1) “Priests” had no doctrine only obligatory rituals (the japanese ritual model). The monarchy originally performed the rituals, then appointed patricians, but the duty was separated under the republic because of scale. All that I know of were a variation on sacrifice (contract).
2) To equate “the performance of ritual”, when it was not required they even understand the words they spoke, only that they performed the ritual precisely, with ‘priesthood’ as ‘a competitor to the state’ or means of state sponsored deception, is more than a mischaracterization.
3) A professional priesthood in the sense I use it (education in doctrine under pretense of divine authority) as a competitor to the state (see Huntington’s history mesopotamia) rather than archetypes and anthropomorphic instantiations of nature, was an import.
4) Alexander should be heralded for his techniques and cursed for his introduction of semitism and supernaturalism to old europe. Thankfully the romans were as skeptical of those religions as they were of greek sophisms.
5) once you start looking at history as the battle between western truth and law for aristocracy and it’s domestication of animal man, and semitic occultism and sophism for the expansion of production by the underclasses, the cycles of history are much more obvious.
6) Masculine western truth, duty, reciprocity, and empirical law, eastern masculine hierarchical and empirical bureaucracy, and semitic feminine fictional rule of flood river production. Everything comes back to geography, climate, means of production, and degree of neoteny.
