Wall Street Journal's Five Best Books About CultsThe true story of cult leader Cyrus Teed and his hollow earth theory For five days in December 1908 the body of Cyrus Teed lay in a bathtub at a beach house just south of Fort Myers, Florida. His followers, the Koreshans, waited for signs that he was coming back to life. They watched hieroglyphics emerge on his skin and observed what looked like the formation of a third arm. They saw his belly fall and rise with breath, even though his swollen tongue sealed his mouth. As his corpse turned black, they declared that their leader was transforming into the Egyptian god Horus. Teed was a charismatic and controversial guru who at the age of 30 had been "illuminated" by an angel in his electro-alchemical laboratory. At the turn of the twentieth century, surrounded by the marvels of the Second Industrial Revolution, he proclaimed himself a prophet and led 200 people out of Chicago and into a new age. Or so he promised. The Koreshans settled in a mosquito-infested scrubland and set to building a communal utopia inside what they believed was a hollow earth--with humans living on the inside crust and the entire universe contained within. According to Teed's socialist and millennialist teachings, if his people practiced celibacy and focused their love on him, he would return after death and they would all become immortal. Was Teed a visionary or villain, savior or two-bit charlatan? Why did his promises and his theory of "cellular cosmogony" persuade so many? In The Allure of Immortality, Lyn Millner weaves the many bizarre strands of Teed's life and those of his followers into a riveting story of angels, conmen, angry husbands, yellow journalism, and ultimately, hope.

In this novel academic study, Aled Thomas analyses modern issues surrounding boundaries and fluidity in contemporary Scientology. By using the Scientologist practice of 'auditing' as a case study, this book explores the ways in which new types of 'Scientologies' can emerge. The notion of Free Zone Scientology is characterised by its horizontal structure, in contrast to the vertical-hierarchy of the institutional Church of Scientology. With this in mind, Thomas explores the Free Zone as an example of a developing and fluid religion, directly addressing questions concerning authority, leadership and material objects. This book, by maintaining a double-focus on the top-down hierarchy of the Church of Scientology and the horizontal-fluid nature of the Free Zone, breaks away from previous research on new religions, with have tended to focus either on new religions as indices of broad social processes, such as secularization or globalization, or as exemplars of exotic processes, such as charismatic authority and brainwashing. Instead, Thomas adopts auditing as a method of providing an in-depth case study of a new religion in transition and transformation in the 21st century. This opens the study of contemporary and new religions to a series of new questions around hybrid religions (sacred and secular), and acts as a framework for the study of similar movements formed in recent decades.

Why do religions fail or die? Taking a multidisciplinary approach, this open access book explores this important question that has received little scholarly attention to date. International contributors provide case studies from the United States, England, Sweden, Japan, New Guinea, and France resulting in a work that explores processes of attenuation, disintegration, transmutation, death, and extinction across cultures. These include: instances where mass suicides or homicides resulted in religious dissolution; the fall of Mars Hills Church and its larger-than-life megachurch pastor, accused of plagiarism and bullying in 2012; the death of the last member of the Panacea Society in England in 2012; and the disintegration of Knutby Filadelfia, a religious community in Sweden with Pentecostal roots that ceased to exist in May 2018 after a pastor shot his wife. Combining case studies and theoretical contributions, The Demise of Religion: How Religions End, Die, or Dissipate fills a gap in literature to date and paves the way for future research The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Centre for Advanced Study at the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters.

More than three hundred Latter-day Saint settlements were founded by LDS Church President Brigham Young. Colonization-often outside of Utah-continued under the next three LDS Church presidents, fueled by Utah's overpopulation relative to its arable, productive land. In this book, John Gary Maxwell takes a detailed look at the Bighorn Basin colonization of 1900-1901, placing it in the political and socioeconomic climate of the time while examining whether the move to this out-of-the-way frontier was motivated in part by the desire to practice polygamy unnoticed. The LDS Church officially abandoned polygamy in 1890, but evidence that the practice was still tolerated (if not officially sanctioned) by the church circulated widely, resulting in intense investigations by the U.S. Senate. In 1896 Abraham Owen Woodruff, a rising star in LDS leadership and an ardent believer in polygamy, was appointed to head the LDS Colonization Company. Maxwell explores whether under Woodruff's leadership the Bighorn Basin colony was intended as a means to insure the secret survival of polygamy and if his untimely death in 1904, together with the excommunication of two equally dedicated proponents of polygamy-Apostles John Whitaker Taylor and Matthias Foss Cowley-led to its collapse. Maxwell also details how Mormon settlers in Wyoming struggled with finance, irrigation, and farming and how they brought the same violence to indigenous peoples over land and other rights as did non-Mormons. The 1900 Bighorn Basin colonization provides an early twentieth-century example of a Mormon syndicate operating at the intersection of religious conformity, polygamy, nepotism, kinship, corporate business ventures, wealth, and high priesthood status. Maxwell offers evidence that although in many ways the Bighorn Basin colonization failed, Owen Woodruff's prophecy remains unbroken: "No year will ever pass, from now until the coming of the Savior, when children will not be born in plural marriage.