THE ONCE AND FUTURE SKY GOD? – From Göbekli Tepe to The Zodiac – and Beyond…

This is a truly amazing and detailed series. So much research combined with your ability to bring it across so eloquently and precise is a gift that I thank you for giving me. Each post that you bring to the thread is eagerly awaited and makes so much sense. :-):flowers:
 
EPOC FORGING EARTH CHANGES

The Younger Dryas cometary event of 10,900 BC has been well covered on the forum and also especially by the writings of both Laura and Pierre, so it needs little introduction from me. For anyone wholly new to the topic, the impact map and bullet point summary below from the Comet Research group should convey an idea of what a world changing terror it must have been.

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In a nutshell, a monster 200 mile wide comet, having long since entered the solar system, came within direct electrical relationship with earth, whereupon it likely partially fragmented under the strain and reigned down fire and brimstone across close to half the planet (the images below of the 200 times smaller Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 breaking apart before impacting Jupiter in 1994 gives one a low baseline gauge of the scale of such a cosmic crap shoot!)

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In this post I am going to do attempt to widen the focus somewhat away from this singular event and place it within a wider context, because long before and long after there was what an acceleration towards and then out of a phase transition point at 10,900 BC, that involved both multiple and significant environmental changes and ensuing or corresponding changes in human culture.

I’ve further worked on my draft timeline since a previous post, expanding it with more data and pointers as they emerged in my research (though still a work in progress), so I’ll share with you what I have of noteworthiness for the 8,000 years running up to the cometary event of 10,900 BC and the 10,000 years following (which brings us up to all of 9,000 BC). The pertinent dated data is unsurprisingly scant enough, especially with my focus being on one area, namely the eastern Mediterranean / Anatolia / Levant region, but it is still worth reviewing because there is still plenty of import to take on board.

In my next post we'll dig down into the implications of some of this.

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Part two of post follows on.
 
Thanks Michael, I have always wondered about the meaning of painted hands in cave paintings.

It is great to know little by little the secrets that are in sight of all.

Cool.
Yes indeed Wandering Star. It's one of those fascinating moments when the thing you've been looking at and accepting on face value (and as programmed) suddenly transforms into the blindingly obvious (if my hypothesis is correct of course). From then on in you can never look at the same thing in the same way again, and you question how it was your brain/mind didn't recognize it before - it's that obvious.

This little find - and I've a few more like this to share anon - has fascinating implications. I see it as not just a direct observational like for like but of deeper semiotic meaning. It being the very 'Hand of God' is the most important I think; that the fearful, beautiful, animated and dynamically alive object in the sky was the manifestation of creation and creative power itself. From the hand came change and transformation, illumination and being. I think the ancients were at some level deeply aware that the coming of these hands of the god/s heralded death and heralded renewal. That they were creation manifest and that they themselves were a part of this process. The direct connection between human creativity and gods hand was deeply rooted - perhaps originally as an STO grace and then increasingly by some as an STS opportunity for power on earth.

There is also the distinct possibility that we are looking at trauma programming here. I'll write more about this anon but the idea that the caves where these paintings first arrived were 'shamanic' (one word I would happily ban from use in anthropological studies!) and accessed by the people at large doesn't hold water when you look at them with a colder more analytical eye. I think the later we go the more likely it is they were principally 'elite' sanctuaries and were used as initiation training stations to bring those willing into a very different way of being and mindset. So when we see large numbers of these prints I think we are looking at a form of brain washing in action. As I say more on this suggestion anon.
 
QUESTIONS RAISED BY THE PERIOD SURROUNDING THE YOUNGER DRYAS


Following on from the outline chronology I posted previously, I want to focus in on the build up to, and the period out from, the Younger Drays event.

The last glacial duration began about 100,000 BP and lasted until around 22,000 years ago concluding with the final Glacial Maximum from 25,000-20,000 BC. In other words, out of the last 100,000 years only 20% of that time has been spent in the warmer interglacial we are in now, meaning ice age living has been the vast majority of known and lived experience for anatomically modern humans. But that doesn’t mean that environmental life in the ice age was a constant – far from it. A look at temperature changes over the last 60,000 years registered in the Greenland Ice caps reveals a consistent picture of periodic warming and cooling but all strictly within a stable band of approximately 12-14° (an interesting challenge in itself when you consider the panic we are being led into over a proposed 1.5°change!)

However once the interglacial warming begins around 20,000 BC there follows a period of underlying increase in temperature of a further circa 10° that settles at a new base line some 11,000 years later around 9,000 BC, bringing us into the Holocene that we still inhabit today. The implicit, underlying suggestion being that the dramatic increase in temperature that went along with this sustained period of climactic chaos was well on its way to establishing itself prior to the cosmic induced catastrophes surrounding the Younger Dryas, and would have happened in any event as part of a longer-term fundamental transition from ice age to interglacial period. This is perhaps best witnessed by remembering that the 1,200-year return to severe cold brought on by the Younger Dryas event dramatically reversed and accelerated to well above previous norms of warming once the impact of the disturbance caused to the underlying momentum cleared the system.

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It is also worth noting that similar style read outs from the ice data to those left behind by the Younger Dryas occurred on a regular enough basis and yet always settled back down after they completed to the base line low of the prevailing ice age.

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For example, the so called Dansgaard-Oeschger event which commenced around 37,000 BC looks near identikit to the YD, with first a dramatic rise in temperature then a stepping back down before exploding back upwards at the 34,000BC mark before once again plummeting back down.

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It is this plummeting back down to the baseline of the ice age that shows the system was not going to sustain any warming despite whatever external energy source caused the original severe oscillation (and in this example, it seems to span almost precisely two possible 3,600 year comet cycle events).

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We can also note that along with the proposed regular 3,600 year comet cluster event, there are a number of other brief but notable spikes in temperature rise that are otherwise unaccounted for and may be related to random visitors or recycling debris from previous encounters or some other earth bound climatic event such as large scale volcanism (though again these tend to correspond with extra-terrestrial visitors, so…?)

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Therefore, life in the Ice age, whilst having its long-term ‘normal’ for the inhabitants, was far from stable millennium to millennium.

Setting aside for now what the C’s have suggested about the longevity of the ‘Atlantean’ civilisation throughout much of the late Ice age, the scant archaeological record does hint that as the process of gradual warming commenced around 20,000 BC there followed interesting cultural markers hinting at pockets of activity that showed signs of population growth and an economic intensification, diversification of food stuffs and early stage husbandry. The transition to the Epipalaeolithic Near East around 18,000 BC, saw nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small, seasonal camps beginning to make sophisticated stone tools using microliths - small, finely-produced blades that were hafted in wooden implements - first by the Kebaran culture in the Early Epipalaeolithic and then in the Late Epipalaeolithic by the Natufians (12,500–9,500 BC) who are seen by some as the cultural ancestors of the post Younger Dryas Pre-Pottery Neolithic A (PPN A) advances driven by cultures such as those in the region of Anatolia’s Göbekli Tepe .

However, there are some startling isolated cases of significantly more advanced activity prior to this. Around 21,000 BC at Ohalo II, on the shores of the Sea of Galilee, we find the earliest small-scale plant cultivation, some 11,000 years before the official onset of even basic agriculture with also the earliest evidence for the use of composite cereal harvesting tools and stone-made grinding implements. Around 18,000 BC there is evidence of the management of herds of Barbary sheep in North Africa and by 15,000 BC a complex of new features appear in the Nile valley indicating the beginnings of an intensive use of ground grain as a food source. The world's oldest evidence of bread making appears 14,500 BC at Shubayqa 1 in Jordan's north-eastern desert and the earliest known evidence of beer was found at the Raqefet Cave, Haifa in Israel, dating to approximately 11,000 BC, whilst at Tell Abu Hureyra 1, in the Upper Euphrates valley, Syria, a community of hunter-gatherers became the earliest known actual farmers in the world who by 10,900 BC were building up stores for long-term food security.

Just a handful of separated pocket incidences perhaps but suggesting an underlying trend, spread out as they are over 10,000 years and all taking place in North African/Middle Eastern locations.

The environment was slowly changing and so to were responses by the human population in the near east with an increasing application of low grade mixed husbandry and new technologies developed to incorporate a changing diet no longer based solely on hunting and gathering.

The big question remains why? Slowly rising temperatures is not enough of an answer (especially as they were not sustained until around 9-8,000 BC at what one might call modern agricultural levels) because rising temperatures had happened before for periods within the ice age context yet there is no evidence this led to any rise in husbandry. Anyway, the emergence of agriculture has always been linked by the mainstream with the rise of civilisation (complex societies managing surpluses within city walls) but here we are looking at examples some 8-10,000 years before the PPN A when this process most notably began for real and a further 5,000 years before the emergence of city states in Mesopotamia.

To my mind, there is something fundamental missing in this equation. Even though it is sporadic, it is clearly symptomatic of a rumbling under the surface, a drive to reduce dependency on hunted meat, or to spend more time in semi-sedentary behaviour, or some other existential reason and change in underlying ideology, that is enough to suggest some kind of wholly new environmental pressure, tenet of thinking or maybe that a widespread adaptive genetic change was afoot.

Correlation is not always a direct sign of causation, but the principle thing I have found that raises a significant enough red flag is that the 20,000 BC Rubicon coincides very closely with the slow onset of what has been termed the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck. This issue will have even more startling implications as we progress beyond the Younger Dryas (for obvious reasons that we will come to anon) which simply should not be ignored in the way they have been to date by archaeologists, anthropologists and historians, being a fundamental issue underpinning the explosion of changes that were to materialize into a sedentary agricultural and then economically determined lifestyle for one and all.

Before digging down into this issue, I first want to highlight that the period from 12,500 BC (the start of the Older Dryas/Bølling-Allerød period) on into the Younger Dryas commencing at 10,900 BC and out of the same, by way of the beginning of the Holocene at circa 9,500 BC, covers a transition period from sustained cold to sustained warming totaling 3,000 years, during which there were no fewer than 7 significant temperature events (4 dramatic increases ranging from 6° to a whopping 13°, and 3 equally dramatic plummets in temperature ranging from 8° to 12°).

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When you add in the likely comet cluster interaction of 12,500 BC, the massive bombardment of 10,900 BC by a rogue monster comet, the close passage of Mars and the ‘flood of Noah’ event of 10,650 BC, and the ensuing return debris and major/minor bombardments for however many centuries thereafter, it is a wonder that humans survived this period at all. In addition, we haven’t even mentioned the high likelihood of repeat interaction with space born plagues that must have repeatedly ravaged the survivors only increasing the trauma impacts on the collective genome (whilst possibly also bringing with them selective genetic changes in line with the process theorised by Pierre in his pivotal new work being currently shared on the forum).

We should here also note the remarkable suggestions made by the C’s concerning this time period:
  • Prior to the close passage and interaction with Mars and the great flood in 10,650 BC, the Earth had a suspended water-vapour canopy surrounding the planet, which was a natural element of the particular composition of the atmosphere of Earth at that particular time.
  • That Earth’s level of gravity was somewhat different to what we experience today; not so different that it would be perceptible to modern humans if they experienced it now, but enough to contribute to the feature of a suspended vapour canopy.
  • The altered gravitational state, as well as the suspended water-vapour canopy, along with other unnamed conditions that existed on the planet at that particular time, were conducive to longer life spans than are experienced by present day humans.
  • That the interaction with Mars leading to the great flood also knocked/propelled the Earth into a wholly new orbital position.
If correct, these statements imply:
  • That the earth had for some significant period of time existed under an overhanging water vapour-canopy and if as likely it was of uniform density may, for example, have blocked out clear visible access to the heavens 24/7 (so much for any extremely ancient constellational and sun worship!)
  • Such an environment may well correlate to a very different climatic model for earth’s weather (e.g. an additional norm of ice ages?)
  • That there were other unnamed unique conditions that existed on the planet (maybe relating to a galactic plasma event as per below?) that persisted along with the gravity differential and water-vapour canopy as a norm long before the changes post the Mars interaction; what these could have been or meant for life on earth we do not know other than that together provided for a longer life span for inhabitants (how much longer on average we do not know).
  • The implication of all this is that general robust health seems to have been more sustainable by the population and may explain the ability to withstand so many previous earth traumas.
  • All of the propositions raised by the C’s including the lighter (?) gravity differential had survived the comet bombardment of 10,900 BC intact only to be dismantled in full by the planetary chaos caused by the close interaction with Mars.
  • That the new orbital position relates to the length of the solar year/orbit around the sun, (position not necessarily being related to tilt), suggesting that the year was either shorter or longer – my guess being longer (though the implication of the enveloping water canopy may be that Time as we know it was non-existent as a concept anyway for the inhabitants).
I would also add the further conjecture:
  • That during the preceding period, whenever it was - circa 15,000 BC as suggested by Mary Settegast or much, much earlier – an alternative ‘sun’ connecting to the northern polar region, the great and only god, a unique plasma configuration emanating from far out in the galaxy to interact with our solar system and seeming to directly connect with earth, (and despite the vapour canopy), may have dominated the sky all alone with all living beings beneath held in the benign arms of this pulsating ‘man/bull’ god of the sometime Golden Age.
  • That the events the C’s describe broke the link with this external connection and led to what the ancients described as the gradual breakdown of this god, its dismemberment and ‘transformation’, or slaying as a great bull, culminating in its fall and departure post the great flood.
These are only some thoughts that come immediately to mind. I am sure other more astute members here may be able to suggest others or contradict/expand upon mine.

Whatever the case, the world was seemingly a very, very different place indeed.

I raise all this to try to convey that whilst other dramatic interactions with the cosmos had happened on a regular basis down the millennia preceding, it does seem as if these set of intense, highly compressed and cumulatively seismic events, changed human life on earth forever: and the biggest change was that it opened up the slow but steady road ahead to a shift to an increasingly agricultural way of life.

Which brings me back to the matter of the Y-Chromosome Bottleneck.
 
CONTEXT 1: Y-CHROMOSOME BOTTLENECK


In 2015 primary author Monika Karmin collaborated with one hundred co-authors to publish a ground-breaking peer-reviewed paper titled: A Recent Bottleneck in Y-Chromosome Diversity Coincides With a Global Change in Culture, which concluded that thousands of years ago, there was a drastic and sustained drop in the relative number of males in the global population.

The authors present a study of 456 geographically diverse high-coverage Y-chromosome sequences. Whilst the paper’s principle purpose was to focus on the theorised rapid colonisation out of Africa 250,000 years ago, they also detected a second much later bottleneck in Y-chromosome lineages surfacing within the Younger Dryas boundary that in contrast to demographic reconstructions based on mtDNA, strongly indicated an accelerated differential between males to females, rising from a previous 1 male to every 3.5 females to 1 male for every 8 females by 8,000 BC and a staggering 17 females per single male by 5,000 BC, before as dramatically falling back in ratio to where we stand now with near parity of global birth rates.

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Samples were obtained from East and West Africa, from the Near East, from Europe, Siberia, South Asia, South Central Asia, East and Southeast Asia, Oceania, and the Andes, meaning it was a truly international perspective.

The authors hypothesize that this bottleneck was caused by cultural changes affecting variance of reproductive success among males, saying:

"The surprisingly low estimates of the male effective population size might be explained either by natural selection affecting the Y-chromosome or by culturally driven sex-specific changes in variance in offspring number. As the drop of male to female effective population size does not seem to be limited to a single or a few, selection is not a likely explanation. However, the drop of the male effective population size during the mid-Holocene corresponds to a change in the archaeological record characterized by the spread of Neolithic cultures, demographic changes, as well as shifts in social behavior."

In the ensuing debates around the paper’s findings (which have not been disputed), cultural practices that reduce the male gene pool such as selective killing of males, castration, and jailing of males to prevent reproduction, have all been discounted because of the universality of the global findings. Simply put no human political, social or cultural activity could have been the cause without taking place everywhere at the same time to the same level of intensity for 5,000 years or more.

This is why the preferred cause for many – the complex transition from hunter-gatherer to an agricultural way of life – also doesn’t stand up to scrutiny. Though farming practices did indeed eventually spread globally, they happened very slowly and in a seemingly ad hoc manner and in no way relate in uniform pattern to the data concerning the speed of acceleration of the Y-chromosome bottleneck.

That is why researchers such as Antonio Zamora have posited the cataclysmic events of the Younger Dryas as the most feasible of global environmental causes. However, whilst making his case, even he had to admit:

The decrease in effective population size for all regions in the Y-chromosome graph starts gradually at the onset of the Younger Dryas 12,900 years ago, then it dips suddenly and it continues to decrease well beyond the 1,300-year duration of the cold event.

Significant research has been published that shows that birth rates of male children are indeed impacted by environmental calamities. In 2019 post the catastrophic events in Japan, researchers found a link between extreme stress and lower male-to-female sex ratio at birth with, according to Dr Misao Fukuda, the conception of boys being especially vulnerable to external stress factors. Meanwhile Finish researchers found out that more males were born during warm years and an increase of 1 degree Celsius during 2 years corresponded to approximately 1% more sons born annually, with the researchers concluding that logically a period of cold years may decrease the relative male population in a similar fashion.

The problem with this line of thinking in relation to the Younger Dryas being a significant causative agent in the Y-Chromosome bottleneck is that human populations had experienced significant environmental and temperature ups-and-downs previously to the YD event with next to no comparable signal being registered in the DNA data.

More importantly, if one digs down into the nitty-gritty of the data from the 2015 paper, it becomes abundantly clear that the commencement of the build-up in the bottleneck began as early as 22,000 BC, a full 11,000 years before the beginning of the Younger Dryas event.

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If ever a graph told a thousand stories, this one does. As you can see, except for an unexplained downturn then sudden up-spike around 75,000 BC, the rate of male to female births as determined by the mtDNA/Y-chromosome data was remarkably constant for over 110,000 years at a rate of around 3 to 1 female to males. But then as the Glacial Maximum ended, a slow up tick began as early as 23,000 BC that suddenly accelerated around 18,000 BC and continued increasing through the Younger Dryas boundary to reach 8 females for every 1 male by 8,000 BC (long after the YD cold period had been replaced by consistent warmth) and then accelerated further again from there to reach the high point of 17 females to one male by 5,000 BC, when it almost immediately began bouncing straight back down again.

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Interestingly – and we will touch on this again later - it seems that the Near East was the first to bounce back, almost 1,000 years before anywhere else. Smackings of the UK getting a head start on the industrial revolution because of anti-bacterial tea drinking habits (and yes, that is a theory with a reasonable amount of supporting data!)

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This is all indescribably strange and rightly baffles nearly everyone who doesn’t just decide it’s vaguely cultural or vaguely environmental or vaguely both, and then closes the book before getting back to their normal line of socio-economic-cultural explanations for the revolutionary changes that took place in near eastern human society between 20,000 and 5,000 BC.

Well there’s no hiding from the data and the data says something changed around 10,000 years before the Younger Dryas that fundamentally and (in the length of time we are looking at) momentarily altered the very fabric of the most basic relationship in all human culture – namely that of men to women and women to men: and the Younger Dryas was only a blip on the road map of this process.

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That’s why I come back to the likelihood that this was some kind of externally directed intervention in the gene pool, be it viral or ‘frequency’ induced or by some other means activated by an external ‘galactic force’ of nature at the time of the end of the glacial maximum relating to such a fundamental change in the local information field that it happened right across the globe, irrespective of each indigenous culture’s state of development or relationship to localised environmental factors. The fact that the momentum continues for over 17,000 years and then abruptly halts before resetting down to close to the previous norm transcends any knowledge that we currently possess as to a plausible cause; we need to think outside the box, be it directed STS intervention or some form of interaction with precessional/electrical/magnetic/gravitational forces beyond our solar system. Wild I know, but the data itself is wild and the signal to noise extremely strong; as are the implications that follow with regard to cultural developments, the rise of secret societies and perhaps even the furtherance of widespread psychopathology as the most important force for directed change on our planet.
 
CONTEXT 2: THE EMERGENCE OF SECRET SOCIETIES

Session 16 October 1994:

Q: (L) I would like to know what is the origin of the Freemasons?

A: Osirians.

Q: (L) Can you tell us when the original Freemasons formed as a society?

A: 5633 B.C.


Q: (L) Is Freemasonry as it is practiced today the same?

A: 33rd degree, yes.


Q: (L) So, there is a continuing tradition for over 7 thousand years?

A: Yes.

This startling series of claims by the C’s has stuck with me ever since I first read the above many moons ago now. At the time I simply couldn’t place it into any known context – it seemed so bizarre to think of all those bowler hatted bank managers I had watched as a kid trapse into the masonic hall next to my home having nefarious antecedents going back 7,000 years to almost beyond the boundaries of known civilization. Having briefly toyed with being a mason myself (out of pure curiosity and before I knew any better!) I can tell you first hand that what goes on behind those closed doors is even more bizarre than you can imagine – and yes technically I can get still get myself killed for sharing this fact even though I haven’t been near the organisation in 18 years :whistle: .

If you think about what the C’s suggest, if true, it has remarkable implications because it’s clear that the establishment of the Freemasons in 5,633 BC (how precise, with that very interesting 33 at the end of the date), being but the latest step in a process of even greater antiquity; for how else could a group loftily called the Osirians, (likely an existing secret society based on the deeper knowledge of the Osiris myth), have the accumulated knowledge and purpose to establish the masons but that they themselves had been founded long before, especially when you consider that the C’s say that the 33rd degree of masonry, supposedly the most lofty and ‘secret’ of all known degrees, (setting aside for now the likelihood of there being further hidden degrees above this), was fully functional by 5,633 BC.

As I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries surrounding the advent of the Göbekli Tepe centered outburst of activity in south-eastern Anatolia from circa 10,000 BC, and as I crossed referenced to other outcrops in places such as the Levant and in particular the area we know as Israel today, I began to see signs that what the mainstream saw as a benign activity had a much darker underbelly than hitherto realised. Among many such signs, burial practices involving very singular people and their skulls kept cropping up, especially in relation to caves in out of the way places. None of the explanations I read from scholars came close to explaining what I was seeing.

Then I came across the 1980s finds from at Nahal Hemar Cave in the Judean desert dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) period around the 8th millennium BC. I will likely come back to this site in more detail anon but for now let me introduce you to the series of carved stone - yes stone - masks that were found there:

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According to the archaeologists, the cave users were your average farmers from the agricultural villages in the woodland regions nearby.

Right….!

I have some professional knowledge of masks and their incredibly potent mesmeric power and I had been tracking with suspicion the increase in mask production from Göbekli Tepe onward, and I can assure you these terrors are not the product of simple farmers! Therefore, it was at this point that the C’s comment began to ring loudly in my head. Were the hints of deeply nefarious practices with very ancient roots that I kept stumbling on actually tell-tell signs of secret societies being about their business of shaping society as early as the PPN?

This was an idea I had certainly not come across in any of the academic literature to date; but so many symptoms seemed to point powerfully in that direction – the continual use of caves and special purpose buildings; uniquely directed highly symbolic architecture; symptoms of the emergence of bizarre rituals; masks and other signs of elite practices below the surface; surplus gathering; the use of feasting, alcohol and likely other substances… and of course the economic emergence of agriculture. The list went on and on.

So, just for the hell of it, I did an online search to see if anything in the literature would come up that would event hint that this was something scholars had also noted.

On my very first search, and much to my amazement I struck gold. Following certain hints in certain journals I fortuitously stumbled upon THE POWER OF RITUAL: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity by Bryan Hayden, Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University as well as a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

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The title and cover alone was enough for me to immediately order a copy, (though my expectations at that time remained pretty low), for as with many highly specialised academic works it’s a pricey buy; but believe me it’s worth every cent spent ten times over.

Published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press (therefore as mainstream academia as you can get), this weighty tome of scholarly deduction is the closest thing to a game changing time bomb I’ve come across from the pen of an accomplished– if radical thinking – professional.

The summation of 25 years work, Hayden introduces his book with a clear statement of intent:

Reading the early ethnographies for this book has deepened my appreciation for the very significant contributions that so many pioneering ethnographers made during the last part of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. It is apparent that they realized the importance of recording as much detail as possible about traditional ways of life that were rapidly disappearing, and they seem to have spared no effort to record those vanishing cultural traditions… The scenes conjured up by early ethnographers never fail to amaze and sometimes even perturb many readers, including myself. They are some of the most extraordinary accounts in the ethnographic record.

So it seems odd that archaeologists have overlooked them for so long in most places. The goal of this book is to place secret societies at the forefront of archaeological consciousness and to have them occupy their rightful place in prehistorians’ accounts of how and why many important socio-political and religious changes took place in the past. However, the prominence of ritual and religion in the emergence of socioeconomic and political complexity has always been something of an odd feature. The vast amounts of time and effort supposedly devoted to the spirits at Chavin, Teotihuacan, Stonehenge, Avebury, Ur, Karnak, and countless other major centers all seem strange if their only basis was belief in the supernatural. The argument in this volume is that secret societies provide the missing link to explaining how and why these developments took place.

The rigorously notated and documented volume that follows is structured so as to present evidence as follows:
  • An opening statement chapter on the widespread nature of secret societies as well as the word ‘secret’ in the term secret society.
  • A highly detailed systematic exploration of the ethnographic records as well as other scholar’s work in this field, from both the new world (American north west, south west, plains, eastern woodlands, and California / Mesoamerica) and the old world (Oceania, central and west Africa), all of which makes up the bulk of the 370 pages.
  • An exploration of the implications for archaeology and then on to his final conclusions.
This post is not the place to give a complete overview and review of this complex and detailed work and it more than deserves a thread of its own (as well as a Mind Matters show).

Among the many, many shocks and light bulb moments was the amazement that the study of ancient secret societies has such a long tradition in academic studies as well as in contemporary scholarly research. We see so many woo-woo works on the Masons and the Illuminati that one would think they were the only existing or historical secret societies on record as well as taking for granted that it is a fringe study untouched by scholarly rigour. Far from being true on both counts and there are over 20 pages of scholarly references past and present that close this overview by Hayden.

I will begin with a series of extensive quotes from his opening chapter ‘THE SECRET’. I have removed the many citations for clarity of reading – but be assured near every paragraph is littered with them. The first sequence below gives a thorough background to his thinking.

This book is about secret societies: their dynamics, their raisons d’être, their characteristics according to ethnographic accounts, and their importance for understanding changes in the archaeological record. Secret societies embodied some of the most awe-inspiring events in the cultural repertories of traditional societies. They brought to earth masked spirits who performed supernatural feats and exerted exceptional influences on the living. Those in high positions claimed to hold the secrets of the universe and of life, to be able to control spirits, confer wealth, bring the dead back to life, exorcise the possessed, and perform supernatural feats. Secret societies often built elaborate special structures. These organizations may have been precursors of both stage magic shows and institutionalized religions, and they may have played critical roles in the foundation of complex political organizations.

Secret societies had mystery, pomp, impressive displays, and above all, claims to secret supernatural power…. Behind the staged dramas, there were often real and macabre displays of ruthless power including human sacrifices. Trespassers on to the grounds of secret societies were killed or, if they were lucky, got off with a beating… Reading the early ethnographic descriptions is not always for the faint of heart. Secret society members did not shirk from using any tactics they could to impress and intimidate their fellow villagers, no matter how gruesome. Memberships in the most important societies came at high costs not only in terms of material property, but in physical and emotional terms as well. To prove such commitment, candidates in some societies had to make their wives available for sex with leaders of the society or even give their wives away, or they had to provide human sacrifices, engage in cannibalism, or even eat their own sons.

To enter into the world of secret societies is to enter a world of mystery, magic, mortification, smoke and mirrors imbued with supernatural and real power. At times, comparisons with the “dark side” of the Force in Star Wars might not be too farfetched.

Perhaps because of these features, secret societies have fascinated amateur and professional researchers of politics and religion for well over a century, and the accounts are still captivating. As early as the 1840s, Paul Kane recorded a Hamatsa ceremony and used the term “secret society” to refer to exclusive ritual organizations on America’s Northwest Coast with costly initiations. Considerable anthropological attention was subsequently devoted to secret societies from 1890 to 1940, although much less interest has been displayed by academicians since then. Members were usually sworn to keep the secrets of their society’s power on pain of death. Secret societies occurred in tribal and chiefly societies and, in some cases, persisted into modern industrial societies.

In most other areas, secret societies have been ignored altogether (again with some notable exceptions). Whitehouse, in particular, was a pioneer in promoting the existence of secret societies in prehistoric cultures, especially Neolithic caves.

In archaeology, it has become fashionable to invoke the vague power of ritual and beliefs in attempts to explain cultural changes of the past, especially where impressive ritual structures appeared. However, the precise way in which rituals could create religious or political power has remained nebulous. At most, the existing explanations simply attribute major religious constructions to the power of beliefs and rituals without anchoring explanations in more tangible facets of culture. Alternatively, explanations have appealed to various social stresses that rituals purportedly helped alleviate. In contrast, secret societies have the potential of linking ideologies and rituals to the acquisition of power and particularly to explain why religion or ritual has played such an important role in the emergence of more and more complex societies leading up to civilization.

Where there have been attempts to identify and situate secret societies, or “religious sodalities,” in broader cultural dynamics, as in the American Southwest, the architectural remains have generally been interpreted in functional terms, especially as a ritual means for reducing social tensions and binding amalgamated kinship groups together in the same community. This functionalist interpretation is in stark contrast to the ethnographic accounts of secret societies which the following chapters illustrate.

In Europe and Asia, the very concept of a secret society seems to be unknown or not well understood among archaeologists. The recent weighty tome on the prehistory of religion from Oxford University Press (Insoll 2011) does not even have an index entry for secret societies or ritual sodalities, and there is no discussion devoted to them other than two very brief passages. This lack of attention by archaeologists is curious since the anthropological literature describes secret societies as playing prominent roles in community dynamics. Given the widespread ethnographic occurrence of secret societies in tribal societies, it would indeed be surprising if secret societies did not play important roles in many prehistoric cultures throughout the world. The goal of this book is to help rescue secret societies from this state of oblivion in archaeology and to demonstrate that they likely played pivotal roles in socio-political and religious developments in the past. I am convinced that they constitute a sort of “missing link” in the cultural evolution of more complex societies.

I have been investigating secret societies for more than twenty-five years and have concluded that they provide a critical link in our understanding of how individuals augmented their power in many communities and regions. I first became alerted to the potential importance of secret societies when D’Ann Owens undertook a study for me of the ritual contexts of children’s handprints and footprints in the Upper Paleolithic painted caves of France. In order to understand what those rituals may have been like, she examined the ethnographies of complex hunter/gatherers to see what kinds of rituals children were involved in. Owens concluded that the most likely context for children’s participation in rituals was secret societies.

On the basis of that study, I realized that secret societies not only could be potentially identified in the archaeological remains of complex hunter/ gatherer and tribal cultures, but that secret societies were often the most powerful organizations in those societies. Moreover, the power they wielded cross-cut kinship and even community boundaries. Serendipitously, in my own excavations at the Keatley Creek site on the Canadian Plateau, there were several puzzling small structures about 100–200 meters from the core of that large prehistoric village of complex hunter/gatherers. I initially thought that these small outlying structures might be dwellings of outcasts, migrants, specialized hunters, possibly shamans, or women’s menstrual houses. However, after Owens’ study, and given the very secluded nature of the structures on the outskirts of the residential area at Keatley Creek, together with the ethnographically documented existence of secret societies during the nineteenth century in the locality, it occurred to me that these might be specialized ritual structures used by secret societies. Subsequent investigations of those structures have largely confirmed this interpretation...

Given these developments, together with my ongoing interest in aggrandizer strategies for promoting aggrandizers’ own self-interests, I was keen to find out more about the underlying nature of secret societies…

So immediately, we have some very important red flags:
  • The existence of secret societies stretching back into prehistoric cultures, including inside Neolithic caves, and that they occurred in many pre-civilised cultures irrespective of how those societies were ostensibly led.
  • A missing link in understanding at a deeper level substantive cultural, spiritual, political and economic changes as they occur in the archaeological record that have hitherto been given fatuous or nebulous reasons for happening.
  • The power to exert exceptional influence over the living through fear, manipulation and endearment with the ‘dark side’ for material and political gain.
  • The ruthless use of any tactics they could to impress and intimidate, no matter how gruesome, including sexual abuse, murder, human sacrifice, child abuse and cannibalism.
  • By becoming the most powerful organization in a society, they played a critical role in the foundation of complex political organization by linking ideologies and rituals to the acquisition of control.
  • The means by which individuals augmented their power over both communities and whole regions via aggrandizer strategies for promoting aggrandizers’ own self-interests
  • The use of architecture and the building of elaborate special structure facilities to create secure structural bases from which to wield power that cross-cut kinship and even community boundaries.
  • Membership came at high cost, both materially, physically and psychologically for all those drawn into the circle (or square as we will see later on).
As the book goes on, and no matter which culture he explores, one fundamental issue comes through time and time again – the manipulation and control by a small minority of the majority for access to and disproportionate ownership of surplus production and communal material wealth making capacity.

Sound at all familiar…? The tell-tell footsteps of psychopaths and schizoid personalities doing what they do best (an indeed Hayden does not hold back on his understanding in this area).

I also find it interesting that apparently the previously considerable anthropological attention given to secret societies effectively came to a sudden end in the 1940’s and has become a backwater for academics ever since. Most telling considering as he says that secret societies persisted on into modern industrial societies. And I thought we were the first conspiracy theorists!

Next, I quote from section on the importance of secret societies:

The preceding comments provide a general background for understanding why archaeologists and anthropologists should be interested in secret societies. More specifically, these reasons can be enumerated as follows.

First, secret societies are recognized in their own communities as being important and powerful, often embodying the most elaborate traditions of their cultures in terms of ritual, art, music, food, dance, costumes, and language – all aspects that make individual social groups unique and contribute to their cultural identities.

Second, secret societies only appear to emerge among transegalitarian (complex) hunter/gatherers and subsequent agricultural tribal or chiefdom societies. As such, they constitute a relatively recent phenomenon in cultural evolution, likely extending back only to the Upper Paleolithic, or in exceptional circumstances perhaps back to the Middle Paleolithic.

Third, because the most powerful members of communities generally dominate the highest ranks of secret societies, and because they control significant resources and means to advance their own hegemonic control in the community, secret societies constitute powerful driving forces for cultural changes including major changes in ideologies, cultural values, and beliefs, as well as new sociopolitical relationships including an increased centralization of power.

Fourth, secret societies generally include members from different kinship groups and even communities, thus establishing a supra-kinship and supra-community level of organization, control, and power with a far wider demographic and economic base than otherwise might have existed. Secret societies, therefore, could have served ambitious individuals as the means for establishing community and regional political organizations with centralized control. Ware emphasizes that ritual sodalities in the American Southwest were regional organizations that often encompassed different linguistic and ethnic groups. Other ethnographers have explicitly linked the development of secret societies to the limitations of kinship systems for developing political control (e.g., Chapters 2 and 7). Such regional organization also characterized the American Northwest Coast, the Great Plains, the Great Lakes, California, Africa, and Melanesia. Thus, secret societies have a strong tendency to form far- reaching regional networks or interaction spheres.

Fifth, secret societies are important because they constitute a major means for extracting surplus resources and wealth from community members and for concentrating these surpluses in the hands of a few individuals. Moreover, they only appear to have occurred in areas capable of producing significant surpluses. Both the carrot and the stick were often employed, with rewards for those who contributed and intimidation or coercion used for those who were reluctant contributors. Supernatural justifications for these levies and physical means of enforcing requisitions typified many secret societies.

Sixth, secret societies may have led to the development of some of the most notable prehistoric ritual centers and ultimately to the formation of regional state religions. Archaeologists have long been aware that religious institutions seem to have played key roles in the emergence of political complexity, from the first “communal buildings” or shrines of the Neolithic, or even the Epipaleolithic, to the dominating temple or mortuary mounds or megaliths of early chiefdoms, to the impressive ziggurats and pyramids of the first states.

The scale of investment and the artistic efforts devoted to religious institutions dwarf any other undertaking in these polities that archaeologists have detected. Yet, for a long time, attempting to deal with religion was considered a hopeless task by many archaeologists, as exemplified by Hawkes’ dictum that religion and ideology are the least accessible, if not totally inaccessible, aspects of prehistory. As a result, for a long time, the reason why religion was so central to the emergence of political complexity was viewed in terms of religious fanaticism or other mysterious factors. I argue that it is no happenstance that chiefs and early kings played prominent roles in rituals and feasts. Because of the political roles that secret society members played within – and between – communities, secret societies appear to have considerable potential for understanding why ritual and religion were such central elements in the early development of political systems. It can be argued that secret societies were the first institutionalized manifestation of ritual organizations linked to political power, and that this was, in fact, the explicit goal of secret societies. Therefore, the political dimension of secret societies may be critical to understanding the evolution of political systems.

Seventh, secret societies play important roles in lower or middle range archaeological theory. They are eminently visible archaeologically, especially where caves or specialized structures were used. They had ideological characteristics which help to explain the changes in iconography that characterize key periods in the archaeological record in certain areas, such as the European and Near Eastern Neolithic, and even the Upper Paleolithic. And the existence of secret societies helps explain unusual features of the archaeological record such as the use of deep caves, therianthropic images, human sacrifices, and cannibalism.

Thus, there are a variety of important reasons why archaeologists should be interested in secret societies. It should be emphasized, however, that no claims are being made for the universal occurrence of secret societies in the development of complex societies, especially since alternative organizational frameworks could serve similar functions of extending political control beyond kin groups.

Nevertheless, secret societies appear to have been relatively common at the transegalitarian and chiefdom levels, and they were powerful tools for promoting the self-interests of ambitious individuals, especially in terms of political control.

All summarized as:
  • A relatively recent phenomenon in cultural evolution i.e. by recent, earliest roots in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic and only appearing alongside the emergence of complex hunter/gatherers and subsequent agricultural, tribal or chiefdom societies .
  • The ability to embody the most elaborate traditions of a culture.
  • A powerful driving forces for cultural change including major changes in prevailing ideologies and appear to have been relatively common.
  • A supra-community level of organization, control, and power with a far wider demographic and economic base than otherwise might have existed.
  • Supernatural justification used for concentrating surpluses in the hands of a few individuals and only occurring in areas capable of producing significant surpluses.
  • The development of ‘religious’ centres originating with secret societies that eventually led on to the development of more complex, unified political power bases.
  • Secret societies were the first institutionalized manifestation of ritual organizations linked to political power, and that this was, in fact, their explicit goal.
  • They explain the long term fixation on caves and special structures as well as many other unusual features and developments in the archaeological record.
For those who may have a raised eyebrow or two, this next section is pivotal to grasp:

But first, it will be useful to obtain a few more insights into the nature and the character of secret societies.

WHAT IS THE SECRET?

One misconception needs to be addressed from the outset. The term “secret society” instils visions of clandestine meetings by people whose memberships and activities are carefully concealed from public scrutiny. In fact, this is not what is secret in secret societies. Instead of a hidden existence for these ritual organizations or a membership that was kept secret, everyone was usually well aware of the existence of these societies and knew who belonged to them. Members even flaunted the fact that they had been initiated, and they usually put on public displays to awe everyone in their communities with their arcane and profane powers.

The real “secret” was the ritual knowledge that members claimed was the key to their supposed arcane supernatural powers. The most important secrets were known only by the highest ranking members of secret societies… the secrecy was internal, not external. Secret knowledge was kept from lower ranking members as well as from the public. Such knowledge was typically supernatural in nature but need not have been.

BEHIND THE SECRET DOOR: A DEFINITION

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. However, there can be many different types of ritual sodalities. Secret societies differ from other types of religious sodalities in a number of key respects… At one end of the spectrum [there] are inclusive or “open associations,” such as religious-based charity organizations which welcome participation from anyone and have no secret doctrines. At the other end of the spectrum are “secret associations,” or secret societies, which exhibit exclusive access to knowledge that is generally used for purposes of controlling spirits as well as controlling people. Characteristically, membership in these organizations, at least for the higher ranks, is voluntary and based on the ability to pay progressively exorbitant advancement fees. The political position of a family in the community is often important as well. Many, but not all, activities are concealed from the public.

There have been a number of attempts to define secret societies in more specific terms… I prefer to be a little more specific and to follow Johansen in defining a secret society as an association with internal ranks in which membership, especially in upper ranks, is exclusive, voluntary, and associated with secret knowledge.

Entrance and advancement fees are one of the hallmarks of secret societies as a means of excluding those deemed undesirable. Like pyramid schemes everywhere, secret societies provide the greatest benefits to those in the upper ranks. In order to distinguish these types of organizations from relatively elaborate tribal initiations, it may be necessary to include the stipulation that secret societies – at least in their more developed forms… - involve the production and surrender of significant surpluses, or even that they involve power-based (or defensive) motivations in their organization as well as in the recruitment of members. Because of the variability displayed in ritual organizations that have been identified as secret societies by various authors, it may eventually prove to be necessary to use a looser, more polythetic approach to defining secret societies.

TRIBAL INITIATIONS, SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS, ORIGINS, AND GRAY AREAS

Despite the best attempts to craft a definition of secret societies, there remains a grey area in which secret societies can be difficult to distinguish from other organizations. This is especially true when dealing with elaborate tribal initiations… other examples of grey areas involve the induction of all boys in a community into the lower ranks of some secret societies… In the inclusion of all males, and sometimes all females, they resembled tribal initiations. However, in these widely recognized examples of secret societies, there existed subsequent higher grades of secret knowledge to which far fewer individuals had access and these high-ranking members were generally the most powerful and wealthy people in hereditary descent groups. In effect, the general level of initiation versus the more restricted levels of initiation can be viewed as separate ritual organizations with the higher ranks constituting the core of the secret societies.

Several anthropologists have interpreted these and other features as indications that secret societies originated from tribal initiations through a process of progressive restriction of membership at later initiation stages, which required specific abilities, kin group membership, and wealth. Other commonalities with tribal initiations include the hard physical ordeals involved, the frequent death and rebirth themes, seclusion periods, special clubhouses or men’s houses, and rituals of reintroduction into mainstream society often with new identities of initiates.

However, a key difference is that, in general, tribal initiations function to prepare adolescents to take on adult roles, to marry, and to maintain community traditions. In contrast, secret societies seem to function to concentrate power in the hands of a few exclusive high-ranking individuals who control the organization and who try to further their own interests, thus constituting a “rude but powerful aristocracy”… with the emergence of secret societies “religious aspects become more and more a delusion and serve as a cloak to hide merely material and selfish ends.”

In addition, secret societies sometimes took the form of military fraternities and involved ancestor worship, thus blurring the distinctions between these different types of organization. However, ancestor worship can be distinguished on the basis of an exclusive worship of ancestors within a lineage, whereas the invocation of “ancestors” in secret society contexts included ancestors from different kinship groups, and often simply pertained to previous office holders in the secret society, whether related by kinship or not.

ORIGINS


As noted, some ethnographers have viewed secret societies as developing out of tribal initiations. In contrast, on America’s Northwest Coast, Drucker viewed secret societies as resulting from a fusion of shamanism, warfare, mythological elements, hereditary privileges, potlatching (a gift-giving feast), and the guardian spirit complex. Garfield and Wingert also noted the strong resemblance of secret society initiations to individual guardian spirit quests, and one might add, shamanic initiations. Certainly, there were many shamanic elements in secret societies, including possession, throwing power, use of prestidigitation, curing, and often even the honorific title conferred on secret society members of “shaman”.

Shamanic circles tend to be exclusive, whereas “secret societies ... display a quite marked spirit of proselytism that ... tends to abolish the special privilege of shamans. In general, “shamans usually share in the activities of the most important secret societies, and sometimes take them over entirely”. Although the formal issue of how secret societies emerged can be debated (whether from shamanism, tribal initiations, military organizations, or other origins), this issue is not of critical importance to the focus of the present study, which is more concerned with why secret societies were created and what sociopolitical roles they played.

My next post will explore how Hayden classifies the various kinds of secret societies as well as how they coalesced and competed alongside each other.
 
CONTEXT 2: THE EMERGENCE OF SECRET SOCIETIES



This startling series of claims by the C’s has stuck with me ever since I first read the above many moons ago now. At the time I simply couldn’t place it into any known context – it seemed so bizarre to think of all those bowler hatted bank managers I had watched as a kid trapse into the masonic hall next to my home having nefarious antecedents going back 7,000 years to almost beyond the boundaries of known civilization. Having briefly toyed with being a mason myself (out of pure curiosity and before I knew any better!) I can tell you first hand that what goes on behind those closed doors is even more bizarre than you can imagine – and yes technically I can get still get myself killed for sharing this fact even though I haven’t been near the organisation in 18 years :whistle: .

If you think about what the C’s suggest, if true, it has remarkable implications because it’s clear that the establishment of the Freemasons in 5,633 BC (how precise, with that very interesting 33 at the end of the date), being but the latest step in a process of even greater antiquity; for how else could a group loftily called the Osirians, (likely an existing secret society based on the deeper knowledge of the Osiris myth), have the accumulated knowledge and purpose to establish the masons but that they themselves had been founded long before, especially when you consider that the C’s say that the 33rd degree of masonry, supposedly the most lofty and ‘secret’ of all known degrees, (setting aside for now the likelihood of there being further hidden degrees above this), was fully functional by 5,633 BC.

As I delved deeper and deeper into the mysteries surrounding the advent of the Göbekli Tepe centered outburst of activity in south-eastern Anatolia from circa 10,000 BC, and as I crossed referenced to other outcrops in places such as the Levant and in particular the area we know as Israel today, I began to see signs that what the mainstream saw as a benign activity had a much darker underbelly than hitherto realised. Among many such signs, burial practices involving very singular people and their skulls kept cropping up, especially in relation to caves in out of the way places. None of the explanations I read from scholars came close to explaining what I was seeing.

Then I came across the 1980s finds from at Nahal Hemar Cave in the Judean desert dating to the Pre-Pottery Neolithic B (PPNB) period around the 8th millennium BC. I will likely come back to this site in more detail anon but for now let me introduce you to the series of carved stone - yes stone - masks that were found there:

View attachment 63572

According to the archaeologists, the cave users were your average farmers from the agricultural villages in the woodland regions nearby.

Right….!

I have some professional knowledge of masks and their incredibly potent mesmeric power and I had been tracking with suspicion the increase in mask production from Göbekli Tepe onward, and I can assure you these terrors are not the product of simple farmers! Therefore, it was at this point that the C’s comment began to ring loudly in my head. Were the hints of deeply nefarious practices with very ancient roots that I kept stumbling on actually tell-tell signs of secret societies being about their business of shaping society as early as the PPN?

This was an idea I had certainly not come across in any of the academic literature to date; but so many symptoms seemed to point powerfully in that direction – the continual use of caves and special purpose buildings; uniquely directed highly symbolic architecture; symptoms of the emergence of bizarre rituals; masks and other signs of elite practices below the surface; surplus gathering; the use of feasting, alcohol and likely other substances… and of course the economic emergence of agriculture. The list went on and on.

So, just for the hell of it, I did an online search to see if anything in the literature would come up that would event hint that this was something scholars had also noted.

On my very first search, and much to my amazement I struck gold. Following certain hints in certain journals I fortuitously stumbled upon THE POWER OF RITUAL: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity by Bryan Hayden, Research Associate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia and Professor Emeritus at Simon Fraser University as well as a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

View attachment 63573
The title and cover alone was enough for me to immediately order a copy, (though my expectations at that time remained pretty low), for as with many highly specialised academic works it’s a pricey buy; but believe me it’s worth every cent spent ten times over.

Published in 2018 by Cambridge University Press (therefore as mainstream academia as you can get), this weighty tome of scholarly deduction is the closest thing to a game changing time bomb I’ve come across from the pen of an accomplished– if radical thinking – professional.

The summation of 25 years work, Hayden introduces his book with a clear statement of intent:



The rigorously notated and documented volume that follows is structured so as to present evidence as follows:
  • An opening statement chapter on the widespread nature of secret societies as well as the word ‘secret’ in the term secret society.
  • A highly detailed systematic exploration of the ethnographic records as well as other scholar’s work in this field, from both the new world (American north west, south west, plains, eastern woodlands, and California / Mesoamerica) and the old world (Oceania, central and west Africa), all of which makes up the bulk of the 370 pages.
  • An exploration of the implications for archaeology and then on to his final conclusions.
This post is not the place to give a complete overview and review of this complex and detailed work and it more than deserves a thread of its own (as well as a Mind Matters show).

Among the many, many shocks and light bulb moments was the amazement that the study of ancient secret societies has such a long tradition in academic studies as well as in contemporary scholarly research. We see so many woo-woo works on the Masons and the Illuminati that one would think they were the only existing or historical secret societies on record as well as taking for granted that it is a fringe study untouched by scholarly rigour. Far from being true on both counts and there are over 20 pages of scholarly references past and present that close this overview by Hayden.

I will begin with a series of extensive quotes from his opening chapter ‘THE SECRET’. I have removed the many citations for clarity of reading – but be assured near every paragraph is littered with them. The first sequence below gives a thorough background to his thinking.



So immediately, we have some very important red flags:
  • The existence of secret societies stretching back into prehistoric cultures, including inside Neolithic caves, and that they occurred in many pre-civilised cultures irrespective of how those societies were ostensibly led.
  • A missing link in understanding at a deeper level substantive cultural, spiritual, political and economic changes as they occur in the archaeological record that have hitherto been given fatuous or nebulous reasons for happening.
  • The power to exert exceptional influence over the living through fear, manipulation and endearment with the ‘dark side’ for material and political gain.
  • The ruthless use of any tactics they could to impress and intimidate, no matter how gruesome, including sexual abuse, murder, human sacrifice, child abuse and cannibalism.
  • By becoming the most powerful organization in a society, they played a critical role in the foundation of complex political organization by linking ideologies and rituals to the acquisition of control.
  • The means by which individuals augmented their power over both communities and whole regions via aggrandizer strategies for promoting aggrandizers’ own self-interests
  • The use of architecture and the building of elaborate special structure facilities to create secure structural bases from which to wield power that cross-cut kinship and even community boundaries.
  • Membership came at high cost, both materially, physically and psychologically for all those drawn into the circle (or square as we will see later on).
As the book goes on, and no matter which culture he explores, one fundamental issue comes through time and time again – the manipulation and control by a small minority of the majority for access to and disproportionate ownership of surplus production and communal material wealth making capacity.

Sound at all familiar…? The tell-tell footsteps of psychopaths and schizoid personalities doing what they do best (an indeed Hayden does not hold back on his understanding in this area).

I also find it interesting that apparently the previously considerable anthropological attention given to secret societies effectively came to a sudden end in the 1940’s and has become a backwater for academics ever since. Most telling considering as he says that secret societies persisted on into modern industrial societies. And I thought we were the first conspiracy theorists!

Next, I quote from section on the importance of secret societies:



All summarized as:
  • A relatively recent phenomenon in cultural evolution i.e. by recent, earliest roots in the Middle to Upper Paleolithic and only appearing alongside the emergence of complex hunter/gatherers and subsequent agricultural, tribal or chiefdom societies .
  • The ability to embody the most elaborate traditions of a culture.
  • A powerful driving forces for cultural change including major changes in prevailing ideologies and appear to have been relatively common.
  • A supra-community level of organization, control, and power with a far wider demographic and economic base than otherwise might have existed.
  • Supernatural justification used for concentrating surpluses in the hands of a few individuals and only occurring in areas capable of producing significant surpluses.
  • The development of ‘religious’ centres originating with secret societies that eventually led on to the development of more complex, unified political power bases.
  • Secret societies were the first institutionalized manifestation of ritual organizations linked to political power, and that this was, in fact, their explicit goal.
  • They explain the long term fixation on caves and special structures as well as many other unusual features and developments in the archaeological record.
For those who may have a raised eyebrow or two, this next section is pivotal to grasp:



My next post will explore how Hayden classifies the various kinds of secret societies as well as how they coalesced and competed alongside each other.
The more things change, the more they stay the same. - Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr
I've ordered the book 'The Power of Ritual'.
So for all of history, at least from the Younger Dryas, we've had 'elites' who have forced their societies into lock-step in order to gain.
I have to admit that my jaw dropped when I read about STS beings manipulating the social cultures in the past by using secret societies. I shouldn't be shocked but then it comes in front of our eyes again and again. I also didn't think that psychopathology could be that old and wide-spread, so...well...eye opening. Thank you.
 
Would all those women and so few men, wow what an imbalance, have caused the tales of a matriarchal society?
What an engrossing fact finding journey you are taking us on Michael B-C. The disparate facts on a Y-Chromosome Bottleneck AND Secret Societies is stunning. Added to this your free flowing telling is mesmerising and you are uncovering history never before told, that I'm aware of anyway.
Makes me wonder if humanity were even able to see the night sky or the stars with the water vapour cover.
Thank you so much for your hard work and study.
 
CONTEXT 2: THE EMERGENCE OF SECRET SOCIETIES (cont'd)


‘THE POWER OF RITUAL: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity’
by Bryan Hayden

CLASSIFICATIONS, MOTIVATIONS & KEY ISSUES

While a number of anthropologists have previously proposed classifications of secret societies, from an archaeological perspective Hayden claims these have not been very useful or insightful. In recognising that ‘there was considerable diversity within the rubric of secret societies’ he seeks to avoid over focus on the biggest and most dramatic manifestations of secret societies, and instead to recognize the following distinctions based largely on the extent to which power was pursued and the ability to pursue it, no matter how large or small or long lived the organisation:

Power-oriented societies.
These are the classic cases of secret societies as described in the most prominent ethnographies and I suspect represent the initial form of the first secret societies. Examples include the Hamatsa, the Poro, the Ekkpo, and the Suque Societies, which often used terror indiscriminately to enforce their grip on power. However, distinctions also need to be made between the dominant, highest-ranked secret societies, and the much smaller, weaker, upstart, “wannabe,” ephemeral secret societies that constantly appeared and disappeared as on the Plains and the Northwest Coast, which may have had much lower admission and advancement costs, or even none at all, so as to attract people to become members. We can expect that as such start up societies became more popular and powerful, their initiation and advancement costs increased proportionately.
Militaristic secret societies.​
These societies also generally emphasized the exercise of power in communities, but were largely concerned with developing or acquiring protective medicines and/or guardian spirits that would make members immune to attacks in battles. As with power-based secret societies, there was probably a range of sizes and powers among these societies, with one or a few being dominant and others being of minor importance.​
Curing and fertility societies.​
Ostensibly, these societies were benevolent and operated for the benefit of their community without the use of terror. However, they typically charged high fees for cures or rituals, and in a number of cases, members reportedly induced sicknesses in non-members in order to obtain substantial fees for the cures. This could be considered a subtler form of terror tactic. There was probably a range of sizes and powers among these societies, with one or a few being dominant and others being of minor importance.​
Defensive secret societies.​
These formed in some areas like Africa in order to defend members from the predatory attacks of the dominant power-oriented societies. They can be considered as a derivative type of the power-oriented and militaristic types. Defensive societies may also have had nominal or no initiation and advancement costs in order to swell their ranks and create greater defensive power in numbers. However, information on these societies is very limited and it is not clear how central any secret supernatural knowledge was in these organizations.​

Prof. Hayden goes on to say that most of his book focuses on the first and second types of secret societies, the power-oriented societies and the militaristic societies, since these are overwhelmingly the types reported in the ethnographies, and since they were arguably the most important forces in their communities, especially in creating important cultural changes.

He then makes a further framing statement:

In general, secret societies tend to have occurred in complex trans-egalitarian societies (whether hunter/gatherers or horticulturalists) and chiefdoms. I have argued that 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. In more general terms, Marx and Engels (1968) viewed social complexity as developing when the production of goods beyond subsistence requirements resulted in the production of surpluses used for other purposes. In contrast, Morton Fried (1967) argued that complexity emerged from shortages engendered by population growth with control of resources retained by original owners. At least in the case of the American Western Pueblo… the best land was owned by clans, with the highest ranked clan controlling twice as much land as was needed for their subsistence needs. There was no obligatory sharing of maize harvests… access to land was obtained by acquiring ritual roles. However, owing to the high costs of obtaining ritual paraphernalia and hosting the required ritual feasts, it can be argued that the main factor in acquiring ritual roles was owning productive land or at least acquiring access to its produce. It seems clear that in a broader context, ritual complexity, with its attendant political complexity, was fundamentally associated with surplus production either by one’s family or of extended kin or others. Similarly, among hunters and gatherers, secret societies occurred where surpluses could be produced rather than in stressed environments… … Ware and others [have] argued that secret societies were rare in complex polities like states. Whether this was a general pattern or not still requires some analysis, but, as discussed [later on], there appear to have been instances where other state-level organizations, including state religions, evolved from secret societies and supplanted the original types of secret organizations.

He then outlines motivations for the rise of secret societies in ancient cultures follows by a list of key issues that he will explore during the remainder of the bulk of the book:

MOTIVATIONS

Above all, social unity or integration has been viewed as the main motivator for ritual developmentsThis school of interpretation has also been strongly represented in the Middle East where the most popular view among archaeologists is still that social solidarity was the major concern for the growing communities of complex hunter/gatherers and early Neolithic horticulturalists.

The result has been that almost all evidence of ritual or ritual organizations or practices has been interpreted as functioning to integrate diverse groups and interests in the growing communities. However, it might be briefly noted that if the role of secret societies was to promote social solidarity within communities, one should expect a single organization within communities that had a large ceremonial facility to accommodate many people. Instead, there were frequently two or three or more secret society organizations using small ritual buildings within communities which makes sense primarily in more exclusive competitive contexts.

In contrast to these functionalist or communitarian models, another strong tradition in anthropology, extending back to Marx, views control over ritual as a means to dominate political power and others; [several scholars] have argued that religious knowledge is regarded as both powerful and dangerous, especially to the untrained, and that religious language and ritual serves to express and reinforce relations of authority; it works therefore not in the interests of society as a whole, but in those of the religious leaders. The key link in the dynamics of such organizations is promoting religious knowledge as being vital to the health of society, so that access to such knowledge would provide a route to political power, while exclusion from it would be a critical disadvantage.

This view of secret societies is in fundamental agreement with the vast majority of ethnographic observations as well as with the political ecological approach that I have espoused. Political ecology, or paleo-political ecology to be more precise, studies the ways in which surplus production has been used by ambitious, aggrandizing individuals to obtain benefits for themselves, including survival, reproduction, security, wealth, political power, and higher standards of living. In the political ecology view that I adopt in this book, both feasts and secret societies constitute major aggrandizer strategies for achieving these goals based on the production and control of surplus resources, especially in the form of reciprocal feasting debts or as fees for the admission, advancement, or services of secret societies.

The ethnographic record provides considerable support for the political ecology interpretation of secret societies…if the members of a secret association are to enjoy the sense of power and privilege, the acquisition of which was one of their reasons for becoming members, they must, as it were, demonstrate their secrecy publicly ... they must make themselves felt as a force.

From the examples that will be discussed in the following chapters, I concur completely with Johansen who concluded that the underlying motivation of the organizers of secret societies was to promote their own self-interests by creating a hegemonic control over rituals and experiences that they claimed gave them supernatural powers or influence.

If the main underlying motive of secret societies was the concentration of power and surplus production, then it makes sense that internal hierarchies would be a key component of the organizational structures. The public display of the power and wealth of the society also makes sense if the basic motivation was to enhance members’ own powers, since success and wealth were generally portrayed by secret societies as an indication of spiritual power. This is one of the many ideological transformations that ambitious individuals undoubtedly promulgated to serve their own ends.

As previously noted, wealth was also an essential element for initiation and advancement – yet another example of an ideological construct devised to enhance benefits for higher ranking members. None of these, or other, features of secret societies are comprehensible if the purpose of secret societies was to provide benefits for the entire community.

In addition to these ethnographic observations, psychological studies tend to support the self-interested motives of secret society organizers and the general view that aggrandizer personality types dominated secret societies. Notably, Piff et al found that “upper-class individuals behave more unethically than lower-class individuals ... were more likely to take valued goods from others ... to lie in a negotiation ... to cheat to increase their chances of winning a prize ... and endorse unethical behaviour at work.” They had “more favourable attitudes toward greed.” As will be shown, these are precisely the kinds of attitudes that characterize secret society officials, as well as aggrandizers in general and sociopaths in particular (Hare 1993). Piff has also found that as wealth increases, the wealthy are more likely to feel entitled to good things, and that they see themselves as above normal laws and morals – an aspect of tribal and chiefly aggrandizers repeatedly observed by ethnographers.

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 favour their strategies.



KEY ISSUES

Social Integration vs. Competition and Division


There are major differences of opinion on whether secret societies were established for the good of the community or for the self-interests of secret society members, especially the high-ranking members. Related to this is the issue of whether secret societies served as socially integrative organizations, as so often claimed by archaeologists, or whether they actually increased socio-economic and political inequalities, divisiveness, and factionalization.


The Power of Belief vs. the Power of Power


It seems highly unlikely that everyone in a community believed everything that they were taught or all the claims that others promoted including members of secret societies. Undoubtedly some people did believe various claims, but equally certain from the accounts of secret societies is the fact that many people did not believe the claims but simply viewed them as a means of manipulating people. In many cases, outward compliance to norms or beliefs was due to external pressures rather than any acceptance of beliefs.

…there are repeated references to “doubters” of secret society claims and the need to ferret out those individuals and deal with them… other elite or secret society ideologies were clearly not accepted by many commoners who were portrayed as “irreverent.” In fact, most people displayed little interest in sacred knowledge… [there was] a lack of dogma in almost all traditional religions; ritual praxis was far more important than beliefs.

Thus, although some ethnographers reported that initiations into secret societies could have resulted in an increased religious feeling for some people, such initiations only created disillusionment and degradation of religious feeling for others. These observations indicate that it is unrealistic to view the so-called power of belief as a major force for cultural change in tribal societies without other factors being strongly involved.

Thus, as Harris has argued, beliefs per se are probably not the most important factor in explaining cultural practices or developments like the building of megaliths or temples or the acquisition of power by chiefs… what was of the utmost importance in tribal religions was praxis, or conformity to required public behaviour. Actual beliefs were largely irrelevant… it is generally difficult to distinguish true convictions from social posturing… beliefs that are not beneficial to most people can even become publicly entrenched “when backed up by expectations of enforcement that are confirmed when one deviates”.

… contrary to many archaeologists’ appeal to the power of beliefs in explaining monumental ritual architecture, we can only conclude that it was not the power of beliefs or superior ideologies, or even superior ritual experiences, that formed the basis of power in most ritual organizations, but simply the power to exact acquiescence for the ideological and other dictates of the leaders. As will be seen in the following chapters, this was manifestly the case with secret societies.

… Despite the ready support of the more gullible members of communities, doubters could not be tolerated as they could spread their doubts and counterclaims and thereby threaten the claims to authority and the power base of secret societies or elites. In order to intimidate any dissenters or doubters, those who ventured into secret society’s areas or witnessed their activities, whether from curiosity or by accident, were typically killed, or if deemed desirable, were promptly initiated.


The Use of Terror and Human Sacrifice

The term “terrorist” was used in these contexts long before it became a common descriptor in the twenty-first-century media
… there seems to have been little doubt as to the reality of the practices, but how common this was overall is still open to debate.


Roles in Emerging Complexity


What role, if any, did secret societies play in creating more complex religious and political centers like Chavín de Huántar, the Puebloan great houses, Göbekli Tepe, and early state temples, as well as early state polities? This issue will be addressed further [in a later chapter].


Auxiliary Characteristics


Initially, on the basis of her work in Taos pueblo, Brandt observed that a major consequence of secrecy within sodalities was the establishment of status hierarchies based on access to knowledge communicated only in oral form. She argued that oral transmission of knowledge was especially well suited to creating a high degree of control over information, hence the frequent opposition to the recording of that knowledge in written form … equality is always difficult to maintain, but one effective technique for maintaining inequality is the use of secret information and surveillance.

…If secret societies were simply ritual associations for individuals who were extremely religious, such as monks, there would be no need for public displays. Ecstatic or other internal states could provide all the personal gratification necessary from such associations. That public displays – often associated with initiations, which were generally the most extravagant family expenditures in the lifetime of a household – were so prominent indicates that there was a major political or practical motivation behind the formation of secret societies…. Power animals were generally prominent in ideologies and displays. They served to symbolize and emphasize the power of secret societies.

… In addition to the large public displays and facilities, the hierarchical organization of access to the ritual secrets of the organization often involved smaller, restricted, special ritual meeting places.

…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.

…if claims to supernatural power over the material world were to be credible for the general public, then some superior demonstration involving the material world had to be made. Displaying ritual objects and unusual costuming that originated in exotic, faraway, or unknown locations, or that required unusual skill to make, could be used as such convincing demonstrations. Similarly, providing foods that were out of the normal (such as the flesh of “power animals,” or even humans) could serve as demonstrations of unusual powers.

The important role of exotic materials and prestige items, including foods, could form unusual artefact assemblages which would be extremely helpful for archaeologists in identifying prehistoric examples of these organizations, although such use was not exclusive to them. Other political or kinship hierarchies also made good use of the same logic and strategies.

The use of various techniques to induce altered states can sometimes be inferred archaeologically from the use of dark, sensory depriving environments or psychotropic materials, the presence of transformative iconographies, and the violation of taboos such as the eating of human flesh…. the costly proof of dedication to an organization and its ideology provided by these trials generally ensured members’ loyalties to the secret organizations and superseded their responsibilities to all other groups.

In order to fund both secret and public events (as well as to increase the economic power of the organization, or more specifically, its leaders), secret societies had to be able to obtain considerable surplus production from the community or at least from junior members and their supporters.

In order to emphasize the overriding importance and power of the secret society, beyond family, kinship, or community allegiances, especially powerful high-ranking members of such societies were sometimes given special burials in close proximity to secret society facilities or in remote locations rather than with their own kin or community.

… Finally, secret societies as a rule seem to have legitimized their spiritual claims to power by appropriating many of the pre-existing beliefs and ideological elements of their own cultures in order to make their claims more accepted. However, they typically added new levels of esoteric meaning to earlier religious beliefs, thereby transforming traditional ideologies into new systems using familiar symbols and concepts.

In summary:
  • Aggrandizer and sociopathic/psychopathic personality types dominated the upper echelons of ancient secret societies, seeing themselves as above normal laws and morals.
  • In contrast to the prevailing and dominating view that ritual development was about creating social cohesion, control over ritual was developed as a means to dominate political power and others.
  • Religious knowledge was promoted as being vital to the health of society, so that access to such knowledge would provide a route to political power, while exclusion from it would be a critical disadvantage.
  • Despite the likelihood that very few people have ever displayed any interest in obtaining sacred knowledge, what was of the utmost importance in tribal religions was conformity to required public behaviour.
  • That contrary to many archaeologists’ appeal to the power of beliefs in explaining monumental ritual architecture, it was not the power of beliefs or superior ideologies, or even superior ritual experiences, that formed the basis of power in most ritual organizations, but simply the power to exact acquiescence for the ideological and other dictates of the leadership.
  • The establishment of status hierarchies based on access to knowledge communicated only in oral form, being especially well suited to creating a high degree of control over access to information.
  • Power animals were generally prominent in ancient secret society ideologies and grandiose public displays as well as the maintaining of smaller, restricted, special ritual meeting places exclusive to the elites.
  • In order to emphasize the overriding importance and power of the secret society, beyond family, kinship, or community allegiances, powerful high-ranking members of such societies were given special burials in close proximity to secret society facilities or in remote locations rather than with their own kin or community.
  • Secret societies as a rule seem to have legitimized their spiritual claims to power by appropriating many of the pre-existing beliefs and ideological elements of their own cultures in order to make their claims more accepted.
  • They typically added new levels of esoteric meaning to earlier religious beliefs, thereby transforming traditional ideologies into new systems using familiar symbols and concepts.

Would all those women and so few men, wow what an imbalance, have caused the tales of a matriarchal society?

I certainly think that's maybe a factor we should keep in mind Tuatha de Danaan, for as the imposition (which I think it effectively was) of agriculture led to sedentary communal and highly socialised life styles, increasingly materialistic culture - and hence the huge upsurge in the archeological record of what one might loosely describe as trinkets and self adornment arts and crafts as well as the exaltation and fixation on the power of the feminine and its relationship to fertility. It also raises the issue of intense competition for males by females, giving males paradoxically enormous power over females. And it is also a perfect ground within which deviant types can sow their seed as it was in such comparatively short supply. There is significant evidence in the anthropological record that the way males kept psychopaths at bay was through high levels of male competition for females as well as maintaining codes of behavior that enabled such types to be spotted and dealt with. When this balance breaks down, and female promiscuity becomes an essential norm (which seems likely in this scenario), then all bets are suddenly off in terms of the maintenance of a low level of psychopathic intrusion into communal life. It seems as if the period from around 10,000 BC to 5,000 BC was such a time and may have significantly impacted the road ahead to the emergence of what we call civilization.

Makes me wonder if humanity were even able to see the night sky or the stars with the water vapour cover.

And yes that has come to my mind as I highlighted previously. Certain interpretations of Paleolithic cave art suggests otherwise but perhaps it at least lessened the visible span of the stars or only allowed the very brightest to shine through... whatever, when it vanished from the skies post the end of the 11th millennium BC it certainly would have made wonder of the new heavens all the stronger, and that makes me think of all those later gods such as Marduk who set the stars and the constellations and the heavens in their right places when they brought order out of chaos...
 
when it vanished from the skies post the end of the 11th millennium BC it certainly would have made wonder of the new heavens all the stronger, and that makes me think of all those later gods such as Marduk who set the stars and the constellations and the heavens in their right places when they brought order out of chaos...
It seems that by this time the stage was set. The poison was injected, ie. the psychopaths. The people were rudderless suffering from trauma and maybe amnesia with all the destruction changing their landscape. The psychopaths literally had a blank slate to work on and so the human experiment continued all for their own good of course.

Thinking of the water vapour, this is deviating somewhat, the Atlanteans face on Mars came to mind. This must have been done whilst the water vapour was still in situ before the flood of Noah. This would mean that they had no problem seeing the heavens I would think.
 
CONTEXT 2: THE EMERGENCE OF SECRET SOCIETIES (cont'd)


‘THE POWER OF RITUAL: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity’
by Bryan Hayden


As previously stated, the substantial body of the book goes on to explore in minute detail secret societies recorded in the ethnographic record from the new world (American north west, south west, plains, eastern woodlands, and California/Mesoamerica) and the old world (Oceania, central and west Africa).

Below is a heavily edited and citation redacted example of this process, focusing on the secret societies of the complex hunting and gathering cultures of the American Northwest Coast. I could have chosen any other of the regions he reviews because whilst there are many subtle and at times intriguing differences, the core similarities repeat over and over again no matter what part of the globe he explores. This seems to suggest to me that the core psychological, economic, cultural and political pattern is inbuilt into and emerges ‘naturally’ out of the same personality types (cluster B) wherever they seek to impress their perverse inner worldview on a local population. There is also of course the possibility that the infection of secret societies also spread from some very ancient source (Atlantis?) and dispersed itself deliberately around the world and many cultures do indeed speak of foreign teachers arriving in the very distant past to share their higher knowledge and more often than not take up pole position within the host society. We will come anon to the ‘Watchers’ and the Seven Sages who haunt the beginnings of memory in ancient Anatolia/Mesopotamia…

Anyway, the following makes grim if fascinating reading. Hayden Structures each area review as follows:

  1. An introduction
  2. An Overview (Core Features, Tactics, Material Aspects)
  3. Ethnographic Observations (Core Features, Tactics, Material Aspects)


THE COMPLEX HUNTER/ GATHERERS OF THE AMERICAN NORTHWEST

INTRODUCTION

Above all, what is striking about the secret societies of the complex hunting and gathering cultures of the American Northwest Coast is the remarkable amount of time, effort, and expense that went into the rituals and performances. Although no reports deal with the amount of time required for the preparations, they must have taken many months, not counting the years of wealth accumulation required for initiation into the more important positions, the weeks or months of seclusion of the candidates, and the years of prohibitions after initiation.


Similarities with California

In general, there were many, sometimes striking, similarities between the central California Kuksu secret societies and the secret societies of the Northwest Coast… possession only occurred in secret societies of the Northwest Coast, and is seen as a Siberian influence. These include the “shooting” of power into new initiates or others by means of special objects such as quartz crystals…or by cowrie shells… In both areas, the person “shot” fell down as if dead and was then revived. Some detailed similarities also exist between Northwest Coast groups and Plains groups such as the piercing of the skin on the back or arms or legs and the suspension of the individual(s) by ropes attached to items thrust through the skin.


Origins

Boas (1897) maintained that the origins of secret societies were closely connected with warfare. Ernst (1952) similarly thought that the Nuuchahnulth Wolf Society was originally warrior-based, noting that there was a strong warrior emphasis on Vancouver Island. Indeed, pronounced warrior aspects existed in many secret societies, including warrior dances and the destructive use of clubs in warrior spirit possession dances On the other hand, McIlwraith (1948) thought that the Kusiut Society was originally a band of elders.



OVERVIEW

Core Features

Motives and Dynamics


Ethnographers on the Northwest Coast rarely discuss motives behind forming or belonging to secret societies. However, when they do raise such issues they strongly emphasize the practical benefits, particularly obtaining power over other people and dominating society via the use of terror, violence, and black magic tactics. Secret societies have even been referred to as “terrorist organizations.” Since power appears to have been the goal of membership, and a frequently attained one, competition for positions was frequently intense, resulting in a very fluid and dynamic ritual structure with new dances and entire ritual organizations being constantly introduced with only the most successful persisting or flourishing. This is a recurring characteristic of secret societies in most regions of the globe.


Tactics

Ideology


In order to justify the use of terror and violence, secret societies promulgated a number of key ideological premises. These included the existence of members’ ancestors who acquired supernatural powers from spirits which could be passed on to descendants or acquired anew directly from spirits…. Supernatural power was portrayed as dangerous and hence required special training to safely control…. The development of skills and success in all domains was supposed to be dependent on supernatural help, which, in turn, was dependent on wealth. Conversely, wealth was a sign of supernatural favor. Because of such warrants, powerful chiefs could make their own rules and disregard conventional practices.


Community Benefits and Threats


The overwhelming emphasis in the ethnographies is on the dire consequences of ignoring or unleashing the supernatural powers dealt with by the secret societies, as palpably demonstrated by the violent acts of masked spirits and the cannibalistic manias of people who were possessed by spirits.


Esoteric Knowledge

It was the secret societies that claimed to hold the knowledge of how to control the terrible power of the spirits. Others who tried to do so were said to go insane, sicken, or often die.


Exclusiveness, Costs, and Hierarchies


While there were some secret societies of lesser importance which admitted a wide range of members, the more important secret societies were very exclusive and used the criteria of wealth, descent, and sociopolitical position to exclude non-members.

However, there were a number of ranked specialized positions within these societies which constituted a kind of separate society.
These positions were much more exclusive. A number of Northwest Coast societies, especially the Hamatsa (Cannibal) groups, were exclusively for wealthy chiefs or elites.


Public Displays

They also developed highly sophisticated stage magic techniques, all of which provided fascination and entertainment for non-initiated spectators, as well as instilling terror. Thus, spectators witnessed dancers becoming crazy and possessed, going around biting bits of flesh from people, or tearing dogs apart and eating them. Some of those who were possessed destroyed house walls and furniture. Some could handle fire, keep burning coals in their mouths, make rattles dance by themselves, change water to blood, bring dead salmon to life, have arrows thrust through their bodies. Some initiates even cut off their own heads only to be brought back to life. The material power (derived from spirit power) of the society was also manifested in the form of lavish feasts, spirit costumes and masks, and the destruction of property such as the burning of fish oil and killing of slaves.


Ecstatic States


There can be little doubt that at least some of the initiations and dances created altered ecstatic states of consciousness for individuals. The lengthy periods of fasting resulting in emaciated initiates, and the days of drumming, drone-style singing, dancing, and the psychological stresses of confronting or even eating corpses all must have had mind-altering effects.


Enforcement

If uninitiated spectators failed to be awed or suitably fearful of the ideological claims and spirit performances, secret societies generally resorted to coercion and violence to achieve acquiescence from all community members. Those who did not accept secret society claims or dictates were targeted and frequently eliminated one way or another. Some groups employed spies to identify such individuals. Thus, as tends to be true of many secret societies, anyone disclosing or discovering that the appearances of the spirits were really humans in masks, or anyone disclosing the tricks behind stage magic performances, was either inducted into the society (if deemed desirable) or killed outright. This was the common procedure for dealing with individuals who entered – either on purpose or accidentally – designated sacred spaces of the society.

Punishments were also meted out to society members who revealed secrets, or to those who let their masks fall in performances, or who made staged displays that failed to work. Killings for transgressions of conduct rules during dances became prevalent in some groups. Lesser offences such as coughing, talking, or laughing during dances could be punished by clubbing, knife jabs, disfigurement, or fines. Above all, it was the use of violence in these situations and in states of possession which warranted the use of the terms “terrorist” and “terror” to describe the organizations and their tactics.


Sacrifices and Cannibalism


There are numerous claims of first-hand accounts, and there appear to have been desiccated corpses involved in ceremonies, but it cannot be known whether human flesh was actually consumed, or perhaps only touched to the mouth, or whether stage illusions were used to make it seem as though cannibalism was occurring in order to intimidate spectators or to establish fearsome reputations. In other parts of the world such as Melanesia and Africa, secret societies were more certainly using cannibalism as a means to intimidate any who opposed them.


Material Aspects

Paraphernalia and Structures


A broad array of ritual paraphernalia was used by Northwest Coast secret societies. In general, these included masks, various forms of wood whistles, bullroarers, drums, rattles, rattling aprons, bird bone drinking tubes, horns, trumpets, smoking pipes, bark rings, certain bird skins or animal pelts, decorated staffs and poles, copper nails for scratching, quartz crystals, and some special stones.

The general ritual settlement pattern was to hold initiation and other important ceremonies inside a house in the community which was appropriated for the purpose, suitably rearranged, and cordoned off. Special meeting places were also established at varying distances, from 150 to 400 meters, outside the villages, although no structures are reported to have been built at such locations. Ritual paraphernalia was sometimes stored in “faraway” locations, including rock shelters and caves.

Candidates for initiations were taken to secluded locations outside the villages where they camped for the duration of their seclusion, probably not too distant from villages. Caves are mentioned in some areas as being used for seclusion, meetings, or ritual storage locations of secret societies. There are thus both central (village) loci of secret society activities and a variety of remote (non-village) loci for society activities. The use of caves is of particular note given their archaeological importance and frequent evidence of ritual use.


Burials


Kamenskii does report that shamans were buried in caves, but whether he was referring to bona fide shamans or secret society members referred to as shamans is uncertain.


Cross- cutting Kinship or Regional Organizations, and Art Styles


Secret society membership therefore cross-cut kinship groups in communities. In addition to serving as an overarching organization for the wider community, there is ample evidence that major secret society ceremonies included members of neighboring villages or even of larger regions. The marking of initiates with scars or other physical modifications may have been used to reliably identify initiates when they visited groups where they were unknown.

Given such mutual participation in secret society rituals on a regional scale, it is not surprising that the masks and other ritual paraphernalia (rattles, staffs, feasting dishes) exhibit artistic similarities generally known as the Northwest Coast art style with regional substyles


Power Animals


One of the features of these common ritual practices was an emphasis on certain animals as sources of great power. These included bears in particular, but also wolves, various birds (especially ravens and eagles), mythical animals such as sea monsters (especially the sisiutl and thunderbirds), and killer whales.


Number of Societies and Proportion of Population

While some communities may have had only a single secret society organization, the more common pattern seems to have been for communities to have from two to five such organizations. As previously noted, some societies were exclusively for chiefs and thus must have involved only a small segment of the population. Other societies had up to forty-four or fifty-three individual dance roles, but it is not clear whether this was for a single village or whether it was for the regional organization. Some societies like the Nuuchahnulth Wolf Society were for all free male residents of villages at the entry level, although the upper ranks only involved small numbers of people.


Sex and Age


Women could be initiated into at least some secret societies. They could perform dances in some societies, but only held supporting roles in others. There were also societies that excluded women or had exclusively female members

Children were commonly initiated into many secret societies around the age of seven to ten years old. However, cases of three-year- old initiates were also reported.


Feasts

There were numerous feasts associated with secret society initiations and performances, even on a nightly basis for the duration of the ritual season.
There were particularly grandiose feasts at the culmination of sons’ initiations into the most important societies, described as the greatest potlatch of a man’s career. Other feasts were given to secret society members for services, as fines for transgressions, and for various initiation arrangements.


Frequency

Important secret society dances and rituals were held every year during the winter ritual season.
Initiations into the highest ranks must have been much less frequent since it took about twelve years to enter the third level of the Cannibal society.


ETHNOGRAPHIC OBSERVATIONS

Core Features

Motives and Dynamics

In discussing the Gitksan, John Adams makes the important point that for those at the head of kinship groups, there was no way within the kinship system to increase wealth or power. In order to do this, ambitious individuals had to go outside kinship groups to create war or other alliances or to establish secret dance societies.

Thus, as elsewhere (the Plains, New Guinea, the Southwest, California), specific successful secret societies exhibited the ability to spread over large regions very rapidly, creating a relatively uniform regional network of ritual and political organizations that would otherwise be unexpected and surprising


Wealth Acquisition (see also “Membership Fees”)


The cost of advancement into successive ranks escalated in tandem with rank level. While the individual initiate may have personally financed some of these costs as he matured, it is more likely that, as a member of a high-ranking administrative family in a corporate group, he drew upon his entire family, and probably his entire house group or kin group to provide the necessary initiation payments. In this fashion, secret societies could draw off substantial portions of the surplus production of a large section of a community. This was viewed by the afflicted individuals as extortion… Thus, successful secret society “shaman” curers were always wealthy.


Tactics


Ideology and Control of Esoteric Knowledge


Central to Northwest Coast secret society ideologies were putative ancestral contacts with supernatural beings who conveyed supernatural powers to specific ancestors who, in turn, made them available to those of their descendants who wanted those powers and were able to acquire them through memberships in secret societies. This required considerable wealth payments as well as family connections.

Among the Kwakwakawakw and Tsimshian – and probably other Northwest Coastal groups as well as Southwestern groups – the right to control economic resources, like the right to access specific supernatural spirits, was hereditary, with powers and privileges stemming largely from the exclusive elite hereditary rights and roles in secret societies.

Tsimshian chiefs claimed that only they had the power to deal directly with heavenly beings, whereas such contact would make others go insane or make them sick. A more extreme expression of this ideology was promulgated among the Bella Coola, some of whom maintained that humans could not do anything without supernatural help.

This presumably also applied to secret society members since shamans were generally members of secret societies and the same term was used to refer to both a shaman and a secret society member. However, in contravention of all norms, powerful chiefs “feared no restrictions and heeded no conventions”, and undoubtedly justified their actions in terms of their positions in the Sisauk Society. Such actions and attitudes are characteristic of extreme aggrandizer, if not sociopathic, behavior (Hare 1993).

Supernatural power was portrayed as dangerous (rather like electricity or nuclear power), although secret society members knew how to get it and use it without harming themselves.


Benefits and Threats to Community Well-being

A major benefit that secret societies claimed to provide to their communities was protection from dangerous supernatural powers which secret societies themselves periodically unleashed in communities to demonstrate how much danger the community might face without their protection. McIlwraith repeatedly mentions the terror that such events created throughout the entire village, especially for the uninitiated who often cowered in their houses or rooms while destruction rained down on their houses or persons from “Cannibals,” “Breakers,” “Scratchers,” “Bears,” “Wolves,” and other supernatural impersonators. As previously noted, other dancers claimed to capture or steal the souls of spectators.

The Nuuchahnulth had a secret society, largely composed of women, that specialized in curing and this may be the same as the Tsaiyeq Society... The Quinault also had a secret society that was primarily for curing and whose members were primarily women. However, members of their main society, the Klokwalle (Wolf) Society were only male and were feared and reputed to kill and eat people during their secret ceremonies .

As another community benefit, at least one dance, the Mother Nature Dance, of the Bella Coola was portrayed as creating or promoting the birth of plant life.


Exclusiveness and Ranking


The Sisauk Society of the Bella Coola was explicitly viewed as an exclusive society of chiefs. Only children or families of wealthy chiefs could be members and membership gave individuals a warrant for control over a territory derived from their confirmation of ancestral power.


Membership Fees

When a secret society dance was transferred from one Kwakwakawakw mother’s kin group to her son, a square 100 feet on a side was demarcated on the beach and filled with food dishes, pots, cutlery, bracelets, boxes, blankets, copper, canoes, sea otter pelts, slaves, and other wealth items to be given away. The main wealth items that Kane mentioned were slaves, otter furs, dentalia, and wives. Initiations were one of the few events in which wealth was purposefully destroyed. Spradley (1969) also emphasized the excessive costs of initiations and feasts, listing gold bracelets and broaches as given to guest chiefs from other villages in addition to copious amounts of money, clothes, blankets, dishes, pots, and other items given to helpers.


Public Displays of Power and Wealth

McIlwraith (1948) stated explicitly that the prestige of the secret societies was derived from their ability to inspire awe, and that they all worked together toward that end, including promoting the ideology that members were supernaturally powerful and dangerous, and killing slaves to reinforce these claims. As a result of these and other tactics, when Europeans first encountered Northwest Coast tribes, the power of secret society members was described as “unquestioned.”

[There are many] graphic accounts of cannibalism, biting people, devouring live dogs, disemboweling dancers or beheading them or burning them or drowning them (all of whom were subsequently brought back to life), and demolishing house walls and furnishings. The public was allowed to watch many of these performances, sometimes standing by the doorways of host houses or witnessing performances that were routinely repeated in each house of a village. Destruction of property only
took place during the initiation of a son into a secret society or for taking on a new role or building a house. The possessing spirit was subsequently expelled from the dancer by society members at the end of the ceremony.

Some of the “tricks” used in society performances included making objects disappear, making suns and moons move over the walls by themselves, and throwing dog carcasses up in the air where they disappeared. In conjunction with the Kusiut Society, shamans gave a public feast at which they demonstrated some of their supernatural abilities. These included changing water to blood or birds’ down; pulling birds’ down from fires; burning stones; making water disappear; and throwing a stick up in the air to the ridge pole, and hanging from the suspended stick.

Some members of the Nuuchahnulth curing society, the Tsaiyeq, were reported to be able to stick a feather in the ground and make it walk around the floor, to handle hot rocks, or put red-hot rocks in their mouths. One of the most remarkable accounts is of Chief Legaic who found a look-alike slave and had him act as Legaic in a performance. The slave impersonating Legaic was then killed and cremated as part of the performance, after which the real Legaic rose miraculously from the burial box containing the slave’s ashes.


Enforcement


Secret societies also organized raiding parties, engaged assassins, and regularly threatened to kill members who divulged society secrets or killed non-members who trespassed into areas used as special meeting places or for ritual events, or even saw some of the sacred paraphernalia, thereby learning some of the secrets of the societies. Anyone revealing society mysteries among the Coast Salish was torn to bits.

Tsimshian individuals who broke the “laws” of the societies were killed, while, as with most other groups, death was threatened for unauthorized people trespassing near ritual locations or into secret society rituals, especially if they discovered the “tricks” used in demonstrations of supernatural powers during performances. Tsimshian technical assistants could also be killed if they botched special supernatural effects so that the supernatural display became apparent to spectators as an artifice.

The initiates to the Xaihais Kwakwakawakw Cannibal Society were told:

Now you are seeing all the things the chief’s use. You must remember to take care not to reveal the secrets of the Shamans [society members]. You must abide by the rules of the work of the chiefs. These things you see before you will kill you if you break the rules of the dance. If you make a mistake your parents will die, all your relatives will die.

(Drucker 1941)​


Material Aspects

Paraphernalia

Masks were carved by secret society members and represented spirits, but were sometimes supposed to be burned after major rituals like those of the Cannibals
and after all Kusiut ceremonies of the Bella Coola, apparently in an attempt to keep the spirit charade a secret, although Sisauk members received masks to be kept after their initiation. Masks were normally kept hidden among the Tsimshian, and only displayed or used during supernatural performances. Masks used by impersonators of wolves in the Wolf Society of the Nuuchahnulth were “jealously guarded for a lifetime, and relinquished only at death to some duly appointed heir.”


Secret Society Structures and Settlement Patterns

Village Locations


The Kwakwakawakw, Nuuchahnulth, and Bella Coola secret societies each “had a separate house” in the village. This did not necessarily mean that they owned separate structures but only that a residential house (presumably of a high-ranking member of the society) was designated as taboo to non-initiates during the period that secret societies held their rituals inside it. Such houses were cleaned for dancing, profane items were removed, and a central hearth was established for society activities. The houses were publicly marked by hanging a cedar bark ring or other cedar bark symbols outside, or the houses were cordoned off so that non-initiates would not witness any of the secret rituals. Boas specifically states that it was the “Master of Ceremonies’” house that served as a dance house for the Kwakwakawakw, and a separate house was used by society members to prepare for their performances and rituals. In contrast, for the Nuuchahnulth and the Bella Coola, it was the house of the person paying for the initiation which was used as the “taboo” house of the society for their ceremonies. George MacDonald (personal communication) has also indicated that the prevalent practice among the Tsimshian was probably simply to transform one of the larger residential “long houses” into temporary secret society dance venues, especially where leaders lacked sufficient resources or labor to construct special facilities for public dance displays. Within the house, a “room,” or partitioned section, at the rear was used for the seclusion of novices.

However, Marshall (2000) has demonstrated that these communal ritual/ceremonial structures developed after 1890 in response to the shift from large multifamily households suitable for large ritual performances to smaller nuclear family residences.

The Tlingit were reported to have had special “bath houses” adjacent to some high-ranking households where political elites would gather. This is a pattern reminiscent of Californian sweat lodges used by secret societies for some of their rituals.
Whether the Tlingit bath houses were used by secret society elites is unclear, but it seems plausible as part of a general pattern of exclusive gathering places for elites who typically formed secret societies.


Remote Locations

In general, the seclusions, training, and trials of initiates occurred at some distance from villages, in the “woods,”
over periods varying for the Kwakwakawakw from one to two months during which little was eaten, and for the Hartley Bay Tsimshian from four to twelve days, the longer periods being for the highest elite children. At least one Gitksan dance was originally obtained in a cave where dance spirits dwelled and where initiates were supposed to go during their seclusion, and initiates into the main Tsimshian “Shamans’” dance series were sequestered for a month or two “in a hut or cave in the bush surrounded by corpses”. Similarly, the Wikeno Kwakwakawakw initiates usually stayed “in a shelter or cave which has been prepared for him out in the woods”.

Kwakwakawakw initiates into the aL’aqim Society were also taken to “a cave inhabited by spirits” where they remained for four days. Each Bella Bella local group apparently used a separate cave in which spirits of ceremonials dwelled and taught initates songs, dances, and magic. The Cave of the Animals (EeSo-28) in the Broughton Archipelago area was also used to store secret society masks and for secret society ceremonies (“winter ceremonials”) and initiations, as well as having a number of animal pictographs on the cave wall.

In sum, secret societies among complex hunter/gatherers along the Northwest Coast used at least four distinctive types of locations for their activities:

1 venues for public displays of power (usually within or near villages);​
2 locations for secret meetings (either within villages and/or in more or less
remote locations depending on climate or other factors);​
3 locations for the seclusion of initiates (usually in locations at some distance from
villages, and possibly the same locations used for secret meetings); and​
4 isolated remote locations for storing ritual paraphernalia whether owned by
individuals or by secret societies.​



Power Animals

Powerful patron animals, whether derived from natural or imaginary species, were used to help achieve domination by secret society members. In contrast to the subsistence importance of animal prey species, the nature of most animals used in Northwest Coast iconography was dominating and threatening – characteristics which were supposed to be conferred upon their human confederates.


Number of Societies in Communities


[Regarding] the Bella Coola, there were clearly two distinct societies, the Kusiut and the Sisauk, with perhaps a third less prestigious or upstart rival society, the A’alk, about which little is said.


Number of Members, Proportion of Population


Curtis estimated that 60 percent of the native residents at Fort Rupert were “shamans,” i.e., initiated into a secret society. Women were prohibited from being members of the Deer Society and Wild Man Society among the Nuuchahnulth, and the Wolf Society initiates were described as being boys.


Age of Initiates

“Children” were initiated among the Wikeno and Xaihais Kwakwakawakw, in one case as young as three years old, but seven years old appears to have been a more common lower age of initiation for some boys
 
CONTEXT 2: THE EMERGENCE OF SECRET SOCIETIES (cont'd)

From

‘THE POWER OF RITUAL: Secret Societies and Origins of Social Complexity’ by Bryan Hayden

The following sections are if possible the most important to date. Now we have set up the context for widespread and indicative secret society manipulation and directed control over cultural change and transformation, here we get to the very meat of the matter when it comes to the topic in hand; the transition from the Paleolithic to Neolithic and what will be my deep dive into the region around Göbekli Tepe region and the PPN to come next.

I find much of what he writes here spine chilling in its implication and incredibly in line with the thinking and discoveries I had already become semi-convinced of before I came across his thesis.


PART III

IMPLICATIONS FOR ARCHAEOLOGY


ARCHAEOLOGICAL APPLICATIONS


I am not suggesting that secret societies should have, or would have, been present in all such [ancient] societies. They were certainly not recorded in all ethnographic societies at these levels. Nevertheless, their occurrence is common enough ethnographically so that they may have been present in as many as 25–50 percent of archaeological transegalitarian societies. Indeed, it would be astounding if they were not common in many Post-Pleistocene cultures.


Special Structures Used for Rituals within or near Communities


Secret society structures could be multi-functional (combining uses as sweat houses, periodic residences, ritual centers, feasting facilities, and locations for various craft activities), or they could be exclusively used for rituals and the seclusion of initiates. Thus some contained cooking facilities, even multiple hearths, while others had none. A number of secret society structures had distinctive features such as stone-faced or plastered benches along the walls, an architectural design especially suited for viewing central addresses or performances. Other design features hid activities from public view by separating them from residential areas or by situating the structures below ground. Many specialized ritual structures could accommodate only a small number of people, although there were some important exceptions, as in Melanesia, California, and the Plains. Using the direct historic approach or regional ethnographic syntheses to interpret such structures, where possible, should be invaluable in helping to identify ritual structures. Feasting and/or dancing facilities (plazas or demarcated flat areas) or areas for public displays were often associated with secret society structures. Alternatively, special structures or large corporate residential structures could be used as ritual theatres for large numbers of spectators. Feasting and some normal meals took place inside some secret society structures as well.

However, some of the best archaeological examples include unusual volumes of storage features or food preparation facilities (e.g., Jerf el Ahmar, Keatley Creek, Puebloan kivas, Göbekli Tepe). In Melanesia, megalithic monoliths, platforms, benches, or stone walls/cairns were sometimes erected in association with the cult houses or dancing grounds and/or burial sites.


Remote Locations


The use of caves is of particular interest owing to their enhanced archaeological visibility and their prominence in archaeological research. Caves were used as “shrines” and storage locations for ritual paraphernalia, as well as for special rituals such as solstice ceremonies, and for the seclusion of initiates. The ethnographic documentation of their use by secret societies (or any other ritualists) tends to be very limited, but the information that is available is extremely valuable and sufficient to establish caves as important locations for secret society activities. The nearly universal claims that caves were supernaturally dangerous places that normal people avoided may be due in part to their use by secret societies for rituals and the taboos associated with secret society locations. As detailed in the following sections, some of the best arguments for archaeological secret societies come from cave contexts, whether in the Upper Paleolithic, the American Southwest, California, the Near East, or the European metal ages.


Ritual Paraphernalia


Often, such society paraphernalia tended to be carefully curated and/or destroyed at the end of its use life. These included the use of masks, quartz crystals and exotic shells; the use of spears or arrows; and the use of instruments that made unusual noises, which were claimed to be spirit voices, especially drums, rattles, bullroarers, flutes or whistles, and deep resonators like conch
shell trumpets. It is interesting to note that, archaeologically, the earliest occurrences of flutes, whistles, bullroarers, and lithophones were from Upper Paleolithic caves in Europe, and that arrowheads or spearpoints should be recurring types in artifact assemblages at secret society locations. Bullroarers were “one of the most widespread of primitive instruments.

Decoration of artifacts could also be indicative of secret societies. In one case, Mills suggested that the shift from bold exterior motifs on ceramics to more intimate interior designs in the American Southwest may have been due to a shift from large kin-based group feasting and ceremonies to more restricted feasts and ceremonies that only involved small numbers of individuals, such as ritual sodalities. Also of potential note is the occurrence of bedrock mortars or unusual bedrock features in association with a number of archaeological ritual sites like Göbekli Tepe, the Ritidian caves on Guam, Natufian cave burial and feasting sites, and ritual sites in California, as well as the ritual use of mortars by the ethnographic Miwok.


Power Animal Iconography


Iconography of power animals not only indicated an important ideological component of many secret societies but also could reflect individual roles within societies. A variety of such animals were generally present in secret society iconographies, but usually did not represent major animal staple food species – a feature that has often puzzled prehistoric cave art researchers. The most common power animals were carnivores, omnivores, or raptors, but large, powerful, and dangerous herbivores like bison, elephants, and bulls were common as well. These animals were often depicted in threatening poses. Other birds or animals as well as imaginary animals and abstracted supernatural forces, sexual motifs, and natural powers (e.g., lightning) also occurred but were less common. Ancestral spirits, or “ghosts,” were common ideological elements of secret societies, although these were often conceived of in animal or masked forms. The use of animal skins with claws may have indicated either identification with such animals or conceptual transformations into those animals – another common element in secret society ideologies and iconographies. Although not the focus of this study, another iconographic feature noted in passing was the frequent use of sexual motifs, especially phallic and vulvic depictions.


Interaction Spheres


Driver observed that the details of secret society ritual often reflect regional and pan-regional patterns. The details of sodality expression in any particular society “are normally shared with neighboring tribes, as well as with tribes in other culture areas, and must be accounted for by contact of peoples, diffusion, acculturation, and other historical processes.” In fact, it was surprising to see some individual ritual elements appearing across large parts of the continent of North America, such as the “shooting” of special objects into initiates who then “fell dead” but were subsequently revived. The hanging up of people by piercing their flesh and inserting skewers with ropes attached is another ritual feature that occurred on the Pacific Coast and in the Central Plains, thousands of kilometers away. The occurrence of similar uses of tortoise shells in West Africa and Classical Greece and other unusual combinations of traits may be due to similar hyperfluid diffusion of ritual practices – a speculative suggestion to be sure. The ethnographies indicate that popular or effective ritual techniques easily travelled within and between regional secret society networks. In addition, the many “starter” secret societies that sprang up continuously all seem to have shared formats and ideologies that resembled the dominant secret societies of the region, only varying in the details of specific animals invoked or slight alterations in ritual practice, songs or dances used, and visions obtained.


Art Traditions


In many cases, art used at ritual locations was elaborate and sophisticated, displaying considerable skill, training, and time investment. The occurrence of a sophisticated art tradition may therefore be indicative of secret society underwriting. Secret society art traditions were usually based on prior existing motifs and beliefs, but added new dimensions of meaning and new elements to those traditions, such as the occurrence of imaginary animals and ghosts or transformed therianthropic images. As noted above, such art traditions usually encompassed entire regions or larger geographical areas or cultural groupings.


Feasting


Large-scale community feasts and performances were periodically given by many secret societies. Almost all initiations were associated with large feasts, perhaps dispersed among the households of initiates, or perhaps held at the secret society lodges. Ethnographic accounts are unclear. Smaller-scale feasts were undoubtedly held for members or higher ranks only at secret society locations. Remains of specialty foods (e.g., breads, pigs, dogs, or most domestic animals) or drinks (especially alcohol), as well as food preparation and serving vessels, testify to feasting, especially when they occur in large quantities or associated with ritual areas.


Human Sacrifice and Cannibalism

Although not universal, reports of human sacrifices and/or cannibalism occurred surprisingly frequently in secret societies on various continents (e.g., in Africa, Polynesia, Melanesia, and the American Northwest Coast). Such activities usually, but not always, appeared to take place in locations restricted from public view, although precise information was not always available. Sometimes evidence of sacrifice or cannibalism was placed on display, as with trophy skulls in West Africa.

Esoteric Knowledge

On occasion, evidence of esoteric systems of knowledge could be represented materially in the form of standing stones, architecture, or notations, especially in relation to the development of sophisticated astronomical systems which were features of many secret societies.


Age and Sex

There has been considerable debate over the sex of individuals who might have painted or engraved images in the deep recesses of Upper Paleolithic caves. If they were made by members of secret societies, what are the probabilities that women or girls were involved in rituals in the caves, or even in the making of the images? Ethnographically, there was considerable variability in female roles in secret societies. It was very common for children as young as four to six years old, and sometimes younger, to become members of some secret societies, especially if their parents were rich and high ranking. It was also common for women to participate in secret societies in varying ways, although there was considerable variation in different cultural traditions. In some regions, women did not participate at all, in other regions they had a few, very precise roles. Elsewhere they participated as support personnel (cooks, singers, servers, courtesans) but not in important rituals, and still elsewhere they could be full members or have their own secret societies.

Webster argued that “The admission of women is characteristic of the disintegration of the secret societies and of their conversion into purely social clubs or magical fraternities.” However, varying roles for women in secret societies seem to have been too pervasive an ethnographic occurrence to be explained on this basis. Overall, there does seem to have been an emphasis on men’s organizations and power, with many secret societies having been exclusively male. Where women’s secret societies existed, they were always ranked lower than their male equivalents, and women’s roles were generally of lesser importance where they were included as members in more inclusive societies. A separate study could probably be consecrated to unraveling possible patterns in gender roles in the various types of secret societies.


Special Burials

It was very common for high-ranking members of secret societies to be accorded special mortuary treatments. Efforts were often made to prevent body parts from being removed as sources of mana by those seeking to increase their own supernatural powers. These burial practices again varied regionally. High- ranking burials often took place in either the main structures of the societies, or under cairns or tumuli, or in special remote locations. Of special note was the frequent curation of skulls from individuals of high rank, and in some instances the coating of the skulls with plastic media to give more life-like appearances, which were then displayed in ritual structures. Sometimes elaborate burial structures were used or shaft tombs were constructed as repositories of bodies accompanied by wealth and retainer sacrifices, notably in the compound of the deceased members. Few, if any, high-ranking members of major secret societies were buried in common cemeteries.

Although not specifically mentioned in the ethnographies, caves would have been especially suited for secret or clandestine burials of powerful secret society leaders. Caves were protected by prohibitions and, like other secret society locations, were portrayed ideologically as dangerous places. The archaeological occurrence of special burials in caves in Mesoamerica, the Northwest Coast, the American Southwest, Micronesia, Europe, and the Near East is otherwise difficult to explain.

The below is so intrinsic that I post it almost in its entirety without any bolding and with only the mass of notations removed:

CASE STUDIES


Europe and the Near East

The Middle Paleolithic


The stalagmitic circles far in the interior of Bruniquel Cave dated to 175,000 bp provide the best candidate for some sort of exclusive ritual group featuring sensory deprivation and probable altered states of consciousness or sacred ecstatic states in the Middle Paleolithic. The Grotte de Hortus provides another possible example. This is an obscure cave 200 meters above the valley floor where sets of panther third phalanges were probably part of a costume. The occurrence of an articulated bear foot may indicate a similar use of a bear skin. The excavated occupation floor at Hortus was at the bottom of a narrow rock fissure totally hidden from outside view and so small that only a few people could have participated in any activities. It is worth considering the possibility that the shelter may have been used as a storage location for ritual paraphernalia. The occupation also included human remains from at least twenty individuals, with an emphasis on skulls (together with skulls of Alpine ibexes) as well as evidence of cannibalism. Given the fauna present, the analysts felt certain that the cannibalism was not part of subsistence activities, but was for ritual purposes. All these features fit well with secret society characteristics. Use of other dark caves has been reported for this time period, including Arcy-sur- Cure, Cougnac, and Grotta della Barura; however, indications of ritual use are less explicit than at Bruniquel and Hortus. Eagle talons and feathers appear to also have been used by Neandertals as part of costumes or ornaments. These finds hint at some kind of ritual practices similar to secret society organizations, but by themselves are not conclusive.


The Upper Paleolithic

At least in some cases, groups in the Upper Paleolithic using painted caves must have been small and exclusive. There was also good evidence of seclusion-like contexts in caves where crude images occurred in places only suitable for viewing by one or two people. Following the initial suggestion that at least some of the most elaborately decorated Upper Paleolithic caves were used for secret society rituals, Suzanne Villeneuve undertook an analysis of the physical contexts of cave images in an attempt to determine the size and composition of the groups viewing the images. We also examined the likelihood that Upper Paleolithic groups developed relatively sophisticated astronomical systems and calendars. I argued that these developments are primarily understandable as features of secret societies in the Upper Paleolithic. In addition to these published results, a number of other factors indicate that secret societies were central features in Upper Paleolithic rituals, at least in the most prosperous and productive resource areas like the Dordogne and Pyrenees.

23..jpg

10.1 Right: The “Sorcerer” from Les Trois Frères Cave in France. Left: A sketch of an Elk Society dancer among the Ogalala Sioux on the American Plains. While such similarities may be convergences stemming from a common general belief framework, the detailed similarities strengthen the impression that the elaborate Upper Paleolithic cave paintings (including mythic animals) were products of secret societies.


The factors of relevance are:
  1. The occurrence of decorated caves in environmentally rich areas that supported high population densities and complex hunting and gathering societies with surpluses, wealth accumulations, pronounced socioeconomic differences, and sociopolitical competition typical of transegalitarian hunter/gatherers.
  2. Decorated caves seem to have been infrequently used, and not regularly used for events like tribal initiations that would have involved large numbers of people. In fact, Guthrie estimates that only one in a thousand individuals entered caves or left images. This seems exaggerated, but makes the point. Ethnographically, secret society initiations could take place at intervals of up to ten or more years, and new initiates slated for high-ranking positions were often given different training itineraries. The notion that caves were used for tribal initiations has been rejected by Pastoors et al. based on the demographics of footprints and by Clottes on the basis of episodic use, the very young age of some of the participants, and restricted access.
  3. Similarly, Clottes and Lewis-Williams, like Owens and Hayden and Villeneuve, have pointed out that some decorated spaces in caves were really only suitable for a small number of individuals, not large initiation groups.
  4. The common presence of children has been documented in the decorated caves based on footprints, handprints, and finger markings, the youngest so far identified being a two-year- old. Based on the same evidence, both males and females were present at rituals in the caves. This age and sex profile for those involved in cave rituals matches the age and sex profile documented for secret society initiates.
  5. Various authors point out the very restricted nature of access to deep caves and cave art, implying or stating that access was exclusive and somehow related to the acquisition or wielding of power in Upper Paleolithic societies. Other archaeologists remark that these caves were probably only accessed by privileged individuals, and that they were probably painted by high-status families. From a comparative perspective, Wason concluded that restricted access to ritual areas is generally indicative of socioeconomic inequalities in a society. These are also characteristics of secret societies.
  6. The cave iconography and portable sculptures indicate that elaborate animal costumes and masks were used in conjunction with cave rituals, the most notable examples being the “Sorcerer” image in Les Trois Frères (Fig. 10.1), and the figurines of lion-headed men from Hohlenstein-Stadel, Holhe Fels, and Vogelherd caves with scars on their upper arms reminiscent of scarification practices in many secret society initiations. In fact, an image of an Elk secret society ritualist from the Plains (Fig. 10.1) displays an uncanny resemblance to the Sorcerer from Les Trois Frères Cave in France. Clottes documents other therianthropic examples. These images may also represent imagined transformations of secret society members into animal forms.
  7. Cave and portable art does not focus on subsistence animals, but on power animals such as bison, aurochs, mammoths, felines, bears, rhinoceroses, as well as imaginary animals that are characteristic of secret society iconography. “Ghosts,” which were central to many secret society ideologies, were also represented.
  8. There is substantial evidence for the development of sophisticated astronomical knowledge associated with the use of decorated caves. Some similarities are quite remarkable, as with the selection of caves with solar solstice alignments for decoration and rituals by the Chumash ‘Antap members, and the alignment of many decorated Upper Paleolithic caves with solar solstice orientations, including Lascaux and Bernifal caves in. The Blanchard plaquette also appears to record surprisingly sophisticated lunar observations. As in American West Coast secret societies, astronomical knowledge probably served as a basis for the arcane, esoteric secrets of high- ranking secret society members in the Upper Paleolithic.
  9. Caves were ideal for generating altered states of consciousness, and some of the smaller caves like Pergouset and Combarelles II appear to have only been used for vision quests that may have been part of secret society initiations for some high-ranking individuals. Vision quests were often associated with high rank.
  10. Drum beaters, flutes, lithophones, bullroarers, and even two-reed types of pipes or trumpets have been recovered primarily from caves or burials. In fact, bone “flutes are commonly found inside the decorated caves”. These are all typical paraphernalia of secret societies used to represent spirit sounds, or at the very least they represent music which Morley links to ritual activities.
  11. A number of special burials occurred in the Upper Paleolithic that may have been interments of secret society leaders, including possible skull cults. The burials in Cussac Cave, at Brno, and other locations with elaborate grave goods provide marked contrasts with the vast majority of people who do not seem to have received burial treatment.
  12. As in the Middle Paleolithic, cannibalism was certainly present in these Upper Paleolithic areas and possibly involved human sacrifices, especially during the Magdalenian. Again, the predominant, if not exclusive, evidence for cannibalism comes from caves where bone flutes also occur in abundance. These aspects also make sense primarily in terms of secret society cults. Villa (has noted the presence of human remains with cut marks or modifications in at least fifteen Upper Paleolithic sites in France, as well as the nest of thirty-three crania at the Early Mesolithic site of Ofnet in Bavaria. In fact, Pettitt stated that 40 percent of the human remains from the Upper Paleolithic exhibit cut marks.
  13. The widespread similarity of art motifs and musical instruments from western to eastern Europe as well as the exchange of special materials over many hundreds of kilometers is characteristic of the regional scale and networks of most secret society organizations, resulting in interaction sphere material expressions.
  14. In some cases, such as Enlène and La Garma, there were good indications of feasting in the completely dark areas of caves and some of these feasting remains were associated with apparent ritual structures. Ethnographically, feasting in or near ritual spaces was a typical secret society activity.
  15. Another factor is the high degree of specialization and skill exhibited by the principal artists. This level of skill must have been economically supported and directed in some way, such as specialized training. The artistic elaboration of many ethnographic secret societies provides an important model for this development.

Given all these correspondences with the material patterns of secret societies documented in the preceding chapters, I think that the more elaborately painted caves of western Europe constitute some of the best candidates for pre-historic secret societies outside North America.

Using this perspective, I found it very instructive to visit Lascaux and Font-de-Gaume, two of the four caves in western Europe with exceptional Upper Paleolithic polychrome art. In my personal view, there are several remarkable similarities in the way the art was organized in these two caves. First, the main chamber that one initially encounters (Salle des Tauraux in Lascaux and the Carrefour in Font- de- Gaume) is large enough for more than a dozen people and had some of the most visible high quality art. The same was true of Les Trois Frères Cave near the Pyrenees, although the chamber was much deeper than the others.

Second, extending off the main entry chamber in both caves was a narrow corridor with a small alcove toward the back with spectacular art evidently painted by trained and skilled artists. Only one or at most two or three people at a time could view the art in these small alcoves. In Lascaux, the Diverticule Axial formed the corridor leading to the alcove, and the alcove was surrounded by the “falling horse” frieze and the Red Panel. In Font-de-Gaume, the corridor was the “Galerie Principale” and the alcove was the “Salle des Petits Bisons.” In both cases, the corridors were spectacularly painted. At Lascaux, this corridor was referred to as “prehistory’s Sistine Chapel”, a term that may be far more apt than originally suspected. In fact, I suggest that, in both cases, these corridors and their small alcoves were for the exclusive use of the highest ranking member(s) of the secret societies who went to the alcoves to commune with spirits, just as the Sistine Chapel was largely for the Pope’s exclusive use. A similar kind of main entry chamber together with a more private alcove with notable art for viewing by an individual or a very small group of ritualists has been proposed for Villars Cave by Villeneuve. This same spatial logic was expressed in the ritual use of a cave at Santa Eulaia (Guatemala), where the deepest parts were the most sacred and only accessed by the highest ranking ritualists. Similar patterns of spatial use occurred in Malekula where certain areas were exclusively used by chiefs and other areas were used for group dancing.

A third similarity in spatial organization involves what I would call “graffiti” art. In Lascaux, as well as in Bernifal where Suzanne Villeneuve and I recorded the contexts of the parietal art, there were specific areas (separated from the main chambers) where exceptionally high densities of engraved images occurred that were often superimposed and usually exhibited crude, small, even scribbled, execution, although some more refined images were also present (Fig. 10.2). Many of these images were evidently made, and viewed, while in a squatting position such as is generally used when resting or waiting in traditional societies. The engravings would have been best viewed by the glancing light of a single flame placed on the floor or held to the side rather than by torchlight held at eye level. On the basis of the distinctive locations, the high densities of images, the crudeness of most of the art, the expedient nature of its execution (using any random piece of flint, bone, wood, or perhaps even fingernails), and the lack of regard for previous images, it seemed clear to me that these images were not made by the same individuals who created the painted images, nor were they made for the same purposes, nor at the same exact time. However, since they were so locationally concentrated in relation to the high quality paintings, it seemed that they were used in conjunction with whatever was transpiring in the main chambers and/or the private alcoves. Remarkably, no one has drawn much attention to the possible ritual roles or ritual significance of these concentrated images. Indeed, no one has tried to make much sense of them in terms of the activities that they represent. They seem to have been relegated to the status of curios in the cave art world, probably because they do not fit the current models of Upper Paleolithic ritual and art and because there are so many random lines. At most, art analysts have concluded that the superposition of images indicates that it was the act of drawing rather than the image itself that was of importance.

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10.2 Part of the dense panel of engravings in the Abside alcove of Lascaux Cave. Note the strong emphasis on scribbling, the overmarking of previous images, and the generally crude quality of most images. There is little indication of any advance preparation for making these images, which could have been scratched into the rock face with any sharp object at hand (Photo by N. Aujoulat, courtesy of the French Centre National de la Préhistoire)

To me, the concentrations of these engravings constituted graffiti made by individuals who were told to stay and wait in given locations, probably because they were not allowed to witness some things that transpired in the central chambers. Perhaps they were made by new initiates in seclusion areas or by actors in ritual dramas waiting to make appearances in the main chambers. I have recorded essentially identical graffiti on the inside doors of elevators at Simon Fraser University, made expediently with whatever was at hand by untrained and mostly unskilled individuals bored with the slow pace of the elevator (Fig. 10.3). These graffiti, like their prehistoric counterparts, were probably the products of frustration at having to wait for some event. Some scholars have viewed all cave art as graffiti and much of it probably was. Half of all images in Lascaux are engravings on the small wall of the Abside (Fig. 10.2), and in Villeneuve’s study, 75 percent of the images were small and of “poor” quality, with 66 percent most easily viewed from a squatting or crouching position. However, it would be a gross error to conclude that the major masterpieces were nothing but graffiti.


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10.3 Graffiti on an elevator door at Simon Fraser University displaying many of the same characteristics as the densely engraved panels at Lascaux, Gargas, and Trois Frères in terms of expediently made scratches, scribbling, overmarking, and generally crude quality. These characteristics may be typical of activities by individuals who had to wait in enclosed areas for events to transpire (Photo by B. Hayden).


The locations of the proposed “waiting” areas in caves varied. In Bernifal, they occurred in narrow passages well before the main chamber deep inside the cave. In Lascaux, they occured in a small alcove, the “Abside,” off to the right of the Salle des Tauraux. Its two walls are scarcely 3 meters long each, yet the jumbled mass of engravings on those two walls astonishingly contained more than half of the 2,000 images in the entire cave. There are other similar examples in other caves. In Les Trois Frères, a similar jumbled mass of superimposed engravings occurred in a tight passage where one cannot stand upright. The passage is located behind the image of the “Sorcerer” which dominates the major decorated chamber deep inside the cave. Another example of concentrated superimposed engravings occurred at the back of Gargas Cave in a “small chamber” called the Camarin, similar in size to the Abside in Lascaux. The Camarin contains almost 71 percent of all the recognizable figures in Gargas, again similar to the situation in Lascaux’s Abside, and like the fi gures in the Abside, the images were mostly crude and mixed with abundant scribblings. In fact, Barrière, who documented these images, remarked that they “suggest in the strongest possible fashion ... black-board graffiti.” In addition, there were indications that the “Diverticule Final” in Font-de-Gaume may have been used in a similar fashion, since a number of engravings were recorded there; however, no careful studies have taken place since the earliest observations.

I suggest that all these locations of concentrated graffiti were probably waiting places for new initiates undergoing ritual seclusion or waiting to be brought into the main chambers for initiation.

This sequence is similar to that proposed by Lewis-Williams, but with a special focus on secret societies rather than shamans or other types of initiations. One unique feature at Font-de-Gaume is the remarkable decorated frieze of bison along a relatively narrow corridor leading to the central chamber. This appears as a procession of bison heading to the main chamber, and was undoubtedly meant to mimic the procession of ritualists (perhaps conceptually in bison form) entering from the outside, which members would view sequentially as they progressed inward.


The Near East

Although almost none of the archaeologists working in the Near East have interpreted their excavated materials in terms of secret societies (exceptionally, K. Wright has discussed male “sodalities”), there are a number of prime archaeological candidates for secret societies, beginning in the Late Epipaleolithic and continuing into the Neolithic and probably later periods.

The Late Epipaleolithic

One of the earliest indications of likely secret society existence comes from a quite small cave located high above a wadi floor and at some distance from any known settlement of the time. This is the Late Natufian site of Hilazon Tachtit, occupied c . 12,000 bp. The core Natufian sites in the region had rich resources, signifi cant sedentism, permanent architecture, and a wide array of prestige items exchanged in a regional network that belie important inequalities. Thus, they constitute a prime example of a complex, or transegalitarian, hunter/gatherer society that could produce surpluses. While there was evidence of occasional use of the Hilazon cave, perhaps by ritualists, the main feature of this cave is the burial of an older woman accompanied by the remains of a feast including at least fifty tortoise carapaces and parts of wild cattle and wild boar. Of further note were faunal remains of leopard, eagle, and marten – typical power animals – as well as an articulated human foot. Other indications of human sacrifice have been recovered from Natufian sites, and, as we have seen, ethnographic secret society members in other culture areas often either engaged in human sacrifice or used body parts from dead individuals for various purposes. Evidence for human sacrifice is even more compelling in the following Prepottery Neolithic A period to be discussed next.

However, the fundamental question that Hilazon raises is why one single person, or even several people, were buried in such a remote, isolated, difficult- to-access location with so much ceremony.The vast majority of Natufians were buried at the major habitation sites, often under house floors. Why was this person so different? There are few compelling answers to such a question. Perhaps she was a shaman as Grosman and Munro suggest. They also suggest that the burial was a communal event orchestrated to maintain or increase social integration of a community. In view of the small, remote, difficult-to-access location, this seems highly dubious. I think it far more likely that she was an important member of a secret society. Society members in other areas commonly went to considerable lengths to secretly bury their most powerful leaders to maintain the fiction that they still lived, or so that their remains would not be pilfered for power amulets. It might also be coincidental, but several secret societies used tortoise carapaces in their rituals, even lining areas with them for initiates to lie within. Turtle shells appear to have had strong symbolical roles in Mesopotamia. All of these factors seem to point to the burial of a powerful secret society member at Hilazon Tachtit.

Elsewhere, at Zawi Chemi Shanidar in Iran, Rose Solecki excavated a single structure (perhaps the only structure at the site), with abundant remains of raptor wings. These may have been used in secret society rituals in a structure dedicated to society use. At the penecontemporaneous site of Hallan Çemi in southeastern Turkey, Michael Rosenberg excavated two semi-subterranean ritual structures in the center of the site associated with exotic materials (obsidian, shells, and copper ores) and prestige artifacts (e.g., decorated stone cups/bowls, sculpted pestles, notched talley stones, maces). As with later ritual structures in the region, they had benches around the walls, support posts set into the walls, paved areas, a plastered very clean floor, and power animals (aurochs bucrania, deer antlers, and a carving of a snake). One structure seems to have had an aurochs skull and horns hanging from a pillar. The location and distinctive architectural features of these structures recall kiva structures from the Southwestern United States or the dance houses of California, especially in their hidden, subterranean aspects and their unusual architecture. Like these ethnographic examples, the structures at Hallan Çemi may have been used by secret societies. An Early Natufian structure at Al-Shubayqa-1 may also have been used for rituals since it had a paved floor, stone- lined hearths, and an essentially clean occupation surface.
 
Years ago I have visited some caves with cave paintings dating back many thousands of years and the first thing that draws attention is that to get to the place where the paintings are, you had to walk into the cave for almost fifteen minutes.

That is to say, the lighting is non-existent, so someone asked the guide who was explaining the paintings (all speculations of the academics) about the absence of traces of burning torches or fires to light up the walls, since they are supposed to have been drawn by people without any access to lighting technology.

The guide said that he did not know, that perhaps those "footprints" had disappeared over time.

The truth is that with modern lighting it is already difficult to see the paintings well, so drawing them with the lighting of torches seems somewhat unrealistic.
 
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