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Most cults centred on the daily tending and worship of an image of a deity and were analogous to the pattern of human life. The shrine containing the image was opened at dawn, and then the deity was purified, greeted and praised, clothed, and fed. There were several further services, and the image was finally returned to its shrine for the night. Apart from this activity, which took place...
Foreign cults of this kind were not by any means brand-new in the late 5th century; if they seem so, it may be because that period is so much better documented than the early part of the century. But they may have increased in number in Greece as a result of the geographically extensive campaigning of the Peloponnesian War and even the period of the Athenian empire. The cult of Adonis is...
...ruler might also contribute to the shrines of local cults. When, in the 2nd and 1st millennia bce, Babylonia and Assyria emerged as national states, their kings had responsibility for the national cult, and each monarch supervised the administration of all temples in his domain.
...battle against “idols” with all the intensity of faith in the oneness and exclusiveness of the imageless biblical God. The abhorrence of images was strengthened further by the emperor’s cult, which Christians so despised. Christians were compelled to venerate the imperial images by offering sacrifices to them; refusal to make sacrifice was the chief cause of martyrdom....
Cultic worship—a formal system of veneration—is so universal in religion that some historians of religion actually define religion as cult. Cultic worship is social, which means more than a group worshipping the same deity in the same place at the same time. A cult is structured, with a division of sacred personnel (priests) who lead and perform the cultic ceremonies for the people,...
Of broad importance to the religious community is the cult prophet, or priest-prophet. Under the mandate of the cult, the priest-prophet (who may be an ordinary priest) is part of the priestly staff of a sanctuary, and his duty is to pronounce the divine oracular word at the appropriate point in a liturgy. As such, he is an “institutional” prophet. The difference between a cult...
Religious experience receives its initial, practical expression in the forming of the cult that provides an orderly framework for the worship of the religious object. Worship includes expressions of praise, acknowledgments of the excellency of the divine, communion in the form of prayer, and the use of sacraments or visible objects that signify or represent the invisible sacred beyond them,...
Building on the thesis of Pan-Babylonism that a homogeneous Middle Eastern culture existed and on the theories of cult as a ritual drama, the so-called British and Scandinavian cult-historical schools maintained that the king, as the personified god, played the main role in the overall cultural pattern. The English branch of this school (the “myth and ritual school”) concentrated on...
The form of a cult of saints can be categorized as either indirect or direct. An indirect cult form involves the veneration of objects that stand in a magical relationship with the respective saint. In this connection there can be a veneration of the saint’s relics. Such religious practices are to be understood in terms of spiritual power. Numinous power is viewed as issuing from the saint, and...
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