Publishers Note: Hallelujah, we are saved, Tarquin O’Flaherty, at least, can read. Here, as promised, is an article on “Cults”
Cults. by Tarquin O’Flaherty
I have to take my dictionary to task;
• Cult; Latin, cultus, from colere, to till, to worship.The rites and ceremonies of any system of belief. Worship; homage; a system of religious belief.
Can this possibly be right? If it is right, (and it can’t be, surely?) then we are all in a lot of trouble. If we belong to a religious group, then we belong to a cult.
Of course, my Cassell’s English Dictionary is of 1969 vintage and is probably beset by dotage and doesn’t know about Jim Jones and has never heard of the Branch Davidians and how they became so powerful, so threatening that every single one of them, without exception, men, women and children, had to be put to death and their House of Worship reduced to ashes in a ritualised and cleansing fire. You can’t imagine it, can you? How frightening can it get when even the babies, the tiny children of these people, are so inculcated with heretical thinking that they represent a massive threat to National Security, Freedom and Liberty. A threat so great that we cannot suffer these children to live…
On the other hand, and thirty odd years later, my 2001 Penguin English Dictionary has something else to say, something seemingly innocuous, something you wouldn’t give a second glance to, and of which there’s not the slightest hint in the positively naïve old ’69 Cassell’s. This, in part,is what the Penguin adds to the ’69 Cassell’s definition ;
• Cult; [(as Cassell’s) then;] Religion regarded as unorthodox or spurious.
Well now, there’s a thing. Easily understood, nothing mysterious, self explanatory really, but markedly different,and perhaps, a tad pejorative? What changes have been wrought in thirty odd years to add ‘unorthodox’ and ‘spurious’ to what was then, almost fifty years ago, a fairly even-handed dictionary definition? Even my shorter OED of 1978 is silent, casting not a single ‘spurious’ aspersion, whereas, if the ultra-modern, up-to-date ‘Information Super Highway’ is explored, ill-informed arriviste gibbering predominates, and ‘cult’ is seen as being on a par with Communism or the Yellow Peril.
Around Shakespeare’s time, the presiding power, (the Cult of the Christians) thought that the Earth, being God’s creation, must be at the absolute centre of the Universe. Giordano Bruno, by empirical means, begged to differ and was burned to death for his presumption. Luckily Copernicus, Tycho Brahe, and Galileo were in the wings and gradually, through the cult of empiricism, replaced astrology with astronomy. Empiricism, which threatened faith-based belief systems, was viewed as a dangerous ungodly cult, and was fought against every step of the way, particularly as it threatened the whole of Christianity with the ‘spurious’ tag! The Christians at the time didn’t use the word ‘cult’. They had however, their own word, the very mention of which caused people to panic. The word, of course, was heresy.
Here we go again;
• Heresy, From the Greek hairesis, to choose.
• From Old French (heresie) or Latin (haeris), to choose.
There is no suggestion in the above definition that by choosing between, say tea or coffee, by making a choice, you’ll be crucified or burnt alive. Yet that’s what’s happened. A group, in this case the Church, takes on a word or common phrase and makes it their own. ‘Heresy’, through the centuries, and to modern ears, has had only one meaning; a system of belief which runs counter to those of the established church and, therefore must be eliminated. This means that an individual, simply by making the ‘wrong’ choice, is an instant heretic, an enemy of the Church and, recant or not, will be put to death.
This is why the word ‘cult’ has changed it’s meaning. It has changed because we cannot reasonably use the word ‘heresy’ any more. This is, after all, a democratic world we live in and ‘heresy’ is associated with an uncivilised time when they put pigs on trial and people were burnt at the stake. ‘Cult’ is much more acceptable, and gives respectability to a level of modern political intolerance which was once the exclusive preserve of the Church.
Words may change their meaning from time to time; people sadly, just keep on coming up with the same old tedious Fascism.