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A.D. Reader Pt. 2, p14-17

The first of the theoretical dichotomies which Weber develops is that between the function of the magician and the function of the priest in mediating between humans and the supernatural, a dichotomy which will reappear as the distinction between magic and religion.

Weber's distinction is that the magician's function copes with relatively ad hoc interests and tensions, while the priestly function is organized into a systematic and stabilized cult, which is to a significant extent independent of the ad hoc exigencies which impinge upon the ordinary population of the society. Further, magical forces can be "forced" (gezwungen) to serve human needs by the magician's correct use of formulae, while religious agents must be "worshipped" or solicited. Religious forces are conceived to have an independent capacity to guide human destiny which the magical forces do not.

Kolakowski: 
Priests and jesters cannot be reconciled unless one of them is transformed into the other, as sometimes happens. (Most often the jester becomes a priest-as Socrates became Plato-and not vice versa.)

The antagonism between a philosophy that perpetuates the absolute and a philosophy that questions accepted absolutes seems incurable, as incurable as that which exists between conservatism and radicalism in all aspects of human life. This is the antagonism between the priest and the jester, and in almost every epoch the philosophy of the priest and the philosophy of the jester are the two most general forms of intellectual culture. The priest is the guardian of the absolute; he sustains the cult of the final and the obvious as acknowledged by and contained in tradition. The jester is he who moves in good society without belonging to it, and treats it with impertinence; he who doubts all that appears selfevident. He could not do this if he belonged to good society.

The jester is brother to the sage.

The jester is the eternal puer, a skeptical observer of social order: active, critical, questioning all that appears self-evident; he embodies imagination, pluralism, individuality, playfulness, relishes the tensions between ideals, and enjoys exploring the future, the possible, the hopeful. The priest is the senex, a conservative who believes in a harmonious system of values; he guards the absolute, defends the past, orthodoxy, tradition and sanctity. "The priest and the jester both violate the mind; the priest with the garrote of catechism, the fool with the needle of mockery."

The jester must stand outside good society and observe it from the sidelines in order to unveil the nonobvious behind the obvious, the nonfinal behind the final; yet he must frequent society so as to know what it holds sacred and to have the opportunity to address it impertinently.

 The jester's constant effort is to consider all the possible reasons for contradictory ideas. It is thus dialectical by nature simply the attempt to change what is because it is. He is motivated not by a desire to be perverse but by distrust of a stabilized system. In a world where apparently everything has already happened, he represents an active imagination defined by the opposition it must overcome.

Weber:
In the end, the charisma of the pure 'mystic' serves only himself. The charisma of the genuine magician serves others.

The magician has been the historical precursor of the prophet, of the exemplary as well as of the emissary prophet and savior. As a rule the prophet and the savior have legitimized themselves through the possession of a magical charisma. With them, however, this has been merely a means of securing recognition and followers, for the exemplary significance, the mission, or the savior quality of their personalities. For the substance of the prophecy or of the savior's commandment is to direct a way of life to the pursuit of a sacred value. Thus understood, the prophecy or commandment means, at least relatively, to systematize and rationalize the way of life, either in particular points or totally.

Jean Fisher: 
Is trickster a magician? Perhaps. But he is more certainly 'of the earth'. A pragmatist, cultural terrorist, a dice-thrower .and manipulator of the main chance, not a conjuror of the supernatural. His self-appointed role as sauvage savant is a masquerade designed to fulfil a more serious purpose. Trickster is not, and never was, an anthropocentric subject possessing mastery of his world; rather, he exists in a dialogical relation with it. In oral tradition he often appears as a transformer, harmonizing (but by no means eradicating) the contradictions of life.

Weber on the Priest:
The term "priest" may be applied to the functionaries of a regularly organized and permanent enterprise concerned with influencing the gods, in contrast with the individual and occasional efforts of magicians. Even this contrast is bridged over by a sliding scale of transitions, but as a pure type the priesthood is unequivocal and can be said to be characterized by the presence of certain fixed cultic centers associated with some actual cultic apparatus.

Or it may be thought that what is decisive for the concept of priesthood is that the functionaries, regardless of whether their office is hereditary or personal, be actively associated with some type of social organization, of which they are employees or organs operating in the interests of the organization's members, in contrast with magicians, who are self-employed. Yet even this distinction, which is clear enough conceptually, is fluid in actuality. The sorcerer is not infrequently a member of an organized guild, and is occasionally the member of a hereditary caste which may hold a monopoly of magic within the particular community. 

Yet another distinguishing quality of the priest, it is asserted, is his professional equipment of special knowledge, fixed doctrine. and vocational qualifications, which brings him into contrast with sorcerers, prophets, and other types of religious functionaries who exert their influence by virtue of personal gifts (charisma) made manifest in miracle and revelation. But this again is no simple and absolute distinction, since the sorcerer may sometimes be very learned, while deep learning need not always characterize working priests. Rather, the distinction between priest and magician must be established qualitatively with reference to the different nature of the learning in the two cases. As a matter of fact we must later, in our exposition of the forms of domination, distinguish the rational training and discipline of priests from the different preparation of charismatic magicians. The latter preparation proceeds in part as an "awakening education" using irrational means and aiming at rebirth, and proceeds in part as a training in purely empirical lore. But in this case also, the two contrasted types flow into one another.

Fredric Jameson: The Vanishing Mediator

A vanishing mediator is a concept that exists to mediate between two opposing ideas, as a transition occurs between them. This mediating concept exists just long enough to facilitate such an interaction: at the point where one idea has been replaced by the other, the concept is no longer required and thus vanishes.

To juxtapose the magician with the priest in these terms is to understand that the magician's personal prestige amounts to a claim to a purely individual revelation, whereas the sacramental power of the priesthood is based on its participation in what is felt to be a universal doctrine. The bureaucratic organization of the priesthood may then be read as the negation of the purely personal and individual power of the magician, and we may tentatively formalize the relationship of these various characteristics to each other as above.

The Prophet as Vanishing Mediator:
Yet, what such a historical narrative describes is the "cooling off" or solidification of charisma itself, as the latter a vanishing mediator in the truest sense of the expression-serves as a bearer of change and social transformation, only to be forgotten once that change has ratified the reality of the institutions.

Thus, the prophet is able to mediate the basic contradiction between the two social forms or moments of religious practice and to provide a historical transition from one to the other by assimilating traits selected from the opposing forms and by repudiating others. 

Weber:
Now if a religious community emerges in the wake of a prophecy or of the propaganda of a savior, the control of regular conduct first falls into the hands of the charismatically qualified successors, pupils, disciples of the prophet or of the savior. Later, under certain very regularly recurrent conditions, which we shall not deal with here, this task falls into the hands of a priestly, hereditary, or official hierocracy. Yet, as a rule, the prophet or the savior personally has stood in opposition to the traditional hierocratic powers of magicians or of priests. He has set his personal charisma against their dignity consecrated by tradition in order to break their power or force them to his service.

Jameson citing Kluge:
"We must let Till Eulenspiegel pass across Marx and Eisenstein both, in order to create a confusion allowing knowledge and emotions to be combined together in new ways." 

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Summary: https://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~sporter/lecture17.html

Charisma: mainly a quality of the individual that places him or her above normal expectations and endows him or her with the authority to utter new commandments; it is a relational concept because it comes into existence only when it is recognized by a group.

Prophet: "a purely individual bearer of charisma, who by virtue of his mission proclaims a religious doctrine of divine commandment."

It is "the personal call" that is "the decisive element" that distinguishes "the prophet from the priest."

The priest’s authority is based on his or her service to a sacred tradition.

In contrast, the prophet’s authority is based on "personal revelation and charisma."

Unlike magicians prophets claim "definite revelations."

Core of a prophet’s mission: a doctrine about how to live, not magic.

What most distinguishes the prophet from priests and magicians "is an economic factor": prophets (e.g., Amos) don’t get paid for their prophecies.

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Michelet on Rabelais:
Rabelais collected wisdom from the popular elemental forces of the ancient Provencal idioms, sayings, proverbs, school farces, from the mouth of foo.s and clowns. But refracted by this foolery, the genius of the age and its prophetic power are revealed in all their majesty. If he does not discover, he foresees, he promises, he directs. Under each tiny leaf of this forest of dreams, the fruit which the future will harvest lies hidden. This entire book is a golden bough.

The word jester', too, has a respectable ancestry. The chansons de geste played prominent part in medieval literature from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries. They were epics centred on heroic events; their name is derived from the Latin gesta: deeds, exploits. With the coming of the Renaissance, satire tended to replace the epics of chivalry, and in the sixteenth century the heroic 'geste' turned into 'jest'.