Indian yogi, Tibetan lama and Christian monks.   Holiness as a vocation has had a popular history in the last age, the age of the sacred.   Its many variations are not so different.  

The Buddhists in India and throughout SE Asia had teeming monasteries.  In Tibet, a sparsely populated land, these huge centres of holiness and learning, numbering up to 10,000 monks, have only been brutally removed by the Chinese in the twentieth century.  

The Roman priests of Isis modelled the tonsure, later adopted by Christian initiates, and this ‘hairy renunciation’ still spells total devotion around the world.