This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
The sociologist Max Weber gave the comparative study of religious roles a framework it still leans on. In Economy and Society, published after his death in 1922, Weber distinguished priestly authority, exercised by an official trained and installed by an institution, from prophetic authority, claimed by an individual on the strength of a personal revelation the institution did not grant, and from a third, more diffuse charismatic authority resting on a leader's perceived personal gifts rather than on office or revelation alone. Most named religious roles blend the three in different proportions rather than sitting purely in one category.
A parallel line of study grew out of anthropology's long interest in ritual specialists outside the major world religions, shamans, mediums and diviners among them, beginning with nineteenth century writers such as Edward Tylor and James Frazer and continuing today through fieldwork based ethnography that takes far more care than that early scholarship did to describe a role in the terms its own community uses for it.
Early scholarship in this line, Tylor and Frazer included, is now read as much for its historical assumptions as for its findings, since both writers tended to rank the roles they studied against a European template of proper religion rather than describing each one on its own community's terms, a bias later fieldwork has spent decades correcting.