The Encyclopedic Sourcebook of Satanism

Interest in new religious movements or cults has greatly expanded since the 1970s, often because cults were regarded as a social problem or as a form of counter‐culture (often to Christianity or an established religion), and usually because of wider awareness of cross‐cultural belief and practice. The very term cult takes on controversial overtones when it is compared with the term religion, for are we talking about Scientology or Transcendental Meditation or Children of God or Satanism? Some, like the Solar Temple and Heaven's Gate, were in the news in the 1990s for notorious reasons like mass hysteria and suicide....