Abstract
Priests, Prophets, Shamans, and Diviners, seers, mediums, witches, sorcerers and magicians: what can be the links between all those social functions? First of all, they are all religious specialists in their respective cultural and social context. All of them have a special rank, status and function, that gives them power upon the other members of their society. To be more precise, we can offer a simple definition of what is a religious specialist, thanks to Anthropological Studies. In his study of religious specialists, Victor W.Turner tries to give us a definition of this phenomenon in order to show that all the religious specialists share their main characteristics with respect to society. One of those characteristics is the ability to "manipulate the supernatural to their own or society's ends" and (more important) the fact that they all have a culturally defined status coming from a social recognition. His simplest and more useful definition of what is a religious specialist would be: "one who devotes himself to a particular branch of religion or, viewed organizationally, of a religious system". Thanks to this definition, we see how the specific status of the religious specialist is connected with the society he lives in.
