ernatural Powers!
The preparation for such an office is in earlier times ritual and
external, and becomes gradually moralized. Magicians must submit to
purificatory restrictions, and prove their fitness by various
deeds.[381] Initiation into secret societies (whose members had a
certain official character) was, and is, often elaborate.[382] Priests
in Egypt, Babylonia and Assyria, Canaan, India, Greece and Rome, were
subject to conditions of purity, always physical and sometimes moral,
that secured a daily consecration.

+203+. Methods of initial consecration were, probably, of the general
character of those prescribed in the Hebrew ritual law.[383] Authority
is often conferred by a high official, whose consecrating act is then
generally regarded as essential.[384] The priest becomes invested with a
quasi-divine authority. The consecration of kings follows the same
general lines as that of priests. In both cases the desire is to have
some visible form of the deity whose relations with men may be felt to
be direct.

+204+. No purificatory and consecrative usage has been more widespread
than fasting.[385] It is found throughout religious history in the
lowest tribes and in the most highly civilized peoples, has been
practiced in a great variety of circumstances, and has been invested
with a special sanctity and efficacy. It has been regarded as necessary
before partaking of sacred food, before the performance of a sacred
ceremony, after a death, in the presence of a great occurrence (as an
eclipse or a thunderstorm, regarded as supernatural), as a part of the
training of magicians, as a preparation for the search after a guardian
spirit, as a part of ceremonies in honor of gods, as an act of
abstinence in connection with a calamity (or in general as a self-denial
proper to sinful man and pleasing to the deity as an act of humility),
and, finally, as a retirement from fleshly conditions in preparation for
spiritual exercises.

+205+. A great number of explanations of the origin of the custom have
been proposed, and it is obvious that the particular usages come from
somewhat different conceptions. Apparently, however, all these usages of
purification by fasting go back to the idea that the body, which is
identified with the human personality, is in its ordinary state
nonsacred[386] and therefore unfit for the performance of a sacred act,
and that it is rendered especially unfit by contact with a ritually
unclean thing.