Cult.

From last night’s reading:

Following a profound new experience, providing a new illumination of the world, the founder, a highly charismatic person, begins enlisting disciples.  These followers become an informally but closely knit association, bound together by the new experience , whose nature the founder has revealed and interpreted.  The association might be called a circle, indicating that it is oriented toward a central figure with whom each of the followers is in intimate contact.  The followers may be regarded as the founder’s companions, bound to him by personal devotion, friendship, and loyalty.  A growing sense of solidarity both binds the members together and differentiates them from any other form of social organization.  Membership in the circle requires a complete break with the ordinary pursuits of life and a radical change in social relationships.  Ties of family and kinship and loyalties of various kinds were at least temporarily relaxed or severed.  The hardships, suffering, and persecution that loomed for those who cast their lot with the group were counterbalanced by their high hopes and firm expectations.

Of the founder himself, he has visions, dreams, trances, frequent ecstasies, unusual sensitiveness and an intense emotional life, and is ready to interpret manifestations of the divine.  There is something elemental about him: an uncompromising attitude and an archaic manner and language.  He appears as a renewer of lost contracts with the hidden powers of life.  He does not usually come from the aristocracy, the learned, or the refined; frequently he emerges from simpler folk and remains true to his origin even in a changed environment.  He speaks cryptically, with words, signs, gestures, many metaphors. and symbolic acts of a diverse nature, illuminating and interpreting the past and anticipating the future in terms of the circle.

~ Joachim Wach

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