Ancient Human Sacrifice Helped Make Our Unequal Modern Societies

[Nía]

Ancient Human Sacrifice Helped Make Our Unequal Modern Societies

Elites knew the value of fearmongering even way back when.


Photo Credit: Wikipedia Commons / Castelli

Religion has long been a particularly useful tool for social control, with the “fear of god” used in service of every despicable practice from slavery to war. A new study now reveals that religious rites – particularly, ritual sacrifice – helped create and maintain class stratification in ancient societies. According to researchers from the University of Auckland, Victoria University and the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Germany, the findings reveal a “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies” than once thought.

The analysis focused on 93 Austronesian cultures, meaning peoples who originated in Taiwan, later settling in Madagascar, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Researchers found that the more class stratification that existed in a society – elites on top, with the rest of the populace on the bottom – the more likely it was to engage in ritualistic killing. By employing “god-sanctioned” sacrifice – which entailed implicitly threatening the lives of many for supposed wrongdoing – the powerful helped frighten the masses into staying in proverbial line. Those at the top became, by proxy, gods among men and women, and they maintained those positions by doling out killings as they deemed necessary.

“By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralize the underclass and instill fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control,” lead study author Joseph Watts stated in a press release.

“[H]uman sacrifice provided a particularly effective means of social control because it provided a supernatural justification for punishment,” says study co-author Russell Gray. “Rulers, such as priests and chiefs, were often believed to be descended from gods and ritual human sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of their power.”

The method by which sacrifices were carried out reads like a horrifying laundry list of ways you would never want to go out. Ritual killings took the form of “burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being cut to pieces, crushed beneath a newly-built canoe or being rolled off the roof of a house and decapitated.” Once a society began using sacrifice keep the ancient equivalent of the 1 percent in the top slot and slaves at the bottom, the system became self-perpetuating.

“What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force,” says researcher Quentin Atkinson, “making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social structure."

The study, which was published in Nature, holds obvious implications for the role of religion – and, of course, fear – in our own top-down, elite-ruled culture.

“Religion has traditionally been seen as a key driver of morality and cooperation,” states Watts, “but our study finds religious rituals also had a more sinister role in the evolution of modern societies.”

Source: AlterNet, Kali Holloway, April 7, 2016

[Konfusius]

Hard to imagine that something similar would not be utilised / deployed nowadays by circles in similar high positions. It's maybe just we don't publicly see or witness the sacrifices any more. Or don't recognize them as such…

[Spaced]

Hard to imagine that something similar would not be utilised / deployed nowadays by circles in similar high positions. It's maybe just we don't publicly see or witness the sacrifices any more. Or don't recognize them as such…

Many states still employ the death penalty. Many disenfranchised youth are enlisted in the armed forces and sent to die overseas. Etc.

[Stranger]

I do get pretty tired of it when religion keeps getting the blame for all human evils, especially when, say, Christianity or Buddhism get lumped implicitly with human sacrifice cults.

The facts are that 1) our brains are wired such that any identifiable grouping characteristic - race, language, occupation, religion - will automatically create a categorization into "us" and "them"; it's a fact of human nature. Regardless of what basis the grouping is based on, as soon as the grouping is made group conflict is just a step away. There's nothing unique about religion in this regard.
2) Whenever there is a power vacuum, those desiring power will attempt to step in and seize it. That's how they polarize (fulfill their soul's strongest desire), so it's equally inevitable that this will occur. And if you have a ready-made group of people who are already following a leader, it's a natural place for an STS personality to step in and steer the group into a harmful direction. Again, it doesn't matter whether the position in question is king of a country, CEO of a company, Pope/imam, etc. There is nothing unique about religion in that regard, once again - except perhaps that the followers have more zeal that can be misdirected.

So all you need to create all the negative effects typically ascribed to religion are 1) any means of grouping people and 2) the opportunity to lead it toward STS. Those are generic requirements not specific to religion. But what gets lost when this generic situation is mischaracterized as somehow applying only to religion is religion's benefit in focusing the person beyond the immediate/material surroundings and toward the eternal, the mysterious Beyond (whether God, nirvana or anything else), and the inspirational idea that it's possible to have a meaningful connection to it in this life. The ultimate emphasis placed by religions on moral truths, however distorted yet nonetheless focusing on the importance of some form of justice, care, service. Until the recent development of spirituality-without-religion (and it's about time, too) -- the equivalents of Carla and Don were mystics operating within the world's religious traditions. Has mankind's fundamental longing for the Creator been misdirected at times? No question. But I would argue that without religions, there would have been more carnage and chaos in the world, not less - and far fewer works of beauty and acts of compassion.