Well spoken Little Hawk. There's a marvelous book by Ruth Underhill, called "Red Man's Religion", in which she respectfully synposizes and brings together in academic fashion observations by many earlier writers in different fields. The work is an evolutionary approach, inwhich she carefully distinguishes among people fulfilling different heirarchical roles in native american religions. Apropos to this thread, she defines priests as "persons trained in [performance of] rituals", but not guided by or necessarily even in contact with the spirit world. They are seen to emerge in larger, settled communities, early in the development of agricultural societies and reflect the fact that most members of a community were content to let a "professional" worry about correct performance of propitiation ceremonies. The ceremonies themselves are seen to have evolved from "needs" reported by other "professionals" considered to be in direct contact with spirits - the shamans, who were thought to be possesed by spirits in their trance states, and the seers who were directed by visions presumptively brought to them by spirits. With a bit of healthy cynicism, its not hard to imagine the the power struggle that eventually occurred when the priestly class assumed dominance and ritual transitioned from a "mere" propitiation ceremony to becoming an "idol" in its own right. Sort of a "form over function" argument.