We have not outgrown the influence of cultic leaders. This book is as timely now as it would have been generations ago. The last three cults documented here are from the 1990s — even as the Introduction discusses an example from Kenya as recent as 2023. And the earliest two are from the two centuries before Christ.
Here are 2,000 years of charismatic people doing terrible things or sometimes simply acting inexplicably, with religious ritual and spiritual ideas.
Cults are not conservative or liberal; they are perversions, and they are, by definition, dangerous to their members. So we see this book through the lens of our spiritual practice alphabet, focusing on teachers, enthusiasm, and vision — and how these can go awry.
Very few cults set out to be one from the start. Editor Joseph Laycock — an associate professor of religious studies at Texas State University and coeditor of Nova Religio, an academic journal for the study of new religious movements — explains in his Introduction: “At their best, new and alternative religious movements can function like laboratories that explore new solutions to human problems. At their worst, they can foster patterns of abuse that last for generations or end in violence.” The book chronicles the latter, through carefully collected, sometimes rare, primary sources.
According to Laycock’s organization, “The Premodern Era” has five examples including “The Orgies of the Christians” from the second century CE and “The Orleans Heresy,” another Christian cult, which included mind control, from 1022. These are then followed by six examples from the nineteenth century and eight from the twentieth.
Laycock’s introduction goes into close detail about what defines a cult and what does not. This discussion is written with ordinary readers in mind, but students and professors will probably find it most useful. Also, before each set of primary sources, Laycock offers at least a few pages of historical, sociological, cultural, and theological remarks to set the scene. In the chapter devoted to the Branch Davidians of 1992-93 in Waco, Texas, these pages of context-setting expand to a fascinating twelve.
That said, Laycock also includes in his “cults” examples of how the label has been thrown around dangerously. This is addressed in his Introduction (see the excerpt accompanying this review), as well as in, for example, fear of Catholic nuns in Massachusetts in 1836 (“The Awful Disclosures of Maria Monk”) and fear of American women being seduced by Eastern yogis in 1911 (“Invasion of the Yoga Cults”).
