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Chapter Ten Priests
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Preliminaries: Kinds of Priests and Priestly Functions

The priests of Bhaktapur's civic moral realm have a central concern with correct moral behavior and the structuring efficacy of purity and pollution; the priests of the extramoral realm deal with a more direct power, a power that transcends morality as well as purity and pollution. The extramoral religion dealing with powers which transcend that civic moral realm, while at the same time ensuring its protection, is the special religion of Bhaktapur's version of the Ksatriyas[*] as Ksatriyas[*] , but has its echoes and uses throughout the city.

The Newar Brahman, the Rajopadhyaya Brahman, is at the summit of both these religious realms. Within the realm of civic ordering he is allied with a whole set of manipulators of purity, and thus of social order and of salvation-producing dharmic order. These allies are auxiliary priests and what we will call "para-priests," as well as various pollution-manipulating priest-like functionaries—purifiers such as barbers and collectors of impurity such as, above all, the untouchables.

In his role as Tantric guru and priest the Rajopadhyaya Brahman presides over that other world in which purity is not an issue, where the priests and practitioners of the world of the dangerous deities manipulate through those deities the extramoral world of physical events—a world of rain and drought, disease and cure, earthquake and war. Such priests manipulate the deities through devices of power, and the deities, in turn, manipulate the nonmoral world. The Rajopadhyaya Brahman's essential priestly ally in this realm is the Acaju, the priest who performs in public those actions that the Brahman can do only in secret.

The two sorts of religion—the socially constructive dharmic religion and the religion of power—converge once again, as they had in the Rajopahyaya[*] Brahmans, on the untouchable Po(n), and the near-untouchable Jugi. These are the ultimate collectors of impurity, facilitating the purity of all above them. Yet, their ability to do this, whatever the enormous stigma to their social status may be, is a sign of a power to transcend some, at least, of the implications of that impurity. This is clearest in the ascription of Tantric knowledge to the Jugi, but is also a latent aspect of the meaning of the Po(n).

We have been proceeding as if the term "priest" in itself were unproblematic. It was not problematic in the discussion of the priest's contrasts with the king insofar as the "priest" has been the idealized


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figure of the Brahman. The Brahman in such discussions is subsumed comfortably under summary characterizations of "priests"—where the problem in characterization is usually to delineate the "priest" in contrast to other mediators with the "supernatural"—shamans, diviners, magicians, and prophets. Among these the "priest" is someone who "has a special and sometimes secret knowledge of the techniques of worship, including incantations, prayers, sacrificial acts, songs, and other acts that are believed to bridge the separation between the divine or sacred and the profane realms. . .. Because the priest gains his special knowledge from a school for priests, he is differentiated from other religious and cultic leaders . . . who obtain their positions by means of individual efforts. . .. As a member of the institution [the priesthood] that regulates the relationship between the divine or sacred and the profane realms through ritual, the priest is the accepted religious and spiritual leader in his society" (E. O. James 1974, 1007). Such an account emphasizes the social centrality and "routinization" of the institutionalized priesthood in making the priest the accepted "spiritual leader" of the community. In the terms of such a definition, we can discriminate among the functionaries who mediate between the sacred and profane and who belong to the central institutionalized civic order, certain "priests" who help the Brahman in conducting rituals or who act in lieu of Brahmans in rituals or who work for clients where Brahmans can or will not officiate. These are auxiliary priests . We are now left with one further distinction. In chapter 11 we will discuss activities, most particularly purification, that are "at the margins of the sacred." These activities are for the purpose of putting individuals in a proper state to enter into the sacred realm, the realm where priests operate, and do not in themselves entail "techniques of worship." The experts who perform these activities are not properly priests themselves. This is clear in the case of the vitally important purificatory work of the Nau, the "barber." The same claim may be made regarding the astrologers, the Josis. We will call those whose functions are to prepare people for their encounters with the sacred para-priests .


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Chapter Ten Priests
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