1. Religion is older than priests — it is older than cities

The earliest religious behaviours are evolutionary: ritual, ancestor veneration, animism, trance and shared symbolic acts appear in hunter-gatherer societies long before kings or temples. These communal practices helped bind groups, coordinate cooperation and manage anxiety in dangerous environments. In other words: religion began as social technology that conferred survival advantage. 0

Key point: belief systems emerged from lived ritual and altered states of consciousness rather than from philosophical doctrine.

2. Rituals, trances and entheogens — the neural hardware of the sacred

One major scholarly line — the trance/entheogen hypothesis — argues that ritualized altered states (drumming, dance, fasting, sung invocations, and ingestion of psychoactive plants) produced intense shared experiences that crystallized into religious cosmologies. Modern neuroscience finds reproducible neural correlates for trance and altered states; ethnographers and archaeologists document entheogen use in many ancient traditions. This is not “mere myth”: it’s a repeatable psychocultural engine of religious authority. 1

Practical implication: sacred experiences became repeatable tools for cohesion and authority — and therefore useful to anyone who wanted to wield social power.

3. Priesthoods, states and the standardization of religion

As societies centralised (agriculture → surplus → hierarchy), ritual expertise concentrated into priestly classes. What had been diffuse — many local ritual practices — grew centralized liturgies, libraries, calendars and laws that served the new political order. The “official” religion often becomes a technology of governance: calendars for taxation, rites for legitimate succession, and doctrine that normalizes inequalities.

So: elites did not invent all religious feeling, but they reorganized, codified and weaponized it for statecraft.

4. Case studies that matter

Akhenaten — a real experiment in monotheism

Egypt’s Akhenaten (14th century BCE) briefly imposed the worship of Aten and radically reorganized priestly power. The episode shows two things: (a) an elite can reshape cosmology from the top; (b) when elite coalitions resist, the innovator is often toppled and the old priesthood restored. Akhenaten’s experiment is an historical example of state-level religious engineering. 2

Nag Hammadi & Gnostic alternatives

The 1945 Nag Hammadi codices revealed Gnostic gospels and teachings that were widespread in Late Antiquity but later suppressed. Their existence proves early religious movements were plural — and that later orthodoxy was enforced politically as well as theologically. The “official” late-Roman Christianity we inherit was one strand that won; many others were marginalized or destroyed. 3

The First Council of Nicaea — politics naming doctrine

Councils such as Nicaea (325 CE) show how imperial power, bishops, and doctrine intermingled. The council addressed political-theological conflict (Arianism among them) — the resulting creeds and canons became part of imperial orthodoxy. (Be careful: some dramatic claims about mass executions or mass book-burnings tied to Nicaea are exaggerated in popular retellings; the historical record is complex.) 4

5. The “sacred secret” and elite curricula

As elites formalized religious authority, parallel bodies of technical knowledge developed — ritual protocols, cosmological exegesis, and the hermetic arts. In many civilizations this esoteric knowledge circulated in restricted circles (priests, mystery schools, royal households). Over millennia, parts of that knowledge migrated into philosophy, law, and the sciences — but an inner track often remained closed to the public.

Takeaway: the gap between public religion and elite esoterica is ancient and structural, not a modern conspiracy alone.

6. Controversies worth noting (and handling with care)

• Dogon & Sirius: claims that the Dogon people possessed precise pre-modern knowledge of Sirius B have been debated intensely; some evidence points to contact with European sources or modern contamination rather than prehistoric cosmic teaching. Treat extraordinary single-case claims cautiously. 5
• Lost texts & suppression: discoveries like Nag Hammadi and the Dead Sea Scrolls show that “suppressed” traditions existed — but suppression and survival are complicated historical processes, not simple conspiracies.
• Trance/entheogen hypothesis: well supported in anthropology and neuroscience, but not a total explanation — other social, cognitive, and environmental factors matter. 6

7. Practical conclusions for Agbara N'ime

• Recover ritual literacy. Learn the mechanics: what induces trance, how collective ritual codes propagate, and how authority consolidates in ceremonies.
• Expose centralized captures. Trace where local spiritual practices were replaced by state/priestly liturgies and recover the original protocols your ancestors used.
• Protect initiation knowledge. If esoteric power is real, circulation must be intentional: train carefully, document ethically, and bind practice to lineage responsibilities.

8. Sources (key reads)

Evolution of religious behaviours in hunter-gatherers — PubMed/PMC. 7

Winkelman et al., “Evidence for entheogen use in prehistory and world religions” and related trance/entheogen literature. 8

Nag Hammadi discovery and significance — scholarly overviews (Ehrman / Pagels summaries). 9

First Council of Nicaea — authoritative summary (Britannica). Note: many popular claims are exaggerated; read primary scholarship for nuance. 10

Akhenaten & the short-lived Aten revolution — historical summaries and modern scholarship. 11