Well, I'll talk about Egypt, which I know best. The innermost portions of the temples, where the god lived, were not accessible to the public. The seniormost priests were basically the servants in the god's mansion, responsible for providing food, clothing, annointing oils, etc., according to the requirements of the god.
This maintained the relationship between the community and the god by making sure that the needs of the god were addressed, but doesn't involve interaction with the people.
At the same time, the Wab priests, the purity priests, tended to serve three month terms in the local temple and spend the remaining nine months working normal jobs in their communities. One presumes that this led to a general level of awareness of the ways of the temple among the common people, and that this probably carried over into their private shrine rites, but we know that they did have private shrines in their homes, and not every house would have a Wab priest.
Festivals often included the god coming out of its home (the temple) and giving its direct presence to the people and providing direct oracles. At the same time, people had such things as rituals for seeking oracular dreams at holy places, and while there were priests trained in interpretation, the direct contact was between common worshipper and god without priestly intervention.
In more general terms, priestly or ministerial roles are historically things that are generally studied for and which may be full-time jobs. Some of the training will be more intensive in some areas than others -- I seem to recall that at the basic level of rabbinical training a person is qualified to perform weddings and the like, but hasn't accomplished enough skill to be considered able to handle questions of meat and milk.
Generally, people have been able to have their own connections with the divine at a variety of levels; the idea that the priest is the only one who gets to talk to the god, while it exists in antiquity, is not very common. The priests have been the ones tasked to maintaining the health of the boundary condition between the seen and unseen worlds (and in some societies, people who are thought to be on boundaries between dualities are preferentially selected for priestly roles: people who have mysteriously come back from the brink of death, the intersexed, or the transgendered); this is as important a job as bringing in food for the community or making sure that everyone has pottery. Not everyone can make bowls, but everyone needs to use bowls; not everyone can maintain the numinous, but everyone has access to it when it is maintained.
Now, bring this in to the history of Wicca. BTW is similar to a monastic community; the aspects of priesthood that require interaction with other humans are in interaction with other priests within the same community. All are working together in that space between seen and unseen ("space between the worlds" is the term for what's in a circle, isn't it?).
This terminology works all right within that structure. Then the written stuff gets turned loose on the world and we have Wiccans who aren't running within BTW-and-derived structures. Not all have a community, and not all have this sense of maintaining the space between the seen and the unseen. But many of them refer to themselves as 'priests', because 'Wiccan' was originally defined as 'priest' -- within that monastic context.
no subject
Well, I'll talk about Egypt, which I know best. The innermost portions of the temples, where the god lived, were not accessible to the public. The seniormost priests were basically the servants in the god's mansion, responsible for providing food, clothing, annointing oils, etc., according to the requirements of the god.
This maintained the relationship between the community and the god by making sure that the needs of the god were addressed, but doesn't involve interaction with the people.
At the same time, the Wab priests, the purity priests, tended to serve three month terms in the local temple and spend the remaining nine months working normal jobs in their communities. One presumes that this led to a general level of awareness of the ways of the temple among the common people, and that this probably carried over into their private shrine rites, but we know that they did have private shrines in their homes, and not every house would have a Wab priest.
Festivals often included the god coming out of its home (the temple) and giving its direct presence to the people and providing direct oracles. At the same time, people had such things as rituals for seeking oracular dreams at holy places, and while there were priests trained in interpretation, the direct contact was between common worshipper and god without priestly intervention.
In more general terms, priestly or ministerial roles are historically things that are generally studied for and which may be full-time jobs. Some of the training will be more intensive in some areas than others -- I seem to recall that at the basic level of rabbinical training a person is qualified to perform weddings and the like, but hasn't accomplished enough skill to be considered able to handle questions of meat and milk.
Generally, people have been able to have their own connections with the divine at a variety of levels; the idea that the priest is the only one who gets to talk to the god, while it exists in antiquity, is not very common. The priests have been the ones tasked to maintaining the health of the boundary condition between the seen and unseen worlds (and in some societies, people who are thought to be on boundaries between dualities are preferentially selected for priestly roles: people who have mysteriously come back from the brink of death, the intersexed, or the transgendered); this is as important a job as bringing in food for the community or making sure that everyone has pottery. Not everyone can make bowls, but everyone needs to use bowls; not everyone can maintain the numinous, but everyone has access to it when it is maintained.
Now, bring this in to the history of Wicca. BTW is similar to a monastic community; the aspects of priesthood that require interaction with other humans are in interaction with other priests within the same community. All are working together in that space between seen and unseen ("space between the worlds" is the term for what's in a circle, isn't it?).
This terminology works all right within that structure. Then the written stuff gets turned loose on the world and we have Wiccans who aren't running within BTW-and-derived structures. Not all have a community, and not all have this sense of maintaining the space between the seen and the unseen. But many of them refer to themselves as 'priests', because 'Wiccan' was originally defined as 'priest' -- within that monastic context.