Chapter 172. Law, Clergy and Power: Ethics, Priesthoods and the Organisation of Belief Compared

Every religion in this study says how people should live, and nearly every one has a body of people who decide what that means and enforce it. This chapter compares the two sides. The ethical side runs from the Zoroastrian triad to Keshe’s “Ethos”. The institutional side runs from the hereditary Magi to the lodge and the council. The question throughout is the one the sources keep raising: how a priesthood turns doctrine into power, and how prophets and anti-clerical reformers (Keshe among them) challenge that power and then build structures of their own.

A typology of scriptural ethics

Van Voorst gives the frame. “Some scriptures enshrine their religion’s vision of a moral life in law codes, some feature more loosely bound moral precepts, and still others do not seem concerned about ethics” [Van Voorst, Anthology of World Scriptures, #63227, Introduction]. The law-code type includes the Vendidad, the Torah as rabbinic tradition read it, sharia and Manu. The precept type includes the Confucian Analects, the Buddhist precepts and the Sermon on the Mount. The third type covers texts such as the Vedic hymns or Gnostic revelation, where cosmology or salvation by knowledge outranks moral regulation.

The Torah does not sit easily in the first type. Walton and Walton argue that “Legal Collections in the Ancient World Are Not Legislation”, that “Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections Teach Wisdom”, and that “The Torah Is Similar to Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections and Therefore Also Teaches Wisdom, Not Legislation”. In their reading the covenant “functions as an Ancient Near Eastern Suzerainty Treaty”. They draw a strong conclusion: “Wise living cannot be legislated … If God did not give rules, as we have suggested, there are no rules to follow” [Walton & Walton, The Lost World of the Torah, #68328, Props. 3-6 and Part 5]. Rabbinic halakha took the opposite course and turned the Torah into an exhaustive body of law (ch. 35). Ch. 35 also reports the hostile readings of the Talmud made by its critics.

The Waltons’ “Ancient Near Eastern Legal Collections” begin with Hammurabi (c. 1792–1750 BC), and the dispute over his stele mirrors the dispute over the Torah (ch. 3). The stele shows the king before Shamash, god of justice, and its prologue says the gods gave him rule “to prevent the strong from oppressing the weak”. The laws apply the lex talionis and grade penalties by class. Assyriologists disagree whether the text is legislation, a record of royal verdicts, or, following F. R. Kraus, a scholarly treatise of the “list science” type, like the omen series. Owen Jenkins remarked on “an astonishing absence… of all theological or even ceremonial law” in it [Wikipedia: Code of Hammurabi]. On this evidence the oldest law code in the comparison was sacred in its frame and secular in its content. That is the reverse of the Vendidad and the Torah, where purity and cult law are central.

Cosmic order as law: Maat, ṛta and asha

Before any code there was an order that law was supposed to express. In Egypt it was Maat, which the reference shelf defines as “truth, balance, law, morality, and justice”. Kings “inherited the duty to ensure Maat remained in place”, and from the Fifth Dynasty the vizier in charge of justice was called “Priest of Maat”. The Instruction of Ptahhotep warns that “he who transgresses its ordinances is punished” [Wikipedia: Maat] (ch. 4). Maat was also the measure at death. The dead “had to have led a virtuous life according to the precepts of maat”, and their hearts were weighed against her feather [Bierbrier, Historical Dictionary of Ancient Egypt, #366518]. The Negative Confession turned this into a list of prohibitions: “I have not stolen. I have not slain men and women… I have not uttered lies… I have not committed adultery” [Weaver, Egyptian Mythology, #66942, ch. IV]. It belongs to Van Voorst’s precept type rather than the law-code type. Its threat of judgment after death anticipates the Zoroastrian Chinvat bridge (ch. 17).

The Indo-Iranian counterpart is asha/ṛta. Boyce describes it as “a universal principle of what ought to be … variously translated as ‘order, righteousness, truth'”, which “should govern everything, from the workings of nature to human laws and all human conduct”. It was guarded by Mithra and Varuna, “guardians respectively of the oath and covenant” [Boyce (ed.), Textual Sources, #55116, “1.2.3”] (ch. 6). In the Rigveda Mitra and Varuna “govern all the world with the ṛta” (RV 5.63.7), though Heckaman holds that “a precise definition cannot, and need not, be found” for the term [Heckaman, #51915] (ch. 7). The Zoroastrian triad of good thoughts, words and deeds discussed below is a moral version of this older cosmic order, and Keshe’s “Ethos” is a recent descendant of the triad.

The golden rule and the common core

The negative golden rule is the best-attested shared precept. Archer quotes Confucius: “‘Is not reciprocity or sympathy (shu) such a word? What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others'”. In a note he calls it “the so-called ‘Silver Rule,'” adding that “often Orientals state things positively through the negative”. He places it inside jen (ren), “the sum of” the virtues, which includes “I, that which is right to do, duty toward one’s neighbor, loyalty to rulers and the state, faithfulness to one’s family” [Archer, Faiths Men Live By, #55131, ch. 4]. Heisman sets the Confucian formula beside Hillel’s: “Confuscius’s golden rule, ‘Do not do unto others what you would not want others to do unto you’ (Analects 15:23), is virtually identical to Hillel’s; versions of the same golden rule can be found in nearly all the major religions”. He then argues that “Confucianism might be the closest analog to early Judaism”, since both “emphasize ancestral wisdom” [Heisman, Suicide Note, #38252, Part II].

Lindahl’s interfaith list gives other versions. Bahá’í: “Lay not on any soul a load that you would not wish to be laid upon you”. Islam: “None of you truly have the faith if you do not desire for your brother that which you desire for yourself”. Jainism: “we should regard all creatures as we regard our own self”. Judaism: “What is hateful to you, do not do to your neighbor. This is the whole Torah; all the rest is commentary” [Lindahl, The Sacred Art of Listening, #44918, Reflection 9, “Common Values”]. Swann reads Laozi and Confucius as sharing “one of their mutual basic aims … to lift or advance consciousness to some level above war-consciousness” [Swann, The Wisdom Category, #69128].

Purity law and Zoroastrian ethics

The Zoroastrian ethic rests on the triad of good thoughts, words and deeds. One Pahlavi text speaks of “one path of good thoughts, good words and good acts, that of the light and purity and infinity of the Creator Ohrmazd” against a path “of evil thoughts” [Textual Sources for the Study of Zoroastrianism, #55116]. The triad is tied to a purity law. “Death was held to be brought by Angra Mainyu, and so a corpse was wholly unclean. It was therefore not to be brought into contact with any of the vulnerable good creations”. The editors add that the dakhma “appears to have been evolved relatively late” [#55116]. The law was enforced by ordeal: “There were reckoned to be thirty-three kinds of judicial ordeal by fire. In the most severe the accused was cast into a vessel of molten copper, or had molten metal poured on his breast … If he was innocent, Mithra and the other divine beings, it was believed, would sa[ve him]” [#55116, 4.1.5]. Ch. 12 covers next-of-kin marriage and the Vendidad’s penalties. Keshe adopts the triad as “the ethos of the soul do good, be good and act good”, which he says Persians kept “through Mithraism” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 360, #378072].

Law codes and jurists: halakha, sharia, Manu, ahimsa

Chs. 76 and 80 trace the Islamic case: the four Sunni madhhabs, the caliph al-Ma’mun’s mihna (inquisition) over the createdness of the Qur’an, Ibn Hanbal’s resistance, and the line from the Hanbali school to Ibn Taymiyya and Wahhabism. Ch. 85 takes the Hindu case: Manu’s dharma of varna, the exclusion of the untouchables, and B. R. Ambedkar’s mass conversion to Buddhism in protest. Ch. 86 traces Jain ahimsa from Mahavira to Gandhi’s political non-violence. All three show the same pattern. A body of law, once fixed, needs trained interpreters, and the interpreters then become a class.

Antinomian and inverted ethics

Some movements overturn the law instead of interpreting it. The Nizari “Resurrection” proclaimed at Alamut abolished the sharia for the faithful (ch. 77). Sabbatai Zevi and Jacob Frank preached redemption through sin (ch. 36). McClelland notes that the early Church Fathers already charged reincarnationist sects with antinomianism [McClelland, Encyclopedia of Reincarnation and Karma, #66947]. Modern occultism made inversion a programme. Crowley’s Thelema replaced the moral code with the True Will (ch. 120), and LaVey’s Satanic Bible, drawing on Ragnar Redbeard, reversed Christian altruism into rational self-interest (ch. 121). Heisman offers the sharpest analysis of the moral system being inverted. His chapter “Christian Altruism: The Selfish Meme” argues that “Jesus radicalized a form of altruism” and that Christianity “helped oppose the nepotistic values that one would normally predict on the basis of kin selection” [#38252, “Christian Altruism: The Selfish Meme”]. Chs. 119 and 162 follow his argument that this altruism worked as a self-propagating meme.

Priesthoods compared

Temple priesthoods and sacred kings. The oldest priesthoods in the library served a god’s house and a king who claimed to rule for the god. In Mesopotamia the king in theory led the cult. Below him served exorcists (āšipu), lamentation priests (kalû) and diviners (bārû) [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Krauss adds the shailu, who had to discover the worshipper’s sin [Krauss, Civilizaţia Asiro-Babiloniană, #23933] (ch. 3). Kingship was framed as service. In early Assyria the human ruler was “steward of Assur”, and in the Neo-Assyrian empire the king was “the chief servant of the chief god” [Wikipedia: Ancient Mesopotamian religion]. Pharaoh, by contrast, was “Son of Ra” and “acted as judge like the sun-god Ra-Harakhty” [The Egyptians: An Introduction, #363364] (ch. 4). In India the four Śrauta priests made the patron “only a sponsor”, and the king’s household priest, the purohita, became a power beside the throne. The titles hotar/zaotar and atharvan/āθrauuan show that the priesthood is older than the split between India and Iran [Wikipedia: Vedic priesthood] (ch. 7). The four varṇas are first stated in the Purusha Sukta, which the reference article calls “a relatively late addition”, probably made “to accord theological sanction to an increasingly unequal Kuru polity” [Wikipedia: Purusha Sukta]. Ferrara describes the soma rites becoming “the exclusive dispensation of powerful aristocrats” [Ferrara, #66945, ch. 1], and Iranian kings ruled by khvarenah, which they kept while they ruled by asha [Wikipedia: Khvarenah] (ch. 8).

Hereditary priesthoods. Boyce describes how the Iranian priestly vocation closed into a caste. Each satrapy “must have had its own institutions”, and “there was a natural tendency for the calling to become in its turn hereditary, so that by Sasanian times” priestly families formed a closed order. She notes that early priestly and lay families could intermarry: “Zoroaster himself took Hvovi, Jamaspa’s daughter, to be his wife” [Boyce, Zoroastrians, #55117]. Her index traces the clergy’s partnership with the throne (“nobles, and the Sasanian clergy”) and its later reduction under Islam to the status of dhimmis led by dasturs [#55117, Index]. The Levites, the Aaronid priests and the Brahmins (chs. 7, 83) are parallel cases of birth-based sacral office.

Celibate and monastic clergy. The Catholic hierarchy, the Buddhist sangha (ch. 87) and the Tibetan lamas, who are recruited by recognising reincarnations (ch. 100), replace descent with ordination or discovery. Grzymała-Busse argues that the medieval Church became both template and rival for the state. “The papal administration ‘became the model for the beginnings of state bureaucracies'”. Canon law repeatedly took up “a text of Roman private law into church law, its adaptation and transmutation there to a principle of constitutional law, and then its reabsorption into the sphere of secular” law. “A medieval king’s ‘clerks’ were also ‘clerics'”. The conflict between popes and kings “led to the lasting fragmentation of territorial authority” and to “early concepts of sovereignty” [Grzymała-Busse, Sacred Foundations, #62062, chs. 2-3].

Scholar-jurists. Rabbis, ulama and the Shi’i marja’ (chs. 35, 76, 144) hold authority through learning. In the Iranian case that authority has become direct state power.

Lay and lodge hierarchies. Freemasonry has no priesthood, but its grand lodges and the 33 degrees of the Scottish Rite form an elective and initiatory hierarchy (chs. 109–113).

The economics of salvation

Each kind of organisation found a way to turn grace into revenue. The question first arises with the temples of the river civilisations. In the 1920s Anton Deimel concluded from about 1,700 tablets of the Baba temple at Lagash that “all of the cultivable land in the state, as well as its workforce, had belonged to the temple”. Collins calls this “a rather extreme interpretation”, and reports that Igor Diakonoff later showed the calculations to be “erroneous”: temples held estates “rather like medieval monasteries”, alongside the palace and private households [Collins, The Sumerians, #64812] (chs. 3, 8). In Egypt the major temples “became major landholders, their activities supported by vast estates worked by thousands of people”, though the estates remained “ultimately under royal control” [Wikipedia: Atenism]. Bierbrier writes that Karnak’s “great wealth led to an increase of political power for the high priest of Amun”, under whom Thebes became “virtually independent” [Bierbrier, #366518, “High Priest of Amun”]. The Egyptians judges this usual picture of priestly power “probably exaggerated” [#363364]. Akhenaten’s break with Amun and the priests’ erasure of his memory (ch. 4) is the first recorded clash in this study between a king and an endowed priesthood. The reference shelf records “the unrestricted sale of indulgences by professional ‘pardoners'” [Wikipedia: Intermediate state (Christianity)]; see ch. 64. The papal monarchy invented fiscal and legal machinery that secular states later copied [#62062]. Ch. 146 covers the Vatican Bank, ch. 130 Scientology’s priced auditing along the Bridge, ch. 69 the prosperity gospel, and ch. 157 the Keshe Coin.

Charisma against office

Weber’s distinction between charismatic and institutional authority, used as a frame in several chapters of this study, describes a recurring pattern: founders such as Zarathustra, Muhammad, Joseph Smith, Hubbard, Jim Jones and David Koresh claim authority directly from revelation, and their successors routinise it into clergy, law and property. Hassan’s model describes control in a high-demand group as four linked dimensions: “Behavior control, thought control, emotional control, and information control: each form of control has great power and influence on the human mind”. He adds that “Many groups exercise complete control over interpersonal relationships … Some even tell members whom they can marry” [Hassan, Combatting Cult Mind Control, #64506, ch. 4]. The new-religious-movement scholars in ch. 125 dispute whether such models describe groups or stigmatise them.

Keshe: abolishing the intermediary, founding a council

Keshe’s programme is openly anti-clerical. In KSW 464 he says the direct route to the Creator “does not need no rocket, no monkey suit, no Ayatollahs, no Mullahs, and no priests, Pope’s, rabbis”. Anyone placed between the soul and God “can put poison in it, and they poison the connection between me and my Creator. That poison is religion, are the Ayatollahs, Mullahs, Priests, and everybody else in the name of ‘in-between'”. He presents himself as no more than a teacher: “I claim nothing … I’m equal and a part of. I eat on the same kind of table, and sleep in the same kind of bed” [Keshe, Knowledge Seekers Workshop 464, #378176]. Yet the movement has its own governing body. A Keshe Foundation document says Universal Council members “are chosen by their soul”. The council guarantees “that each language are represented as one Universal Council member”, and it quotes KSW 467: “In the cycle of man on this planet there is nothing Higher than the wishes of the Soul, unanimous soul, of the Universal Council. If the soul of the universal Council in unity wishes, it becomes a command for the soul of Humanity and beyond” [Keshe Foundation, Questions for the Universal Council April 2023, #378474]. The library’s summary of the same document places at its centre the “Ethos of the Universe” of thinking, speaking and doing good, together with “the 24 Commandments” [#378474]. Ch. 152 covers the Earth Council and the 12/144 structure.

Key points

• Van Voorst’s three types (law code, loose precepts, little ethical concern) give a working typology for comparing scriptural ethics (#63227).
• Walton and Walton read the Torah as covenant and wisdom, not legislation, which is the opposite of the later halakhic approach (#68328).
• Hammurabi’s stele puts the laws under Shamash but contains almost no theological or ceremonial law. Scholars disagree whether it is legislation, a record of verdicts or “list science” (ch. 3).
• Older than any code is a cosmic order that law was meant to express: Maat in Egypt, kept by the king and measured at the weighing of the heart, and asha/ṛta among the Indo-Iranians, guarded by Mithra and Varuna (#366518; #55116; chs. 4, 6–7).
• The first priesthoods served temples and sacred kings. Mesopotamian kings ruled as the god’s servants and the pharaoh as Son of Ra. The Vedic purohita stood beside the king, and the Purusha Sukta’s four varṇas are read as a late sanction for an unequal polity (#363364; chs. 3, 4, 7).
• The size of temple wealth is disputed: Deimel’s “temple-state” was corrected by Diakonoff, and The Egyptians calls the usual picture of Amun’s priestly power “probably exaggerated” (#64812; #363364).
• The negative golden rule appears in Confucius, Hillel, Islam, Jainism and the Bahá’í writings. Heisman treats its near-universality as the starting point for comparing Confucianism and Judaism (#55131; #38252; #44918).
• Zoroastrian ethics joined the good-thoughts, good-words, good-deeds triad to a strict corpse-purity law and to fire ordeals in which Mithra was expected to save the innocent (#55116).
• Boyce traces the Iranian priesthood’s hardening into a hereditary order by Sasanian times and its partnership with the nobility (#55117). Grzymała-Busse shows the papal Church acting as both model and rival for the European state (#62062).
• Antinomian movements (Nizari, Sabbatean, Thelemic, LaVeyan) invert inherited law. Heisman analyses Christian altruism itself as a “selfish meme” (#38252).
• Keshe calls religious intermediaries “poison” and claims no rank for himself, but his movement governs through a Universal Council whose unanimous wish “becomes a command” (#378176; #378474).