Psychedelics come to mind An entire population on some nasty shrooms 24/7/365, communicating with "entities".... Like some sort of mass DMT consumption going utterly wrong That's how such stuffs would make sense to me You have the aztec football/soccer if memory serves that is super fucked up too from what I've heard. They not only played soccer with the severed heads of their captives; the winning team (yes) was supposed to get sacrificed at the end of it ... Imagine the level of suck, imagine what a match would look like, with such rules... Like, you do everything under the sun not to win... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mesoamerican_ballgame#Human_sacrifice The association between human sacrifice and the ballgame appears rather late in the archaeological record, no earlier than the Classic era.[61][62] The association was particularly strong within the Classic Veracruz and the Maya cultures, where the most explicit depictions of human sacrifice can be seen on the ballcourt panels—for example at El Tajín (850–1100 CE)[63] and at Chichen Itza (900–1200 CE)—as well as on the decapitated ballplayer stelae from the Classic Veracruz site of Aparicio (700–900 CE). The Postclassic Maya religious and quasi-historical narrative, the Popol Vuh, also links human sacrifice with the ballgame (see below). Captives were often shown in Maya art, and it is assumed that these captives were sacrificed after losing a rigged ritual ballgame.[64] Rather than nearly nude and sometimes battered captives, however, the ballcourts at El Tajín and Chichen Itza show the sacrifice of practiced ballplayers, perhaps the captain of a team.[65][66] Decapitation is particularly associated with the ballgame—severed heads are featured in much Late Classic ballgame art and appear repeatedly in the Popol Vuh. There has been speculation that the heads and skulls were used as balls.[67] ... So it was the mayans... https://www.livescience.com/65611-how-to-play-maya-ballgame.html For instance, did the game's winners or losers get sacrificed at the end of the game? And were the hoops on the ball courts treated like modern-day basketball nets? The answer to both questions is no; the players were **most likely** not sacrificed, and the ball wasn't meant to go through the hoop, although it likely happened from time to time, said Christophe Helmke, an associate professor at the Institute of Cross-Cultural and Regional Studies at the University of Copenhagen. [What's the Toughest Sport?] >>"**It would have been really horrible if your best players were sacrificed all the time**," said Helmke, who explained the inner workings of the game to Live Science. ... Yeah "it would really have been horrible"... Like, human sacrifices... That's why it didn't happen lol