In this chapter we describe the behavior and beliefs of religious people from an external point of view. Where The Religious Mindset was subjective, entering into the mind and opinion of the believer, this chapter will be objective, describing people's behavior in a way that you will be able to easily transform into rules for the game you play, if that is your intention. Whether or not you intend to use the mechanics in this chapter, you will be able to use the rest to better quantify and roleplay religious people and groups.
In every field of human endeavor there are two classes of people, specialists and those who have limited interest, or dabblers. Religion does not differ from that formula.
Religious dabblers, whom we call "believers" or "worshippers," make the vast majority of any religious community. Believers compose approximately 99% of every religious group. Believers go to worship services regularly, they may only attend externally and understand little of what goes on or they may be deeply into the religion. However, they have not dedicated their lives to religion. Their lives are dominated by other concerns.
Religious specialists make up the rest of every religious community. Their lives are dedicated to religion. In some communities they have devoted their entire lives to religion, from childhood until death. In other communities people pledge several years of their life to religion, acting as religious specialists for that time and returning to normal believer status afterwards. In either case active religious specialists make up about 1% percent of the general population.
Religious leaders, specialists in the field of religion, are known by many terms which indicate the respect people feel for them: priest; medicine man; shaman; prophet; monk; ayatollah; hermit; mystic; visionary; sheik; master; sacred king or queen; abbess; imam; bishop; father; mother; magus; seer; doctor; etc. Many of these terms appear to have little to do with religion. This is an accurate observation. Many titles for religious specialists are titles of respect which reflect the admiration they elicit in the society that surrounds them.
Collected here are a number of titles commonly or popularly used to refer to religious specialists. Note that we can't list every possible title by which religious specialists might be known. This is because people use any and every available term of respect. For instance, in a country with a feudal style government headed by a religious figure every noble might also be a religious specialist. If the King is a sacred figure, the Queen and family may also be sacred, and also Dukes, Counts, Earls, Barons, and Knights.
Most of the following terms are in English. Plenty of terms exist in other languages for religious specialists, but most of them translate adequately into English terms. I attempted to include those that do not translate into equivalent English terms.
A nunnery is a monastery for women who wish to join the contemplative lifestyle. The abbess is the female superior, mother superior, or governess at a nunnery. She is so called because the alternate name for a monastery is abbey, and while both names are unisex, in English monastery has male connotations and abbey has female ones.
The abbot is a father superior, male superior, or governor at an abbey or monastery. While the governor of a monastery may also be a bishop or hold some other title, this is a functional title.
A bishop is a powerful priest, with local authority, the sacred equivalent to a baron or similar noble. In the catholic church, bishops inherit a line of succession directly from the twelve apostles. They are the apostles of Jesus Christ in the modern day church. Over the bishop sits an archbishop, who has the authority for an entire region with millions of worshippers.
From the Arabic for "successor, follower," a Caliph is a supreme spiritual leader of Sunni Islam who traces his line of authority from Muhammad through his father-in-law, Abu Bakr. Similar to the Catholic Pope, but for Sunni Islam. Shiites do not accept the Caliph as a valid spiritual descendant of Muhammad.
Cardinal as in the sense of "primary." There are the seven cardinal sins. And then there are the Cardinals of the catholic church, who rank second to the Pope in dignity and status. They form the College of Cardinals, the Pope's council.
Strictly speaking a cleric is someone who reads and writes, a clerk or scribe. During the medieval period, the catholic church was the main repository of learning in Christian Europe. During this time the catholic priesthood became identified with their unique ability to read and write. Cleric, plural clergy, has become a general term for Christian religious specialists which can apply to both monks and priests.
A diviner is someone who interacts with the Divine, with God or gods. A diviner may speak to the god, see visions, or interpret numbers or dreams to understand and interpret the Divine will. Whatever the method (see Divination in Worship) the diviner predicts the future and sees distant happenings.
If surrounding society has great respect for healers, and few do not have such respect, then the word for doctor may be a term of general respect. As a result, we have doctors of philosophy who do no healing whatsoever, doctors of jurisprudence who do verbal battle in courts of law, and doctors of divinity who are actually clergy. In some societies the healing arts are believed to be divinely inspired, and in such societies every doctor is also a religious specialist. They may be known to us as witch doctors or medicine men, but they are healers to their patients.
Father is a term of respect for a man. Religious specialists, male or female, often arouse the respect of their friends and neighbors. For this reason male religious specialists are often called Father. Variants of this, from other European languages, include Padre, Pater, Papa, and Pope.
A hermit is a person who retires from life and lives alone, usually for religious purposes. There are several synonyms which mean similar things. Anchorites are similar to hermits, only their privations are more severe, and their religious dedication is greater. Originally, an anchorite was a hermit who was bricked into the wall of the church while alive, to spend the remainder of life in a small cell with only a single window through which food and waste could be passed. A monk is like a hermit but joins with a community of other like-minded people to live in silence and seclusion from the world.
A hero is a human being who lives a life according to the heroic cycle. After death such a person is immortalized in Legend and ritual, and becomes a magically powerful figure, a figure of mystery. The heroic cycle generally follows this pattern. Miraculous events foreshadow the hero's birth, which is in itself miraculous. Heroes are most often born from virgin mothers who have been impregnated by a god. Either before or after birth the hero is menaced by evil. After the child hero grows up, he or she goes through some kind of initiation, a religious experience, which is followed by a great deal of distant wandering. Then the hero engages in some kind of magical contest, a contest of skills or miracles, which he or she wins dramatically. After the contest come the trials and persecutions of the hero, and his or her final, inevitable defeat. The hero may or not have a last scene, a set piece in which to dispense final wisdom, and then undergoes a mysterious death, which may involve resurrection, ascension to spiritual existence, or some other startling, ominous event.
Heroes do not necessarily have to be warriors, though some of the best known examples are warriors. Hercules was such a figure, from his mother's impregnation by Zeus to the poisoned cloak that slew him. So were Achilles, Arthur, and Joan of Arc. Heroes are religious figures, though, and objects of veneration.
From the Arabic for "he who stands before," an Imam in Shiite Islam is a supreme spiritual leader who traces his line of authority from Muhammad through Muhammad's son-in-law Ali and his descendants. Similar to the Catholic Pope, but for Shiite Islam. Sunni Muslims do not accept the Imam as a valid spiritual descendant of Muhammad.
The Magi were a Medean caste or tribe of priest-nobles from pre-Zoroastrian Iran. They dominated religious discourse in their day, and even after Medea was conquered by the Persians maintained their status as the supreme religious experts. Their arts included astrology, numerology, all the divinatory arts, weather control, and various demonstrations of sacred power. The Greeks knew of them, and they were widely respected over the entire ancient world, from the western Atlantic coast east to the Indian subcontinent. Magic is named after them. Many European stories of magic workers and witches are directly descended from the stories told about the Magi. The Greek legends about Medea are obvious links to them, and it's likely that there's a lot more that can't be so easily traced.
A master is someone who is superior to all but the very best, to whom he or she is equal. A religious master is someone whom other people follow, whom they obey. He or she is an instructor, a teacher, a holy one. Today it carries the connotation of "master and slave" or "master and servant" and smacks of inequity, but it wasn't always so. The master is a superbly qualified person, worthy of respect.
A minister is technically speaking someone who attends to people, who cares about them. In its broader meaning, a minister is a person who leads a group of people in worship and who councils troubled people.
A monk is someone who lives in a monastery, a place where many people may withdraw from the world, and by their nearness to one another protect one another from the dangers suffered by true loners. See hermit, above. Monk has a male connotation; a female monk is usually called a nun.
Mother is a term of respect for a woman. People respect their mothers. A woman who elicits such respect in other people may find them calling her Mother. Mother is also a traditional title for the earth, or for any priestess who represents a goddess of the earth. Variants include Madre, Mater, Virgin Mother, Great Mother, Mother Superior, and so on.
A mystic is a religious believer who concentrates on the spiritual aspect of religion, perhaps to the exclusion of the ritual and mythical aspects. A mystic may be an ecstatic, a visionary, and a prophet. Mystics aren't very popular in large, bureaucratic religions because they aren't predictable, and they frequently claim revelations from the Divine that would be inconvenient for the goals and policies of the hierarchy.
The Pope is the highest mortal leader of the Roman Catholic church, with direct access to God. He is believed to be infallible, incapable of error. He is the leader and spiritual father of millions of Catholics all over the world.
A preacher is someone who speaks to a group of people about religion. A preacher sermonizes, a preacher is a storyteller who tells myths and fables, and convinces the audience to believe.
A priest is a religious specialist with a formal position in a religious organization. A priest usually signifies a man, a woman is usually called a priestess. Priests are officially in charge of the rituals. A priest may hold a bureaucratic position, be a preacher, a pastor, or another specialty, but is fully capable of officiating at many religious rituals. There are some priests that specialize in various rituals, such as marriage or funerary rites, but most are generalists.
A prophet is someone who actively seeks out Divine knowledge and uses it to predict the future. A prophet is a little bit preacher and a little bit diviner.
When a society elects its leaders according to Divine law, they are sacred rulers. Sacred Kings may be elected in the spring, rule for a year, and be sacrificed at midwinter. Sacred Queens may follow a similar schedule, or they may be worshipped as Divine mothers of society.
A saint is someone who, like a hero, lives a prominent and overtly religious life and death, a life and death that make a good legend. The legend must illustrate something important about the world and Divine will. A saint may stay around after death to intercede in favor of faithful believers, or to punish the evil.
A seer, like a diviner, is one who ´sees' distant things. A seer can see into the past, present, and future. A seer can see hidden things, secret things, far distant things. A seer and a visionary are pretty much the same thing.
Shaman is originally a word from the Tungus people of Siberia, but has been widely adopted to describe a type of religious found in small-scale societies all over the world. A shaman is a mystic, a preacher, a healer, and a priest. A shaman, female shamana or shamanka, plural shamans, can be identified by eccentric behavior while still young, for the aptitude is passed along from parent to child. After difficult and dangerous ordeals, a youth who is so inclined may be initiated into shaman-hood.
Witch, apparently derived from an old English word meaning "to twist," is the word for a female worker of magic. Witches who work good magic are often called "white witches," and witches who work evil magic are often called just plain "witches," or "wicked witches." Of course, a witch who does favors for you may not be the favorite of your enemy over the hill, and likewise a witch who is his friend may be your worst enemy. As usual with good and evil, whether a witch is of the white or wicked variety is a subjective decision.
Two notes on terminology: First, a warlock is a popular name for a male witch, especially one of the wicked, Satan worshipping variety. However, warlock is an old English word for "oathbreaker," and most people who claim to be witches think it is very insulting. The preferred term for a male witch is "male witch," surprisingly enough. Second, a witch doctor is so called because he, for witch doctors are almost always male, can smell out wicked witches and their evil spells, and because he can cure it. A female witch doctor would be called a "good witch," and would be despised by the people over the hill just as much as if she were truly evil.
Wizard is etymologically related to "wisdom." A wizard, or wise one, is a learned person, a person who like the magi controls vast powers of magic and may or may not have religious duties. There is no doubt, given the power at a wizard's disposal, that Divine forces are involved somehow.
States that become large lead to large religious organizations. Conquering of new lands almost always leads to a conversion of much of the defeated populace to the winner's religion. After all, if the old religion was so great then they wouldn't have lost. When a religion becomes large, the need for a bureaucracy to handle it becomes irresistible. Military success and religious bureaucracy go hand in hand. This is why religions are often organized along military fashion. There is a single leader in an army, a general, and he or she is assisted by a war council. Likewise in a large religion, the High Leader of the religion is assisted by a council. Together they order the movement of missionaries, priests, associate groups, and ordinary believers.
In November, the end of the year, the shalako come to the village. The shalako are messengers of the rain gods (ancestors). Six of them arrive, standing fifteen feet tall with birdlike faces surmounted with broad antlers and adorned with fans of feathers in all the colors of the rainbow. The six gigantic masked figures make a big impression. The dancers who impersonate the shalako peek out through eye-holes in a rug which covers them and dance during the festival, carrying the feathered and horned masks on poles ten feet long.
The shalako arrive from the desert and bring life and fertility. They are the harbingers of the new year, the servants of the ancestors who ensure rain and natural cooperation for the year to come. On the first night of the festival they appear in the desert and approach the village. Members of each kiva society join the shalako from their own house and accompany them back to the village. They cross the river as darkness falls. All of a sudden, as the spectators await them, they appear at the top of a rise, accompanied by loud, formally composed songs. The moment is one to remember forever with the glorious creatures suddenly appearing, surrounded in otherworldly song. Afterwards, the masked beings go to their kiva houses. Their kiva brothers join them, and they all dance the entire night. If any man in the house falls asleep the mask bearer lowers the mask to the sleeper's face and awakens him with a loud clap of the mask's beak.
[FOOTNOTE: The description of this Zuni festival is paraphrased from Religious Traditions of the World, ed. H. Byron Earhart. p. 354. Ake Hultkrantz, "Native Religions of North America."]
During the year the kiva societies prepare for the arrival of the shalako. They rebuild and repair the mask. They find and add feathers to it, also antlers. They may build a new mask some years or many years. This house is a society for men only. Women are not allowed to participate in their work. However, women are allowed to be in the audience when they play their part in the year-end festivities.
The kiva societies exist for ritual purposes, to assure the orderly passage from season to season and year to year. They are not devoted to violence. They are not antisocial or destructive. However, they do not allow women. That is the basic requirement for any men's society. A men's society cannot include anyone but men of the village, and that excludes women, boys, girls, and outsiders. The men's society also holds secrets which are dangerous to people, and that is why the men say that their society must remain secretive and must admit only men. It would be dangerous for women or children to see the secrets. It would threaten the orderly progression of the years. It must not happen. The secrets must remain secret.
Such kiva societies have leadership by the most senior members. They are the elders of the society. Their opinions are important. One or more of the elders may be a delegate from the society to a greater governmental council or group. For instance, one of the elders of the shalako societies would represent their interests within the village council. Zuni society is tribal with a ruling council, so there is no single leader for the secret society, just as there is no single leader for the village. Below the elders are the majority of members. They do most of the work during their spare time. Finally, there are the young men of the secret society. They are new members, expected to know little. Their main contribution is energy. The young men, in the prime of their health, are expected to be the main dancers in the kiva rituals. They take orders from everyone and give orders to none. They are shown the secrets slowly, carefully, no more than they need to know at any one time. They have years to develop the wisdom of the elders. Those who join the kiva society are sponsored by parents and must undergo two initiations. First, at a young age they are whipped by the masked kiva spirits in a purifying ceremony that drives out bad luck. The Zuni do not use whipping as a punishment. They use it only to purify. Right before puberty they are once again cleansed by whipping, and at that time they learn the first secrets of the kiva rituals.
Other men's societies exist. A mystique accrues to their houses. They accumulate their share of secrets. Like kiva societies, fraternities, military organizations, many boardrooms and barrooms are restricted to men. Hunting societies are common among foraging people, as are warrior societies. Guilds, unions, and clubs are all similar to men's societies, but the restrictions on membership differ. The element of secrecy remains the same.
Believers are the backbone of religion. Without their efforts the specialists would be unable to achieve their goals. Without believers the gods would lose the human arm of their power. Believers constitute 99% or more of every religion. They are who we talk about when we talk about religious people. Religious specialists, scholars, and others are exceptions to the rule that traditional societies are religious and consist of believers.
The Divine forces at the center of religion expect believers to supply through various kinds of worship most of the sacred power needed for Divine survival and prosperity. Worship involves many types of behavior. It involves ecstasy, ritual, imitation, and sacrifice. All these types of worship serve as sources of sacred energy. In addition to sacred energy, believers supply the Divine with respect--everybody wants to be respected. They honor the Divine. They obey It.
Believers are expected to offer economic support to the religion, to specialists in it, and to their fellow believers. This may take the form of gifts of food, service, or lodging to religious specialists. They may be required to supply the religion with sacrificial objects such as oils, perfumes, grain, fruit, animals, and perhaps with occasional human sacrifices. They may be required to pay a "tithe," or religious tax, for the continued operation of the religious group. No matter what the economic basis for the community, believers will be expected to contribute some part to any relevant religious organization.
The most common and representative expressions of worship are the ecstatic experience, role models, rituals, and various sacrifices.
Ecstasy: First off, the ecstatic experience, described in some completeness in Worship, is a central feature of all vigorous religions. It is the religious experience noted by Henry James [[[Fact Check]]] in his work The Varieties of Religious Experience. Visions, sacred dreams, possession, instances of sacred insight and madness, these are varieties of ecstatic experience common to religion. Meditation, song, dance, prayer, and artistic pursuits are a few ways of reaching an ecstatic state. They take time. Other ways of reaching ecstasy are quicker. They may be derided as shortcuts or lauded and much used, depending on cultural values.
For example, in the apocryphal Book of the Secrets of Enoch the prophet travels to the seven heavens and descends to the seven hells, hears of the fate of the fallen angels, the fate of the Messiah, the world, and the people in it, speaks directly with God, and afterwards returns to the world and tells his family and friends about his journey. Finally he writes 366 books about it.
Role Model: Role models, which are briefly described in The Religious Mind, are an important facet of religious worship that is easy to ignore. Nowadays, many people choose role models from entertainment or the world of professional sports. We have many people who want to be more like Roseanne Arnold, Princess Diana, and Michael Jordan. Our most popular role models are celebrities, people whose most impressive distinction often is the fame that defines them. In a religious culture role models would come from Legend and Myth. Legends describe the founding heroes of a culture, those people who defined culture through their actions. Johnny Appleseed, King Arthur, Joan of Arc, for the better or worse these people defined roles within their cultures. They became the focus of legends, larger than life, with religious overtones. Johnny Appleseed was an exemplar of the ecological, naturalistic, pantheistic religion of Whitman and Thoreau. King Arthur was the perfect Christian King. Joan of Arc was the ideal Christian soldier who was burned at the stake because she was a woman who should have been weak but was strong. They are heroes. Every time a person imitates the actions and motives of a hero the legend of that hero is reinforced. The legend becomes stronger through repetition. When people imitate the gods their myths are reinforced, they are supported in their reality and power. Constant repetition, hour after hour, day after day, is a basic way in which religion receives strength.
Ritual: Rituals are another way of reinforcing the patterns of myth. Every religious ritual is based on myth and legend, which provide the primal pattern for all activities which are sacred and powerful. As with the process of taking and imitating role models, ritual strengthens the fabric of myth and ritual by repeating it. Unlike imitation, a ritual is a public performance with an audience which participates in a secondary manner. Often people who are only marginally in a religion avoid taking religiously relevant role models, and so the religion receives no strength from them on that front. However, they may participate in rituals for several reasons. Rituals are dramatic. Many people enjoy acting in dramatic activities. Those who do not participate actively, may take place in a passive manner. It doesn't matter. The heightened emotions and concentration of actors and audience in a ritual lend power to the religion, they strengthen the myth by supporting it with emotion, and they recreate it through the repetition of ritual.
Sacrifice: Sacrifices are a type of ritual. In addition to the reinforcement of primal truths through repetition which is a function of every ritual, sacrifices also send additional energy to a religion and the Divine force that powers it. To Sacrifice is to make sacred. Sacrifice translates the sacrificial object to the otherworld in which the Divine dwells. Sacrifices of food nourish Divine forces. Sacrifices of possessions equip Divine forces. There is an ecology of sacrifice, and by sacrificing things mortals can ensure that ancestors and divine spirits get the things they deserve to have.
Small scale societies, foraging and horticultural societies with average settlement size less than 25 or so, encourage people to generalize rather than specialize. Everybody in such a society will know how to hunt, to fish, to perform any common skills, and will have control over their own spiritual and religious life. There may be someone who is better in a specific circumstance than other people, but specialized leaders don't have a place in society. On the other hand, religious specialists in a large scale society spend enough time doing religious duties that they don't have time to do everyday work. They specialize in an economic sense. They don't produce any tangible, consumable result of their labor. The society around them must support them by contributing food, shelter, and the other necessities for life. Some religious specialists receive a bare minimum and live on the edge of poverty. Others receive generous gifts and live the life of nobility, very well indeed.
Religious bureaucracies need a constant stream of new members in order to function. The main way they recruit is for parents to send their children to the temple and dedicate them to the religion. This is especially necessary in those religions which require sexual abstinence from religious specialists, or which allow the priests to have families and children but forbid them to pass on their religious vocation to children. Alternately, cultures with hereditary religious castes would never dream of letting an unwanted child become a priest. In the societies in which it is common, the dedication of a child to religious life is seen as one of the greatest, most valuable sacrifices a family can make. Nobility and gentry may discover that they are forced to contribute at least one child per family to the religious organization.
Believers may wish to enhance their standing in the religion and the community by making special effort for their religion. Four common courses of action are to make pilgrimages, participate in holy wars, to become temporary religious specialists, and to join lay organizations.
A pilgrim is someone who travels to a distant place of religious importance with the goal of personal religious growth. The distant place may be the site of the founding of the religion, the birthplace of a hero or saint, or the ancestral home of clan, tribe, or nation. It may be mentioned in Myth and Legend. It may have any meaning, as long as it is important. People do not make pilgrimages to meaningless places. Especially in the days before the airplane and the automobile travel over a long distance was very difficult and expensive. People often walked thousands of miles to go on pilgrimages. They faced bandits, surprised and hostile natives, weather, wild animals, all without extensive networks of roads or lodging.
Imagine if you lived in Miami, Florida and had to visit Salt Lake City, Utah. That's a daunting trip if you drive there on the interstate highway system. Now assume there are no roads, that the natives of the lands between here and there don't use the same currency you do, don't speak your language, and don't particularly like you, that there are few inns, of varying quality, between here and there, and that you don't have enough money to take a horse. You have one ox which can pull a cart with your possessions in it. Cars, naturally, haven't been invented yet. Given up yet? Given the difficulties they entailed, it's no wonder that pilgrimages have long been viewed as proofs of courage and dedication.
The pilgrimage is one common way for believers who are not religious specialists to prove their dedication to religion. Generally, the poorer classes cannot make long pilgrimages. They will make regional pilgrimages instead, perhaps to a temple several days away, perhaps to a shrine founded by a hero in a wilderness area. They may combine the pilgrimage with requests for boons or blessings. People often go on pilgrimages after someone becomes sick. They will take a trip to the nearest holy site with a reputation for healing the sick. They may take the sick person with them, or bring a "votive object," a representation of the illness. For instance, if a man fell ill with an infected leg and couldn't travel, his relatives might take a plaster casting of a leg, or such a statuette, to the shrine, and get it healed. They would also bring other offerings, other sacrifices, to the holy site. All sacrifices, including votive objects, will be left at the holy site.
We recommend that you determine the high holy site for each religion that you create for your gameworld, and make this site the primary goal of pilgrims. It could be the hut in which the founder was born, the burial ground, or the mountaintop where the founder first encountered the Divine. You can design more complex pilgrimages later, if you want.
Examples of Pilgrims
Worshippers who aren't quite so ordinary as pilgrims may want to use their special skills to dedicate themselves to their religion. Those who are skilled in warfare get the chance to dedicate themselves by participating in holy wars. By conquering outsiders, others, the religion can expand. It also offers the usual attractions of war to warriors, namely loot, rapine, and slaughter.
Example Holy Wars
To most westerners, the many crusades are perhaps the best known examples of holy wars. They were all holy wars against various "pagan" enemies, and even against some who could only loosely be called pagan, such as Jews and Byzantine Christians.
The first crusade, preached in CE 1096 by Pope Urban II, was intended to rescue Jerusalem and the lands around it, the Holy Land, from domination by Jews and Muslims. Jerusalem was to be transferred to Christian rule. Along the way the crusaders kill all the Jews they can find in Europe. An offshoot of the first crusades went to support the Christian Kingdom of Leon against the Caliphate of Cordoba and help drive the Moors out of Spain.
The second crusade, preached in CE 1146 by Pope Eugenius III and Saint Bernard of Clairveaux, the founder of the Templars, was intended to support the efforts of the first crusades in the Christian countries of Palestine (Edessa, Tripoli, Antioch, and Jerusalem) and also to finish driving the Moors out of Spain. It also included the King of Saxony's drive in the Balkans against the Wends and Lithuanians. The second crusade failed to dent Muslim defenses in the east, but did better in Spain and the Baltics.
The Templars and Hospitallers were two monastic orders of pious warriors. They dominated the second crusade, and have become the model for Paladins and the other holy knights in roleplaying games.
In response to the Christian crusades, Salidin led a Muslim Jihad against the Christian states and took back much of the land that had been taken in the first crusades. Jihad is the Arabic word for a holy war. Those who die in a Jihad are assured immediate entrance to paradise.
That's about enough for the crusades. I don't want to make this into a history of warfare. However, a few more facts about the crusades would be enlightening. The next few crusades, against the Cathars of Albi, and the Byzantines, were both against other Christian states. Crusaders claimed to be attacking heretics, but perhaps more importantly, their targets were too rich for their own good. Albi was the most prosperous area of France, a ripened plum for northern nobles intent on loot. Byzantium was the gateway to the East, and much of the wealth that passed along the silk and spice routes stayed there. Wealth wasn't the only reason for these non-holy crusades. In the twelfth century crusades were declared against political enemies of the pope. The holy nature of these wars is doubtful. Instead, it is apparent that holy war often bucks the control of those who attempt to guide it and becomes a violent convulsion of "us against them" feeling and racial and cultural hatred.
Kill them all and let God sort them out.
--Simon de Montfort [???] upon taking the town of ???, ordering the slaughter of all the inhabitants, Catholic and Cathar alike.
Other religions encourage people to become religious specialists for some period of their lives. This is especially common after retirement from active work. Many older people retire from the fields and withdraw to the contemplative life, there to prepare themselves spiritually for death. For instance, Chinese Buddhists commonly take vows and become monks when they become old. In this way they can satisfy their mundane obligations with a lifetime of work and effort, and also satisfy their spiritual obligations with a commitment to religion.
In Thailand it is common for Buddhist men to join a monastery for a few years between the age of twenty and thirty. It is seen as a rite of passage, which prepares the young man for marriage, and in fact is reproduced in miniature in the marriage ceremony. The typical monk remains in the monastery for two or three years, while those who become chief monks remain for up to seven to ten years, but nobody stays a monk forever.
On a tangential note: At one time Buddhist monasteries for women existed, but some time around the 5th century CE the line of female monks dribbled and dried out, leaving nobody to induct new ones.
The Templars accepted temporary members, who didn't have to permanently take vows of chastity, give up their wives, or offer their entire estates, for the duration of various wars. This practice was common among all the medieval fighting orders. The Hospitallers and Teutonic Knights, among others, also allowed it. It was also uncommon but accepted among various non-fighting cloistered orders such as the Cistercian and Benedictine orders.
Many religious organizations encourage believers to join organizations which are not as stringent in their requirements as more formal religious organizations, such as cloistered monasteries, priesthoods, colleges, or fighting orders. Such groups are called lay organizations, because they consist of lay believers.
Lay organizations are associated with the official religious organization, though this may not be a formal affiliation. Religious specialists cooperate with them, but do not always assume leadership positions in them. Usually such groups are established for charitable purposes, or for some other purpose that fits in with societal and cultural goals. In a society where cheese fondue was the highest good, you might have a lay organization called the Cheese Melters. Since there is no formal relationship between most lay organizations and the official religious hierarchy, lay goals can diverge from official ones. Such a process may on occasion lead to heresies or schisms in the religion when a charismatic lay person claims divine inspiration and the official hierarchy objects.