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The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1617, derived from the French culte, meaning "worship" which in turn originated from the Latin word cultus meaning "care, cultivation, worship". The meaning "devotion to a person or thing" is from 1829. Starting about 1920, "cult" acquired an additional six or more positive and negative definitions.
From the second half of the 20th century, some scholars in the social scientific study of religion have advocated referring to cults as new religious movements (NRMs) [33] hoping to avoid the often pejorative and derogatory connotations attached to the word "cult" in popular language. [34]
In their typology, a "cult movement" is an actual complete organization, differing from a "sect" in that it is not a splinter of a bigger religion, while "audience cults" are loosely organized, and propagated through media, and "client cults" offer services (i.e. psychic readings or meditation sessions).
In his book The Road to Total Freedom, the English sociologist Roy Wallis [8] describes that a sect is characterized by "epistemological authoritarianism": meaning it has an authoritative source for determining heresy. According to Wallis, sects claim to have unique and privileged access to truth or salvation, and their followers often view ...
Montell argues in Cultish that cults and cultists can be identified in particular through their non-standard use of language – as scholar Scott Lowe put it, "the technical terms, the redefined words, the shorthand, the clichés, the euphemisms, logical distortions, and so on […] set members apart from (and above) their pedestrian neighbors, families, and coworkers". [2]
Yoder later noted that although the earliest known usage of the term "folk religion" in the English language was unknown, it probably developed as a translation of the German Volksreligion. [26] One of the earliest prominent usages of the term was in the title of Joshua Trachtenberg 's 1939 work Jewish Magic and Superstition: A Study in Folk ...
Pseudoreligion or pseudotheology is a pejorative term which is a combination of the Greek prefix "pseudo", meaning false, and "religion."The term is sometimes avoided in religious scholarship as it is seen as polemic, but it is used colloquially in multiple ways, and is generally used for a belief system, philosophy, or movement which is functionally similar to a religious movement, often ...
The purpose of traditional theosophical kabbalah was to give the whole of normative Jewish religious practice this mystical metaphysical meaning. The Meditative tradition of Ecstatic Kabbalah (exemplified by Abraham Abulafia and Isaac of Acre ) strives to achieve a mystical union with God, or nullification of the meditator in God's Active ...