I agree with the ponzi scheme statement. There are some exceptions but they are either dead or abusively maintained. In the twenty first century everything is backwards. What we once complained about we now pay for. Christianity and Scientology made it big because they recognized the establishment of the new modicum of sway.
If there is a true religion, I'm with Lao Tzu on this one, anyone that says they know is full of shit. It's like fight club but the rules are built into the system. You can talk about it all you want, but the moment you do it ceases to be.
Acharya S' work did a number of amazing things for my spiritual development. From a practical standpoint when you have nothing to write on but the cave walls of your home which would tend to be devoted to specific events exclusive to your clan then a shaman who must carry with him thousands of years of accumulated knowledge about observed cycles will need a mnemonic device to remember that vast amount of information.
If you've ever picked up one of those 'super memory' or 'cognitive enhancement' tricks that teach you how to utilize mental habits then you may have heard of one mnemonic device in which you encode a list into a story. Stars are a wondrously immobile and common medium available anywhere in the world that serve as an easy trigger for extending the capacity of the device. And so it comes that our story is 'written in the stars' as it were. The best way to see what's ahead of you is to see where you've been. Add things up and it's not hard to see what's coming, generally speaking. This practice of shamans 'consulting the stars' was mystical and not understood by anyone who hadn't had the tutelage of a shaman who could relate the story, it's meaning, and indexing against the stars.
A leader of any group never had time to grasp these things. A leader both feared and respected the power of a shaman to both see the future, and help maintain psychosocial health of the clan. Trauma, drama and aeons later, the brotherly relationship between the leader and the shaman widens. The respect and fear gives way to mistrust, which gives way to murder rebellion, and genocide.
On an entirely unrelated note, I have this thing I do with animal crackers. I eat the broken pieces first while sorting out the orientation and stack the one facing opposite directions with one upside down so they face the same direction. Then I eat the excess, then I eat the pears.