Concept
Cult
Overview
Cults are social groups which have unusual, and often extreme, religious, spiritual, or philosophical beliefs and rituals. Extreme devotion to a particular person, object, or goal is another characteristic often ascribed to cults. The term has different, divergent and often pejorative definitions both in popular culture and academia and has been an ongoing source of contention among scholars across several fields of study.
Beginning in the 1930s, new religious movements became an object of sociological study within the context of the study of religious behavior. Since the 1940s, the Christian countercult movement has opposed some sects and new religious movements, labeling them cults because of their unorthodox beliefs. Since the 1970s, the secular anti-cult movement has opposed certain groups, which they call cults, accusing them of practicing brainwashing.
Groups labelled cults are found around the world and range in size from small localized groups to some international organizations with up to millions of members.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
In the original texts
Passages from public-domain books where Cult is discussed.
Where the deity does not reach this stage, or where, at the very least, he does not possess this ideal value during the progress of the cult activities, the cult is not religious in nature, but prereligious or subreligious. Thus, while myth and cult date back to the beginnings of human development, they acquire a religious character only at a specific time, which comes earlier in the case of cult than in that of the…
Wilhelm Max Wundt, Elements of Folk Psychology Outline of a Psychological History of the Development of Mankind
names the idea; a chapter is titled for it; states what it is; opens on it
It is true that funeral rites and rites of mourning are found there; but these practices do not constitute a cult, though this name has sometimes wrongfully been given them. In reality, a cult is not a simple group of ritual precautions which a man is held to take in certain circumstances; it is a system of diverse rites, festivals and ceremonies which _all have this characteristic, that they reappear periodically_…
Émile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of the Religious Life
names the idea; states what it is; opens on it
Religion, considered in relation to society, which is either general or particular, may also be divided into two kinds: the religion of man, and that of the citizen. The first, which has neither temples, nor altars, nor rites, and is confined to the purely internal cult of the supreme God and the eternal obligations of morality, is the religion of the Gospel pure and simple, the true theism, what may be called…
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The social contract & discourses
names the idea
Liberty 5-3000... Liberty five-three thousand ... Liberty 5-3000.... We wish to write this name. We wish to speak it, but we dare not speak it above a whisper. For men are forbidden to take notice of women, and women are forbidden to take notice of men. But we think of one among women, they whose name is Liberty 5-3000, and we think of no others. The women who have been assigned to work the soil live in the Homes of…
Ayn Rand, Anthem
author linked in the graph
One becomes artist or hero through the exaltation of Polytheism; savant or philosopher through that of Diarchy; and sage or theosophist through that of Tritheism. These three cults, whether pure or variously mixed, are the only ones in which transformation may be possible; that is to say, which may be clothed in ostensible forms and enclosed in any sort of ritual. The fourth cult, which is founded upon the absolute…
Antoine Fabre d'Olivet, The golden verses of Pythagoras
names the idea; opens on it
Philosophers who discussed Cult
Related ideas
- Ritual
- Freedom of the press
- Ernst Troeltsch
- Philosophy
- Transaction Publishers
- Rodney Stark
- Public policy
- University of Toronto Press
- Sociology
- Heterodoxy
- Max Weber
- Scientific theory
- New religious movement
- Heresy
- Worldview
- Freedom of speech
- Oxford English Dictionary
- Charismatic authority
- Pejorative
- Russia
- Rational choice model
- Religion
- Religious conversion
- Orthodoxy
Place in the tradition
Part of Neo-Vedanta.