Anthology of Primary Sources on Cults with Thorough Commentary
Joseph P. Laycock, Ed., The Penguin Book of Cults (New York: Penguin Books, October 7, 2025). Softcover: $20: 304pp. ISBN: 978-0-143138-69-3.
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“A chilling documentary history of the most notorious cults of the past two thousand years, from the Celtic druids whose ritual sacrifices inspired the folk horror film The Wicker Man all the way up to the Peoples Temple and Heaven’s Gate. The word ‘cult’ conjures images of people in thrall to a charismatic leader who extracts obedience through lies and threats, and of apocalyptic prophecies, ritual sacrifices, sexual perversion, and mass suicide.” It “charts the history of our fear of the religious other: the arrest and public execution of thousands of members of an ancient Roman cult devoted to Bacchus, the god of wine; the burning alive of victims in giant wicker effigies as an offering to Celtic gods; the nocturnal orgies, murder of children, and demon worship of medieval heretics; a church of ‘human vampires’ in nineteenth-century Kansas City; moral panics over the hypnotic powers of yoga; and mass casualty events like the sarin nerve gas attack on the Tokyo subway system by the doomsday cult Aum Shinrikyo. Bringing to light little-known sources such as a ‘death tape’ of Jonestown’s final hour, when Jim Jones led more than 900 of his followers to drink poison, and a minute-by-minute log of the FBI’s final assault on the Branch Davidian headquarters, and including accounts of drinking the blood of sacrificed cats, theories that we are living inside a hollow earth, and reports that space brothers from Venus are coming to redeem us from the threat of nuclear war, this volume opens a fascinating window into cults and why some of them have ended in spectacular violence.”
After the previous review of the vampire-genre, my attention was initially drawn to the chapter on the “Vampire Cult in Kansas City” article from a newspaper in 1890: the “Samaritans” cult in “rural Missouri” were accused of drinking “human blood”. “One Samaritan suffering from tuberculosis began feeding extensively on his children, prompting a neighbor to report the matter to the police.” Christian-charity was evoked in convincing people to give their blood to help others’ health willingly. Curiously, the introduction to this chapter explains: “no evidence” appeared to “corroborate this story. It appears to be an example of the ‘yellow journalism’”, or sensational fiction-writing that was sold as “news”.
This collection also includes an interesting chapter that describes how early Christians were accused of holding murderous orgies, just as they later accused Jews and pagans of doing in echoing passages. These early accusation against Christians appeared in Octavius, and The Apology of Tertullian for the Christians.
Another interesting chapter is on the “Orleans Heresy” (1022 AD), when a sect of Christians who objected to some of the rules of the mainstream Catholic order were all “burned alive” as heretics: the first such burning “in medieval Europe”.
Another significant section is the “Legends of the Wicker Man” (58 BC – 18 AD). Its introduction explains that this fear of a “Wicker Man” was partly spread by “armchair anthropologist” James Frazer (1854-1941) who deliberately “discovered” “ancient sources” with “accounts of human sacrifice and stories of Celtic druids burning people alive within wicker effigies.” This was part of central-Europe’s campaign to spread Christianity by demonizing pre-Christian beliefs, which are likely to have been fiction-propagandas ghostwritten by an earlier generation of Christian myth-writers. The “wicker man… druids… first” appeared “in Julius Caesar’s Commentaries on the Gallic War” (58-49 BC?), or in Roman anti-Gallic-European propaganda. This source claims to be relying on a “lost” manuscript of a Greek geographer called Posidonius (or Poseidonius) (1335-51 BC). The editor of this collection explains this bias, writing: “Because of the lack of eyewitness accounts or corroborating archaeological evidence, there is a strong possibility the wicker man is just a legend. However, it is still an interesting case study in how claims about the wrong sort of religion are deployed. Caesar’s political ambitions required the support of the plebeians (commoners), and one goal of his book was to win their support. By presenting the Gauls as a monstrous people, Caesar emphasized his own role as a courageous hero.”
I am thinking about the difference between “cults”, “myths”, and “religions” as I prepare for my Mythology class for this Fall semester. I saved the titles of some of these chapters to research more about these entities as I progress in developing my course.
This anthology helps to explain that past centuries’ cults had been fictions designed by propagandists. In contrast, the past few decades, people have adopted this cult-formula by actually starting sects that aim to control people by selling false-beliefs as mainstream Abrahamic religions have sold their theological concepts. The simple reality is that to maintain a “unified” set of religious beliefs, Christians and other mainstream religions have tended to have to execute anybody who attempts to edit, expand or otherwise to alter the accepted-by-administration set of religious rules and beliefs. As they murdered authorial rivals, they have had to design extreme falsehoods that accused these rivals of horrifying wrongs, instead of these simple acts of authorial disobedience. Thus, the horror-fictions of cult-accounts are these false-narratives that were used to justify state-sanctioned mass-murders of rival-theologians. Studying this topic is very relevant today because Trump partly won two elections by exploiting similar cult-accusations against Democrats being pedophiles, orgy-exploiters, murderers, etc.: all tricks designed by these old cult-fiction-writers.
This is a thoughtful and well-designed study. It fails to grasp some of the larger implications that I am explaining. But otherwise, it is as useful and thorough as one might hope. It might be a good textbook for a college course on cults. It should be very helpful to researchers studying any related subject. And thus, all types of libraries should purchase this book for their collection.
--Pennsylvania Literary Journal: https://anaphoraliterary.com/journals/plj/plj-excerpts/book-reviews-summer-2025/

Even if you think you know cults, puck this up. It's full of information on both cults as a practice and individual cults. Enlightening and engaging.

Deeply edifying reading all the first-hand accounts about various cults throughout history. Was especially intrigued by how similar some of those well-known groups sounded to a lot of modern-day orgs.

Thank you to the publisher and NetGalley for an ARC of this book.
4 Stars
The Penguin Book of Cults is a great way to learn the histories of both popular and less well-known cults. This collection is divided into three eras, in which I was able to get different things out of each. While the second half of the book dives into groups like the Branch Davidians, Jonestown, and Heaven's Gate, the first half contains cult-like religious groups dating back to ancient Rome. The most enjoyable part of this collection was the first-hand accounts and sources provided with each cult, as I have previously learned about some of these groups, but have never actually read their writings from primary sources. For this reason, I would recommend this book to people who may already have some previous knowledge of cults, but I believe everyone can learn a few new things from this collection.

This was a great collection of cult sources, providing background and a window into the thinking of these mass movements. The first half of the book was the most informative to me, as I knew little of those groups or movements. The second half, while I knew about them, I would say was more enlightening. The scariest part of reading through all of this collection, is, at the end, when I thought: many of these groups don't seem as so far out there as I thought they were. Coerced? Yes. Manipulated? Yes. But unfortunately that is routine in deviant behavior.
This book is an insightful collection into one of the dark sides of human history. Readers will be able to put the different movements into a larger historical context, and view, however disturbing it might be, the humanness of these groups.