In contemporary parlance "charisma" is scarcely more than a journalistic term used to explain a leader whose success is attributed, at least in part, to an unusually attractive public personality and style. This devalues a currency first circulated in our culture by the apostle Paul and fixed in the modern sociological imagination by Max Weber. Along the route from Paul to contemporary politics our perception of charisma has changed under the pressure of two dominant trends. Although Weber would not recognize the current casual usage of the term, he, more than anyone, helped stimulate these trends. One is the trend toward appropriating as secular what was once religiously fast rooted. The other is a trend which tends to blur the distinctions between charisma, leadership, and authority. Weber was, of course, trying to interpret not Paul but the structures of authority fundamental to social organization. Such an interpretation, if it is to take cognizance of religious phenomena, must be able to identify these with secular counterparts. It must also be able to account for abrupt, revolutionary, and "irrational" instances of exercising authority which appear to be almost sui generis; to account for the emergence of leaders who seem to possess their gifts even before they find a constituency, or exercise these gifts in calling forth a constituency. The prophet, that religious archetype of the charismatic leader, belongs to a type not unknown to the secular world.