Dr. Brian Hayden, Anthropology of Power and Evil |411|

Anthropologist Dr. Brian Hayden traces the long history of using supernatural claims to grab power.

photo by: Skeptiko

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you have been witness to the unspeakable horrors of the defendant’s heinous crimes.

That’s a clip from the new Netflix movie about Ted Bundy.

For years I’ve carried this guilt that I’m to blame for everything.

And yeah, we’re back to talking about the nature of evil.

it’s about another missing girl, isn’t it?

Ted, did you do it?

No.

Not because I’m drawn to it but because avoiding it may be missing an opportunity to more fully understand, what I keep calling this extended consciousness realm.

Now as it turns out, today’s guest, the very excellent Dr Brian Hayden, has studied this evil, if you will, from a whole different perspective that traces it back to our earliest recorded history and what he’s discovered may cause you to rethink everything you think you know about evil.

Alex Tsakiris: Ted Bundy is back in the headlines through doing this big movie and everyone’s excited about it.

Dr Brian Hayden: Right.

Alex Tsakiris: The secret story and Ted Bundy, if you really dig into it, satanic worship again, and then he meets other folks were going, “Yeah, I’m connected with these spiritual forces,” and he is now trying to make this connection with the malevolent spiritual…

Dr Brian Hayden: Yeah, but he’s buying into a system that he feels is going to be able to let him do what he wants to do and that system, that conceptual system is really a product of secret societies and institutionalized religions. It didn’t exist before that.

Alex Tsakiris: Unless there’s a reality to it, right?

Dr Brian Hayden: Well, that’s an open question. Is it one of our constructs, another self-serving construct of secret societies or is there any reality to it? And that is an open question.

Stay with me for my conversation with Dr Brian Hayden.

Click here for forum discussion Click here for Brian’s website

Read Excerpts 

Alex Tsakiris: Today we welcome Dr Brian Hayden to Skeptiko. Brian is a member of the Royal Society of Canada for his contributions in archeology and had a distinguished career at Simon Fraser University, during which he authored several important academic books and many, many papers exploring the prehistory of religion, ritual and our relationship with the supernatural, just to name a few topics.

Brian, welcome to Skeptiko and thanks so much for joining me.

Dr Brian Hayden: Well thank you, it’s a pleasure to be here.

Alex Tsakiris: Let’s start with the very basics, improve on my intro, who is Brian Hayden?

Dr Brian Hayden: Well, I’m an archeologist, but I’ve always been trying to find out what the archeological remains represent, in terms of what people did, how they organized their societies,