A Daoist ritual master does not simply learn talismans and exorcistic procedure; he is ordained into a rank within a celestial bureaucracy that the ritual itself invokes, and the ordination is what makes the summons and command he issues legitimate rather than empty gesture. Ordination is transmitted from a master to a disciple, historically within family lineages of ritual specialists as much as through monastic institutions, and it confers registers, lists of the spirit generals and celestial officials a priest is authorised to command, which are guarded documents rather than public texts. A priest without registers who attempts the same talismans and commands is held, within the tradition's own logic, to be issuing orders he has no standing to give, which the tradition treats as ineffective at best and dangerous at worst, since it invites a response from the spirit world without the authority to control it.
Zhengyi Daoism, the main lineage that ordains married, village-based ritual masters as distinct from celibate monastics, has preserved this apparatus through centuries of state suspicion and, in twentieth-century China, direct suppression during the Cultural Revolution, when temples were closed and ritual specialists were forced underground or abroad, chiefly to Taiwan and Hong Kong, which is why the clearest surviving lineages of this ordination and its registers are documented today outside mainland China rather than within it, a displacement now slowly reversing as ritual practice has been permitted to revive on the mainland since the 1980s.