Historically, priests and rulers of ancient societies sanctioned human sacrifice as an appeal to the gods to grant them a plentiful harvest or success in war. A new study suggests, however, that rulers may have had a more strategic motive as well. The study examined over seven dozen Austronesian cultures and found that human sacrifice led to societies becoming less egalitarian, which led to rigid, inherited class systems—the power stayed in power, and the weak remained weak, according to a Washington Post report.
Researchers said in the journal Nature that the study’s implications suggest “darker link between religion and the evolution of modern hierarchical societies,” and that “ritual killings helped humans transition from the small egalitarian groups of our ancestors and the large, stratified societies were live in today.”
The studied cultures were all ocean voyagers originating in Taiwan but extended throughout the Pacific extending south to New Zealand and east to Easter Island. The communities were a diverse study group including family-structured and egalitarian communities such as the Isneg in the Philippines and larger, more hierarchical and complex societies of the Hawaiian Islands, which comprised of royal families, slaves, and 100,000 other inhabitants.
Each sub-culture was rated according to a degree of stratification and its relation to engagement in ritual sacrifice. The reason and method of killings varied across the cultures including the death of a chief, construction of a home, war conquests, and to stamp out a disease outbreak among others.
But there was a stark correlation between the number of sacrifices and social hierarchies: the victims were mostly from lower social classes and the more stratified the society was, the higher presence of ritual killings was found.
Certain societies were designated as egalitarian because they prohibited inheritance of wealth and status between succeeding generations; of these, just 25 percent engaged in human sacrifice. But 37 to 46 percent practiced ritual killings from cultures with divided social systems, and among the 27 rigidly separated cultures that enforced limited social mobility, 65 percent committed sacrificial killings.
Lead researcher Joseph Watts, a psychologist at the University of Auckland, noted that elaborate ceremonies exploited the gore and spectacle to instill fear, and the practice continued to function “as a stepping-stone to help build and maintain power in early hierarchical societies.” And once the power structure was secure it maximized policing, taxation, and war to maintain class systems.
“People often claim that religion underpins morality,” Watts told Science, and he says his study illuminates how religious rituals like human sacrifice are often designed to serve particular interests other than the gods: “It shows how religion can be exploited by social elites to their own benefit.”