a community of Jupiter-worshippers to join (just a disparate group of people who happened to sacrifice to Jupiter without seeing that as a salient part of their identity). But you COULD potentially self-identify as a worshipper of Jupiter Dolichenus and so gain access to a community of other devotees with their own idiosyncratic worship practices.

Having said this, it's unclear to what extent people outside your subculture would notice or care about this aspect of your identity (except again in the case of Christianity, where knowing someone was a Christian presumably had a significant impact on how pagans saw them, at least if the accusations that Christians were unpatriotic and dodgy are any indication). For instance, Isis-worshippers apparently had some sort of special purity rules (p.289), but Beard et al. don't go into details and so it's hard to gauge how much impact this typically had on interactions with non-Isis devotees (did they eat separately from non-devotees? Take days off work for festivals? Wear little bracelets saying 'What Would Sarapis Do?'). They did apparently sometimes have different dress codes than normal Romans, which is probably one reason why you don't see men from the senatorial class joining these cults until after Christianity takes over (after which, things seem to become more a case of "Christianity vs all the different urban paganisms teamed up together", as people stop caring about the fact that they think Magna Mater is inferior to Mithras, and reflect that at least her priests aren't trying to ban animal sacrifices. See p.291, 383).

It's probably also significant that most elective cults don't seem to have had a distinct emic name for their own followers. For example, Mithras-worship has the names for different initiation grades, but no generic word for 'Mithras-worshipper'. 'Mithraist' is a word created by later scholars with no precise Latin equivalent- except possibly 'sacratus' (devotee) or 'syndexios' ('he who has performed the sacred handshake'). 'Judaeus' (Jew) is a common Latin word, but it was an ethnic descriptor as well as a religious one. The Isis cult sometimes used the word 'Isiacus' to mean 'Isis-devotee', but it doesn't seem to have been a very common word (p.307).

Christianity was clearly unusually exclusive, in that so many prominent Christians argued that one could not be a Christian AND a worshipper of other cults (we have no evidence of the other cults doing anything similar). However, we should clarify that there were probably at least some Christians who were less hardline on this issue than the famous Christians were (e.g. Christians who aren't famous martyrs because they decided to go along with imperial sacrifices and hope God didn't mind). There are also the Naassenes, who explicitly argued that the Magna Mater cult was actually worshipping the Christian God, and so it was ok for Christians to go to their rituals (although the Naassenes didn't castrate themselves as Magna Mater's priests did). They seem to have been declared heretical pretty quickly (p.311).

(Incidentally, wiki notes something else interesting about them:

"The Naassenes (from the Hebrew word na'asch meaning snake) were a gnostic Ophite sect from around 100 A.D. The Naassenes, the Sethians, the Mandaeans, the Perates, and the Borborites are the known Ophite sects. Naassenes worshipped the serpent of Genesis as the bestower of knowledge. The Ophites' point of view on the biblic perception is this: The serpent is the hero, the one that calls himself God is called Yaldabaoth, Samael, or Saklas. Yaldabaoth was seen as the creator of the material world, but not as God, but as the will of God.[citation needed] Samael can be compared to the angel of death or the Devil. Saklas means 'fool' in the ancient language of Aramaic."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Naassenes )

Final interesting thing: we've apparently found copies of a message that the Roman governor of Egypt circulated, informing the province that the Emperor Claudius did NOT want the Alexandrians to worship him as a god. This message was complicated by the fact that it was attached to a covering edict referring to him as "our god Caesar". Not sure what the precise word was, though (presumably this was all written in Latin?) See p.313. Similarly, one high-ranking Roman apparently wrote approvingly that at least one German tribe worshipped Augustus (before his death), and that their leader had crossed the Elbe in a canoe so that he could touch Augustus' heir Tiberius, who they also saw as divine (p.352).

Sadly, Beard et al. don't really get into the topic of pagan monotheism in the classical period. They briefly mention that some Isis-devotees explicitly argued that Isis was the same being as the goddesses worshipped under names such as 'Venus', 'Minerva' and 'Magna Mater' (p.281). I guess I'll have to go chase this up properly at some point.



So, follow-up questions:

-How systematic/organised was Christian evangelism in the early churches? How does that compare to the post-Constantine period? Do we know how much of it was based around public preaching, vs how much of it involved approaching people one-on-one in private?

-If we look at religions besides Christianity which were explicitly founded by one person (e.g. Islam, Buddhism), do their early followers also show a concern with producing a very large number of texts about their founder and then making sure they denounce any 'heretical' versions?

-Early Christianity was distinctive in several ways. It was exclusive (it banned its members from joining other cults). It was extremely evangelistic, in that it sought to systematically convert the world. It was very concerned with writing texts for worshippers to learn from, and then vetting these texts for possible error. It was also very concerned with writing texts to persuade others to convert (apologetics and polemics against other faiths). And it was unusually centralised. To what extent are all these traits linked? For example, was it centralised BECAUSE Christians felt they needed a central authority to make decisions on which texts were heretical?

-If we look at people following religions which DON'T stress the idea of a happy afterlife for devotees, how do they tend to respond when they encounter members of religions which do? Assuming they don't convert, do they tend to dismiss the idea as wishful thinking, or just not as anything worth thinking about too much, or what? In the long term, does regular contact (or competition) with religions that promise a happy afterlife tend to make other religions develop a Heaven-concept of their own?

'Sociobiology Sanitised' by Val Dusek

I've finished Hardacre's Shinto and the State, and I'd meant to stick a review up today. But then someone forwarded me a link to this article and consequently made me angry enough to put the kami on hold. So congratulations, Val Dusek, I guess you're the lucky guy whose work I'm going to be regurgitating today.

My biggest problem with 'Sociobiology Sanitised' is that it violates Hume's guillotine, aka the is-ought distinction, aka "not losing sight of the distinction between scientific descriptions of what is currently the case and speculations about what implications this might hypothetically have for human conduct, ethics and the Meaning of Life.)

For some reason, this only seems to get violated in relation to studies of human behaviour and/or evolution. For instance, I don't recall ever hearing that announcements of the discovery of the Ebola virus were immediately met by protests that Western-trained virologists were trying to maliciously portray Sudanese and Congolese people as filthy and disease-ridden. If a scientist predicts that Vesuvius could erupt soon, people don't write long essays about how this is the same as saying volcanic eruptions are 'natural', which is the same thing as saying that anyone living on the slopes of Vesuvius now should just stay where they are, suck it up and quit whining about the risk of possible incineration. Why, then, do people so often confuse the two when it comes to human genetics?

Admittedly it's unfair to lay all the blame on Dusek in this case- I'm guessing that all or most of the people he cites on both sides have committed the same fallacy at least once (even Pinker seems to be guilty of it- for example, at one point in The Blank Slate he seems to be saying that anyone who stresses the importance of culture is basically a pessimist who thinks we're all automatons. I'll try to find the page reference, but it kind of jumps out because throughout most of that book Pinker gives the impression of being someone who's got a pretty good grasp of the role culture plays in the human species). I also realise that Dusek is probably aware that he's mixing science and politics in this discussion, and doesn't consider this to be a weakness so much as a sign of integrity. I'm not sure that I can currently articulate why I think this is a bad idea, so I think the plan is to critique his essay point-by-point and then see if I can come up with anything more convincing than "I think he's wrong".

I should also state that I'm going to be skimming over a couple of bits of Dusek's essay, on the grounds that I know approximately nothing about neuroscience or the Minnesota twin studies. Feel free to assume that this fatally undermines my position if this will make you feel happier about the whole thing.

Dusek begins by informing us that he was present at the famous incident in which protestors hurled water at sociobiologist E.O. Wilson while he was attempting to give a speech at a convention, apparently because they believed that sociobiology is inherently racist. The Blank Slate gives a description of this, along with several other incidents where people have done their best to prevent various biologists speaking in public (on the grounds that they might say something evil). Personally, I found this rather worrying (from a censorship perspective, if nothing else).

Dusek argues that the people repeating accounts of this incident neglect to report that Wilson "responded by saying to the audience that he felt like he had been speared by an aborigine". I've certainly never heard that detail before, and when I've finished bitching on the internet I should probably go and see if I can find anywhere else that mentions it. Having said that, I don't think this really excuses the fact that they threw water on him in the first place. Unless it was magic water which makes people reveal their secret racist thoughts when you throw it on them. That would be so cool. If I had magic racism-revealing water then you can bet that I'd be throwing it on people, like, ALL THE TIME. I'd be breaking into conferences on topics I knew nothing about, just so I could throw it at the keynote speaker and see if they responded with an unpleasant slur about my genetic ancestry. I'd be a vigilante, just like Batman, except I wouldn't live in a cave or own cars or harpoon guns. It would still be pretty sweet, though.

Where was I? Oh. Yes. Racism is wrong, kids. Don't let the misguided ramblings of a postgrad with a questionable sense of humour persuade you otherwise.

Dusek goes on to address the question of whether there's any difference between 'sociobiology' and 'evolutionary psychology' except that the latter term is currently more fashionable. Off the top of my head, I can't think of any major differences, but then I'm not an evolutionary psychologist and God knows that academics will fight to the bitter end to defend their right to self-define disciplinary boundaries that are frequently invisible to people outside the discipline in question, so I can't really offer an opinion on this one. However, I thought this statement of Dusek's was somewhat odd:

"I believe part of the difference [between sociobiology and EP] is a tactical retreat from some of the more belligerently ideological and sexist pronouncements of the past which attracted criticism and condemnation."

Call me a cynic, but I can't help but feel like this is one of those irregular verbs. You know- "I respond well to peer input; you pay attention to constructive criticism, he just enacts a tactical retreat from the belligerent sexism of the past." Where I come from, if a group of scientists start backing down from a position on the grounds that it's chauvinist, feminists usually see that as a reason to celebrate. It seems a bit weird to watch people abandoning an argument which you find offensive, and then use that as an argument that this proves nothing except that they're evil hypocrites.

"Wilson has more recently allied himself with the fellow Harvard professor Thernstrom in forming an organization to dismiss and denigrate (without any actual investigation) the academic quality of Womens Studies and Ethnic Studies programs. Dawkins, on the other hand, does not make explicit social policy pronouncements."

Sorry- I just want to pause a moment to contemplate the idea of a world where Richard Dawkins steers well clear of debates on social policy. The essay was written back in 1998, when atheists were quiet and respectful folk, beer was a shilling a bottle, and we all let children play in the street without worrying that they would be viciously labelled as 'Christian' by the mainstream media. Of course, Dusek has to go ahead and ruin this daydream by stating that:

"Dawkins' work is ideology in an even stronger sense that E. O. Wilson's precisely because none of it is explicit. Dawkins can present himself as the pure scientist in contrast to Gould and Lewontin precisely by feigning political unconsciousness and indifference."

This comment is an example of a sentiment which seems to come up quite often in a certain kind of humanities and social science theorising. I think the reason why you see this in those fields is because they're disciplines which spend a lot of time focusing on the fact that words have power. This seems to lead some people to the conclusion that attempts to communicate effectively are inherently oppressive, since they basically involve tricking or seducing your listeners into doing what you want. Some people who hold this opinion seem to make their peace with it (I get the impression that Foucault was one of them, although I haven't read enough of his original material to be sure). Others just seem to reach the conclusion that the only way to fight oppression is to find someone who looks like they endorse an influential point of view, and then spend your time incessantly telling them to shut up and go away. It's not enough just to critique the speaker every time they say something you disagree with; for all we know, even their apparently innocuous comments could actually be subliminal rhetoric designed to spread the tyranny; therefore "shut up and go away" is the only safe counterargument.

I say these people 'seem to' believe this, because I can only assume that this isn't the way it looks from an emic-insider perspective to this academic subculture. Unfortunately my empathy detector is failing to come up with alternative interpretation of how people like Dusek perceive the issue; if anyone could explain it more convincingly, I'd much appreciate it.

Since this post has gone on for more than long enough already, I think I'll just cut it off there. Tune in for more diatribe tomorrow.

Fun with Bestiaries!

Bunny the Landlord is a medieval studies postgrad, and she has found a thing of wonder.

"The dove is associated with Christ and the Holy Spirit. God sent his spirit in the form of a dove to gather mankind into his church. As there are many colours of doves, so there were many ways of speaking through the laws and the prophets. The meanings of the colours of the dove are:

• red- the predominant colour because Christ redeemed man with his blood
• speckled- the diversity of the twelve prophets
• gold- the three boys who refused to worship the golden image
• air coloured- the prophet Elisha, who was taken up into the air
• black- obscure sermons
• ash coloured- Jonah, who preached wearing a hair shirt and ashes
• stephanite- Stephen, the first martyr
• white- John the Baptist and the cleansing of baptism."

There are several things here that make intriguingly little sense. What does "obscure sermons" mean in this context? Where on earth did he get the idea that doves could be red, black or gold, let alone 'stephanite'? (I wikied it- stephanite is a silvery-black mineral, although wiki seems to think that the earliest mention of it is Georgius Agricola, who came along a few hundred years after the sources mentioned on the bestiary page). Who are the three boys who refused to worship the golden image? Do they mean the golden calf? I'm no Biblical scholar, but I'm looking at Exodus 32 now, and I can't see anything about three boys who refused to worship it (unless they were among the Levites who subsequently agreed to kill 3000 Israelites after Moses found out).

But I think the most bizarre point on the list is the air-coloured dove. Like, a completely translucent one? Or did the writer in question just live in Victorian London?

And then there's the quote from Bartholomaeus Anglicus:

"The culvour [dove] is forgetful. And therefore when the birds are borne away, she forgetteth her harm and damage, and leaveth not therefore to build and breed in the same place. Also she is nicely curious. For sitting on a tree, she beholdeth and looketh all about toward what part she will fly, and bendeth her neck all about as it were taking avisement. But oft while she taketh avisement of flight, ere she taketh her flight, an arrow flieth through her body, and therefore she faileth of her purpose, as Gregory saith."

(PS- The Biologist Housemate says that he's calling dibs on the dissertation title Effects of Plant Pheremones on Imaginary Vertebrates).

Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' part 2: magicians, prophets and priests

The main reason I wanted to read this book (apart from wanting the opportunity to bitch about it on the internet) is Weber's description of a framework for categorising different kinds of religious specialist.

Systems of etic categorisation are always going to be a bit problematic in the social sciences. It doesn't take a genius to see that even in the best taxonomies there are going to be intermediate cases that don't quite fit into any category. This means that some people are inevitably going to start questioning the point of categorising the thing at all.

Every now and again you get arguments to the effect that human social constructs are inherently unclassifiable. This position generally seems to be adopted after someone has the startling revelation that People Are Complicated (this is a scientific fact). Maybe this is just me being anal-retentive and Teacherite at things, but I say suck it up, social sciences. Biologists seem able to cope with the level of complexity that comes with bog-standard taxonomy (God help them if the issue in question involves asexual species or anything at all to do with conservation). As long as people make an effort to flag up the fact that there are going to be ambiguous cases, a flawed typology is often going to be more useful than no typology at all, at least when it comes to the initial job of getting our heads around the problem.

Notice that I said 'often'.

I'm in two minds about Weber's framework. His main dichotomy is between priests and magicians, and as such is basically similar to the priest vs shaman distinction which you see in a bunch of other people's work*. There's also the 'prophet' category, which doesn't seem to have received much attention in anthropology (maybe because they seem to be world-changing figures who only come along every once in a while, and ethnography tends to be better suited to studying more routine aspects of religion).

This is Weber's framework, as I understand it:

Priests: people who are permanently employed by a large stable organisation which they are expected to support. They have professional qualifications which are earned by studying to become an expert on specialist knowledge (e.g. formal theology). They are also supposed to be experts on "the practical problems involved in the cure of souls" (p.30), which means general pastoral care and also whatever rituals are deemed necessary for salvation (e.g. confession, baptism, etc). In addition, priests worship gods (i.e. they adopt a relatively humble attitude towards supernatural beings which are seen as being worthy of respect). Oh, Weber also labels their training as "rational" (p.29)- as I said in last post, I have no idea what we're meant to assume that word means in this context.


Magicians: are generally "self-employed" (p.29), and tend to act alone in rituals which are not held according to any fixed schedule. Their qualifications are based entirely on personal charisma, which is made manifest through the ability to perform various types of magic. They're emically deemed to gain this charisma via a ritual rebirth plus training in "purely empirical lore" (p.29). Weber doesn't mention if he thinks they do pastoral/salvation work. They focus not on worshipping gods, but on coercing and charming demons. And yes, Weber has decided that the way they operate is in some sense "irrational" (p.29).


Prophets: a person who makes it their personal mission to spearhead a campaign for religious change (whether this is subsequently viewed as an attempt to start a new religion, or just to revitalise an old one). They may focus on preaching and giving advice on how people can live better lives (in which case Weber calls them 'ethical prophets'), or on just making themselves a paragon who others can try to emulate (in which case he calls them 'exemplary prophets'). They generally don't have steady jobs or live in a stable household; they may travel around a lot, beg or do a series of temporary jobs.


'Magicians' seem to be the least exclusive category in Weber's eyes. Priests may do magic (p.28)- e.g., given what Weber has to say about magicians and demon-coercion, I'd guess that Catholic exorcisms would count as 'magic' under this system. Successful prophets almost always do magic, or at least have magic attributed to them: they have so much charisma that people would tend to present them as BEST MAGICIAN EVER even if they tried to deny the title. I suspect Weber felt that Christ's resurrection may fall into this category (p.78).

I'm sure that there are going to be at least some things that don't fit into any of these categories, and the specific words 'priest' and 'magician' are probably unhelpful here (especially since, as is often the case with these issues, we start running into serious theoretical difficulties when we try to work the modern-day Pagan movement into the model). The question is, does this describe any sort of general tendency? For example, do people who have fulltime jobs as religious specialists have a greater tendency to present their supernatural patrons as uncoercable?

It would be interesting to see if anyone's tried to systematically test that idea- sadly, since Weber isn't phrasing his ideas in terms of testable hypotheses, it sounds like it would be quite a lot of work.



*For those who care, I've so far seen a binary priest/shaman typology come up in: W.A. Lessa and E.Z. Zogt's Reader in Comparative Religion (1958)

Victor Turner's essay 'Religious Specialists' (originally 1972, but republished in Magic, Witchcraft and Religion: an anthropological study of the supernatural: fourth edition, 1997)

Morton Klass' Ordered Universes (1995)

A somewhat similar typology is proposed in Fredrik Barth's 'The Guru and the Conjurer' (1990, Man, 25, 4, pp.640-653). This article went on to inspire Harvey Whitehouse to write extensively on the same topic; I think his most persuasive article on the issue is still 'Memorable Religion' (1992, Man, 27, 3, pp.777-797), but if you don't have access to that journal then Arguments and Icons is probably the next best bet.

Reading: Weber's 'Sociology of Religion' (Ch 1-3)

Link to online version of the book, although the version I'm actually reading (and referencing) is the 1965 Methuen & Co. edition, translated by Ephraim Fischoff from the German fourth ed.

This one is a bit disappointing so far. Maybe this is anthropologist-spite surfacing again, but I can't help but make unflattering comparisons with Malinowski's Argonauts. The latter is a book which turned out to feel a lot less dated than I expected it to, in that large parts of it read very much like an ethnography which could have been written decades later (admittedly this is punctuated by passages which reveal their age by stopping to explain that ethnography is an entirely new and untested method which just might pay off if we give it a chance. Or by casually noting that Dobu is a great island because the natives look like funny little gnomes and make excellent servants. See p.41 of the 2002 Routledge edition). After a while, the unexpectedly contemporary feel of much of Argonauts starts to get a bit depressing- has standard ethnographic methodology has really progressed so little since the 1920s? By now, shouldn't we be sneering at his silly primitive ur-ethnography while we fly around in our jetpacks and drink violently fluorescent cocktails on our top-secret communist moonbase?

I've never forgiven 1960s sci-fi for raising my hopes like that, so in today's spirit of frustrated academic Oedipalism I guess I'll blame that on Malinowski too. Bloody Malinowski. It's your fault that we're not all wearing improbably orange latex jumpsuits and letting our children be raised on robot kibbutzes.

Anyway, I'd somehow acquired the impression that The Sociology of Religion featured a similar kind of depressingly cutting-edge-sounding insight, of the kind which makes you want to curl up on the sofa and despair at later social scientists' sad inability to properly bash Daddy's head in, Primal Horde-style, so that the rest of us would have at least some chance of getting on with the important business of trading women and developing more interesting neuroses. Oh, there were giants then.

Sadly, Weber has so far come across less like Malinowski and more like James Frazer. Perhaps that's inevitable, given both authors' ambitious goal of describing the entire human species without letting any trifling distractions getting in the way (such as empirical research, or citations). It doesn't help that he seems to be upholding a linear evolutionist view of religion (i.e. one of the ones where the author starts from the assumption that primitive societies start all start off with a particular view of the supernatural, such as animism/magic/naturalism, and then painstakingly work their way up to something more sophisticated, like monotheism/atheism/social science funding. This is not a paradigm which I am particularly sympathetic to, especially since it now means that any use of the word 'evolution' in a social sciences paper needs to be surrounded by a bodyguard of anxious caveats in riot gear (with radios and teargas to show they mean business).

Furthermore, he persists in using the R-word, which has been a bad idea in the social sciences since the Rationality Wars of a few decades ago (I keep meaning to go and check whether anyone actually won those; currently my impression is that an impasse was reached and so everyone declared a ceasefire in order to creep back to their respective departments and lick their wounds. It looks as though one of the key terms in the subsequent peace treaty was that no one should ever use the word 'rationality' in academic discourse, except when shouting at economists). Weber pre-dates that particular academic conflict by several decades, which may be why he doesn't seem inclined to define what he means by the R-word. On p.1, he seems to give the impression that he's going to be speaking in terms of what we'd now call bounded rationality:

"Furthermore, religious or magically motivated behaviour is relatively rational behaviour, especially in its earliest manifestations. It follows rules of experience, though it is not necessarily action in accordance with a means-end schema. [...] Thus religious or magical behaviour or thinking must not be set apart from the range of everyday purposive conduct, particularly since even the ends of the religious and magical actions are predominantly economic."

It's a bit of a simplistic statement, but I'm reasonably happy with what he's saying. However, he goes on to use the word in ways which don't seem to back this up (for example, he refers to the "incredible irrationality" of certain taboos, without elaborating (p.38)). In some cases, we can speculate that he's drawing on his 'rationalisation' argument, so that by 'irrational' he actually means 'bad for capitalism' (e.g. when he refers to the 'irrationality' of Chinese funeral rites on p.6). It's still irritating, though.

This means that for the most part, this feels less like a reliable theoretical framework, and more like an interesting grab-bag of eccentric intellectual arguments, based on data which may or may not be accurate. Some random questionable highlights include Weber's arguments that:

• funeral rites and belief in ghosts developed because Early Man was scared of corpses. (p.6)

• concepts such as 'fire god' are a relatively recent innovation; originally fire itself was worshipped as a god. Allegedly we find this view still present in the Vedas; I'd be interested in knowing if there's anything to that claim. (p.10)

• the major reason why religions prohibit adultery is that in ancient times it raised the possibility that the male-line ancestors of the clan might start receiving sacrifices from someone who wasn't related to them by blood. (p.15)

• when a religious system evolves to accord greater precedence to one god over the others, the god who is so exalted is likely to be a sky or star god (apparently because these deities usually "evinced the greatest regularity in their behaviour").(p.21)

• "almost everywhere a beginning was made toward some form of consistent monotheism", but in most cases this was stymied by the fact that the polytheist priests wanted to cling to power, while the commoners clung to the idea of gods who had distinct and recognisable spheres, could be represented iconographically, and were weak enough to be coerced by magic. (p.24)

• in Athens, a man who had no household god could not hold public office. Sadly he doesn't elaborate as to exactly what implications this had in practice. (p.18)

• Weber argues that there's a tension between the fact that, on the one hand, a low-caste Hindu sees his own vocation as a sacred duty entrusted to him by the gods themselves- but on the other hand, their reward for doing it properly is to be reborn as a higher-caste person. I know very little about caste, so I have no idea if this is in any way accurate. (p.42)

• there's a brief mention of the fact that some gods are emically held to be bound by some sort of impersonal super-divine force, like 'fate' in the case of the Greeks (p.36). This is interesting, because I seem to remember Laidlaw saying something similar about Jain gods and karma in Riches and Renunciation. I suppose you might also be able to draw a parallel ith variants of Christian theology which argue that God would have liked to just automatically forgive humanity, but regrettably couldn't do this except by way of the crucifixion (admittedly I can't think of any sources which explicitly spell out this view, although it's what CS Lewis' description of Narnian Old Magic seems to be driving at).

Weber also brings up the evocation rituals which I mentioned in my trawl through Religions of Rome. He mentions that it was attempted by some dude named Camillus in relation to the Veji. He then adds that:

"The gods of one group might be stolen or otherwise acquired by another group, but this does not always accrue to the benefit of the latter, as in the case of the ark of the Israelites which brought plagues upon the Philistine conquerors."

I'm unconvinced that it's actually a sensible idea to consider the Philistine example the same thing as the Roman evocations, but it's an interesting idea.

Also contained in this section is the first mention of Weber's typology of different kinds of charismatic leader, which leads into a discussion of priests, prophets, magicians, etc. This is more immediately relevant to me, for reasons that take a certain amount of explanation. I'll try to discuss that properly in another post.