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Cult   Listen
noun
Cult  n.  
1.
Attentive care; homage; worship. "Every one is convinced of the reality of a better self, and of the cult or homage which is due to it."
2.
A system of religious belief and worship. "That which was the religion of Moses is the ceremonial or cult of the religion of Christ."
3.
A system of intense religious veneration of a particular person, idea, or object, especially one considered spurious or irrational by traditional religious bodies; as, the Moonie cult.
4.
The group of individuals who adhere to a cult (senses 2 or 3).
5.
A strong devotion or interest in a particular person, idea or thing without religious associations, or the people holding such an interest; as, the cult of James Dean; the cult of personality in totalitarian societies.






Collaborative International Dictionary of English 0.48








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"Cult" Quotes from Famous Books



... With her following, the roe From the danger of ken Couches inly, and low, In the haunts of the glen; Ever watchful to hear, Ever active to peer, Ever deft to career,— All ear, vision, and limb. And though Cult[121] and Cuchullin, With their horses and following, Should rush to her dwelling, And our prince[122] in his trim, They might vainly aspire Without rifle and fire To ruffle or nigh her, Her mantle to dim. Stark-footed, lively, Ever capering naively With ...
— The Modern Scottish Minstrel, Volumes I-VI. - The Songs of Scotland of the Past Half Century • Various

... "coolness," these are not endowments that in such connection can be admired or praised. For surely the gambler who cannot face bravely those very slings and arrows of variant if not always outrageous fortune which form the chief indices of his dingy profession, cuts a mean enough figure in the cult of it. "Jim" Fisk had traits like these, but who now applauds them? As well admire the courage of a house-breaker in scaling a garden-wall at midnight, or his exquisite tact in selecting a bed-chamber well-stored with jewels and money. ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various

... in question the whole school, in second-best party dresses, met in the big Assembly Hall. It was a conventional occasion, and they were received by Mrs. Morrison and the teachers, and responded with an elaborate politeness that was the cult of the College. For the space of three hours an extremely high-toned atmosphere prevailed, not a word of slang offended the ear, and everybody behaved with the dignity and courtesy demanded by such a stately ceremony. Mrs. Morrison, ...
— A Patriotic Schoolgirl • Angela Brazil

... of various masters, brilliant, morbid, or essentially rotten, was the basis of this cult—not originality. Its devotees were the devotees of Richard Strauss, of Huysmans, of Manet, of Degas, Rops, Louis Le Grand, Forain, Monticelli; its painters painted nakedness in footlight effects with blobs for faces and blue shadows where they were needed ...
— The Common Law • Robert W. Chambers

... obstacles in case the command to "go in" should ever come. Such preparations were suggestive to extreme skeptics of the purchase of robes and the selection of a suitable hilltop of a religious cult which has appointed the ...
— My Second Year of the War • Frederick Palmer

... merely of hysterical and supersensitive persons, like Carlyle and Nietzsche, it mattered little to the world of politics. An excitable man, of vivid imagination and invalid constitution, like Carlyle, feels a natural predilection for the cult of the healthy brute. Carlyle's English style is itself a kind of epilepsy. Nietzsche was so nervously sensitive that everyday life was an anguish to him, and broke his strength. Both were poets, as Marlowe was a poet, and both sang the song of Power. The brutes of the swamp and the ...
— England and the War • Walter Raleigh

... from the spot, in fact the north of France is the nearest. Each slab is about twenty feet in height and they are fashioned rudely in the form of a temple. It is said that in the design geometrical figures were used, and that some sun cult was practised by those who reared them, for the sun's shadow passes through various points only on Midsummer and on May Day. The Druids are supposed to have used this as the great shrine of their faith, and ...
— The Red Watch - With the First Canadian Division in Flanders • J. A. Currie

... tradition of prayers or prescribed dogma, but is characterized by individual ritual. Respect for the kamis in nature is a key Shinto value. Prior to the end of World War II, Shinto was the state religion of Japan, and bolstered the cult of ...
— The 2008 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.

... when their only child, Joe, was six years old, the mother ran away with a carpenter who had been at work on the house for some six weeks. A maiden aunt of some fifty years, who was a worshiper of the professor's cult, came to keep his house and to train Joe in the way that ...
— When A Man's A Man • Harold Bell Wright

... ascetics known as the Assisi Set. His conspicuous ability in telling the tale to the London Pressmen encourages expectations that he will be no less successful as a preacher to the birds, after the manner of St. FRANCIS, the founder of the cult. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, June 30th, 1920 • Various

... one day be a great crash, believing himself to be doing his part by undermining the structure, and working on undoubtingly. Abenali was not aggressive. In fact, though he was reckoned among Lucas's party, because of his abstinence from all cult of saints or images, and the persecution he had suffered, he did not join in their general opinions, and held aloof from their meetings. And Tibble Steelman, as has been before said, lived two lives, and that as foreman at the Dragon court, being habitual to him, and requiring ...
— The Armourer's Prentices • Charlotte Mary Yonge

... Christianity, appealing to all bloods, in some measure to all economic classes, and spreading into all sections of the eastern Mediterranean region, did not to any great extent create communities. And what was true of Christianity was in like manner true of the Mithras cult, widely diffused in the second Christian century. Even Mohammedanism, a faith seemingly well calculated to create autonomous states, in contact with a world prepared by Roman organization could not completely identify itself with definite ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park

... afternoon after the "putting out of the fire." Zalu Zako and the chiefs also were barred from the sacred enclosure; for being mere laymen they could not hope to withstand the evil spirits of the dead. Even Bakahenzie and the inner circle of the cult were compelled to employ the most potent methods of protection to preserve them from being ...
— Witch-Doctors • Charles Beadle

... is not my design to find fault with this scheme as a matter of medical benefit; if I have ventured to point out some drawbacks, it is only by way of showing that, even from the strictly medical standpoint the cult of uniformity, of standardization, of mechanical perfection, is not free from fault. But the great objection against that attitude of mind which is typified in the appeal to the analogy of machinery ...
— The Unpopular Review, Volume II Number 3 • Various

... some unconscious knowledge as to that outer sphere, that surrounding, peopled ether, in which, under their apparent rationality, the two had come to believe. Yet the banker and his wife stood to Mockwooders for no special cult or fad; it was only between themselves that their quest had become ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1920 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various

... practised what is termed the Druidic cult, their priests being poets, bards, or gleemen, who could compose or recite in verse, ritual, laws, and heroic ballads. During the four hundred years of Roman occupation, the Celts in England became somewhat Romanized, but the Irish, and their ...
— The Book of the Epic • Helene A. Guerber

... be occupied by physical science at another; and a belief in graven images may supply in the third century the target, which is supplied by a belief in the supreme wisdom of majorities in the nineteenth. But the general principles—the cult of the Muses and the Graces for their own sake, and the practice of satiric archery at the follies of the day—appear in all the elect of this particular election, and they certainly appear in Peacock. The results no doubt are distasteful, not to say shocking, to some excellent people. It ...
— Essays in English Literature, 1780-1860 • George Saintsbury

... That was perhaps the only part of the Anglo-Saxon programme that the contemporary English really carried out. Then, in the very real decline from Cobbett to Cobden (that is, from a broad to a narrow manliness and good sense) there had grown up the cult of a very curious kind of peace, to be spread all over the world not by pilgrims, but by pedlars. Mystics from the beginning had made vows of peace—but they added to them vows of poverty. Vows of poverty were not in the Cobdenite's line. Then, ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton

... younger men he met on these occasions as well as he did many of the older ones; the serious ones would not waste their time on society, and there were too many of the sort who were asked everywhere because they had made a cult of fashion, whether they could afford it or not. A few were the sons of wealthy parents, and were more dissipated than those obliged to "hold down" a job that provided them with money enough above their bare living expenses to make them useful ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton

... have begun. You are unconsciously absorbing this atmosphere. You are involuntarily becoming more and more of our cult,—of our inspirations. You are evolving,—you don't realise it, but you ...
— Patty Blossom • Carolyn Wells

... the ancient nobility whom the Shogun represented. Upon this, every temple was required to declare itself either Shinto or Buddhist, and to remove the emblems and ornaments peculiar to the discarded cult, whichever that might be. That no little excitement and dispute followed upon this proclamation, will be readily understood; especially when we bear in mind that, for several hundred years, Buddhist and Shinto clergy had ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.

... The cult of the Grand Act is a snare and a delusion. Whatever may happen hereafter—even the Grand Act itself—posterity is likely to look back upon August, 1914, as the moment when the British Empire reached the zenith of its unity. Let us remember that the existing system is not stationary, ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various

... and the Book,' a huge psychological epic, which proved the tardy turning point in his reputation. People might not understand the poem, but they could not disregard it, the author became famous, almost popular, and a Browning cult arose, marked by the spread of Browning societies in both England and America. Browning enjoyed his success for twenty years and died quietly in 1889 at the home of ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher

... and a continued turning to Nature, not as to a cult like a latter-day nature-student, but as a child to its mother, or a hart to the water brook. As even in a border, stayed between two lines of solid-coloured galloon, flowers and fruit do not stand forever upright without help, ...
— The Tapestry Book • Helen Churchill Candee

... Egyptologist, I will merely say that apart from the name and titles by which she is known to the ordinary student, this queen is also known to certain inquirers as the Witch-Queen. She was not an Egyptian, but an Asiatic. In short, she was the last high priestess of a cult which became extinct at her death. Her secret mark—I am not referring to a cartouche or anything of that kind—was a spider; it was the mark of the religion or cult which she practised. The high priest of the principal Temple of Ra, during the reign of the Pharaoh who was this ...
— Brood of the Witch-Queen • Sax Rohmer

... the man remarked, with a ghost of a smile. "My name is Edward Owston. I was clerk at a large drapery firm, Messrs. Appleby, Sons, and Dawson, in St. Paul's Churchyard, for fourteen years. I have a verified character from them. They were obliged to cult down their staff, owing to foreign competition, and—I have never succeeded—in obtaining another situation. There is nothing against me, sir. I would have worked for fifteen shillings a week. I walked the streets till my boots were worn through and ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim

... Gods, dost thou, thou many-coloured mystery?" This he said having reference to my splendid robes. "Well, I serve the Goddesses, which is a softer cult. And there's this between us: that though what they put in my mind I say, neither can I read their meaning," and he glanced at Cleopatra as ...
— Cleopatra • H. Rider Haggard

... from that Variety Stage, whereon he sought a desperate sanctuary. The clinquant corslet of the Swiss girl just survives at bals costumes. I am told that the kilt is now confined entirely to certain of the soldiery and to a small cult of Scotch Archaicists. I have seen men flock from the boulevards of one capital and from the avenues of another to be clad in Conduit Street. Even into Oxford, that curious little city, where nothing is ever born nor anything ever quite dies, the force of the movement has ...
— The Works of Max Beerbohm • Max Beerbohm

... the cult comprised some of the most dangerous Chinese criminals, thugs, and assassins, besides a number of dangerous characters who belonged to various Chinese secret societies. At the head of this formidable organization was Long Sin, the high priest of the Devil God, and Long Sin had, as we knew, ...
— The Exploits of Elaine • Arthur B. Reeve

... street, bright with the lamps of the small houses, from which projected wooden balconies painted in gay colours, and with the glowing radiance of the moon, was mysterious despite its gaiety, its obvious dedication to the cult of pleasure. Alive with the shrieking sounds of music, the movement and the murmur of desert humanity made it almost solemn. This crowd of boys and men, robed in white from head to heel, preserved a serious grace in its vivacity, suggested besides a dignified barbarity a mingling of angel, ...
— The Garden Of Allah • Robert Hichens

... kind of religion shall we call this of the Hopi? Seeing the importance of the sun in their rites, one is inclined to say Sun Worship; but clouds, rain, springs, streams enter into the idea, and we say Nature Worship. A study of the great Snake Cult suggests Snake Worship; but their reverence for and communion with the spirits of ancestors gives to this complex religious fabric of the Hopi a strong quality of Ancestor Worship. It ...
— The Unwritten Literature of the Hopi • Hattie Greene Lockett

... the usual inevitable. What in the Hebrides and other places, where the Sight is a cult—a belief—is called 'the doom'—the court from which there is no appeal. I have often heard of second sight—we have many western Scots in Australia; but I have realised more of its true inwardness in an instant of this afternoon than ...
— The Lair of the White Worm • Bram Stoker

... in which she commonly kept Eldorado face-powder; and herself occupied a sofa in the apartment of a friend of humanity in the next street. These arrangements enabled her to admit an experimenter on hypnotism, a mental healer who had been much abused by the orthodox members of her cult, and was evolving a method of her own, an ostensible delegate to an Occidental Conference of Religions, and a lady agent for a flexible celluloid undershirt. For a few days Mrs. Grubb found the society of these persons very stimulating and agreeable; but before long the hypnotist proved to be ...
— Marm Lisa • Kate Douglas Wiggin

... hundred coolies during six weeks of arduous toil. The brief English occupation of the island necessarily left the work unfinished, but Dutch archaeologists continued the labour, though with slower methods and feebler grasp of the situation. A transient cult sprang up among the Javanese populace as the ancient sanctuary revealed itself anew. The statues were invoked with reverential awe, incense was offered; the saffron, used as a personal decoration on festive occasions, was smeared over the impassive faces, unchanged ...
— Through the Malay Archipelago • Emily Richings

... faith had one of its longest and hardest fights at Praeneste to overcome the old Roman cult of Fortuna Primigenia. Christianity triumphed completely, and Praeneste was so important a place, that it was made one of the six suburban bishoprics,[3] and from that time on there is more or less mention in the Papal records of the diocese ...
— A Study Of The Topography And Municipal History Of Praeneste • Ralph Van Deman Magoffin

... fought for the creed of this literary orthodoxy, and first exemplified (with whatever admixture of will-worship of his own, with whatever quaint rites and ceremonies) the carrying out of the cult. It is possible that his direct influence may have been exaggerated; one of the most necessary, though not of the most grateful, businesses of the literary historian is to point out that with rare exceptions, and those almost ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury

... country-houses, how highly civilized they look, and ineffably respectable and intellectual, all of them presidents of colleges, and substantial bank directors, and possible ambassadors, and of a social cult (isn't that the word?) uniting brains and ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner

... the substance of the ceremonies if at that season the poor ghosts were indeed thought to creep from the narrow house with the opening flowers. There may therefore be a measure of truth in the theory of Renan, who saw in the Adonis worship a dreamy voluptuous cult of death, conceived not as the King of Terrors, but as an insidious enchanter who lures his victims to himself and lulls them into an eternal sleep. The infinite charm of nature in the Lebanon, he thought, lends itself ...
— The Golden Bough - A study of magic and religion • Sir James George Frazer

... missile (very properly) slit their throats. The dear people of the neighbourhood affected little sympathy for the slain whose orgies had kept them awake at night. Indeed a wish was expressed that a few more of the cult might get hissed off the world's stage. And curiously enough a second shell did fall at the hotel; but the feline minstrels were out of the way—and their well-wishers so much in it that they made peace with ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan

... deprecatory shrug of the shoulders, and busied himself with the girths of his saddle. At the touch and the sight of the buckles, his eyes became grave and earnest. And it is not only Frenchmen who cherish this cult of the horse, making false gods of saddle and bridle, and a sacred temple of the harness-room. Very seriously de Vasselot shifted the side-saddle from the Arab to his own large and gentle horse—a wise old charger with a Roman nose, who never wasted his mettle in park tricks, but served ...
— The Isle of Unrest • Henry Seton Merriman

... too, the cult of appearances went hand in hand with generosity and enthusiasm. "C'est presque un monde," she writes to Voltaire, "a creer, a unir, a conserver!" First comes the administration of justice, and her ukase of 1762, on its abuses, has a ring of sincerity ...
— The Great Events by Famous Historians, v. 13 • Various

... too, with some exactness (for Sir John resembles a journalist in his love of detail) about the way in which his friend's fame began to spread, and the pilgrims to journey to his shrine. It would have been of interest to trace the first stages in the unauthorised cult of one as yet uncanonised. What is left of the book is the record of only the last week in Master Richard's life and of his death under peculiar circumstances at Westminster in the ...
— The History of Richard Raynal, Solitary • Robert Hugh Benson

... men are going to stand for it?" yelled Sayre, waving his hands, "ordinary, decent, God-fearing, everyday young men like you and me? If this cataclysmic cult gains ground among American women—if these exasperating suffragettes really intend to carry out any such programme, everybody on earth will resemble everybody else—like those wax figures marked 'neat,' 'imported,' and 'nobby'! ...
— The Gay Rebellion • Robert W. Chambers

... everything that goes to make the modern great city. It is the largest city of Australasia, and fills the post with honor and credit. It has one specialty; this must not be jumbled in with those other things. It is the mitred Metropolitan of the Horse-Racing Cult. Its race-ground is the Mecca of Australasia. On the great annual day of sacrifice—the 5th of November, Guy Fawkes's Day—business is suspended over a stretch of land and sea as wide as from New York to San Francisco, ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain

... has been a radical change in your originally sound and inspired ideas, and which clearly indicates to me that a discussion and exchange of basic concept would be fruitless. I'm rather hurt that you question my integrity with the statement about the "slick, calculating, career-minded cult of Ph. Deism." Moreover, I would appreciate, if possible, the ...
— On Handling the Data • M. I. Mayfield

... of formalism in uttering ceremonies, scarcely two persons speak exactly the same words, though I believe the purport of each ceremony, as uttered by two people, to be the same. This looseness may be due in part to the absence of a developed cult having the ceremonies in charge from ...
— The Bontoc Igorot • Albert Ernest Jenks

... when I returned to the village it was February. The cold season still lingered on. The morning sun came into my room, and I was grateful for its warmth. I was writing, when the servant came to tell me that a devotee, of the Vishnu cult, wanted to see me. I told him, in an absent way, to bring her upstairs, and went on with my writing. The Devotee came in, and bowed to me, touching my feet. I found that she was the same woman whom I had met, for a brief moment, a ...
— The Hungry Stones And Other Stories • Rabindranath Tagore

... doubtless felt that so unseemly an act of intervention was beneath the dignity even of an inferior form of the suzerain god; Shu was therefore borrowed for the purpose from the kindred cult of Anhuri, and at Heliopolis, as at Sebennytos, the office was entrusted to him of seizing the sky-goddess and raising her with outstretched arms. The violence suffered by Nuit at the hands of Shu led to a connexion of the Osirian dogma of Mendes with the solar dogma ...
— History Of Egypt, Chaldaea, Syria, Babylonia, and Assyria, Volume 1 (of 12) • G. Maspero

... comparative theology in this distinction between the Being of Nature (cf. Kant's "starry vault above") and the God of the heart (Kant's "moral law within"). The idea of an antagonism seems to have been cardinal in the thought of the Essenes and the Orphic cult and in the Persian dualism. So, too, Buddhism seems to be "antagonistic." On the other hand, the Moslem teaching and modern Judaism seem absolutely to combine and identify the two; God the creator is altogether and without distinction also God the King of Mankind. Christianity stands somewhere ...
— God The Invisible King • Herbert George Wells

... largely hierographic and heroic. The drama, the cult image, the pictograph, the synecdochic picture, the ideaglyph, were steps in a progress without a break. The warrior painted the story of conflicts on his robe only in part, to help him recount the history of his ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia

... appearance of vocational, or technical, economics under such names as "scientific management" and the "economics of engineering." Viewed in this perspective such a development appears to be commendable and valuable in its main purpose. Unfortunately, some, if not all, of the adherents of this new cult of "economy" and "efficiency" fail to appreciate how very restricted and special it is, compared with the whole ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper

... Tlavatli were with somewhat greater capacity for intellectual development than the previous sub-race, their cult was still of a ...
— The Story of Atlantis and the Lost Lemuria • W. Scott-Elliot

... that Visscher was a rhetorician. The word perhaps needs a little explanation, for it means more than would appear. In those days rhetoric was a living cult in the Netherlands: Dutchmen and Flemings played at rhetoric with some of the enthusiasm that we keep for cricket and sport. Every town of any importance had its Chamber of Rhetoric. "These Chambers," says Longfellow in his Poets ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas

... these observances of their special cult the Vestals took part in nearly every important sacrifice, procession and festival of the public worship of Rome. They were busy women and among them Brinnaria was anything but idle. She never found time hang ...
— The Unwilling Vestal • Edward Lucas White

... bold lead they profess to follow, lies at rest in the Jewish cemetery of his native Breslau under the simple epitaph "Thinker and Fighter," and at his death the extraordinary popular manifestations seemed to inaugurate the cult of a modern Messiah—the Saviour ...
— Dreamers of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill

... the world would vanish into chaos if they went the way of the revelations supporting them. In this fear a great many judicious men joined, and so there arose what was, in essence, an absolutely new Christian cult—a cult, to wit, purged of all the supernaturalism superimposed upon the older cult by generations of theologians, and harking back to what was conceived to be the pure ethical doctrine of Jesus. This cult still flourishes; Protestantism tends to become identical with it; it invades Catholicism ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche

... commander-in-chief of his army, begging him to send reinforcements to Syria, imploring him to realize the danger that menaced Asia, you would feel as impatient as I do with his mission work at Tel-el-Amarna, his cult of flowers ...
— There was a King in Egypt • Norma Lorimer

... reading my poems all this while!—There is renunciation in our words, renunciation in the metre, renunciation in our music. That is why fortune always forsakes us; and we, in turn always forsake fortune. We go about, all day long, initiating the youths in the sacred cult of fortune-forsaking. ...
— The Cycle of Spring • Rabindranath Tagore

... understand, much in vogue in the purlieus of Fifth Avenue where it is practiced with skill and persistence by a large and needy cult of grateful recipients. Our Square doesn't take to it. As recipients we are, I fear, grudgingly grateful. So when Miss Holland transferred her enthusiasms and activities to our far-away corner of the world she ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams

... culture, and it is the failure to locate properly the several examples in relationship to each other which produces a loose and inadequate conception of the relics of fire worship in European countries, and the refusal to recognise its special place as the cult of a tribal people.[160] Another example of this fundamental error takes us in the very opposite direction to that of Dr. Frazer. Thus Dr. Gummere, in a recent study dealing with Germanic origins,[161] sees nothing in the fire cult of the Indo-European people ...
— Folklore as an Historical Science • George Laurence Gomme

... cult of the birthplaces of famous men must be added that of their graves, and, in the case of Petrarch, of the spot where he died. In memory of him Arqua became a favorite resort of the Paduans, and was dotted with graceful little villas. At this time there were no 'classic spots' in ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt

... amounts to a cult has developed around the idea that the average person has a natural bent for some particular job or profession, which if thwarted will fill him with those frustrations which are conceded to be the cause of most of the mental and moral ...
— The Armed Forces Officer - Department of the Army Pamphlet 600-2 • U. S. Department of Defense

... rejecting historical Christianity, she believed in a God of Love. This Deity was said, upon closer analysis, to have proved to be a God of Sentiment, and Miss Gleason was herself a hero-worshiper, or, more strictly speaking, a heroine-worshiper. At present Dr. Breen was her cult, and she was apt to lie in wait for her idol, to beam upon it with her suggestive eyes, and evidently to expect it to say or do something remarkable, but not to suffer anything like disillusion or disappointment in any event. She would sometimes offer it suddenly a muddled depth of sympathy in ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells

... insufficiently advertised, that it is only to be found in a very few houses indeed, and is not a commodity in general request. The Patentees then call themselves a Church, and devote their energies to advertising the new "Cult," as they generally style it. For example, you have Esoteric Buddhism, so named because it is not Buddhism, nor Esoteric. It is imported by an American company with a manufactory in Thibet, and has had some ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang

... ages without my saying so. Let the jury judge them, it's my job simply to show what sort of people they are. I write: you are dealing with horse-stealers, so let me tell you that they are not beggars but well-fed people, that they are people of a special cult, and that horse-stealing is not simply theft but a passion. Of course it would be pleasant to combine art with a sermon, but for me personally it is extremely difficult and almost impossible, owing to the conditions of technique. You ...
— Letters of Anton Chekhov • Anton Chekhov

... biblical villages and reformed cottages of pious England, a multitude of little Samuels and little St. Johns, with hair curling like lambs, who, about 1840, and 1850, became spectacled professors and founded the cult of the primitives. ...
— Penguin Island • Anatole France

... between architecture and music. In music, the emotional content is purely personal; while in architecture, it may become social and historical. Architectural purposes are all social: the purposes of a family, a nation, a cult. And the purposes of the greatest of buildings—of those which serve the nation and religion—are also historical; about them gather the traditions of a community. Centers of the life of a people, created by it and enduring with it, they become its ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker

... That cult of Woman had been invented by the lute-playing nobles of Provence. But quickly it had begun to spread from court to court, from one land to another. So now, in Italy, as in southern France, sometimes in wild hill castles as well as in the city palaces, a hymn of adoration rose ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various

... party in the propagation of the cult of Milton was of course encountered by an equal passion on the part of the Tory opposition. They were exasperated by the lustre which was reflected upon Revolution principles by the name of Milton. About ...
— Milton • Mark Pattison

... afternoons were devoted to hockey. In addition to this the girls played tennis on the asphalt courts during the winter and spring terms, whenever the weather was suitable, and basket ball was constantly going on in the playground. Athletics was decidedly the fashionable cult of the school. Kirsty Paterson, as Games Captain, made it her business to see that nobody slacked without justifiable cause. She would break up knots of chatting idlers, and cajole them forth to "cultivate muscle" as she expressed it, ...
— The Luckiest Girl in the School • Angela Brazil

... it—the religion of the primitive Chaldaeans, that it will be unnecessary, after the full treatment which that subject received in an earlier portion of this work, to do much more than notice in the present place certain peculiarities by which it would appear that the cult of Assyria was distinguished from that of the neighboring and closely connected country. With the exception that the first god in the Babylonian Pantheon was replaced by a distinct and thoroughly national deity in the Pantheon ...
— The Seven Great Monarchies Of The Ancient Eastern World, Vol 2. (of 7): Assyria • George Rawlinson

... primitive stage of religious development. Stocks and stones—the latter often reputed to have fallen from heaven, the former sometimes in the shape of a growing tree, sometimes of a mere unwrought log—were to be found as the centres of religious cult in many of the shrines of Greece. These sacred objects are sometimes called fetishes; and although it is perhaps wiser to avoid terms belonging properly to the religion of modern savages in speaking of ancient Greece, ...
— Religion and Art in Ancient Greece • Ernest Arthur Gardner

... doubtful if APS here really means the great abyss of waters from out of which the world was called. It was, more probably, a ceremonial object used in the cult of the god, something like the great basin, or "sea," in the court of the temple of King Solomon, mentioned in I Kings, vii, 23; 2 Kings, ...
— The Babylonian Legends of the Creation • British Museum

... second or Dominican Inquisition had taken cognizance were designated under the generic name of heresy. Heretics were either patent by profession of some heterodox cult or doctrine; or they were suspected. The suspected included witches, sorcerers, and blasphemers who invoked the devil's aid; Catholics abstaining from confession and absolution; harborers of avowed ...
— Renaissance in Italy, Volumes 1 and 2 - The Catholic Reaction • John Addington Symonds

... fanatical zeal, and have no creed or cult of my own to vindicate. I am influenced only by a noble love of truth and a sublime sense of duty in arraying myself with the despised minority,—perhaps I may say by a sense of fair play for the "under dog." I do not ask the kynolatrist to "call off his dogs" altogether: ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, September, 1885 • Various

... "bright pictures of boys and girls with their rosy cheeks and flashing skates,—a breeze of old associations." At Benares, various root ideas of Hindoo holiness were illustrated, including the linga worship and the passion for motherhood in that strange phallic cult which, from India to Japan, has survived all later forms of religion. In Calcutta, Old India had already been forgotten in the newer and more Christian India. He visited especially the American Union Mission Home, where Miss Louise Hook and Miss Britton were ...
— Charles Carleton Coffin - War Correspondent, Traveller, Author, and Statesman • William Elliot Griffis

... least what the friend of Antinous wished the world to know about his death; and though this does not go for much, since Hadrian is himself an accused person in the suit before us, yet the whole Roman Empire may be said to have accepted his account, and based on it a pious cult that held its own through the next three centuries of growing Christianity. Dion, in the abstract of his history compiled by Xiphilinus, speaks then to this effect: 'In Egypt he also built the city named after Antinous. Now Antinous ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds

... poisoning of a well, but of the poisoning of a great river at its source. The force of cowardice can no farther go. So long as it goes thus far, so long as the Froudes find Fletchers to echo them, Irishmen will inevitably "brood over the past." We do not share the cult of ancestor-worship, but we hold the belief that the Irish nation, like any other, is an organism endowed with a life in some sort continuous and repetitive of its origins. To us it does matter something whether our forerunners ...
— The Open Secret of Ireland • T. M. Kettle

... to be past master of an art which workmen pleasantly call "tipple-ography," an art held in high esteem by the divine author of Pantagruel; though of late, by reason of the persecution of societies yclept of Temperance, the cult has fallen, day ...
— Two Poets - Lost Illusions Part I • Honore de Balzac

... self-will. Virginia was, so-to-speak, heiress-presumptive. Not that she was likely to be supplanted by the birth of some one having greater claim to her aunt's fortune. Her possible rivals for the very substantial income which her aunt enjoyed were foundling asylums, a new religious cult just then in its infancy in the hub of the universe, and ...
— A Dixie School Girl • Gabrielle E. Jackson

... the nursery of this particular art-cult, and 'twould relieve some of us to talk freely about it. The Repertory Theatre has already become fashionable, and is quite rapidly become a nuisance. Men are making songs and plays and lectures for art's sake, for the praise of a coterie or to shock the bourgeois—above all ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney

... by-product of his every-day experience, certain more or less clearly defined impressions. With some men these are still in a sort of hazy formation; with others these vague ideas are almost a cult. The letter-writer who can tap one of these lines of thought gets results in a flash. Such letter takes a basis of facts common to most men, blends them in the letter written, so as to form fixedly from the prospect's own ideas ...
— Business Correspondence • Anonymous

... great men who have swayed men's minds no longer have altars, but they have statues, or their portraits are in the hands of their admirers, and the cult of which they are the object is not notably different from that accorded to their predecessors. An understanding of the philosophy of history is only to be got by a thorough appreciation of this fundamental point ...
— The Crowd • Gustave le Bon

... together,"—for sometimes the wretched children, instead of being immediately sacrificed, were allowed to live until they had offspring whose sad fate was determined ere their birth. In the work of Reclus may be read the fearful tale of the cult of "Pennou, the terrible earth-deity, the bride of ...
— The Child and Childhood in Folk-Thought • Alexander F. Chamberlain

... old grimy world he knows, thanking God beyond measure that he will never live to see the hateful day when one baby out of every four ceases to die in our manufacturing towns, when lives of sordid care are banished altogether from the earth, and when the "sense of humour" and the cult of Mark Tapley which flourishes so among these things will be in danger ...
— New Worlds For Old - A Plain Account of Modern Socialism • Herbert George Wells

... to bridge the chasm 'Twixt man to-day and protoplasm, Who theorize and probe and gape, And finally evolve an ape— Yours is a harmless sort of cult, If you are pleased with the result. Some folks admit, with cynic grace, That you have rather proved your case. These dogmatists are so severe! Enough for me that Fanny's here, Enough that, having long survived Pre-Eveic forms, she HAS ...
— The Sisters' Tragedy • Thomas Bailey Aldrich

... cathedrals, parish churches, temples and chapels, sumptuous and admired, where they adore the same God of the Sinai and Golgotha, where severs and ostensive cult is rendered to Immaculate Virgin Mary and to the Saints you have on your altars and none dare to ...
— The Story of the Philippines and Our New Possessions, • Murat Halstead

... person could not be, for in that case the evil would not have been external, it would have seemed quite natural to her, and would not even have been distinguishable from herself; and as for virtue, respect for the dead, filial obedience, since she would never have practised the cult of these things, she would take no impious delight in their profanation. 'Sadists' of Mlle. Vinteuil's sort are creatures so purely sentimental, so virtuous by nature, that even sensual pleasure appears to them as something bad, a privilege reserved for the wicked. ...
— Swann's Way - (vol. 1 of Remembrance of Things Past) • Marcel Proust

... on," as they say, to these delights. But, except one or two of the masters, the school were only playing at aesthetics, and laughing at their own performances. There was more fun than fashion in the cult, which was later revived, developed, and gossiped ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang

... and an affectionate mother! The mixture of old and new in her—the fresh habits of growth imposed on the original plant—startle me at every turn. Her Catholicism, which resolves itself, perhaps, into the cult of a particular church and of two or three admirable and sagacious priests, seems to me one long intrigue of a comparatively harmless kind. It provides her with enemies, allies, plots, battles, and surprises. It ministers, too, to her love of colour and magnificence—a ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward

... not set forth the close cousinship of humanitarianism with socialism and the fungous growth of the two out of the mouldering ruins of faith and the foul reek of a sensuous philosophy? And do you not see why any surrender to this modern cult of human comfort means the indefinite postponement of that fresh-dawning ideal which shall bring life to literature and art and evoke once more the golden ...
— The Jessica Letters: An Editor's Romance • Paul Elmer More

... of Bengal, separating it from Madras to the south-west, was added to the empire in 1803. This circumstance, and the fact that its Pooree district, after centuries of sun-worship and then shiva-worship, had become the high-place of the vaishnava cult of Jaganath and his car, which attracted and often slew hundreds of thousands of pilgrims every year, led Carey to prepare at once for the press the Ooriya Bible. The chief pundit, Mritunjaya, skilled in both dialects, first adapted the Bengali version to the language of the Ooriyas, ...
— The Life of William Carey • George Smith

... intervals, administered in bottles with moral labels upon them of soothing colours. In fact, man has been able to make his pursuit of power easier to-day by his art of mitigating the obstructive forces that come from the higher region of his humanity. With his cult of power and his idolatry of money he has, in a great measure, reverted to his primitive barbarism, a barbarism whose path is lit up by the lurid light of intellect. For barbarism is the simplicity of a superficial life. It may be bewildering in its surface adornments ...
— Creative Unity • Rabindranath Tagore

... Earth and Ceres by the common name of Mother and esteemed that those who worshipped her lead a life at once pious and useful and were the sole representatives left on earth of the race of Saturn. A proof of this is that the mysteries peculiar to the cult of Ceres were called Initia, the very name indicating that they related to ...
— Roman Farm Management - The Treatises Of Cato And Varro • Marcus Porcius Cato

... he could not see the sham and cant of some of the speeches, but in general there was much earnestness and truth. When Priscilla rose in her turn and spoke, with downcast eyes, he felt the beauty and simplicity of her religious life. And he rightly judged that from the soil of a cult so severe there must grow some noble and heroic lives. Last of all the class leader reached the marquis, whom he did ...
— Duffels • Edward Eggleston

... equinox, and Anthony Trollope we read with a constancy and a recurrence surpassed only by our devotion to the truth as it is in the fiction of the Divine Jane; and Jane Austen herself was not an idol of our first or even our second youth, but became the cult of a time when if our tastes had stiffened we could have cared only for the most modern of the naturalists, and those preferably of the Russian and Spanish schools. A signal proof of their continued suppleness came but ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells

... his time and since to many a benevolent dreamer. Though the rites of the humanitarian cult differ with its different priests, its creed retains everywhere and always its narrow identity. But that all men are good, or would be so save for the unequal pressure of social conditions on them, is a conclusion which does not follow from the single premise that human ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott

... The cult of Ciceronianism established by Quintilian is the real origin of the collection of Pliny's Letters. Cicero and Pliny had many weaknesses and some virtues in common, and the desire of emulating Cicero, which Pliny openly ...
— Latin Literature • J. W. Mackail

... out, I have devoted my life to the teaching of rhythm, being fully satisfied that, thanks to it, man will regain his natural powers of expression, and at the same time his full motor faculties, and that art has everything to hope from new generations brought up in the cult of harmony, of physical and mental health, of order, beauty ...
— The Eurhythmics of Jaques-Dalcroze • Emile Jaques-Dalcroze

... to reproach yourself with in defect of plain speaking, or excess of amiable subterfuge! You hit out very straight from the shoulder! Directly I arrived you also told me how you had devoted this place—with which, after all, I am not wholly unconnected—to the cult, to the ideal worship, of a woman ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet

... flow, and seldom has religion been so powerless or religions so many. Of one abandoned woman it is told as the climax of her other wickednesses that she blasphemously proclaimed her belief in one god only. Apuleius seems to have been initiated into every cult of religious mystery, and in his story he exultingly shows us the dog-faced gods of Egypt triumphing on the soil that Apollo and Athene had blessed. Here was Anubis, their messenger, and unconquered Osiris, supreme father of gods, and another whose emblem no mortal tongue ...
— Essays in Rebellion • Henry W. Nevinson

... front of those of Heracles and Zeus, stood a huge altar for burnt offerings, as long as the facade of the temple itself. The cella of the temple of Heracles underwent considerable modifications in Roman times, and the discovery in it of a statue of Asclepius seems to show that the cult of this deity superseded the ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia



Words linked to "Cult" :   Rastafarianism, religious cult, furor, voodoo, cargo cult, fashion, Rastafari, faith, craze, religion, religious belief, cultist, obi



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