Is Epstein following in the long tradition of secret societies of rulers, perhaps cannibalistic? By Thomas Peermohamed Lambert at UnHerd.
Native Canadian example:
In 1886, a young German anthropologist named Franz Boas landed in British Columbia, with the intention of studying the indigenous peoples as they began their ritual preparations for winter. … Almost nightly, the Kwakiutl gathered in their long, rectangular houses to dance into the small hours of the morning, until the sun showed itself again. …
The longer Boas spent among the Kwakiutl, though, the more he became convinced that the strangest and most shocking rituals were held behind closed doors, only accessible to those with considerable wealth and long periods of purificatory seclusion behind them. He asked a few villagers about the rumours though: no one seemed to want to talk. They did have a name, though, for the select group of men in the village who were allowed to attend them: the “Hamatsa” — meaning, the “cannibals”.
Boas spent the next decade exploring the Pacific Northwest region. The more indigenous peoples he visited, the more he became convinced that all of them had equivalent, secret brotherhoods. There were “Cannibal Societies” among Kwakiutl, the Bella Coola, and the Tsimshian peoples, not to mention “Grizzly Bear Societies” and “Wolf Societies” who were rumoured to eat human flesh, too. …
Boas began to suspect that they were all connected: what other anthropologists had believed were multiple different peoples were perhaps better thought of as just two different groups: a scared, confused rank and file, and a secretive, cannibalistic elite.
For several decades, Boas’s discovery languished in the pages of relatively obscure ethnographies. Those anthropologists who encountered it tended to treat secret, cannibalistic cults as a quirk of the Pacific Northwest: a strange outgrowth of the totem religions of the region, and certainly not something with any wider sociological significance. …
More and more examples emerged:
Then, in 1902, a colonial administrator named P.A. Talbot began to notice some strikingly similar patterns in the region he had been tasked with governing in British Nigeria.
Talbot was first alerted to the fact that there might be a strange, second power system operating in his fiefdom by the road closures. Masked figures kept appearing on public highways and demanding they be shut for unspecified, ritual purposes. Soon they began to commandeer other public spaces: markets, town squares. … Over time, he uncovered the truth: the masked men belonged to a shadowy group known as the “Ekkpo,” or “Leopard Society”, which had “usurped practically all the functions of government”, regulating trade, adjudicating disputes, imposing fines, and executing people they found guilty of non-observance of public rites, or having witnessed private ones. …
The Leopard Society was a kind of state-within-a-state, their power maintained by a vast network of secretive rituals: mock beheadings, staged resurrections, feats of bodily invulnerability — not to mention, of course, cannibalistic sacrifices. Within a few years, colonial officials across West and Central Africa had begun to notice similar features in their own territories: in Liberia and Sierra Leone, the secretive Poro society wormed its way into just about every important political position with initiates sacrificing their own first-born sons to reach the highest ranks; in Rwanda, the Kubwanda Society maintained secret lodges outside villages where they plotted techniques for taking over political power.
Secret societies for ruling by fear turned out to have evolved nearly everywhere, a universal phenomenon for societies bigger than very primitive tribes but less advanced than formal kings and emperors:
By 1950, anthropologists were discovering secret societies on every continent on the planet: the Suque in Melanesia, with their mass sacrifices of pigs; the clown-fraternities of the American Southwest, with their black-and-white body paint; the “bear cults” among the Ainu of Japan, with their hidden feasts of ursine flesh. What Boas had thought was a relatively isolated phenomenon confined to a few fishing peoples in British Columbia was starting to look like a human universal. …
The “wisdom” guarded by the secret societies was pretty variable — and in many cases, initiates didn’t even really seem to know what the secret they were guarding actually was. In fact, what all human societies seemed to require was not a particular kind of secret ritual or rite, but an excuse for secrecy itself.
The next breakthrough came in the Nineties, when archaeologists in France and Italy began to notice some strange patterns in the Palaeolithic cave dwellings that littered the Northern Mediterranean. With surprising regularity, they noticed, there would be smaller caves, positioned a little way away from the main dwellings with hidden apertures, with unusual concentrations of cultic artefacts, and — entirely unheard of in other dwellings from the period — evidence of cannibalistic human sacrifice.
What was more, such dwellings tended to belong to very specific types of peoples. The cannibal cults invariably seemed to emerge in “transegalitarian” societies — that is, societies who were caught somewhere between flat, egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands and stratified, feudal societies with established hereditary classes. In such societies, the archaeologist Brian Hayden explains, everything was up for grabs: greedy “aggrandisers” needed to recruit deputies and cronies, and quickly; but in the absence of standing armies and sophisticated ruling-class ideologies about the importance of giving tithes to the local baron or paying back one’s student loan, they needed to get creative.
Perhaps, the archaeologists began to suspect, all the machinery of terror was simply a way of solving a technical problem of government: how to cleave apart a group of people who formerly believed themselves to be bound together in structures of reciprocal obligation. Masked ceremonies and mock-beheadings to terrify those excluded.
The awful secrets that bind members of the secret societies:
Cannibalistic ceremonies to lock in the initiates. After all, were you really going to go crawling back to your family for forgiveness when you had just sacrificed your first-born son? …
Secret societies are not just a vestige of older, quirkier times; they remain one of the most empirically sound explanations we have for why groups that have hitherto been bound together by bonds of community and family suddenly explode into hierarchy. Indeed, they are perhaps best thought of as social technologies for creating hierarchies.
Epstein:
In an important sense, the Epstein revelations are simply the latest chapter in the ancient history of secret societies designed to enforce boundaries between a cosy elite and a terrified rank and file.
The evidence — the testimonies of all those underage girls trafficked for sex, the trapdoor into the ocean, the torture video, the suspicious order of 300 gallons of sulphuric acid the day after Epstein’s indictment — certainly seems grisly enough to guarantee a similar kind of bond of secrecy among those involved.
What is more, Epstein really does seem to have had a coterie of powerful people willing to give him the benefit of the doubt against all evidence: not just among the celebrities who flocked to him long after his conviction, but also, perhaps, in institutions like the FBI, which gave him peculiarly lenient plea deal back in 2007, not to mention the virtually unprecedented guarantee of “immunity for all co-conspirators”.
But in a sense, it is the more feverish rumours, like the cannibalistic orgies in the upstairs rooms of pizza restaurants posited by QAnon, that are most telling of Epstein’s sociological significance. Suddenly, spontaneously, people with no familiarity with the Hamatsa, the Ekkpo or the Poro, are devising imagery straight out of the ethnographies of Boas and Talbot. It is as if ordinary people know, instinctively, that the greater the inequality, the stranger and more occult the rituals that reinforce it need to be. …
Even today, it is hard to spend too much time among politicians and barristers in London without noticing, say, the preponderance of freemasons in the livery companies of the City of London, or the tendency of entire political dynasties to be drawn from the alumni of Oxford drinking societies with humiliatingly macabre initiation ceremonies involving dead pigs. As hard as it might be to imagine some horsehair-wigged judge staging the mock-execution of an infant, Ekkpo-style, our most venerable institutions do seem very good at devising ways of getting their members ensnared in a web of each other’s humiliating secrets, even without an Epstein to orchestrate it all. …
Now the secret societies in the West rule more openly, striking fear into the peasants:
But perhaps this conspiratorial reading misses the most important way in which our liberal institutions have begun to function like secret societies. After all, far more potent than the way these institutions operate behind closed doors is the way they operate out in the open — specifically, the way they strike fear into those who do not belong to the elite guild.
Take the law, for instance. Reading over the Epstein files, one of the most shocking things one discovers is that for Epstein and his affiliates the whole function of the legal system seemed to be to frighten and bully those who did not really understand it. Epstein appears to have been serenely comfortable using his lawyers to hound and pester people who fell afoul of him: for him, with the best lawyers in the world on retainer, a few dozen lawsuits were easily navigable; for his victims, with normal jobs and families and no savings to pay for counsel, just one lawsuit could quite plausibly ruin their lives. This technique — using what are supposed to be neutral procedures for administering justice as a punishment in their own right — is so widely acknowledged today that it even has a nickname in America: the SLAPP, or “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation”. But we should not be seduced by the jargon into thinking this is anything new. The underlying logic is exactly the same as the Hamatsa and the Ekkpo: the law is a secret guild, that works in the service of initiates, and terrifies everyone else.
All that vague hate speech legislation? Same idea:
This logic seems to be increasingly popular among politicians, too. In the UK, our political class seems to be gleefully shedding the Enlightenment commitment to accessibility and transparency in legislative affairs and embracing the occult techniques of the Ekkpo. …
Now ask yourself: what are these bills meant to achieve? What any of these legal widgets really means is a secret …It doesn’t matter. You are not supposed to obey rules like these. You are meant to cower before them in holy terror. …
Conclusion:
If there is some small good that comes from the Epstein case, it will be that it has helped us to recapture some of that strangeness.
For the first time in decades, people seem to be viscerally, instinctively aware that when it comes down to it, power is never actually about laws and regulations and procedures.
It is about what goes on in hidden caves and smoky rooms. It is about the infinite terror of what we do not understand, and the suspicion, even if we cannot prove it, that the person ordering us around might just have a taste for human flesh.
How the world really works.
UPDATE: Back to the ancient Greeks at least (Michael Strong and Stefan Molyneux):
Socrates asked simple questions: what do you believe, and why do you believe it? That’s the entire method at its core. No lectures. No facts to memorize. No correct answers to reproduce on tests. Just: what do you think, and can you defend it with reasons?
He was put to death for it. The young people of Athens saw him in the marketplace asking questions that embarrassed powerful men. They wanted to do it too. They started questioning their elders. That was called corrupting the youth. The questions were the corruption.
Socrates also opposed the homosexual pedophelia of powerful Athenian men.
Oppose the pedo-elites, you’re in trouble
Been the same for thousands of years.
