Word Finder - cults

definition

A group or sect of people with a deviant religious, philosophical or cultural identity, often existing on the margins of society or exploitative towards its members.

example

Oh my gosh, I'm in a repressive cult! How can I leave it?

definition

Devotion to a saint.

definition

The veneration and religious rites given to a deity, esp. in a historical polytheistic context.

definition

A religion that evolved out of another religion but has become a different religion through developing a radically different theology.

definition

A group of people having an obsession with or intense admiration for a particular activity, idea, person or thing.

A metropolis demanded tribute and military support from its subject cities but left their local cults and customs unaffected.

We learn much as to these magistrates from the large number of inscriptions that have been found (over 2000 in Ostia and Portus taken together) and also as to the cults.

The belief in human immortality in some form is almost universal; even in early animistic cults the germ of the idea is present, and in all the higher religions it is an important feature.

Like Cleisthenes of Sicyon and Periander of Corinth, he realized that one great source of strength to the nobles had been their presidency over the local cults.

That in early pre-Mosaic times parallel cults existed among the various Hebrew tribes is by no means improbable.

Just as we have in Assyria an Ishtar of Arbela and an Ishtar of Nineveh (treated in Assur-bani-pal's (Rassam) cylinder 2 like two distinct deities), as we have local Madonnas in Roman Catholic countries, so must it have been with the cults of Yahweh in the regal period carried on in the numerous high places, Bethel, Shechem, Shiloh (till its destruction in the days of Eli) and Jerusalem.

Times of peace meant national disintegration and the lapse of Israel into the Canaanite local cults, which is interpreted by the redactor as the prophets of the 8th century would have interpreted it, viz.

But the prevalence of the worship of " other gods " and of graven images in these " high places," and the moral debasement of life which accompanied these cults, made it clear that the " high places " were sources of grave injury to Israel's social life.

Her victim was a porca, as in the cults of other deities of fertility, and was called damium, and we are told that the goddess herself was known as Damia and her priestess as damiatrix.

This age, with its regular maritime intercourse between the Aegean settlements, Phoenicia and the Delta, and with lines of caravans connecting Babylonia, North Syria, Arabia and Egypt, presents a remarkable picture of life and activity, in the centre of which lies Palestine, with here and there Egyptian colonies and some traces of Egyptian cults.

Hebrew religious institutions can be understood from the biblical evidence studied in the light of comparative religion; and without going afield to Babylonia, Assyria or Egypt, valuable data are furnished by the cults of Phoenicia, Syria and Arabia, and these in turn can be illustrated from excavation and from modern custom.

The earlier Persian kings acknowledged the various religions of the petty peoples; they were also patrons of their temples and would take care to preserve an ancient right of asylum or the privileges of long-established cults.'

The thought that is most intensely present with the mystic is that ' Farnell, Cults, iii.

The dead, who returned to the Great Mother, were objects of a sort of heroworship. This early nature-cult explains many anomalous features of Hellenic religion, especially in the cults of Artemis and Aphrodite.

The two deities were, no doubt, of common origin, but their cults are historically distinct.

Native cults the Hellenistic kings thought it good policy to patronize.

This god, whose worship was introduced into Athens at a later date by the Ionian immigrants, was identified with ErechtheusErichthonius (for whose birth Athena was in a certain sense responsible), and thus was brought into connexion with the goddess, in order to effect a reconciliation of the two cults.

While the Roman cults were amply protected by taboos, there was no comprehensive term in Roman law for religious violations and profanations in general.

This was partly due to the influence of Christianity, which sought to include as objects of sacrilege all forms of church property, rather than merely those things consecrated in pagan cults, partly to the efforts of the later emperors to surround themselves and everything emanating from them with highest sanctions.

The worship of these heroes is in reality an ancestor worship, which existed in pre-Homeric times, and was preserved in local cults.

The common calendar and cycle of festivals, observed by all Dorians (of which the Carneia was chief), and the distribution in Greece of the worships of Apollo and Heracles, which attained pre-eminence mainly in or near districts historically " Dorian," suggest that these cults, or an important element in them, were introduced comparatively late, and represent the beliefs of a fresh ethnic superstratum.

Certainly the Spartans adopted, together with the political traditions of the Heracleids, many old Laconian cults and observances such as those connected with the Tyndaridae.

By the time when Latin literature begins, the genuine Roman religion had already been overlaid by foreign cults and modes of thought, by the classical period it was - except in formal observance - practically buried and to a large extent fossilized.

No doubt the later indigitamenta (" bidding-prayers") which give us detailed lists of the spirits which preside over the various actions of the infant, or the stages in the marriage ceremony, or the agricultural operations of the farmer, are due in a large measure to deliberate pontifical elaboration, but they are a true indication of the Roman attitude of mind, which reveals itself continually in the analysis of the cults of the household or the festivals of the agricultural year.

We find then two prominent notes of the state influence, firstly, the adaptation of the old ideas of the household and agricultural cults to the broader needs of the community, especially to the new necessities of internal justice between citizens and war against external enemies, and secondly the organization of more or less casual worship into something like a consistent system.

The later stages represent not the spontaneous development of the genuine Roman religion, but its alteration and supersession by new cults and ideas introduced from foreign sources.

Other Italian cults introduced at this period were those of Juno Sospes and Juno Regina, Venus and Fortuna Primigenia, a goddess of childbirth who came from Praeneste.

In this period, then, we find first a legitimate extension of cults corresponding to the needs of the growing community, and secondly a religious restlessness and a consequent tendency to more dramatic forms of worship.

Some of the old cults passed away altogether, others survived in name and form, but were so wholly devoid of inner meaning that even the learning of a Varro could not tell their intention or the character of the deity with whom they were concerned.

His new palace on the Palatine he intended to be primarily the seat of the Julian family and the cults associated with it, and secondarily the centre of the new popular religion.

As the palace cults became national, the worship of the Genius was bound to spread, and ultimately Augustus sanctioned its celebration at the compita together with the worship of the old Lares.

For, though the form of the old cults was long preserved and even Antoninus Pius was honoured in an inscription for his care of the ancient rites of religion, the vital spirit was almost gone.

In the popular mind the hosts of exciting oriental cults, which in the 3rd and 4th centuries of the Empire filled Rome with the rites of mysticism and initiation, held undisputed sway; and with the more educated a revived philosophy, less accurate perhaps in thought, but more satisfying to the religious conscience, gave men a clearer monotheistic conception, and a notion of individual relations with the divine in prayer and even of consecration.

Idolatrous cults repose so largely on make-believe and credulity that the priests who administered them, perhaps oftener than we know, fell into the kind of imposture and trickery of which the legend of Bel and the dragon represents a classical example.

Such petitions as the above are common in the more ancient of the Christian cults, and are all alike inspired by the idea that a spirit or divine virtue can be confined in material objects which are to be brought into contact with or swallowed by men and animals.

The former was their creeds, the latter their cults or worships.

There is no trace of its having continued into imperial times, but the cults of Lavinium were kept up, largely by the imperial appointment of honorary non-resident citizens to hold the priesthoods.

Under the empire we find Eastern cults taking root here sooner than in Rome.

The honour paid by them to the serpent is connected with the old mythologies of Babylon and Egypt as well as with the popular cults of Greece and the Orient.

It was a time of great religious interest, when old cults were being revived and new ones were finding acceptance on all sides.

Moreover, in the earlier times we find the prince of the nome acting as the High Priest of the local god, but in course of time the state, represented by the king, began to an ever-increasing degree to take oversight over the more important local cults.

The duties of the priests were not restricted to the services of the temple, but they also took part in the household cults.

It is probable that the first of these forms is the primary one and the second in most cases a development from it due to (i.) the influence of other individual cults, (ii.) anthropomorphic tendencies, (iii.) the influence of chieftainship, hereditary and otherwise, (iv.) annual sacrifice of the sacred animal and mystical ideas connected therewith, (v.) syncretism, due either to unity of function or to a philosophic unification, (vi.) the desire to do honour to the species in the person of one of its members, and possibly other less easily traceable causes.

Conspicuous among Egyptian animal cults was that of the bull, Apis.

Serpent cults were well known in ancient Europe; there does not, it is true, appear to be much ground for supposing that Aesculapius was a serpent-god in spite of his connexion with serpents.

Just as a process of syncretism has given rise to cults of animal gods, tree spirits tend to become detached from the trees, which are thenceforward only their abodes; and here again animism has begun to pass into polytheism.

Here again, though to a less extent than in tree cults, the theriomorphic aspect recurs; in the north of Europe, in ancient Greece, in China, the water or river spirit is horse or bull-shaped; the water monster in serpent shape is even more widely found, but it is less strictly the spirit of the water.

Ancestor-worship has its parallels in Christian cults of the dead and of the saints; it must be remembered, however, that a saint is not as a rule an ancestor, and that his cult is not based upon family feeling and love of kinsmen, nor tends to stimulate and encourage the same.

Such cults have never prevented those who participated in them from fighting one another.

The question has often been raised, what is the relation of private cults of ancestors to public religion?