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Publisher: Prometheus Books, Amherst, NY, 2008, £69.99 $105.
ISBN: 978 1 59102 390 6
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. The view that cults were scary drove much of the so-called research early on, though more recently, in work by people like [1] Dawson (1998), it has become more reliably sociological. One of the two editors of this new encyclopedia on Satanism, James R. Lewis, has edited a useful Oxford handbook ([3] Lewis, 2004) to new religious movements (NRMs as they are called in the trade).
We are, then, in a field where experts and others come from many walks of life, where there are often very strong views about right and wrong and good and bad, where rumor and media and celebrity both provide evidence and distort it with wild anecdote, and where a spurious kind of respectability provides a patina to a lot of discussion that, when you look at it hard, it just plain prurient. That said, interest in Satanism goes back a long way, to the medieval period and its Dantean representations of hell, to biblical exegesis and claims of a dualistic after-life one option of which was Satanic. The extent to which such things are the very creations of institutionalized religion is worth noting - one theme in the...