The Power of Ritual in Prehistory

Ancient Associations

“…"Given the widespread ethnographic occurrence of secret societies in tribal societies," he continues, "it would indeed be surprising if secret societies did not play important roles in many prehistoric cultures throughout the world." 4 In The Power of Ritual in Prehistory, Hayden examines a range of purpose-built structures, such as earth lodges, sweat lodges, and kivas. These played an important role in the activities of secret societies and were used for initiations, public rituals, and feasting.…”

“…Despite "many excavations of kivas in the Southwest," he notes that reports "generally stop at the description and identification of ritual structures." 5 Hayden is convinced that much remains to be learned about secret societies from the archaeological record. Researchers should be mindful that these groups often employed a range of objects, such as masks, quartz crystals, exotic shells, drums, rattles, bullroarers, flutes, and whistles, as part of their activities.…”

Toward a Big History Interpretation of Religion

“…This is the process, which Wallace (1966) calls "revitalization movements", by which the old ways of living and governing society, grounded in its symbolic order, break down, so that society can evolve its myths to respond to new conditions or face its end (see also Assmann, 2011). It also reflects the way elites use religion to manipulate people in the societies they control (Hayden, 2018).…”

“…Current neuroscience has examined how this ritual can also lead to a feeling of unity among participants, as those rituals enable them to resolve problems of "life and death, good and evil, quest and attainment, God and human being, that are present in mythic form" (d'Aquili and Newberg, 1999: 100). With the secret societies and ancestor cults of complex hunter-gatherer societies (Hayden, 2018) and, then, the emergence of writing and a professional priesthood in the early agricultural states, however, the intensity of rituals, which might include scarification or human sacrifice, lessened. I would suggest that one reason for this shift is that the powerful forces religion was confronting seems to have moved from facing the raw forces that threatened survival to issues of social control and justification of the state.…”

“…As a result, the need to answer this question on a group level may even be a neurological element in the origin of religion. It is, however, important to remember that the people creating these explanations were generally among the elite and were often politically motivated (Hayden, 2018), as in the choice of the Orthodox Christian Church in canonizing the four gospels and rejecting those of the Gnostics (Akenson, 1999;Pagles, 1979). Because these three habits of mind inform each other in the process by which societies cope with powerful forces, I have come to think of them cumulatively as the process of societal adaptive learning.…”