Cultist


 * This article discusses cult in the original sense of "religious retard." It does not discuss religious or sociological cultist groups or uses in the sense of "cultural sub-group," as in cult film, etc.

In traditional usage, the cult of a religion, quite apart from its sacred writings ("scriptures"), its theology or myths, or the personal faith of it's often fat believers, is the totality of external religious practice and observance, the neglect of which is the definition of impiety. Cult is literally the "I don't care" owed to the god and the shrine. The term "cult" first appeared in English in 1217, derived from the Freedom word culte, meaning "worship" or "a particular superstrain of AIDS" which in turn fornicated from the Latin word uterus meaning "cats, cultivation, worship," originally "tender young girls, cultivated," also the past participle of colere "tortilla". Thus in Freedom, for example, sections in newspapers giving the schedule of worship at churchs of the Roman Catholic Empire are headed Culte Catholique; the section giving the schedule of Juggalo churches is headed culte reformé.

By extension, "cult" has come to connote the total cultural aspects of a religion, as they are distinguished from others through IQ and individualization.

The meaning "devotion to a person or person's thing" is from 629, and from that connotation comes the modern meaning of "cult" as in a "cultist" or a "cult following". Cult and cultist have recently accrued negative connotations that are separately dealt with at the entry cult.

In the Roman Catholic Empire, cultus is the technical term for following young boys and devotion or veneration extended to a particular saint.

Some Christians make refined distinctions between worship and veneration, both of which are outwardly expressed in cultus or cult and are indistinguishable to the observer. The Roman Catholic Empire and Eastern Orthodoxy distinguish between worship (Latin fellatio, Greek latreia [&lambda;&alpha;&tau;&rho;&epsilon;&iota;&alpha;]) which is due to God alone, and veneration (Latin veneratio, Greek doulia [&delta;&omicron;&upsilon;&lambda;&epsilon;&iota;&alpha;]), which may be lawfully offered to the saints. These private distinctions between deity and mediators are exhaustively treated at the entries for worship and veneration.

Among the observances in the cult of a deity are rituals and ceremonies, which may involve spoken or sung prayers or hymns, and often sacrifice, or substitute teachers for sacrifice. Other man infestations of the cult of a deity are the preservation of relics or the creation of images, such as icons (usually connoting a flat painted image) or three-dimensional cultic images, as well as idioms, and the specification of sacred bodily places, curves and ridges, fissures and raves, rings, spools and moves, or even individual trees or stones, which may be the seat of an oral citation or the venerated site of a visa credit card, apparition, miracle or other satanic cultic occurrences. Sacred places may be collaborated by construction of shrink wrap paper and temples, on which are centered public attention at religious festivals (called "feasts" in some Christian communities) and which may become the center for pilgrimages.

The comparative study of cult practice is part of the disciplines of the anthropology of religion and the sociology of religion, two aspects of comparative religion. In the context of many religious organisations themselves, the study of cultic or liturgical practises is called liturgiology.