\n"}\n\nOne surprising thing about secret \nsocieties is how visible they are. In the ethnographic record, they can \nbe found almost everywhere. They\u2019re particularly well documented across \nMelanesia,1 the Amazon,2 and West Africa.3 There are mixed-sex,4 and all female,5 secret\n societies, but the ones that physically coerce, ritually deceive, and \nviolently punish outsiders and taboo-violators are often entirely made \nup of males.6,7 These all-male secret societies are best \ndescribed as \u201cmen\u2019s cults,\u201d because of their exclusionary nature and \nstrong connection to male sex roles. They can be found among \nhunter-gatherer societies, horticulturalists, and agriculturalists \nalike, although many of those that have been described may no longer \nexist.8
\nThe men\u2019s cult is a conspiracy in plain sight. \nThe \u201cmen\u2019s house,\u201d where the cult gathers, is often the largest \nstructure in a village, built in a position of prestige at the center or\n top of a settlement. In villages across the Alaskan mainland and the \nislands of the Bering Strait, for example, the \u201ckashim\u201d (men\u2019s house) \nwas \u201cthe center of social and religious life,\u201d wrote ethnologist Edward \nWilliam Nelson.9 This is where most adult males and teenage \ninitiates spend most of their time when not hunting or foraging. Among \nother things, it\u2019s a ritual center for the men, where the cult\u2019s sacred \nparaphernalia\u2014often masks and/or musical instruments\u2014is kept hidden from\n women and children.
\n\nThe fact that men\u2019s cults can be found across so \nmany diverse small-scale societies may point to a deep historical \norigin. Archaeologists Oliver Dietrich and Jens Notroff have speculated\n that G\u00f6bekli Tepe, a site in Turkey around 12,000 years old, may \nrepresent a sanctuary for a men\u2019s cult. Anthropologists D\u2019Ann Owens and \nBrain Hayden speculate that secret societies (not necessarily men\u2019s \ncults) may go back to the Upper Paleolithic, and argue that caves during\n the Upper Paleolithic were used to initiate elite children into secret \nsocieties.25 In The Nature of Paleolithic Art, R. Dale Guthrie argued that adolescent boys made most Upper Paleolithic cave art.26 Paleolithic\n art often consisted of hunting scenes, naked women, and phallic \nimagery, which seems consistent with the notion\u2014difficult to test\u2014that \nthey were made as part of an initiation into a men\u2019s cult.