Our friends at Neos Alexandria have an interesting post on the reconstruction of priesthoods. They suggest an important reason for us to be interested in this:
"...to create religions that provide for the spiritual needs of the people who follow it, and help cement the chances of our survival as a faith in the modern world. Many of the successful and still surviving ancient religions have such divisions, and it is one reason why they still exist, despite pressures from Western Monotheisms." (1)
Neos Alexandria is a multicultural group, and they mention the case of Roman reconstructionism:
"The Romans had similar divisions [of society] particularly with the Pontifices who oversaw the priesthoods, the Flamines who carried the rituals out, and the Augurs who served as diviners." (1)
I agree that our survival and growth depends in great measure on our ability to speak to people's spiritual needs. More than that, we need to agree upon and promote a set of core values and procedures that we can keep in common. I don't mean that we need to have a "Spanish Inquisition" type obsession with orthodoxy, but if we are to be anything we have to be
something. This is the reason, for example, that we carry the "Basic Principles" statement at the bottom of every page of this blog. (That statement came out of both scholarly research and discussions with a fairly large group of self-identified followers of the
Cultus Deorum.)
What I disagree with, though, is the suggestion that the best way to do this is through establishment of formal priesthoods such as the College of Pontifices. There are several reasons for this.
