Name: Beyond Belief - Cults and Crowds
Start: 2025-05-31T13:00:00+0000
End: -0001-11-30T18:02:00+0000
Location: Verdurin

Are humans fundamentally cultic? We are both seduced and frightened by cults. Cults are secretive, hierarchical, and arcane – this is often given in warning. But the same qualities trigger in us a deep desire for the mysterious, ritual, and magical.

We are told that cults are all around us but believe that we would be too rational to join one. We are prone to describe groups we disagree with as cults when their ideologies and politics are alien to our own. At the same time, we are unlikely to be critical of the groupthink dimension of our own beliefs and intuitions.

Under two per cent of the British population regularly attend a church, but the yearning for meaning and magic is universal. Where previously the emergence of a cult might have required a physical compound, today, one can start a cult in a Discord server or via YouTube.

Cult leaders promise love, harmony, wholeness, wellness, and a “better you” – but the allure of connection is all too proximate to the possibility of brainwashing and submission.

Symposium programme

Beyond Belief will examine the cultic in its recognisable and hidden form.

Ewan Morrison has been exploring collectives and cults since 2013, and cult themes feature in three of his novels: Close Your Eyes, Nina X, and How to Survive Everything. He has also written essays on cults for Areo Magazine and Psychology Today, as well as for his newsletter UNTOPIA.

Ewan is particularly interested in the stages of cult growth and the way they turn against the world and in on themselves.

Nina Power will discuss the deep anthropology of cultic behaviour and consider how accusations of cult membership have played out in the social media age. How prey to cult-like thinking are we all? Why might we imagine that others have been brainwashed into supporting “evil” beliefs and positions? Do we come out of one set of moral panics only to land in new ones? And to what extent do we hold beliefs because they are popular with out in-group? What happens when these beliefs are themselves crazy?

Nina will also discuss the use of humour and playfulness in relation to contested symbols, and their larger aesthetic and political meaning so mediated.

Karin Ferrari explores the culty side of capitalism, offering a funhouse-mirror reflection on the symbols, rituals, and sacred spaces of consumer culture.

Pop music videos as initiation rites. Hotel temple-pool-bars in Bali. Overlooked cultic sites atop Manhattan’s financial skyline. A pyramid-shaped shopping mall in Memphis, Tennessee. And ultimately, a techno-shamanistic magic flight on the escalator leads – inevitably, like the slurp at the bottom of an iced Frappuccino – to the question: Could the layout of Angkor Wat be the original blueprint for the modern mall?

Suzanne Newcombe will address online cults, and the role of the internet in cult phenomena more generally.

Suzanne’s interest in cults relates to her interest in the sociology of religions and quasi-religious organisations. Her recent co-authored report on Cults and Online Violent Extremism marks a distinction between benign and pernicious aspects of cultic formation.

Show more +

Beyond Belief is organised with Nina Power. Karin Ferrari’s participation is supported by the Federal Ministry for Arts, Culture, the Civil Service and Sport of the Republic of Austria.