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Shamans, Priests, and the Origins of Hierarchy
Domination over nature as a stepping stone to domination over people
How far back does power go? Not how far back any one hierarchy of powerful people goes, nor how far back the reaches of powerful institutions go; how far back into history does the idea of power originate?
In a time when many of our most powerful figures seem to have gone completely insane — actively undermining the interests of their own subjects for ideological points, suicidally breaking nearly 80-year peaces and jeopardizing the future of the entire planet’s climate for cash — few questions could be more pressing. The answer, of course, lies in a past so distant it precedes history itself. Just as obviously, this answer is multifaceted and ultimately made mysterious by its mere antiquity. And yet, no matter how full of unanswerable questions it may be, we may at least make an investigation of this all-important question to hope to better help determine how we came to be in our current mess in the first place.
Starting in prehistory, as most know, humans were organized into small hunter-gatherer bands, in which leadership was definitely present but power as we know it now wasn’t necessarily. New research actually seems to suggest that what hierarchy is integrated into hunter-gatherer societies is determined by natural patterns of human communication — optimization principles, if you will — where the natural limits of how many people one can reasonably know are what determines the size and organization of social groups. Therefore, in such societies, it is static natural patterns and not human ambition that limits the amount of power any one person can accumulate.
This sort of natural scaling clearly fell apart at some point, though, so how? Simply put, the answer largely lies in the role of the shaman.
A shaman is a crucial functionary of any pre-agricultural society. Primarily, on paper, their purpose was to communicate with the spirits, who inhabited all things both animate and inanimate, but who in their metaphysical forms together inhabited a separate spirit realm only accessible with difficulty by certain skilled people. In reality, though, their importance and responsibilities extended far beyond the realm of pure spirit…
