Cult (religion)

“ Probably, however, most students of the science of religion would agree that a cult which included or {217} allowed intimidation and castigation of the object of the cult was as little entitled to be termed religious as it is to be called worship. In the period of animism, then, either there was no religious cult, no worship in our sense of the term; or, if there was religion, then the spirit worshipped was worshipped as a being higher than man. Whether man has at any time been without religion is a question on which there is here no need to enter. ”

“ We are now near the close of the nineteenth century of the Christian era, but the faith we profess is by no means a worn-out cult, a spent force, a religious movement which has run its evolutionary course and is now about to take its place among the things that have been. Such a fate may overtake a religion as well as other things. ”

“ Growing antagonism to externals of worship.
The most essential incident of every dogmatic religion, the cult, is not less foreign to the spirit of modern society than dogma itself is. The foundation of outer forms of worship, as we have seen, is a crystallization of custom and tradition into the form of rites. ”

“ The intellectualist is unable to explain even the fact of cult, to say nothing of those effects upon religion by virtue of which cult becomes religion's creative force. While, therefore, there are cults—namely, those of magic and demons—which, for specific reasons, we may call prereligious, there is no religion without some form of cult, even though, in the course of religious development, the external phases of cult may diminish in significance. In so far, cult is to be regarded as moulding, rather than as permanently expressing religious emotions ”

“ And there must be the demand for devotion, the response of loyalty. Every effective religion unerringly develops a worthy symbolism, and its devotees would do well to prevent the crystallization of such a ritual into cramping, deforming, and stifling stereotyped ceremonials which can only handicap and retard all social, moral, and spiritual progress. No cult can survive if it retards moral growth and fails to foster spiritual progress. The cult is the skeletal structure around which grows the living and dynamic body of personal spiritual experience—true religion. ”

“ In the more advanced cults the functions of the departed souls become larger and more important. They are regarded as having the power of foretelling the future, and are consulted.197 They become guardian spirits, and a cult of souls arises.198 In some higher forms of religion (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) they are regarded as mediators between man and the deity, or as advocates for man in the heavenly court. ”

“ I am content merely to point out that it was a definite religion with beliefs, ritual, and organization as highly developed as that of any other cult in the world.
The deity of this cult was incarnate in a man, a woman, or an animal; the animal form being apparently earlier than the human, for the god was often spoken of as wearing the skin or attributes of an animal. At the same time, however, there was another form of the god in the shape of a man with two faces. ”

“ On the side of creed they held firmly by the law of Moses, yet also reverenced the sun, to which they sang a morning hymn of praise; strictly observed the Sabbath; conducted their religious services without priests, and studied magic and angelology, but tabooed logic and metaphysics. Ethically the cult was in the main one of physical purity and fraternal humility, hostile to slavery and war as well as to the normal vices, but running to mysticism on the line of a belief, often seen in early religion, that asceticism could raise men to supernatural powers. ”

“ He will not define God or prove God, but introduce Him and talk about Him. And at the same time the association of prayer and worship with his sermon, and the atmosphere created by the meeting together of a body of disciples, will act as the confirmation of his suggestions of such a living presence.
The conveyance of any single religious cult from generation to generation affords a signal illustration of the importance in religion of the recognition of attitude. Religions manage somehow to survive any amount of transformation of creed and ritual. ”

“ These are all mythological ideas, yet to call them religious would obviously leave one with a most vague conception of religion. Similarly, moreover, not every cult relating to things beyond immediate reality is a religious cult. Winding a cord about a tree, for example, might constitute part of a magic cult which aims at certain beneficent or pernicious results through the aid of demons of some sort. There is no ground, however, for identifying these cult activities with deity cult. From the very beginning, of course, every cult is magical. ”

“ Miss Murray actually postulates that “underlying the Christian religion was a cult practised by many classes of the community” which “can be traced back to pre-Christian times, and appears to be the ancient religion of Western Europe.” We are given a full account of the chief festivals of this imaginary cult, of its hierarchy, its organization, and many other details. The feasts and dances—the obscene horrors of the Sabbat—“show that it was a joyous religion”! It is impossible to conceive a more amazing assertion. ”

“ It is also necessary to satisfy the innate desire, if we may so speak, for a cult, that natural feeling for a religion which these people, like all others, have. It is necessary to substitute for their barbarous and inhuman practices others that may lift them up and revive their drooping and pusillanimous spirits. ”

“ I discover that hardly a week passes that some one does not start a new cult, or revive an old one; if I had a hundred life-times I could not know all the creeds and ceremonies, the services and rituals, the litanies and liturgies, the hymns, anthems and offertories of Bootstrap-lifting. ”

“ Our religious consciousness is simply our ordinary consciousness obeying its laws. So unpurposed does cult grow up that it combines many elements of diverse origin, and is seldom precisely and wholly in accordance with the creed. No doubt the two interact, cult influencing creed and creed modifying cult—cult, perhaps, being most powerful in forming the actual religious faith of the multitude. Cult divides into two unequal parts, the stimulation of the religious emotions and the control of piety. In the Church service it came early to centre in the sacrament of the Eucharist (q.v.) ”

“ What these men without {4} countries asked for was personal salvation, and this they believed that they could find in their mysterious worship. Each of these religions was rapidly developing in the first century into a sacramental cult which offered the blessing of partial protection in this world, and of a happy immortality after death to all who accepted and were accepted by its divine lord, and took part in its sacraments or mysteries. ”

“ The ceremony of interring a dead friend, or naming a child is cult, though we do not worship our dead friend, nor do we worship the baby when brought for presentation. Cult, as we understand it, is a process that concerns the person or persons who worship, not the being worshipped. Whatever stimulates the sense of social duty and kindles the noblest emotions, whether by a mere historical lecture, or a grand piece of music, or by a solemn act, or by some expression of emotion—this is cult. ”

“ In any case the character of a cult is liable, in course of time, to change from one side to the other; and at the same time, two men may officiate in the same rites and, at heart, one of them may be a priest and the other a sorcerer. ”

“ This is the only thing through which the Christian Church can claim to guide humanity into all truths. But there is nothing new about it. If it was a truth, it became revealed to ancient paganism and is the distinctive feature of the mystery cult. " The deities of the mystery faith were essentially Saviour Gods, whose task was to rescue their votaries from the influence of sin."' By the Mysteries, no less than by St. Paul and by the Catechism of the Anglican Church, it was thought of as effecting a " death unto sin, and a new birth into righteousness. ”

“ The early Christian cult was the most effective, appealing, and enduring of any ritual ever conceived or devised, but much of its value has been destroyed in a scientific age by the destruction of so many of its original underlying tenets. The Christian cult has been devitalized by the loss of many fundamental ideas. ”

“ In all of them, the prevailing sentiment is fear of the Unknown; the spirit of worship is propitiatory, the gods being regarded as jealous and inclined to malevolence; the cult is of the nature of sorcery, certain formulas, rites and sacrifices being held to placate or neutralize the ill-will or bad temper of the divinities. ”

“ Thus, the god is soon succeeded by the divine State, and by the cult festivals dedicated to the latter. As an idealized counterpart of the human institution peculiarly characteristic of the heroic era, religious cult appears, from this point of view also, as the most distinctive creation of the age of heroes and gods.
If a conception proves to be too narrow to cover all the phenomena which fall within its sphere, it is legitimate, of course, to broaden it, to a certain extent, to suit our needs. ”

“ I turn now, as is our custom, to review the work of the year under its three-fold heads of Cult, Education, Politics. You will see that I avoid the word Worship, because worship is so often misunderstood; and because it wholly fails to convey the meaning of the Positivist cultus, or stimulus of the noblest emotions of man. Worship is in no way a translation of Comte’s word culte. ”

“ Viewed in this light, much of the inexplicable and irrational in the ancient cults is understandable. The ceremonies of the cult were primitive man's attempt to control the material world in which he found himself. ”

“ The same psychological fact universally accounts for the superior importance of deity cult over deity myth. It is action that constantly influences ideas, changing and strengthening them, and thus arousing new emotions which stimulate to further activities. Thus, the elevation of the gods into ideal beings must be ascribed, in great part, to religious cult, for it came about as a result of the influence which the emotions associated with cult exercised upon the ideas of the gods. ”

“ That is why we can rest assured in advance that the practices of the cult, whatever they may be, are something more than movements without importance and gestures without efficacy. By the mere fact that their apparent function is to strengthen the bonds attaching the believer to his god, they at the same time really strengthen the bonds attaching the individual to the society of which he is a member, since the god is only a figurative expression of the society. ”

“ Were it possible to induce the masses to adopt atheism, this belief would exhibit all the intolerant ardour of a religious sentiment, and in its exterior forms would soon become a cult. ”

“ Thus we find it probable that, in order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given in which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing in heaven. ”

“ Though these two classes of cults are, of course, frequently merged and united—for the very reason that both spring from the same emotions of hope, of desire, and of fear—they are nevertheless clearly distinguishable by reference to the immediate purpose which the magic of the cult aims to serve. The first of these classes includes those cults which relate to the most significant events of human life; the second, those concerned with the natural phenomena most important to man.
Human life furnishes motives for cult acts in its origin as in its decline, in birth and in death. ”

“ THE CONTINUANCE OF THE RELIGIOUS CULT IN THE FEELINGS.—The Roman Catholic Church, and before that all antique cults, dominated the entire range of means by which man was put into unaccustomed moods and rendered incapable of the cold calculation of judgment or the clear thinking of reason. ”

“ Christian Science and kindred cults are just an attempt to reconcile the love and goodness of God with pain, sickness, sorrow, and to a lesser degree with sin. How they do this remains to be seen, but the force of their appeal depends upon the fact that a very considerable and constantly growing number of people believe that they have really done it. Such cults as these have also found a place for the New Testament tradition of healing; they have also appealed strongly to those who seek a natural or a pseudo-natural explanation for the miraculous elements in religion generally. ”

“ In its symbols, the cultus preserves all the past levels of religious response achieved by the race; weaving them into the fabric of religion, and carrying them forward into the present. All the instinctive movements of the primitive mind; its fear of the invisible, its self-subjection, its trust in ritual acts, amulets, spells, sacrifices, its tendency to localize Deity in certain places or shrines, to buy off the unknown, to set up magicians and mediators, are represented in it. Its function is racial more than individual. It is the art-work of the folk-soul in the religious sphere. ”

“ If we are to see in the efficacy attributed to the rites anything more than the product of a chronic delirium with which humanity has abused itself, we must show that the effect of the cult really is to recreate periodically a moral being upon which we depend as it depends upon us. ”

“ Similarly, that which finally makes the distinction a universal one is religious cult. The object of cult is to propitiate the gods; their favour is to be won through petitions and magical acts. The gods are to grant not merely a happy lot in this world but also the assurance of permanent happiness in the next. ”