Ritual Human Sacrifice: Keeping the 99% in their place? [View all]

[Kelvin Mace]

I would argue that eternal warfare, waged by the poor for the profit of the rich, is the new ritual human sacrifice:

Thanks to math, we can calculate the benefits of human sacrifice
Ars Technica

Most of us would agree that human sacrifice is a bad idea. Yet many ancient civilizations (and some more modern ones) engaged in religious rituals that involved sacrificing people. Why do so many societies evolve a system of human sacrifice, despite the obvious moral drawbacks? A group of social scientists has just published a statistical analysis in Nature that reveals how this grisly practice has fairly predictable results, which benefit elites in socially stratified cultures.

The group examined 93 Austronesian cultures in the Pacific Islands, drawing information from the Pulotu Database of Pacific Religions to determine which groups had human sacrifice and when. Previous analysts have suggested that human sacrifice helps to maintain social stratification. In this new study, the researchers wanted to understand the relationship between human sacrifice and social stratification over time.

To do that, they created statistical models using Bayesian methods, testing to see how human sacrifice affected societies that fit into three buckets: egalitarian, moderately stratified, and highly stratified. They write:

Evidence of human sacrifice was observed in 40 of the 93 cultures sampled (43%). Human sacrifice was practiced in 5 of the 20 egalitarian societies (25%), 17 of the 46 moderately stratified societies (37%), and 18 of the 27 highly stratified societies (67%) sampled.

The researchers ran these societies through several different probabilistic models, exploring how the cultures had changed over time and what role (if any) human sacrifice played in those changes.

What they found is probably not too surprising, though it is revealing. Human sacrifice has the effect of maintaining stability in highly stratified cultures, and it can also turn a moderately stratified society into a highly stratified one. Interestingly, egalitarian societies that introduced human sacrifice did not become stratified.

Human sacrifice, in other words, is a useful tool for elites who want to maintain their power in a stratified society. This is especially true in the Austronesian context, where religious and political leaders were often the ones doing the sacrificing, and the sacrificial humans were generally slaves or people with low social standing