Priests, Priestesses, and Protestors

The Death and Resurrection of the Sacerdote

Did you know that priestesses are everywhere and that the fastest growing religion in the western world is Paganism? According to the interwebs, the Norse religion Asatru is the second most populous faith in Iceland, and the fastest growing lig (religion) in Northern Europe. (In this substack, I often discuss “ligs”, referring to the root of the word religion, and the Old World way of understanding ligament-like worldviews that bind people together and point them toward meaning).

After Gunnar converted, well, there goes the village as they say

Another article, in the Christian Post, proclaimed that there are now more Wiccan practitioners in the United States than Presbyterians. Even the New York Times and Ross Douthat proclaimed that, “Maybe there actually is a genuinely post-Christian future for America.”

And that brings me to the notion of priests.

What is a priest? And why is it that when we go back in time to the world before the Light People revolutions (American, French and Russian to name just three), nearly every leader of every “lig” would be known to the community as a priest? And that begs another question: If there is a priest comeback in the making, where did all the priests go in the first place? This substack is an attempt to find this stuff out.

In Rome, priests and priestesses managed the public and the private sacrificial spaces, the temples and homes where men and women went to give offerings to their gods. Sometimes Greek and Roman priests offered blood sacrifices, sometimes they offered incense or precious metals, sometimes they offered time. Priests put their hands on the offerings it seems. (Oh, by the way, there really isn’t a word “priestess” in history – that English word exists as a reaction against the ordination of women priests in medieval Christianity).

In Haiti, I witnessed a most extraordinary voodoo service where the priest felled a bull, with a machete. His bloody bull offering was done as a sacrifice to the goddess Erzuli, the goddess of love, and done on behalf of a lover scorned by her husband. It turned out she had paid big money for this bloody sacrifice, and all in order to get her husband back and wreak some havoc on her female rival. This is very much how it looked in Rome, too. You can see it in other places as well. All across Central and South America, chickens and other critters are sacrificed by priests on behalf of believers. In West Africa, for Ramadan, I was asked to be the honorary sacrificer-in-chief. They handed me a sharp knife and showed me how to cut the throat of a goat. The goat was held hard to the ground, head turned to Mecca, and then like that I cut its throat. I played the role of a priest, and I can still feel the warm blood on my hands when I decide to think about it.

And then there are the Christians. Every Sunday Christians offer a sacrifice on an altar (well, some anyway). In fact, during the Covid lockdowns, that was the actual reason that churches sued local governments to reopen. Some Christian people, it turns out, must have access to their altars in order to complete the sacrifice that is at the center of their liturgy. You can’t really do it on Zoom, and if you try, it just turns out to be a gnostic wordfest. It’s lame.  

Yay for gnostic facetime…I guess?

And so what is going on here? What is the Old World telling us about this sacrifice thing? I mean, do we really need a sacrificer? Do we need priests?

The short answer is, you better believe it. The Old World religions, the ligs of old, needed the priest in order to open the portal, the window, into the divine world. For all of these Old World views there was a place where the magisterial and divine met the mundane and profane. There was always a space and time, in and around us, above us and within us, that meant something different, something else, something not of this world. It was in this space that the priest stood firm. The priest, in fact, was the window through which and by which one world met the other. 

And what was the sacrifice? Well, that was the creature offering a portion of our bounty to the creator. It was the weak offering what they could to the powerful, sometimes as a way to appease, sometimes as an act of forgiveness or, as in Hammurabi’s Sumeria, as a way to keep things level, balanced properly upon the fulcrum of justice. But there was something else in all the pre-Christian sacrifices as well, there was a power of burial, a way to take all the wrongdoing of a particular cult or culture and bury it forever. This sacrifice allowed an innocent to suffer in order to expatiate sin. The scapegoat. This type of sacrifice was a major element in the Old World. You can see it in the ancient Yom Kippur services with the offering  of the Azazel, the goat that was burdened with all the sins of the Jewish people. That goat had to be sent away  to set things right. The Hittites, very long ago Syrians, they did this too. To give them good fortune before a dangerous deity, they would adorn a woman and load her with food and gold and good things. Then, the army would chase the woman into the desert to die. You can see hints of this in the Mayan sacrifices to the sun God at Chichen Itza. Those chosen to die were heralded and given honor before being, um, beheaded. There are all kinds of variations of this in the Old World. I mean there’s foreskin sacrifices, and ear lobe sacrifices, and innard sacrifices and the sacrifice of having to burn expensive stones (you know this as incense). Sacrifice was the hallmark of all ancient ways of binding the world together in meaning. 

Our new reality in the west

And then in Jerusalem a couple of thousand years ago, and before the beginning of time too, the sacrifice was God. 

Christianity. 

Christianity was weird, even for the ancients. The sacrifice now became the Creator Himself. In perhaps the most bizarre and unique and mysterious and fundamentally revolutionary moment in history, God became the sacrifice and the one to whom his creatures offered the sacrifice. The sacrifice was God, and the sacrifice was to God, and somehow also for all of us. This all-in-all moment turned lots of things upside down. This was not how pre-Christian ligs understood their sacrifices.

And guess what happened as Christianity took its place in the Greco-Roman world? The blood sacrifices stopped. There wasn’t a need for them anymore where Christianity was practiced.  And yet, there was still a need for the priest. The bloodless sacrifice of the Eucharist remained, and someone had to do it. For the Christians, using the example of the Jews and their priestly class the Levites, the ordination of hands to offer sacrifice was a no-brainer. Christian priests offered God to the world.

But then, during what some might call an unfortunate period in history, a very unique group of Christians began to think of themselves as no longer in need of a sacrificer. These European Christians, we’ll call them protestors for lack of a better word, began to see themselves as priests; all of them, at once, priests. Their term for this semi-new idea was the “priesthood of all believers”. I say semi-new because the priesthood of all believers had always been a thing for Christians. But the protestors, as a way to fight the power of corrupt priests, made the term “priesthood of all believers” to mean, “no need for those sacrificer guys”. For Protestants of the 16th and 17th centuries (a worldview taking flight within and as a catalyst for the Enlightenment), individuals could be priests for and by themselves. Individual believers could commune with God without the need for a sacerdote. And that was a very powerful idea. It led to all kinds of conclusions, and first among them was the logical eradication of the sacrifice itself. Now you could be a Christian without participating in the sacrifice.

And if you look at modern day Christianity in say, America, the blood and the body, the bread and the wine, they are not exactly at the center of worship. Think Joel Osteen and big happy concert Christians. They may have communion but it’s kind of offered in a take away box, once a month at best, and you can pack it for lunch the next day. Or not. Let’s just be honest; communion, the altar, the sacrifice, these things aren’t really why most American Christians get up in the morning. Some? Sure. But I think it is fair to say that 500 years of scientism and individualism (and lots of Christian fads) have given us a very different understanding of that thing called Sunday morning. 

And the proof is obvious, it’s how we started this article: Wiccan priests are making a comeback because Christian priests have been sacrificed on the altar of modernity. This modern mix of protestor Christianity and Light People scientism, this New World religion we call ‘Murica has gotten rid of the sacrifice because they’ve gotten rid of the sacred. Modernity has managed to teach western people a hellish anthropology that makes the soul a feeling and the body a purposeless machine. We’ve become dry and empty inside because we’ve come to believe that there is no altar on which to offer a sacrifice to something bigger and better than ourselves. We’ve become thirsty because the world has become self-contained in our Cartesian minds, every mystical crawl space therein plumbed and scraped for data and analysis. Our biggest dreamscapes find us leaving our bodies in order to live forever as databytes.

It’s as if the prodigal son story ended with the prodigal never coming home. Instead, in our modern retelling, the father goes out and finds the pigpen with his son still in it. Frowning, the father asks his son to come home, only to be rebuked by his son:

But look Dad! I built a 100-story skyscraper where I kick back in conditioned air and do all the money stuff, including loans to poor people for 30% interest! Usury rocks! I love my life in the pigpen, Pops! Also, please take your shoes off so you don’t track any of your heavenly dirt into my utopia. Thanks, Dad.

Next time I might try to write a better  ending for my ending, but for now, suffice to say that a dying modernity is making the priesthood a thing again. We should take this seriously.

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