I Love Cults

 

I've already talked about how I love religion.  But I especially love cults.

Two ways of thinking this.  First, the ancient way:

Think of a cult in the original sense of a cultus.  For the ancient Roman, "cult" was not a pejorative term, and it had no negative connotations.  This was a polytheistic society, in which you had the cult of Isis, the cult of Epona, the cult of Cybele, as well as the more mainstream veneration Jupiter, Juno, Minerva, Quirinius, Janus, and so on.  No contradiction was seen between these different practices, even if the mythology of one cult seemed to be in conflict with the mythology of another, because there was no attempt at a harmonization between differing worldviews.  Rather than seeing competing cults as obnoxious irritants or dangerous heretics, the Republic, and later, the Empire, tended to appreciate the work of these cults - their specialized labor in the appeasement of various deities - and even subsidized them with state funds to a considerable degree.  The idea is, essentially, one of convenience: they worship these deities so you don't have to.  The general attitude towards cults was one of gratitude.  It was, of course, possible for a Roman citizen to be a member of more than one cult, and many did, for political, networking reasons.  But there was no compulsion for people to do so, and little expectation that they should - with, of course, the exception of the Imperial Cult, the worship of the Emperor and his family themselves.

I think there's something healthy about this general tendency towards appreciation and gratitude towards cults, rather than suspicion and intolerance.  It sets up a virtuous circle, rather than a vicious one.  When cults are treated with suspicion, hostility, and discrimination, they tend to become more insular, more inward-turning, more distrustful of outsiders - and pretty soon they may become fairly anti-social and even dangerous.  Thus suspicion towards cults can become a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.  

Of course, we no longer live in the Roman Empire.  But that brings me to the other way of thinking about this, in the modern context.  Today, in the (post?-)Christian world, cults earn my respect and admiration in a different way: precisely by having the courage, the moral strength, the audacity to overcome their own feelings and tendencies towards conformity and passive acceptance of consensus reality, cult members are people who, not merely as individuals, but collectively, as a group, have worked together to establish their own distinct culture, within the dominant culture.  It takes incredible strength of character to achieve such risk-taking.  It's a scary thing to do, but precisely where your fear is, there your freedom is.  Cults are collective art projects, where people (re-)create themselves, as living art.  They are bending reality, transforming it.

In short, cults are situationists with a lower-case s.

I have to respect that accomplishment, which is more than most people ever accomplish in their lives, even if it is risky - or precisely because it is so very risky, and so often therefore ends in failure in one sense or another.