SUE DE GROOT | Hoarders of hoes: a cultured look at cults, cultivators and collective culls

My friend and colleague Jennifer Platt, books editor for the Sunday Times, wrote a column recently about her obsession with cults and books about cults. There do seem to be rather a lot of these about, mainly written by those who have escaped the clutches of cultists.

(Incidentally, Jen and I are both members of the air fryer cult, but that’s a different kettle of crispy fish entirely.)

I decided to investigate the word “cult” and discovered that it dates back to the early 1600s, when it meant worship, or homage, in English. This sprang from the Latin root “cultus”, meaning “care, labour or cultivation”, which was the past participle of “colere”, meaning to till the land.

It is not a stretch of the imagination to see how cultivation of the soil became associated with care and reverence, because if we do not treat nature with a suitably worshipful attitude we will all starve.

“Cult” as a word for worship soon became obsolete, but the Online Etymology Dictionary tells us it was revived in the 1800s, when it started to be used for particular (read: odd) forms of religious belief, invoking “ancient or primitive” (read: odd) rites and rituals.

Someone who grooms potential cult members before fully assimilating them into a particular cult might well be called a ‘cultivator’. 

At around the same time, “cult” also began to refer to the devotion offered by acolytes to a particular person or thing.

From there, it’s a short leap to the Moonies, the Manson Family, the Branch Davidians, the Sullivanians, the Children of God and Heaven’s Gate, all of which have been in the news during the last 50 years or so, mostly for bad reasons.

In an article for Rolling Stone in 2017, Elizabeth Yuko wrote: “Our fascination with cults — real or fictional — may stem from the fine line between being drawn to what appears to be a utopian community and a dangerous, free-will-stripping group.”

She listed “five spiritual groups that went too far”, including The People’s Temple, members of which worshipped their leader Jim Jones, who in 1978 instructed his followers to drink cyanide, resulting in 909 deaths.

Then there was the Heaven’s Gate cult. Those inculcated into this group believed that extraterrestrial aliens would save some chosen humans when Earth was destroyed, which doesn’t sound all that different from the beliefs of many mainstream religions, but HG took it further, timing a Nike-wearing mass suicide to coincide with the appearance of the Hale-Bopp comet in the night sky in March 1997.

These are what one might call “proper cults” but the word is bandied around far more loosely these days. We hear “cult” used to describe those who obsessively discuss air fryer recipes online as well as those who follow celebrity influencers, those who think Winston Churchill was marvellous, those who remain loyal to Donald Trump and those who trade in cryptocurrency.

Leaning more to the language side, I’ve been wondering how we could repurpose words in the service of cults. Cults that make their members work really hard could be “diffi-cults” and those who consult or worship the dead could be “oc-cults”.

The words culture and cultivation stem from the same etymological roots as cult. Someone who grooms potential cult members before fully assimilating them into a particular cult might well be called a “cultivator”. And “culture” could be a form of mould or fungus grown by cult members for nutritional or even suicidal purposes.

As an aside, the word “colony” also originates from “colere”, the agricultural progenitor of cults. The first colonies were settlements outside of what was not yet called Italy, established by the ancient Romans. Any Asterix reader will know there were pockets of outliers who opposed the cult of colonial rule, and thus it continued.

Getting back to the modern use of cult as a word, it seems any person who has any sort of following whatsoever is frequently tagged with this pejorative label. There’s the Mandela cult, the Malema cult, the Jamie Oliver cult and the Khanyi Mbau cult, to name but a few.

I am not the first to point out the disintegration of cult in popular culture.

In 1873, linguist Fitzedward Hall wrote: “Cult is a term which, as we value exactness, we can ill do without, seeing how completely religion has lost its original signification.”

And in 1993, fellow word lover Hugh Rawson included this entry in his splendid book, Wicked Words: “Cult — An organised group of people, religious or not, with whom you disagree.”