This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A religious role is the atlas's entry for a generic function a tradition recognizes, priest, pastor, imam, shaman, monk, medium, the kind of position many different individuals across many different communities can hold, rather than one specific named office within one specific body. That second, narrower kind of entry, a particular office such as a named papacy or a specific archbishopric, is recorded separately under Religious Office; a role is the general category an office is one instance of.
Each entry describes what the role is understood to do within its tradition, how a person typically comes to hold it, whether by training, ordination, inheritance, calling or election, and what authority or restriction attaches to it. Several roles recorded here belong to closed or initiatory traditions where becoming, or acting as, that kind of specialist involves knowledge or standing the tradition does not share outside itself; those entries describe the role's place in its community without describing how to become or perform as one.
An entry also notes where a role carries formal training or examination, an ordination process, a seminary curriculum, an apprenticeship under a recognized elder, since the path into a role is frequently as distinctive as the role itself and says a great deal about how a tradition understands religious authority to be earned.