Religions, Cults and Power

Modern Satanism rests on a long reversal. Through most of Christian history Satan was the enemy of humankind, a label pinned on others, not a figure anyone claimed. Over many centuries the Eden serpent, the fallen archangel and the “Light-bringer”…

Eliphas Levi rehabilitated Lucifer in theory (Chapter 119). Aleister Crowley (1875-1947) built a religion, a set of initiatory orders and a body of sexual magic around a revelation he said he received in Cairo in 1904. The Deep State Encyclopedia…

Faxneld and Petersen write that “an enduring and public tradition of Satanism was first instated in 1966, with the founding of the Church of Satan”; earlier “Satanists” had mostly been figures of accusation, and the precursors of Chapter 119 founded…

After LaVey founded the Church of Satan in 1966, organised Satanism did not stay a single movement. It split into currents that disagree on almost everything except their use of the Adversary as a symbol. Some are theistic and some…

The twentieth century produced the Satanist, and it also brought back the pagan. The new pagans presented themselves as survivors or restorers of pre-Christian religions. The movements that followed range widely. At one end is a nudist witch-cult in Hertfordshire,…

For most of the history traced in this Part, the “Satanist” was a figure other people accused. Faxneld and Petersen list early-modern “witches”, “abortionists and poisoners close to the court of Louis XIV” and “certain English rakes” as people “slandered…

Part 13 deals with groups that critics call “cults”, members call churches, foundations or movements, and academic specialists call “new religious movements” (NRMs). The choice of word already takes a side. This chapter sets out the vocabulary used in the…

Willis lists the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints among the movements that began as “cults” in nineteenth-century America and became an established denomination [Willis, American Cults, #63203]. Its history is also, from the start, a political history: a…

The 1890 Manifesto ended plural marriage in the official church. It did not end what believers called “the Principle”. Mormon fundamentalists hold that Woodruff suspended, but could not revoke, Section 132 of the Doctrine and Covenants. They built a chain…

The religious ferment of nineteenth-century America produced two kinds of movement that went on to become worldwide denominations. One kind counted the days: it read the prophetic numbers of Daniel and Revelation as a timetable and announced when Christ would…

The Millerites had looked for Christ in the sky over the “burned-over district” of upstate New York. Four years after the Great Disappointment, the same region produced a different promise. The dead, it was said, could be reached directly, at…

Christian Science (Chapter 128) located illness in “mortal mind”. Spiritualism (Chapter 129) claimed that personality survives the body. In the mid-twentieth century a pulp-fiction writer combined both themes, a mental cause of suffering and an immortal spiritual being, into a…

Two of the best-known new religious movements of the post-war decades took shape at opposite ends of the Pacific world and in very different registers. Sun Myung Moon’s Unification Church came out of the divided Korea of the 1950s. It…

On 18 November 1978, at a remote agricultural settlement in north-western Guyana, more than nine hundred followers of the Reverend Jim Jones died, most of them from cyanide mixed into a fruit drink. The reference shelf describes it as the…

Mount Carmel, the Branch Davidian centre outside Waco, Texas, is the most politically contested case in this part of the study. Its story runs from an Adventist schism of the 1920s and 1930s through the Roden family’s leadership to Vernon…

Most millenarian movements wait for the end of the world. Two movements of the 1990s acted on it instead. Shoko Asahara’s Aum Shinrikyo built a counter-state, stood for parliament, made nerve agents and on 20 March 1995 released sarin on…

From the 1930s onward a family of movements moved the source of revelation away from the biblical God. In its place they put Ascended Masters, channelled entities and extraterrestrial creators: the I AM Activity, the Church Universal and Triumphant, Raël’s…

This final chapter of the part brings the story to the present and turns to the response to cults: parents’ associations, deprogrammers, exit counsellors, courts, and the scholars who opposed them all. On the “cult” side the cases include a…

Every religious system examined in this book also answers a political question: who may command, and why must others obey? The earliest states placed the ruler inside the sacred order itself, as a god incarnate, a god’s son or the…

In the medieval West the question of who may command took the form of a contest between two institutions, each claiming to hold its authority from God. The papacy claimed supremacy over all Christians, kings included. Emperors and kings claimed…

The papal claim to dispose of kingdoms, examined in the previous chapter, reached its widest extent when Europe crossed the oceans. A pope divided the newly found world between two Catholic crowns. Theologians debated whether its inhabitants were fully human.…

The French Revolution was the first time a European state set out to take apart the public power of Christianity and, briefly, to put a religion of its own making in its place. The library’s sources read this break in…

The French Revolution’s Cult of Reason lasted barely a year. The Marxist-Leninist states made atheism a permanent doctrine of state for most of the twentieth century. This chapter starts from Marx’s own sentence and its misreadings. It then follows state…

The United States combines a constitution that names no God and forbids an established church with a public life full of prayer, oaths and the motto “In God We Trust”. This chapter traces that mix through four layers. The first…

No modern political question carries more religious weight than the one that began when a secular Viennese journalist proposed a state for the Jews and the British Empire promised them a “national home” in a land holy to three faiths.…

In 1979 a Shi’a jurist took control of a modern state, and a doctrine developed over centuries in the seminaries of Qom and Najaf became the constitution of a nation of some forty million. This chapter follows that change through…

The same year that brought a Shi’a jurist to power in Tehran (Chapter 144) also set in motion the Sunni forces that, over two decades, produced al-Qaeda and, after another decade, the Islamic State’s caliphate of 2014. This chapter follows…

The Holy See is unusual among religious bodies: it is a sovereign subject of international law, it signs treaties, it keeps diplomats, and since 1929 it has had its own territory and its own bank. This double nature has produced…

After the Cold War, religion returned to great-power politics. Russia rebuilt a partnership between the Kremlin and the Moscow Patriarchate. China’s Communist Party moved from tolerating religion to “sinicising” it. Iran’s clerical state and Saudi Arabia’s Wahhabi monarchy fought a…

Throughout this study, political legitimacy has been bound up with claims to secret or sacred knowledge: Magi, mystery schools, Templars and lodges. The library’s large conspiracy literature turns that theme into an accusation. It holds that a small number of…