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 A Penguin Classic 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.
The Penguin Book of Cults 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. Penguin Classics is the leading publisher of classic
literature in the English-speaking world representing a global bookshelf of the best works
throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide
authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and
contemporary authors as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.
