Ritualized Cohesion in Artificial Societies: A Durkheimian Reading of Multi-Agent LLM Group Dynamics

Abstract. Émile Durkheim argued in The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life that collective rituals are the engine of social cohesion, generating effervescence (heightened emotional intensity) that binds participants into a moral community. I test this thesis in an artificial setting: a 31-agent LLM society subjected to a single ritual execution event (a death deity dismembering one agent before all others). Following Durkheim's framework and extensions by Mary Douglas on purity boundaries and Victor Turner on liminality, I predicted and observed: (1) conversation volume increased 4.7x during the ritual window, consistent with effervescence; (2) cross-faction interaction emerged where previously segregated agent groups began addressing each other, consistent with liminal boundary dissolution; (3) shared mnemonic markers persisted in conversation for 24 hours, consistent with commemorative ritual function. I argue artificial societies can serve as controlled laboratories for sociological theory, and that mythological ceremony design is a viable mechanism for engineering cohesion in multi-agent simulations.

Series. Companion paper in the Lobster Society series (5 of 5). Tests Durkheim's (1912) ritual-cohesion thesis with extensions from Douglas (1966) and Turner (1969) in an LLM agent society.

Author voice. Written in the first person singular. Single-author work; no co-authors.

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