John L. Sorenson discusses "secret groups" in Mesoamerica; draws parallels between these groups and the Gadianton Robbers in the Book of Mormon.
John L. Sorenson, Images of Ancient America: Visualizing Book of Mormon Life (Provo, UT: Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, 1998), 118
Secret Groups
Historical sources indicate that secret organizations have existed in many parts of the world. They have taken many forms, but their shared intent has been to provide participants with assistance in undertakings at odds with public norms of conduct.
Mesoamerica had its share.
The internal social structure of long-distance merchants among the Aztecs at the time of the Spanish Conquest provides an example. They had their own deities and rites to comfort and support them on the road; they mutually protected their economic secrets and contacts, in the fashion of the medieval guilds of Europe; and they passed secret intelligence to each other about exotic lands that they penetrated and to a degree shared the same with the Aztec war machine.
Military orders were another type of quasi-secret society; their members—dedicated super-warriors, so to speak—fought together as a unit in battle but in peace supported each others’ ambitions for power and influence. There is also evidence for the existence of little-known secret cults associated with the night, perhaps jaguars, and caves or lairs in isolated wilderness spots. In central Mexico the god Tezcatlipoca, the arch-sorceror who was associated with darkness, the night, and the jaguar, may have had a particular link to culturally subversive groups. The pattern seems to go back a very long time. Some of these elements in society were manifest in colonial times and right up until recently, but by their own clandestine nature it is now impossible to learn much about them.
Visualizing Book of Mormon Life
Nephites and Lamanites went through periods when secret groups were powerful and subversive of the regular political order (see Helaman 7;4). Their prototype was a secret order among the Jaredites that dated as far back as the second millennium B.C. and claimed Near Eastern inspiration. From soon after the Christian era, for example, the Nephite account quotes a communication from the chief “capo” of “the secret society of Gadianton” who claimed that his ”society and the works thereof I know to be good; and they are of ancient date and they have been handed down unto us” (3 Nephi 3:9). At the very end of Nephite history, this revived secret order, called the robbers of Gadianton, became so influential that they occupied their own lands and mounted their own armies on a par with those of the Nephites and Lamanites (see 4 Nephi 1:46; Mormon 2:8, 28).