The analysis focused on 93 Austronesian cultures, meaning peoples who originated in Taiwan, later settling in Madagascar, Rapa Nui (Easter Island) the Pacific Islands and New Zealand. Researchers found that the more class stratification that existed in a society—elites on top, with the rest of the populace on the bottom—the more likely it was to engage in ritualistic killings. The powerful frightened the masses into staying in proverbial line by employing "god-sanctioned" sacrifice, which entailed implicitly threatening the lives of many for supposed wrongdoing. Those at the top became, by proxy, gods among men and women, and they maintained those positions by doling out killings as they deemed necessary.
"By using human sacrifice to punish taboo violations, demoralize the underclass and instill fear of social elites, power elites were able to maintain and build social control," lead study author Joseph Watts stated in a press release.
"[H]uman sacrifice provided a particularly effective means of social control because it provided a supernatural justification for punishment," says study co-author Russell Gray. "Rulers, such as priests and chiefs, were often believed to be descended from gods and ritual human sacrifice was the ultimate demonstration of their power."
The method by which sacrifices were carried out reads like a horrifying laundry list of ways you would never want to go out. Ritual killings took the form of "burning, drowning, strangulation, bludgeoning, burial, being cut to pieces, crushed beneath a newly built canoe or being rolled off the roof of a house and decapitated." Once a society began using sacrifice to keep the ancient equivalent of the 1 percent in the top slot and slaves at the bottom, the system became self-perpetuating.
"What we found was that sacrifice was the driving force," says researcher Quentin Atkinson, "making societies more likely to adopt high social status and less likely to revert to egalitarian social structure."
The study, which was published in Nature, holds obvious implications for the roles of religion—and fear—in our own top-down, elite-ruled culture.
"Religion has traditionally been seen as a key driver of morality and cooperation," states Watts, "but our study finds religious rituals also had a more sinister role in the evolution of modern societies."
Human sacrifice in Saudi Arabia today.
Reader Comments
100% HOAX! FAKE KNIFE FOOLISH MASK, AUDIENCE THERE TO WATCH THE PLAY. NEVER BELIEVE THE ZIONIST PROPAGANDA OF DECEPTION.
In this information age, we forget ourselves because me are being forced into the 24/7/365 age of deception where we are told nothing true is true so we dont believe the absolute truth...
by looking at society in Madagascar and Rapa Nui .... The UK is hardly a classless society but I can't recall too much ritualistic killing going on
Maybe the researchers want a pat on the back for realising that if the head honcho is into ritualistic killings, he's probably is a bit of a psycho and the society would be split into different levels
I wonder if some people take it this far.
All intended to instill fear in the population and keep the little people in there place.
Yeah, you 'people'. Better do as I say or we're lopping heads off. See these big dudes. Right. We'll be making an entire social order out of this.
That's just amazing that there is anyone left who hasn't figured out this order of life. So why are we reading about this as if it's something new. This is waste-of-money research. If you are compos mentis you know this.
Anne Bullen figured this out too late.
The key is understanding how those that take over and ponerize any 'govt' thinks,such as this Report from Iron Mountain:
"War is not, as is widely assumed, primarily an instrument of policy utilized by nations to extend or defend their expressed political values or their economic interests. On the contrary, it is itself the principal basis of organization on which all modern societies are constructed. The common proximate cause of war is the apparent interference of one nation with the aspirations of another. But at the root of all ostensible differences of national interest lie the dynamic requirements of the war system itself for periodic armed conflict. Readiness for war characterizes contemporary social systems more broadly than their economic and political structures, which is subsumes."
[...]
Economic: War has provided both ancient and modern societies with a dependable system for stabilizing and controlling national economies. No alternate method of control has yet been tested in a complex modern economy that has shown itself remotely comparable in scope or effectiveness.
Political: The permanent possibility of war is the foundation for stable government; it supplies the basis for general acceptance of political authority. It has enabled societies to maintain necessary class distinctions, and it has ensured the subordination of the citizen to the state, by virtue of the residual war powers inherent in the concept of nationhood. No modern political ruling group has successfully controlled its constituency after failing to sustain the continuing credibility of an external threat of war.
[... etc, etc...]
[Link]
The article shows incredibly "Divine Obtuseness" in its thundering silence on the related/identical matter - with effectively similar aims (control) and results (deaths) - from the Western European Socio-Theological theory that is typically euphemized as "The Divine Right of Monarchy."
How many lives were taken using that as the justification? I'm not at all surprised how this article - and probably also the study - somehow miss/avoid that point. However, the overwhelming obtuseness in failing to point out this obvious parallel, fairly screams as powerfully as one of the Spanish Inquisition’s* persecuted, preyed-upon , and Poe-penned, pinioned prisoner imperiled and pitted to perish per a powerful pendulum put to plunging at the prisoner’s pericardium by ponerological - (and perhaps pedophilic) -prelates and parish priests, power-plastered with perfidy.
I guess they’d look like this and chant as follows:
............“Deus maledicit tu. Morte morietur quod vos sunt malum.” (“God curses you. You must die because you are evil.”)........................
Said 'Divine Right' was before and behind the evil and feudalism of the dark ages, and continued long thereafter - up until this day..
As Mark Twain noted in "A Connecticut Yankee..."
“THERE were two "Reigns of Terror," if we would but remember it and consider it; the one wrought murder in hot passion, the other in heartless cold blood; the one lasted mere months, the other had lasted a thousand years; the one inflicted death upon ten thousand persons, the other upon a hundred millions; but our shudders are all for the "horrors" of the minor Terror, the momentary Terror, so to speak; whereas, what is the horror of swift death by the axe, compared with lifelong death from hunger, cold, insult, cruelty, and heart-break? What is swift death by lightning compared with death by slow fire at the stake? A city cemetery could contain the coffins filled by that brief Terror which we have all been so diligently taught to shiver at and mourn over; but all France could hardly contain the coffins filled by that older and real Terror-that unspeakably bitter and awful Terror which none of us has been taught to see in its vastness or pity as it deserves.”
(And that mere paragraph itself suffered a storied history of censorship.)
R.C.
*"Nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition!" ;-) (Monty Python) (Which accords with Twain's position that most humor is merely tragedy plus time.)
**( No guarantees on this translation, just being silly.)
RC