Cult (redirected from Cult debate)

cult, ritual observances involved in worship of, or communication with, the supernatural or its symbolic representations. A cult includes the totality of ideas, activities, and practices associated with a given divinity or social group. It includes not only ritual activities but also the beliefs and myths centering on the rites. The objects of the cult are often things associated with the daily life of the celebrants. The English scholar Jane Harrison pointed out the importance of the cult in the development of religion. Sacred persons may have their own cults. The cult may be associated with a single person, place, or object or may have much broader associations. There may be officials entrusted with the rites, or anyone who belongs may be allowed to take part in them.

The term cult is now often used to refer to contemporary religious groups whose beliefs and practices depart from the conventional norms of society. These groups vary widely in doctrine, leadership, and ritual, but most stress direct experience of the divine and duties to the cult community. Such cults tend to proliferate during periods of social unrest; most are transient and peripheral. Many cults that have emerged in the United States since the late 1960s have been marked by renewed interest in mysticism and Asian religions, but many others have had Christian roots.

Such major U.S. cults as the Rev. Sun Myung Moon's Unification Church and Hare Krishna, a movement derived from Hinduism, have stirred wide controversy. Cults' insularity and distrust of society sometimes lead to violent conflicts with the law. In 1978 in Jonestown, Guyana, followers of Jim Jones killed a U.S. congressman who was investigating Jones, and then Jones and more than 900 others committed mass suicide. In 1993 a gunfight near Waco, Tex., between federal officers and David Koresh and his Branch Davidian followers led to a 51-day siege that ended in a blaze that left Koresh and 82 people dead. Other notorious cults have included the Japanese Aum Shinri Kyo, whose adherents were responsible for a number of murders, including a 1995 nerve-gas attack in the Tokyo subway system that killed 12 and injured thousands; the Order of the Solar Temple, whose members died by murder or suicide in Quebec, Switzerland, and France in a series of incidents in the mid- to late 1990s; Heaven's Gate, a group formed in the mid-1970s whose 39 members committed mass suicide in California in 1997; and the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, a millennialist Ugandan church, more than 900 members of which apparently died by mass murder and mass suicide in 2000.

Bibliography

See D. J. Reavis, The Ashes of Waco (1995); J. D. Tabor and E. V. Gallagher, Why Waco? (1995); R. J. Lifton, Destroying the World to Save It (1999).

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cult

Collective veneration or worship (e.g., the cult of the saints—meaning collective veneration of the saints—in Roman Catholicism). In the West, the term has come to be used for groups that are perceived to have deviated from normative religions in belief and practice. They typically have a charismatic leader and attract followers who are in some way disenfranchised from the mainstream of society. Cults as thus defined are often viewed as foreign or dangerous.

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cult

1. a specific system of religious worship, esp with reference to its rites and deity

2. a sect devoted to such a system

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Cult 

or worship, religious veneration of objects or of real or imaginary beings, to which supernatural qualities are attributed. In the broad sense, the type of religious relations that developed historically. The components of the cult are acts of religious magic, such as rituals and prayers, and the objects associated with them, such as sacred images, temples, and sanctuaries. These external acts and material accoutrements of the cult are indissolubly connected with more or less distinctly separate systems of religious beliefs, feelings, and corresponding social roles and relationships (the priesthood and the church organization). In the narrower sense, the concept of “worship” refers only to religious systems which are bound up with a belief in higher, supernatural beings and which aim at placating these beings. Worship in that sense does not include the rituals of magic and casting out of spirits (exorcism).

The historical forms of religion have their own corresponding types of cult complexes, such as totemism, the burial cult, craft cults, ancestor and family worship, the shaman cult, and tribal god cults. Cults may be distinguished by their objects, as in cults of the sun, sky, water, animals (zoolatry), plants, fire, ancestors, and the king. Whereas historically earlier forms of religious cult are characterized by their direct association with certain spheres of social life (such as the cults of agriculture and of kingly power), later religions characteristically have a variety of cults directly oriented toward mythological objects (god-man cult), priestly functions (priest cult), or ritualized values (cult of suffering). The orientation, structure, and meaning of religious cults differ substantially in the various historical and regional types of religions. Indirectly, that is symbolically, they are connected with various features characteristic of a number of aesthetic, ethical, and philosophical systems of the past, such as the “cult of strength,” “cult of success,” “cult of man,” and “cult of reason.”

The earliest forms of worship were undoubtedly undisguised acts of magic—for example, gestures of adoration (such as raising the hands and lifting the eyes toward heaven) developed obviously from the simplest body movements used in magic. Primitive magical dances (for hunting and war, for example) later became part of many cults; in present-day India religious dances in the temples serve as a usual form of worship. Prayers—an important manifestation of worship—developed from magical incantations and spells. The offering of sacrifices, an essential element of worship, has a more complex origin. It arose partly from primitive hunters’ meals, partly from a social taboo against touching the fruits until the moment that the taboo was ceremoniously lifted, and partly from the superstitious custom of feeding the dead.

The use of various sacred objects and images, such as icons and church vessels, in religious worship goes back to fetishism, when people attributed supernatural powers to inanimate objects and images. In Christian and Buddhist worship, for example, magical powers are attributed to various material objects, such as miracle-working icons, saints’ remains, holy water, crosses worn on the body, and relics.

S. A. TOKAREV