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. Shamans served in many different roles for people worldwide; as experts of medicine and healing, maintainers of social cohesion, orchestrators of community-creating rituals and keepers of cultural knowledge.

That the shaman would eventually acquire political power as a consequence of all of these functions, then, isn’t surprising, especially considering the role of knowledge-keeper. With expertise tends to come legitimacy; with knowledge comes power. Consider the druids; who, in addition to their well-known expertise in magic and religion, were the singular and secretive experts in their communities on all arcane and public knowledge, making them judges of all disputes and officiators of all rituals. The power in even one sliver of these many aspects would’ve been immense. Take astronomy. The druids were the sole holders of astronomical knowledge, creating calendars and predicting astronomical phenomena as a result.

Imagine the power in that. Imagine the power projected by the druid who claims to be able to blot out the sun. Because only they have the knowledge to predict an eclipse, they hold a ritual to “cause” the eclipse, and lo and behold, the eclipse occurs. Who, in communities that took the supernatural powers of shamans for granted, would deny such damning evidence? Who could?

Now, if we really want to understand the process that took shamanic leaders into shamanic rulers, we have to turn to a bit of social theory; specifically, the socialist social-ecological theories of Murray Bookchin, who envisioned modern industrial societies made non-hierarchical and who inspired the Rojava Revolution in Syria.

Among Bookchin’s arguments is that the rise of the shamanic class to power was an epiphenomenon of the rise of the idea of power itself. Social hierarchy isn’t exactly absent in pre-agricultural cultures, where a particular family or individual may hold significant sway over others’ actions. The distinction is that this hierarchy is stagnant. Power doesn’t accumulate. The influence enjoyed by those at the top of the hierarchy is clearly defined and can’t be expanded by particularly ambitious leaders. Even if one leader does emerge with outsized individual influence, that influence is additional to their defined social role, so when said individual dies, that individual influence dies with them.

To Bookchin, this is essentially the story of the first class war, in which the idea of class must first be established from the pre-class societies which dominated all people-groups in the distant past. It surely wasn’t always the shaman who, in those nonhierarchical hunter-gatherer societies that did transition to hierarchical agricultural ones, orchestrate the introduction of hard power and reap the many benefits, but with their advantageous social positions, it would’ve been hard for anyone other than them to. The fact that the first large-scale stone complex ever found (that being Göbekli Tepe) was most likely a temple isn’t insignificant. Religion was paramount to prehistoric people. So who else would it be but their religious leaders to create and take the reins of power?

Bookchin scholar John Raven perhaps describes the theorized process by which a shaman could begin to become a tyrant best, using the example of an independent hunted bear turned into a controllable spiritual concept:

“If the individual bear is merely an epiphenomenon of an animal spirit, it is now possible to objectify nature by completely subsuming the particular by the general and denying the uniqueness of the specific and concrete. The emphasis of the animistic outlook thereby shifted from accommodation and communication to domination and coercion. This shift was probably the work of the shaman who concomitantly embodied the role of the protector of game — the master of their spirits — and the helper of the hunter. The shaman magically delivered the hunted animal into the hands of the hunter. As both elder and professional magician, he established a new, quasi­hierarchical boundary that subverted the old animistic outlook.”

Through such shifts, the shaman could emerge as a dominating force over nature, which, as hunting and gathering turned to horticulture turned to agriculture and the size and complexity of social groups multiplied, turned to domination over people. And, just as the rise of shamanic power coincided with the start of settled lifestyles, the advent of empire coincided with the institution of the priestly temple, which codified shamans’ powers, bestowed upon them control of massive amounts of wealth, and made their outsized influence into an integral social fact. In Sumer, the priest (Sumerian en) became the ensi (owner of the fields) became the lugal (minor king), at which point the lugals gradually disassociated from their religious function and became singularly political figures. Through this, the shaman became the powerful priest became the basis of the same political power that plagues us today.

All of this is essentially just a reflection of what may sound a self-evident truth; a culture’s religion is largely defined by its social structure, and its social structure by its religion. In the first several thousand years of agriculture in the ancient Near East, matriarchal and only apparently loosely class-stratified societies were the norm, and consequently, mother-goddesses reigned supreme in archaeological findings.

With the advent of large-scale war, though, militarily aggressive patriarchal nation-states began snuffing out their matriarchal predecessors and eventually ushered in the era of the early Near Eastern empires. Those patriarchal societies worshiped patriarchal supreme deities — kings, rulers and conquerors of the universe — and their world-warrior sons whose glorious exploits against great beasts and men made for said cultures’ most famous stories. Religious narratives reflect social structures, and perhaps even more importantly, social structures influence psychological states.

Among Bookchin’s most crucial points in The Ecology of Freedom: The Emergence and Dissolution of Hierarchy, widely regarded as his principal work, is that civilization is just as much a psychological state as it is an institution. The intrinsic violence in the upholding of nation-states and the unending bloody wars they’ve waged against each other since the dawn of history have made people in a state of civilization (that being basically everybody) psychologically project their artificially induced state of perpetual violence onto nature.

We see hierarchy in nature — in food pyramids, apex predators, kings of the jungle and more — where in reality, species’ relations are complicated, nuanced, and more web-like than hierarchical. We talk of the “survival of the fittest” all the time without ever mentioning the mutualism present everywhere in nature. We act as if social Darwinism was a projection of nature’s cruel processes onto society, whereas in reality, it was a socially projected version of nature’s processes projected back onto us to try to justify the unjustifiable violence we’ve built our societies upon.

Our social imagination today is limited by the tyrannical state powers which are running the world into the ground right now and, in many places, have been for millennia. But top-down power and state-justified mass violence are not, nor have they been, our sole option.

More worlds are possible — necessary, even — but only once we understand where the power that oppresses us now originates and the role of different social institutions in bringing that power about will we be able to reverse-engineer our own subjugation.