The Power of Ritual in Prehistory: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity

by Brian Hayden

The Power of Ritual in Prehistory is the first book in nearly a century to deal with traditional secret societies from a comparative perspective and the first from an archaeological viewpoint. Providing a clear definition, as well as the material signatures, of ethnographic secret societies, Brian Hayden demonstrates how they worked, what motivated their organizers, and what tactics they used to obtain what they wanted. He shows that far from working for the welfare of their communities, traditional secret societies emerged as predatory organizations operated for the benefit of their own members. Moreover, and contrary to the prevailing ideas that prehistoric rituals were used to integrate communities, Hayden demonstrates how traditional secret societies created divisiveness and inequalities. They were one of the key tools for increasing political control leading to chiefdoms, states, and world religions. Hayden's conclusions will be eye-opening, not only for archaeologists, but also for anthropologists, political scientists, and scholars of religion.

Genres: History, Anthropology, Religion, Nonfiction, Sociology, Archaeology, Conspiracy Theories

410 pages, Hardcover

Published October 18, 2018

Reviews

[Thomas · Rating 4 out of 5]

My review: Man, this is a dark, cynical way of viewing human history. While Hayden may be exaggerating the centrality and near universality of secret societies in the transition to complex societies, I think he is probably right to some degree. Where humans are, there are always power-hungry individuals who seek power, wealth, and prestige. Once populations are able to create and store surpluses, the possibility of unequal distribution immediately emerges. Even as children, we form cliques and promote social differentiation. It seems that the only antidote to rising power differentials among individuals is subsistence level lifestyles. And that is hard on everyone.

What Hayden does not take seriously is any positive role for religion in the well-being of communities. The religious impulse obviously predates the existence of secret societies. They didn't create it-- they twisted it to their ends. That doesn't preclude religious faith and practice promoting more salutary ends as well.

But in terms of describing how societies may have changed from transegalitarian communities to chiefdoms and proto-states, Hayden is pretty convincing.
Notes:
Interesting reference to The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Ritual and Religion, edited by Timothy Insoll. Worth taking a look at relevant sections: introduction, ch 24 neolithic, ch 51 anatolia

Are secret societies a (necessary) precursor to ritual centers and further institutionalization of religion?
It should be no surprise that early chiefs and kings could get their outsized power through the collective efforts of secret societies who choose to elevate them.
Secret societies could be critical to understanding the evolution of political systems.

Alternatives to secret societies could include: saroans (large-scale work exchange groups), hunting societies, feasting societies, military and marital alliances, age grades, village administrations, extending kin networks, pilgrimage organizations, and spirit quests.

My question: What archaeological evidence would you look for to determine the presence of a secret society as opposed to another form of religious ritual?
When do you interpret evidence of ritual as something that integrated diverse groups and interests in growing communities, versus exploiting that diversity for their own gain?
Maybe the size of ceremonial sites gives a clue?

In anthropology, any non-kinship organization is referred to as a “sodality.” Sodalities can be organizations based on politics, sports, occupational specializations, rituals, music, dance, military roles, or almost any other activities. Secret societies are a ritual type of sodality.

Definition of secret society: an association with internal ranks in which membership, especially in upper ranks, is exclusive, voluntary, and associated with secret knowledge.

Secret societies were one of a number of resource-based strategies (including feasting, prestige items, high funerary costs, high marriage costs, and military alliances) used by ambitious individuals to increase their control over people and resources

Here's a very astute generalization: A small percentage of all populations do have aggrandizer traits strongly developed, and it seems that they, by and large, become the elites and gravitate toward positions of power, including memberships and high positions in secret societies. They are relentlessly aggressive in getting what they want and in trying to change attitudes, norms, and rules to favor their strategies.

Hayden seems to adopt the position that rituals and beliefs in themselves were not major drivers of cultural change. It was the powerful members who utilized rituals and beliefs to their own ends that brought about the changes. Machiavellian perspective, or perhaps Hobbesian. Echoes of Marx are present, too- religion primarily as instrument for power. Disagrees strongly with Hodder on interpreting Catalhoyuk.

A very good point: The use of opulent ritual paraphernalia, costuming, and special foods is another frequent characteristic which underlines the self-interested political and economic motivations behind the formation of secret societies. Such materials were not required for ecstatic or other ritual experiences, as demonstrated by Australian Aboriginal initiations, monastic orders, ascetic hermits, and similar seekers of spiritual experiences.

What are some archeological clues that there may have been secret societies present in a community? 1. if it transformed into a hierarchy
2. if it produced large surpluses
3. if it contained very small ritual structures
4. remote structures outside the main community
5. human sacrifice or cannibalism
6. evidence of ecstatic states
7. special burials

It makes more sense to me that humans used caves primarily ritual and/or secretive activities rather than everyday living (eg "cavemen"). After all, who would want to live in a cave all the time when you could build structures in whatever location you wish?

Could Gobekli Tepe be the site of a secret society?

The standard archaeological explanatory model used in the Near East and elsewhere has been that ritual and religion served as the social “glue” that held societies together, an idea going back to Durkheim and Weber.

One of the problems with the scalar stress and social stress models that hold people together through integrative rituals is that these models assume that there is no motive for people to stay together. They are simply forced to live together as a result of population increases or settlement amalgamation due to climate deterioration, and have to resolve the resultant conflicts. However, an alternative view is that people congregated together because they were attracted to sources of wealth and prospects of improved lifestyles. In such a case, there was no scalar stress and no need for social glue or community-integrative rituals. The people who controlled the wealth and power in communities were in positions to impose cooperation and rules of behavior on their own terms, and people with hopes of sharing that wealth or power simply had to comply. These are the perspectives favored by political ecological models.

Secret societies could definitely be a stepping stone to early state priesthoods, and eventually elite-controlled, institutionalized religions. Viewing political complexity as emerging from secret society origins may also explain why the heads of states so often resorted to the use of terror and lavish impressive ritual displays of power to rule their domains. These were the main tactics used by most successful secret societies.
Thus, secret societies may constitute the missing link in understanding why religion played such a prominent role in the development of more complex polities, including early states. With the establishment of secret society organizations came the first commandments (against trespass and dishonoring the society), the first organized ritual system outside kinship groups with a corporate existence transcending individual lives, the first priest-like roles, and the first institutionalized links to power. In essence, I want to argue that secret societies created the foundations from which the world religions of the past three millennia emerged.

[s · Rating 3 out of 5]

I actually really liked the basic idea here: anthropologists often theorize secret societies in small-scale communities as having some kind of positive role in maintaining social cohesion, but isn't it more parsimonious just to see them as a parasitic means of concentrating power and resources?

Most of the book is a comprehensive survey of the ethnography of secret societies in various regions, which can get pretty dry but would make a good resource for anyone doing academic work. There is apparently a universal tendency to kill or at least maim 'civilians' who laugh at masked initiates or take their masks off during dances that I found fascinating. In general I'm convinced that a lot of these societies were about maintaining the impunity of a few and terrorizing everyone else.

I wish more was done to shore up the argument itself and to make its terms clear. Often 'secret society' seems to become as loose and meaningless a term as 'ritual' here; e.g. just the presence of luxury goods at an archaeological site becomes evidence for the operation of a secret society. I think there's also a historical argument here about how this is the means of primitive accumulation in societies that are not (yet) based on states and agriculture and all that, but it remains underdeveloped.

[avery · Rating 2 out of 5]

Hayden's archaeological comparative assessment of secret societies and secret sodalities analyzes the acquisition of power and wealth through the use of fear and the supernatural.

"Secret society members did not shrink from using any tactics they could to impress and intimidate their fellow villagers, no matter how gruesome." (2)

Hayden covers a plethora of secret societies around the world. In the New World: Hunter/Gatherers of the American Northwest, Hunter/Gatherers of California, Eastern and Western Pueblos of the American Southwest, Mesoamerica, the Great Plains, and the Eastern Woodlands. In the Old World: Oceania, Central Africa, and West Africa. Each region contains several societies which Hayden assesses through the ethnographic observations of motives and dynamics, sources of wealth, relation to politics, ideology, benefits and threats to communities, exclusivity, hierarchies, roles, public displays, sacred ecstatic experiences, enforcement, paraphernalia, proportion of population, sex, age, and frequency, and more.

The only complaint I have about this work is Hayden's minimal assessment of women's societies. Most anthropological and ethnographic findings by Western scholars have primarily focused on interviewing and recording the activities of men. This doesn’t necessarily mean that the men painted a false picture of their roles within their culture, but that the interviewers asking the questions did so in a nature that already assumed male-domination and female-subjugation. Despite these historically male-centric assessments of Indigenous American and African societies, there is still information available on the women in these societies.

For example, regarding the sex of the Indigenous American Eastern Woodlands: "Either men or women could enter the Midewiwin and Mitawit societies and hold positions in any of the four degrees. However, it seems that the main role of female initiates was to sing and to prepare food for feasts and to erect the ritual structures (Hoffman 1891:164,224,274; 1896:67-70,84,125)." (187).

This factor is an outlier in comparison to most secret societies around the world, where the highest-ranking positions are exclusively held by men. This is the entire paragraph regarding the assessment of sex in the Eastern Woodlands. Hayden automatically equates women typically holding the roles of singing and preparing food as automatically subordinate, despite there being no limitation on which positions they could hold. I am tired of the narrative that the roles women hold in societies aren't somehow integral to their functioning, and just as important as male-dominated roles. In addition, there is no mention of two-spirited peoples (vital members of great spiritual importance in Algonquian societies), or those who will change between the genders of man and woman during ritual.

Since this work was first published in 2018, I expected a much better assessment of gender and sex, given that the historical work regarding gender and sex amongst Indigenous societies has made great breakthroughs in the past two decades.

In regard to the ending: “Thus, secret societies may constitute the missing link in understanding why religion played such a prominent role in the development of more complex polities, including early states.” (372).

While I agree with Hayden’s argument that small scale secret societies can help to explain the evolution of state-religion control and power, I fail to agree completely with his statement that it developed into something more “complex”. Transegalitarian societies are not more or less complex than state based societies. The polities of transegalitarian societies are no less complex than that of early or modern states. Both are complex, both have differences and similarities.

In addition to this, Hayden claims: “They probably occurred in the European Upper Paleolithic, and possibly earlier.” (371)

Well no shit. While there is limited archeological evidence to paint as clear a picture as, say, the Western Pueblos, and those who lived in these European Paleolithic societies are long dead, it would be close to impossible for these types of secret societies to not exist in Europe. While Hayden doesn’t necessarily deny this. The way he words this sentence and quickly moves on wasn’t the best way to go about making this statement. This goes along with my previous complaint that Hayden equates state based societies to be more “complex” than transegalitarian ones. Eurocentrism came through a little bit (even if he didn’t intend it to).

[Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

If you read this all at once you will find it repetitive, but the author is trying to establish patterns. As a source book it works very well.

Hayden has compiled a thorough (if geographically uneven, which is hardly his fault given the differing levels of accessible information available) survey of the rise of secret societies in mostly non-agrarian and non-urbanized societies. His central point is that these societies arose in particularly affluent cultures moving out of hunter-gatherer phase but still partly in it. The accumulation of wealth means opportunities for hoarding and class stratification that previously did not exist. The way to set up a nascent aristocracy (whose descendants go on to become leaders in religion and politics) is to build up a secret society who is above and beyond the norms of the rest of society. These pacts must be internally inviolate and thus involve taboo breaking to get in.

Small business tyrants, in today's parlance. Or, on a larger scale, the Epstein flight logs. Taboos, of course, change over time and I struggle to think of premodern (or even pre 50 years ago) societies where pedophilia was a taboo, so the old version of these blackmail networks was usually rooted in something else like cannibalism or the threat of witchcraft/monopolization of its use as its pact binding taboo. In public the members would host ceremonies in disguise and rigorously police those who doubted they had extra human abilities.

One interesting element is that these societies were usually malignant to the rest of the community but not always. And particularly detrimental ones would meet opposition either by collective uprising or, more commonly, the rise of rival secret societies who set up opposition to them.

The case the author makes is circumstantial, yes, but it is a strong case. The implied argument is that archeologists often overlook signs of secret societies when conducting field work. The other implied argument is that the iron law of oligarchy predates literacy.

[T D · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'd facetiously five star this analysis only for its BONKERS ending line seeming to imply that Hayden believes the human rights abuses committed by secret societies in prehistory may have been beneficial in the grand scheme of eternity because their practices opened up the potential for human spiritual exploration. I BALKED I tell you.

This book wavers between genuinely revelatory in anthropological explanations of human belief systems alongside the development of human power structure patterns and increasingly generalist to an almost insensitive degree. The writing has weirdly asymmetrical acrimony from the author depending on the society being dissected. Despite even admitting the tactics appear worldwide in similar societies regardless of location, the same tactic is written about with wildly different tones depending on the geographical location of societies. Cannibalism as a means to achieve a sacred esoteric experience was actually defensible in certain societies (remember the Europeans consuming mummies?) while on other continents it was an unbearable act of hedonistic inferiority. The contempt is PALPABLE. The prose is often repetitive and laughably reductive at points. Still extremely formative analysis that ultimately accomplishes its goal of emphasizing secret societies in human civilization as a particular manifestation of numerous yet consistently topical factors with similar goals, strategies, and endgames.

[0:50]

Not really a book to be read at one go. But even dipping into this book is enough to give one a severe case of spiritual cold. Interestingly, even in only semi-agricultural groups, the elites formed relatively "global" alliances with other tribes, whose normal members were not in communication. God's message to Moses, that nobody can see his face and live, also takes a new meaning in noticing that these elites killed the people who saw them prepping for their shows or getting inside their disguises. They also used the excuse of angry demons as a leverage to gain benefits from the community they themselves tormented in the guise of these demons: destroying property, assaulting people and causing general havoc.

The formula seems to be: the more these psychopaths hurt people, the more the people's faith in them grows and the more resources they get for punishing people even more. This begs the question: if the pattern is this already with semi-agricultural Indian groups, how much further has it gone with the development of agriculture? Based on this book, it makes sense to assume that these sadists got globally connected very early and that a lot of the violence and maladies in societies is engineered or committed by them. Considering the inter-tribal alliance, one might reasonably assume that the global or inter-tribal elite networks could agree to wage war against each others' communities, because that is a major opportunity for the elites to get more resources and increase ritual activity.

If social organization developed along these lines, it would make sense to assume that mostly wars between groups were arranged for this purpose. The foundational world literature is for this purpose: they were all written by these elites, just as the mythologies were manipulated(although the beliefs have a real background, otherwise they wouldn't work: the substitute parent theory, through remnants of which they are still alive). As for the miracle of the internet, the internet is the same thing as an oracle of olden times: a divine, "self-organized" authority spouting out information which is all framed by the elites, much more insidiously than the much-touted mass media: it's not that the opinion was decided, but possibly the particular dichotomies were - along with endless mechanisms of cheap pride in what consists of suffering for the sake of those whose mere chortle constitutes that which one's purpose in life reduces to.

[Vanessa McHale · Rating 5 out of 5]

Solid, detailed scholarship and an important topic/analysis of power. Hayden deals with the brutality of human society and is willing to call out duplicitous agents—neither credulous (60s) nor supremacist (1880s), which is refreshing.

At the end of the day, all human religion and society is Scooby-Doo except they actually kill people and they get away with it.