This bugbear starts with Mother God.
I first learned about Love Has Won while watching Hospice Nurse Julie’s channel, which then led me over to Ask a Mortician’s video on the discovery of Amy Carlson’s remains, which led me over to watching the entire Love Has Won: The Cult of Mother God docuseries in one sitting.
One thing that kept coming to mind as I watched was how ordinary the thought process of Amy’s adherents seemed. Some of their beliefs are bog standard in the New Age movements (even the unhinged ones, especially the unhinged ones), but more importantly their methods of arriving at a conclusion struck me as something that wouldn’t have seemed even slightly out of place in the average pagan group. One example that stuck out to me was Archaiea Hope describing herself praying to the angels for guidance on how to assist Mom, and receiving her confirmation in the form of a phone notification—not the content of the notification, but the timing. The “ding-ding” was enough.
There’s a lot I could say about errors in discernment here, but it’s not really the core point. It got me wondering about the likelihood of cults as a phenomenon within neo-paganism, considering its proximity and extensive overlap with New Age, especially having witnessed a handful of groups’ dynamics decaying into something that would be better described as a cult than an ordinary religious group.
Of course, when the topic of cults does come up in a pagan social setting it’s a touchy subject at best, and the response is often (honestly earned) defensiveness because of the stigma around pagan religions in general, often employing a well-ackshully response of splitting hairs over the modern usage of the word “cult” and the academic, English derivation of the Latin cultus. The attitude often seems to be that cult accusations shouldn’t be granted any real seriousness.
Granted, cult vs. cultus is not a minor distinction to want to make. People looking for historical precedent to guide a modern practice would very much want to find a cult of [insert deity here]. A historical cult of Odin certainly wouldn’t imply a social environment that leads to shit like inoculating takeout salads with e. coli to swing a local election, or the cops finding your goði’s emaciated corpse in some back room wrapped in string lights. Hopefully.
I think it’s also worth mentioning here that death is actually a very rare outcome of cult activity and it tends to happen in rather specific circumstances. The downfalls of the People’s Temple, Heaven’s Gate, and Aum Shinrikyo became public sensations because they were abnormal. The great majority of groups who meet the criteria of cults get by without anybody dying an unnatural death.
While raising these concerns, though, I am not referring to the historical cultus. We are modern people, semantic drift happens, connotational meanings of words influence everyday usage more often than denotational meanings, and at the end of the day I just really didn’t want to type “high-control/high-demand group” or “HCHDG” over and over while I was drafting a post on my phone. Also, I have noticed—though anecdotal observation can only count for so much—that people who like to quibble over historical-“cultus” vs. modern-pejorative-“cult” are prone to being kinda modern-pejorative-culty themselves. I’m not interested in humoring that crowd.
So, for the purpose of this series, “cult” should be taken to mean “high-control and/or high-demand group, where belief or ideology are the primary draw.” This borrows from Zablocki’s definition, but drops his prerequisite for unquestioning obedience as a feature, as obedience can still very easily happen in tandem with doubt. Ask anyone who thinks their parents, teachers or bosses are full of shit but still demonstrates obedience or loyalty. It sidesteps various other definitions entirely because the anti-cult movements are rife with moral entrepreneurs whose judgement I do not trust. I also don’t find the idea of unquestioning obedience to be truthful or useful even when specifically describing an ideology-centric, high control, high demand group. Many people who leave cults describe being in a stage where they were mentally checked out from the group but had not yet left—this doesn’t mean the group is not a cult, or that members on their way out cease to experience harmful influence. You can very much be influenced by false information that you don’t actually believe in, and solidifying disbelief into something actionable can take significant time and effort.
This is also to maintain a distinction between cults-as-in-HCHDGs and New Religious Movements in general, which many writers in both the self-described “anti-cult” camp and those who would be written off by the former as “cult apologists” insist on conflating—the former dismissing all NRMs as cults, the latter overcorrecting in response to otherwise valid concerns about “cult” as a snarl word.
I think this conflation is harmful, and honestly I consider it downright violent when it comes from the “anti-cult” camp, because it reflects motivations more tied up in constraining heterodoxy and punishing deviance than it does in analyzing the workings of these groups, and discovering solutions for people harmed by cults. Neopaganisms are new religious movements, even despite being historically inspired. The great majority of pagan groups are also not cults.
But, because no belief system is safe from the development of systems of extreme control, some are. We need practical language to discuss them, and we need to discuss them. I have scrounged extensively and only found a small handful of people publicly talking about having been in ideolgically-pagan cults, but the number is not zero. One would hope that this means the incidence is rather low, but another observation that I’ve made while looking at online spaces geared towards cult survivors of all stripes is that far fewer people explicitly identify which groups they were part of than I expected, or sometimes even the belief systems of these cults.
I have been a Heathen since late 2012, and in that time I have observed social norms in pagan circles that lend themselves to the development of a high-control dynamic, and which increase the risk of these developments going unnoticed.
I’ve also been alive for 30+ years and I’ve seen how common it is for people to scramble for control irrespective of ideology. Further, the impact left by the early days of the anti-cult movements (plural), and pop-wisdom about cults, is such that pagans are more likely to be unfairly accused of cult involvement even when they aren’t. Information meant to be educational also isn’t tailored to pagan norms and needs. Even the more generalized educational material on cults is written in a way that basically treats pagans like they don’t exist, and that’s when it manages not to be intentionally hostile to us, or doesn’t treat Christianity or culturally-Christian secularism as an aspirational default.
The core idea to remember is that it is not beliefs that make a cult—being weird is not some moral failure and doesn’t inherently lead to being controlling, and the norms of the overculture should not be used as a measure of the validity of the belief systems of those who fall outside of it.
And anyway, you might find that most cults’ actual theologies are shockingly boring and are not sufficient on their own to explain the degree of control exerted within. Aliens in the architecture do not a cult make—although a study by Asbjørn Dyrendal and Leif Kennair does suggest that believing in aliens does tend to correlate just a bit with conspiracy-mindedness, which also in turn tends to correlate with authoritarianism. Thankfully the study also does seem to confirm the common belief that pagans are overall more egalitarian.
So, maybe, like, squint a little if aliens are involved, I guess.
Posts:
Warning Signs (goes live July 31st)
Subcultural Risk Factors (goes live Aug 1st)
Comment settings on the blog were adjusted a few months ago, and comments will require review if they contain certain filtered words. I still see filtered comments.
Do not openly speculate about which pagan groups are cults in my comment section. Comments that do so will be deleted on sight, as some of these groups reportedly monitor discussion about them and harass critics.
Falkabarn 