Cult

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A cult, in the vocabulary of religious studies, is the organized worship of a particular deity, saint, place, or sacred object: the body of rites, images, offerings, and festivals by which a community maintains its relationship with the divine. The word descends from the Latin cultus, from colere, to tend or cultivate — the same root that gives “cultivate” and “culture.” A field is tended; so, in this older sense, is a god. The verb runs in both directions at once: one cultivates a vineyard and one cultivates a patron, and the religious sense is the same care turned toward the sacred. To have a cult is to be attended to — fed, washed, clothed, addressed, kept. The pejorative meaning now dominant in ordinary English — a small, deviant, dangerous group under a charismatic leader — is a modern development, twentieth-century in its hardening, and scholars writing in the technical sense mean nothing of the kind. The two usages are best held apart from the first line, because the analytic term and the popular slur describe different objects and serve different ends.

The basic unit of ancient religion

In the ancient Mediterranean the term names something close to the basic unit of religion. A god did not float free of place and practice; a god had a cult — a temple or shrine, a priesthood, a calendar of sacrifices, a public image attended day by day, a treasury, a festival, a body of worshippers who counted themselves the god’s people. Religion in this world was less a matter of belief than of maintenance: the cult was the standing arrangement by which a community and a divinity stayed on terms. To establish a cult was to found a relationship; to neglect one was to let a relationship lapse, with consequences a city took seriously.

Egypt ran its great temples on a daily service before the statue of the god — the awakening, washing, clothing, and feeding of the image at dawn and its sealing-away at dusk, the daily office described under priest. The god was understood to be present in the image, and the rite was the literal tending of that presence — the same offices a great household paid its master, raised to the pitch of the sacred. The temples of Heliopolis and Dendera housed such cults; the walls of Dendera still carry the registers of offerings and the calendar of feasts by which the goddess Hathor was served through the year. Greek and Roman cities supported the cults of their patron deities as a civic duty rather than a private devotion. Athena at Athens, Artemis at Ephesus, the Capitoline triad at Rome — each had its temple, its image, its priesthoods, and its festival days written into the public calendar, and the magistrates who funded the sacrifices did so as an act of statecraft. A failed harvest or a lost war could be read as a cult left undone. Worship here was a public good, and the upkeep of the gods was the upkeep of the city.

The vocabulary the historian of religion still uses preserves this scale. A cult image is the statue at the center of the rite; a cult title is the local epithet under which a god was worshipped at a given place — Zeus Olympios, Apollo Pythios — so that the same divine name fractured into as many cults as there were sanctuaries. To speak of the cult of Artemis at Ephesus is to name not a sect but the whole local apparatus of her worship: the great temple, the image fallen (it was said) from the sky, the priesthood, the processions, the artisans who lived by it. This is the register in which the phrase the imperial cult belongs — the organized worship of the Roman emperor and his house, with temples, flamens, and altars across the provinces, carried out as ordinary civic religion. None of these usages carries the faintest charge of the modern slur. They describe the ritual machinery by which a deity was kept among the living.

Public worship and the mysteries

Across the ancient world a distinction ran not between true cults and false ones but between the open civic rites and the restricted ones. The public cult was, by design, visible: its processions filled the streets, its sacrifices were performed at altars before the temple in daylight, and its festivals belonged to everyone. Alongside these ran the mystery cults — those of Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, of Isis, of Mithras — which admitted members through initiation and offered a deeper or more personal share in the divine than the open rites afforded. What the mysteries withheld was access, not legitimacy. The Eleusinian sanctuary stood under the protection of the Athenian state; its hierophant was a public officer; the procession along the Sacred Way was a civic event — and yet the climactic epopteia in the Telesterion was shown only to the initiated, who were sworn to a silence so well kept that the content of the secret has never been securely recovered. The distinction between a public cult and a mystery cult was therefore one of admission, not of category. Both were cults in the full technical sense: both had their priesthoods, their sacred calendars, their images and implements, their rites.

What initiation added was a particular kind of experience. The mysteries were something an initiate underwent rather than something taught — Aristotle’s formula, preserved in late antiquity, holds that those being initiated were not to learn anything but to be brought into a state. The classic scholarly reconstruction reads the pathos of the rite as the work of orchestrated conditions: fasting and the long torchlit procession, the all-night vigil, the darkness of the hall broken by sudden fire, the controlled handling of awe and terror. The mystery cults are accordingly the ancient world’s clearest case of a worship organized to transform the worshipper. The cult of Mithras, documented from roughly the late first century CE in close to a thousand surviving cave-shrines across the empire, ran its initiates through seven graded ranks, each with its planetary patron, and gathered them around the icon of the bull-slaying and a communal meal — a fully articulated cult that left almost no doctrine in words and survives chiefly in stone. The mystery and the public altar are two settings of the same basic institution: a god with a place, a tending, and a people.

The Christian inheritance

Christianity inherited the vocabulary and transformed it. As the worship of the one God displaced the worship of the many, the language of cult had to be re-sorted, and the sorting produced one of the most carefully guarded distinctions in Christian theology: the difference between the worship owed to God alone and the honor paid to those held near to God. Medieval and later theology fixed the line with Greek-derived terms. Latria — from the Greek latreia, divine service — is the adoration that may be offered to God and to nothing made; dulia is the veneration paid to the saints and angels as creatures whom God has glorified; and hyperdulia is the higher veneration reserved in Catholic usage for the Virgin Mary, mother of the incarnate God. The distinction is held to be one of kind, not of degree along a single scale: latria acknowledges God as the source and end of all things, while dulia honors a creature precisely as a creature.

The terms were old, but the crisis that sharpened them was the eighth- and ninth-century struggle over the holy images, when the charge against icon-veneration was idolatry — the giving of latria to wood and paint. The defenders answered that the honor shown to an image is not latria at all but passes through the image to its prototype, so that the worship of God is never divided. John of Damascus put the case in the East; the Second Council of Nicaea in 787 ratified it, decreeing that images were to receive veneration but never the true adoration that belongs to the divine nature alone. The Western scholastics ordered the terms further: Thomas Aquinas treated latria as the chief act of the virtue of religion, owed to God as first principle, and placed dulia and hyperdulia beneath it as distinct and lesser acts. The Reformation reopened the wound, charging that the veneration of saints and images had collapsed the boundary in practice; Catholic and Orthodox theology answered that the line held, and that to honor the saints is to honor God’s work in them.

Within this settlement the cult of the saints is not a deviation but an ordinary feature of devotional life. The phrase names the whole organized honor paid to a holy figure: the shrine built over the grave, the relics enclosed in the altar, the feast day kept in the calendar, the pilgrimage made to the tomb, the liturgy sung on the saint’s day. A saint, in this usage, has a cult exactly as a Greek god had one — a place, a feast, a body of devotees, a tending — and the parallel is structural, not polemical. The word carried no slur. To say that a medieval town maintained the cult of its patron saint is to describe its devotional economy, the same kind of statement as saying an ancient city maintained the cult of its patron god. The consecration of the altar, the sacrament celebrated upon it, the priesthood that serves it: these are the cult’s working parts under a new theology.

Cult as an analytic term

Across these settings the scholarly use of cult is deliberately neutral. It describes how worship is structured rather than judging what worship is worth; it asks who was venerated, by whom, with what rites, and to what end. The historian of religion who writes of the cult of Asclepius, the cult of the emperor, the cult of Saint Demetrios, or the cult of the relics of the True Cross is using one word across pagan, imperial, and Christian material precisely because the word names a constant — the patterned, communal tending of a sacred relationship — beneath every change of theology. That constancy is the term’s analytic value. It lets the same questions be asked of a temple at Dendera, a Mithraic cave, and a saint’s shrine, and the questions return comparable answers: there is an object of devotion, a body that devotes itself, a place, a calendar, a set of acts.

This neutrality is also why the technical term sits awkwardly beside the popular one. The everyday sense fixes on a suspected pathology — a group too tightly bound to a leader, a devotion gone dangerous — and reads cult as an accusation. The analytic sense fixes on a structure and reads cult as a description, applying the same word to the Capitoline temple and the village shrine without implying that either has gone wrong. The pejorative is the younger sense and the narrower one; the technical sense is the older and the wider, and it is the one a historian of religion intends in every line.

The textual and scholarly record

The interior life of an ancient cult is recovered, where it can be recovered at all, from the apparatus around it: the images, the inscriptions, the temple walls, and the rare philosophical witness from within. For the daily service of the Egyptian temple, the offering-formulae and the registers of feasts inscribed at sites such as Dendera supply the order of the rite; E. A. Wallis Budge’s older synthesis Egyptian Magic (1901) gathers the liturgical material for a general reader, though its framing is of its period and later Egyptology has refined it considerably. For the mystery cults the central ancient evidence is sparse and oblique. Porphyry’s On the Cave of the Nymphs, the only surviving philosophical exegesis of Mithraic cave-symbolism from within antiquity, is read by modern scholars as the gateway text for the cult’s inner meaning precisely because the cult’s own doctrinal literature does not survive; Thomas Taylor’s 1823 English version is available in Select Works of Porphyry. The wider Neoplatonic theory of cult — the defense of statues, sacrifices, and rites as genuine points of contact with the divine rather than empty custom — is laid out in Iamblichus’s On the Mysteries, likewise rendered by Taylor in Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians.

The modern study of cult as a category runs through the comparative history of religion. Walter Burkert’s Greek Religion (English translation, Harvard University Press, 1985) is the standard account of Greek cult as civic institution, and his Ancient Mystery Cults (Harvard University Press, 1987) the standard treatment of the initiatory variety as experience rather than doctrine. The Roman cult of Mithras has the densest material record of any ancient mystery and the leanest textual one; Manfred Clauss’s The Roman Cult of Mithras (Edinburgh University Press / Routledge, 2000) and Roger Beck’s The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire (Oxford University Press, 2006) are the contemporary standards, with Hugh Bowden’s Mystery Cults of the Ancient World (Princeton University Press, 2010) placing the mysteries within the broader frame. For the Christian re-sorting of the vocabulary the doctrinal history is set out in Jaroslav Pelikan’s The Christian Tradition (University of Chicago Press, 1971–1989), and the analytic status of the term itself is examined in the methodological essays of Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion (University of Chicago Press, 2004).

The tending

What every cult holds in common, under all its theologies, is the discipline of attention paid on a schedule. The Egyptian priest who breaks the seal at dawn, washes the image, sets out the bread, and bolts the door again at dusk is doing what the keeper of a saint’s shrine does in trimming the lamp and keeping the feast, and what the city does in funding the sacrifice on the god’s appointed day: keeping a presence supplied, addressed, and unforgotten. The festival cycle turns the care over the year; the daily rite turns it over the hours; the priesthood guarantees that someone is always there to perform it. A cult is, at bottom, the standing answer to a simple practical question — how a community keeps a relationship with the sacred alive when the sacred does not eat, sleep, or remember on its own. The image must be tended or it is only stone; the feast must be kept or it is only a date. The word came from the tilled field, and it never quite left it: a cult is a presence cultivated, day after day, by hands that do not let it go to seed.

→ In the library: Porphyry: On the Cave of the Nymphs (Taylor, 1823) · Iamblichus on the Mysteries of the Egyptians (Taylor, 1821) · Budge — Egyptian Magic (1901, on temple ritual)

→ Related: Heliopolis · Dendera · Hermes Trismegistus · Neoplatonism · Gnosis · Eleusis · Isis · Demeter · Mithraic Mysteries · Mystery Religions · Christianity · Priest · Consecration · Sacrament · Latria · Ritual · Liturgy · Deity · Idolatry · Initiation