The Word Is Doing Too Much Work

English has one word where the traditions have many, and the flattening it causes is the single most common error in writing about religious office.

A Catholic priest is defined by what ordination authorises him to do at the altar. That is a sacrificial and sacramental definition, and it has a genuine parallel in the Israelite kohen, in the Roman flamen, in the Vedic ritual specialist, all of them men whose function is to perform an act that others may not perform.

It does not describe most of the offices English calls priesthood.

• An imam in ordinary Sunni usage leads prayer, and any competent adult male Muslim may do it. There is no act reserved to him.
• A rabbi is a teacher and a judge. He offers nothing and mediates nothing, and a Jewish service does not require one.
• A granthi attends the Guru Granth Sahib. Sikhism has no priesthood and says so.
• A kannushi manages ritual purity and presents offerings, in a tradition with almost no doctrine for him to hold.
• A bhikkhu has taken a training. He is not a mediator between anyone and anything, and Theravada Buddhism has no god for him to mediate with.

Calling all of these priests puts a Latin Christian shape on offices that were not built to it, and it makes the differences invisible at exactly the point where the differences are the content. This atlas keeps them as separate entries and describes each by its own authorisation.