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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 GateA Penguin ClassicHypnotism. 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; early horror stories of abuse in the Mormon Church; the massacre at Jonestown, which left hundreds of bodies strewn across a foreign jungle; a church that worshipped a 1950s salesman named Bob; the bloody FBI siege of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas; 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.