This paper provides a method- and theory-focused assessment of religious behavior based on cross-cultural research that provides an empirically derived model as a basis for making inferences about ritual practices in the past through an ethnological analogy. A review of previous research provides an etic typology of religious practitioners and identifies their characteristics, selection-function features, the societal configurations of practitioners, and the social complexity features of the societies where they are found. New analyses reported here identify social predictors of the individual practitioner types in their relationships to subsistence and sociopolitical conditions (foraging, intensive agriculture, political integration, warfare, and community integration). These relations reveal the factors contributing to social evolution through roles of religious organization in the operation of cultural institutions. The discussion expands on the previous findings identifying fundamental forms of religious life in the relations of the selection processes for religious practitioner positions to their principal professional functions. These relationships reveal three biogenetic structures of religious life involving (1) alterations of consciousness used in healing rituals, manifested in a cultural universal of shamanistic healers; (2) kin inheritance of leadership roles providing a hierarchical political organization of agricultural societies, manifested in priests who carry out collective rituals for agricultural abundance and propitiation of common deities; and (3) attribution of evil activities, manifested in witches who are persecuted and killed in subordinated groups of societies with political hierarchies and warfare. These systematic cross-cultural patterns of types of ritualists and their activities provide a basis for inferring biogenetic bases of religion and models for interpreting the activities, organization, and beliefs regarding religious activities of past societies. Cases are analyzed to illustrate the utility of the models presented.

本文基于跨文化研究，提供了一种以方法和理论为重点的宗教行为评估，该研究提供了一种经验派生的模型，以此作为通过民族学类比推断过去的仪式实践的基础。对先前研究的回顾为宗教从业者提供了一种意识形态类型，并确定了他们的特征，选择功能特征，从业者的社会形态以及所处社会的社会复杂性特征。此处报道的新分析确定了个体从业者类型与生存和社会政治条件（觅食，集约化农业，政治整合，战争和社区融合）之间的社会预测因子。这些关系通过宗教组织在文化机构运作中的作用揭示了促进社会发展的因素。讨论的基础是先前的发现，这些发现在宗教从业人员职位的甄选过程与其主要专业职能之间的关系中确定了宗教生活的基本形式。这些关系揭示了宗教生活的三种生物遗传结构，其中包括：（1）用于治疗仪式的意识改变，表现为萨满治疗者的文化普遍性；（2）领导角色的近亲继承提供了农业社会的等级政治组织，表现在为农业丰盛和共同的神灵进行集体仪式的祭司中表现出来；（3）邪恶活动的归因，在女巫中表现出来，这些女巫在具有政治等级制度和战争的下级社会团体中受到迫害和杀害。这些仪式主义者类型及其活动的系统的跨文化模式为推断宗教的生物遗传基础和解释过去社会宗教活动的活动，组织和信念的模型提供了基础。通过分析案例来说明所提出模型的实用性。