The origins of secret societies and their contribution to the rise of social complexity

• Autores: Ricardo Chacón González, David Dye, Brian Hayden, Johan Ling, Yamilette Chacon
• Localización: Presenting Counterpoints to the Dominant Terrestrial Narrative of European Prehistory / coord. por John T. Koch, Mikael Fauvelle, Barry Cunliffe, Johan Ling, 2025, ISBN 9798888571859, págs. 115-127
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • Cross-culturally, shamans are believed to have the capacity to supernaturally cure and cause sickness. For this reason, shamans are both universally admired and feared. When a person dies, or when a shaman's patient fails to recover; shamans are often accused of practising sorcery on a targeted individual. In turn, shamans were/are sometimes killed as a result of such accusations. We propose that such transegalitarian cultural contexts, in which suspluses were produced and competition over wealth and power increased, exacerbated accusations against shamans who might stand ti benefit from individual misfortunes or recoveries. Under these conditions, to protect themselves from being physically attacked, ritual specialists formed sodalities, which offered mutual aid and protection to their members. In this sense, such shamanic fence alliances formed the basis of secret societies. In addition to providing shamans with protection, ritual sodalities typically claim privileged access to the ancestors, other-than-human beings, or other supernatural beings. The leaders of secret societies often charge fellow villagers exorbitant fees in exchange for various services, including memberships that confer access to coveted esoteric knowledge of the supernatural world and the secrets of healing and dramatic legerdemain. Thus, ritual sodalities serve as culturally sanctioned mechanisms for extracting wealth and funneling surpluses from villagers. We suggest that over time, the wealth, status, and power of aggrandizing secret society leaders grew vis-à-vis fellow transgalitarian villagers resulting in some of the first steps towards the rise of social complexity. In sum, we propose that similar practices of aggrandizement, along with the adoption of similar protection measures, were employed in the distant past by leaders of transegalitarian societies, such as those operating in Scandinavian polities during the Bronze Age.