You also have a (largely) farming population, who have work from the spring into the early Autumn. Then months on end of not much to do. Be drunk, eat into food reserves, stay warm and somehow stay strong enough to be useful farmers next spring. You have a bored population of young, drunk, possibly abusive, probably male.

If you want some semblance of control over that population, you create religion, you tax the religion, you convince people that their gods want them to move that stone. The stone gets moved by those people. The taxes feed and intoxicates them, the work keeps them warm. At different times in history you send them to join the army, build a pyramid, go on a crusade.

Dunno, I could be completely wrong. But it doesn’t feel entirely wrong to me that we have a common problem that’s been solved in a variety of ways in history and this could fit that pattern.