Re: Chemosh - Discussion
Posted: 06 Dec 2012 20:34
The term cult, while easily defined using a dictionary, is actually not easily defined.
Being a religious studies major we often had discussions in class surrounding this term. There is a university in Wisconsin that developed a list of what they considered to be cults. On this list was Buddhism and Hinduism.
The term cult actually was developed by god-worshiping groups as far back the mesopotamia using the earliest form of written language, cuniform. Obviously it wasn't called cult, but the essential translation refers to the same thing.
Essentially your first definition is the one commonly used, but you need to remove the word religious before veneration. If you included that almost all religions would be defined as cults, but they are not. A cult is meant to refer to a group of people that venerate something but not necessarily in the religious sense. There was, for example, a cult of Sophia in greek times. While they obviously venerated Sophia the Goddess of Wisdom, it was more the veneration of Wisdom more than anything else. This is where the word Philosophy comes from (Philo = Love, Sophia = Wisdom).
A cult of Chemosh does not necessarily need to be considered a priesthood, since a preisthood, or clerics, would have a church or place of worship towards this deity and would offer methods for people to gain favour from this god by performing various rituals. Rather this is a cult in the sense that they venerate the concepts for which Chemosh would stand for, in this case Necromancy or having power over death.
Cult, like Religion, has a definition but is incredibly hard to define in a way that covers everything off and as such I, and many of the religious studies scholars I read, do not like using a one-off definition to cover everything.
Being a religious studies major we often had discussions in class surrounding this term. There is a university in Wisconsin that developed a list of what they considered to be cults. On this list was Buddhism and Hinduism.
The term cult actually was developed by god-worshiping groups as far back the mesopotamia using the earliest form of written language, cuniform. Obviously it wasn't called cult, but the essential translation refers to the same thing.
Essentially your first definition is the one commonly used, but you need to remove the word religious before veneration. If you included that almost all religions would be defined as cults, but they are not. A cult is meant to refer to a group of people that venerate something but not necessarily in the religious sense. There was, for example, a cult of Sophia in greek times. While they obviously venerated Sophia the Goddess of Wisdom, it was more the veneration of Wisdom more than anything else. This is where the word Philosophy comes from (Philo = Love, Sophia = Wisdom).
A cult of Chemosh does not necessarily need to be considered a priesthood, since a preisthood, or clerics, would have a church or place of worship towards this deity and would offer methods for people to gain favour from this god by performing various rituals. Rather this is a cult in the sense that they venerate the concepts for which Chemosh would stand for, in this case Necromancy or having power over death.
Cult, like Religion, has a definition but is incredibly hard to define in a way that covers everything off and as such I, and many of the religious studies scholars I read, do not like using a one-off definition to cover everything.