In religion and sociology, a cult is a cohesive group of people (sometimes a relatively small and recently founded religious movement, sometimes numbering in the hundreds of thousands) devoted to beliefs or practices that the surrounding culture or society considers to be far outside the mainstream, sometimes reaching the point of a taboo. Its separate status may come about either due to its novel belief system, its idiosyncratic practices, its perceived harmful effects on members, or because it opposes the interests of the mainstream culture. Other non-religious groups may also display cult-like characteristics.

In common usage, "cult" has a negative connotation, and is generally applied to a group by its opponents, for a variety of reasons. Understandably, most, if not all, groups that are called "cults" deny this label. Some anthropologists and sociologists studying cults have argued that no one yet has been able to define "cult" in a way that enables the term to identify only groups that have been claimed as problematic^{[citation needed]}.

The literal and traditional meanings of the word cult is derived from the Latin cultus, meaning "care" or "adoration", as "a system of religious belief or ritual; or: the body of adherents to same"³². In English, it remains neutral and a technical term within this context to refer to the "cult of Artemis at Ephesus" and the "cult figures" that accompanied it, or to "the importance of the Ave Maria in the cult of the Virgin." This usage is more fully explored in the entry Cult (religious practice).

In non-English European terms, the cognates of the English word "cult" are neutral, and refer mainly to divisions within a single faith, a case where English speakers might use the word "sect", as in "Roman Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Protestantism are sects (or denominations) within Christianity". In French or Spanish, culte or culto simply means "worship" or "religious attendance"; thus an association cultuelle is an association whose goal is to organize religious worship and practices.

The word for "cult" in the popular English meaning is secte (French) or secta (Spanish). In German the usual word used for the English cult is Sekte, which also has other definitions. A similar case is the Russian word sekta.

This article discusses cult in the original sense of "religious practice." It does not discuss religious or sociological cultist groups or uses in the sense of "cultural sub-group," as in cult film, etc.

In traditional usage, the cult of a religion, quite apart from its sacred writings ("scriptures"), its theology or myths, or the personal faith of its believers, is the totality of external religious practice and observance, the neglect of which is the definition of impiety. Cult is literally the "care" owed to the god and the shrine. The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" or "a particular form of worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship," originally "tended, cultivated," also the past participle of colere "to till". Thus in French, for example, sections in newspapers giving the schedule of worship at Catholic churches are headed Culte Catholique; the section giving the schedule of protestant churches is headed culte réformé.

The word "cult" in a general sense basically is a religion that is well less tolerated in a society, and is often taboo.

By extension, "cult" has come to connote the total cultural aspects of a religion, as they are distinguished from others through change and individualization.

The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829, and from that connotation comes the modern meaning of "cult" as in a "cultist" or a "cult following". Cult and cultist have recently accrued negative connotations that are separately dealt with at the entry cult.

In Roman Catholicism, cultus or cult is the technical term for the following and devotion or veneration extended to a particular saint.

Among the observances in the cult of a deity are rituals and ceremonies, which may involve spoken or sung prayers or hymns, and often sacrifice, or substitutes for sacrifice. Other manifestations of the cult of a deity are the preservation of relics or the creation of images, such as icons (usually connoting a flat painted image) or three-dimensional cultic images, denigrated as "idols", and the specification of sacred places, hilltops and mountains, fissures and caves, springs, pools and groves, or even individual trees or stones, which may be the seat of an oracle or the venerated site of a vision, apparition, miracle or other occurrence commemorated or recreated in cult practices. Sacred places may be identified and elaborated by construction of shrines and temples, on which are centered public attention at religious festivals (called "feasts" in some Christian communities) and which may become the center for pilgrimages.

The comparative study of cult practice is part of the disciplines of the anthropology of religion and the sociology of religion, two aspects of comparative religion. In the context of many religious organisations themselves, the study of cultic or liturgical practises is called liturgiology.

Impiety is a lack of proper concern for the obligations owed to cult in its proper sense of the outward practices of a belief system. Impiety was a main Pagan objection to Christianity, for unlike other initiates into mystery religions, Christians refused to cast a pinch of incense before the images of the gods, among whom were the protective deified Emperors. Impiety was a civic concern, for it could bring down upon the whole res publica the wrath of the tutelary gods who protected the polis.

Socrates and Anaxagoras were put to death for impiety, and Aristotle was also charged with impiety after the death of Alexander the Great. According to the Vita Aristotelis Marciana, a much mutilated single manuscript in the Biblioteca Nazionale di San Marco in Venice, which was written about 1300, Aristotle left the city, saying, "I will not allow the Athenians to sin twice against philosophy" (Vita Aristotelis, 41). The medieval Christian compiler has rendered the Athenians' crime as a "sin". Sin, however, was an alien concept to the Greeks and Romans. When Aramaic had to be translated into Greek in editing the New Testament, the Greek word hamartia came to be used. Hamartia ("missing the mark") is only very approximately translated as "sin."

Cult, in its original sense, refers to:

Cult may also refer to:

Source: Wikipedia a free encyclopedia