The Penguin Book of Cults

A chilling documentary history of the most notorious cults of the past two thousand years, from the ancient Roman ritual sacrifices that inspired The Wicker Man all the way up to Heaven’s Gate

A Penguin Classic

Hypnotism. Human sacrifice. Sexual perversion. Mass suicide. For millennia, people have been enthralled by graphic descriptions of terrible rites performed by the religious other. The Penguin Book of Cults compiles the most notorious and uncanny of these true accounts: salacious stories of frenzied worship by the cult of Dionysus; human sacrifices burned alive in giant wooden effigies, the inspiration for the (cult) classic movie The Wicker Man; moral panics over the hypnotic powers of yoga; the massacre at Jonestown, which left hundreds of bodies strewn across a foreign jungle; the bloody FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; the deadly chemical attack in a Tokyo subway by the Aum Shinrikyo cult; and the mass suicide of Heaven’s Gate. Both terrible and tragic, this illuminating history of cults exposes the seductive power with which new religious movements have ensnared their followers and beguiled outsiders for generations.