In the beginning...
There have been cults for as long as there have been religions. And there have been religions since the dawn of man. They are ever present, ever evolving, ever threatening and of course, ever difficult to define.
They are defined as “a deviant religious organisation with novel beliefs and practices.”
Those ‘novel beliefs and practices’ include the mass marriage of thousands of strangers at the same time like the Moonies; mass suicide to be saved by aliens hidden behind a comet, as followers of Heaven’s Gate believe; or even the belief that bread and wine can transform into the flesh and blood of your Go Roman Catholic style.
Christians may not be deviant anymore, but to the Roman Empire they were a dangerous cult which goes to show that today’s cult is tomorrow’s world religion.
Man becoming God
Strictly speaking, a cult is a religious group, but their traits can be seen in secular organisations as well. Good examples of this are cults of personality.
The godless world of 20th century communism led to the need for new, proletariat, gods such as Mao, Ho Chi Minh and Lenin. The adoration of Lenin’s embalmed corpse in the Soviet Union could be considered a ’novel practice’.
Elvis Presley started the trend with mass outpourings of emotion on his death, and a wealth of sightings of him since. It could be argued that the refusal to accept the death of your king – or should that be ‘the King’– is a novel belief. Lady Diana and most recently Michael Jackson have carried on this trend in popular culture.
The darker side
But of course cults have their darker side. The Death Angels were a group within the Nation of Islam responsible for the ‘Zebra Murders’ which was a string of racially motivated black on white hate crimes that took place in California.
The group believed that the white race was created by a scientist named Yakub. Furthermore, the Death Angels believed that they could earn ‘points’ towards paradise when they died if they killed as many whites as possible.
More recently, a doomsday cult called Aum Shinrikyo gained international notoriety in 1995 when it carried out the Sarin gas attack in a Tokyo subway.
Lead by Shoko Asahara, a mystic and psychopathic figure, the group’s orchestration of the ‘Subway Sarin Incident’ left 12 people dead, 50 severely injured and caused temporary vision problems for nearly a thousand others.
At the time of the attack the group claimed it had 9,000 members in Japan and as many as 40,000 followers worldwide.
Mass suicide
This side of the Atlantic has bared witness to the tragic effects cults can have as well.
In 1994, 48 members of a cult that revered the Knights Temple, of Da Vinci Code fame, named Order of the Solar Temple, were found dead at a farm in Switzerland.
Their motto was ‘Money, Sex and Joy’, however, there was nothing joyous about their deaths - while some committed suicide, others had been shot or strangled.
It may seem trite to claim that obsessive Jacko fans and mass murdering religious figures, like Peoples Temple leader Jim Jones, can be put under the same heading. And it probably is.
But that is how broad, wide-ranging and open to interpretation the whole concept of cults is.
One thing cult followers, however devout or prosaic, have in common are the reasons they are seemingly more susceptible to falling under the spell of an influential leader.
American cult specialist Michael D. Langone lists the following reasons; a high level of stress or dissatisfaction, lack of self-confidence, unassertiveness, a desire to belong to a group, and cultural disillusionment.
This may sound like a description of clichéd teen angst, but if it sounds like you then you may be sucked into the world of cults. Let’s just hope that it’s one that venerates dead celebrities, not one that ends in ritual suicide.
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2010-02-07 16:37:26
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