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the final exit of the deciples of ascensia 

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the final exit of the deciples of ascensia 

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based on heavens gate cult

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The Final Exit of the Disciples of Ascensia

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Videos inside Heaven's Gate house reveal those lured into cult: 20/20 ‘The Cult Next Door’ Preview

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'dont drink the kool aid'

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Watch Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey | Netflix Official Site

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This docuseries examines the rise of Warren Jeffs in the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints and his shocking criminal case. Watch trailers & learn more.

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The line between delusion and what the rest of us believe may be blurrier than we think, Zoë Heller writes.

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The pagan community in Alexandria contains many different sections and subsections, far too many to discuss in any good detail, so we shall focus on the major pagan religion, and conflicts with the Christians, The Cult of Isis. This religion, dating back to the 4th century BCE, was one of the most popular branches of worship in the pre-empire era of Ancient Rome during the rule of Lucius Cornelius Sulla. It achieved its pinnacle in 83 BCE with the institution of a holy trinity and has since been on the decline, but is still popular in Alexandria.. Now lets take a look at specifics.

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The Roman imperial cult identified emperors and some members of their families with the divinely sanctioned authority (auctoritas) of the Roman State. Its framework was based on Roman and Greek precedents, and was formulated during the early Principate of Augustus. It was rapidly established throughout the Empire and its provinces, with marked local variations in its reception and expression.

Augustus's reforms transformed Rome's Republican system of government to a de facto monarchy, couched in traditional Roman practices and Republican values. The (emperor) was expected to balance the interests of the Roman military, Senate and people, and to maintain peace, security and prosperity throughout an ethnically diverse empire. The official offer of to a living emperor acknowledged his office and rule as divinely approved and constitutional: his Principate should therefore demonstrate pious respect for traditional Republican deities and mores.

A deceased emperor held worthy of the honor could be voted a state divinity (, plural divi) by the Senate and elevated as such in an act of apotheosis. The granting of apotheosis served religious, political and moral judgment on Imperial rulers and allowed living emperors to associate themselves with a well-regarded lineage of Imperial divi from which unpopular or unworthy predecessors were excluded. This proved a useful instrument to Vespasian in his establishment of the Flavian Imperial Dynasty following the death of Nero and civil war, and to Septimius in his consolidation of the Severan dynasty after the assassination of Commodus.

The imperial cult was inseparable from that of Rome's official deities, whose cult was essential to Rome's survival and whose neglect was therefore treasonous. Traditional cult was a focus of Imperial revivalist legislation under Decius and Diocletian. It therefore became a focus of theological and political debate during the ascendancy of Christianity under Constantine I. The emperor Julian failed to reverse the declining support for Rome's official religious practices: Theodosius I adopted Christianity as Rome's state religion. Rome's traditional gods and imperial cult were officially abandoned.

Venus and Mars sculpture group reworked to portray an Imperial couple (created 120-140 AD, reworked 170-175)

For five centuries, the Roman Republic did not give worship to any historic figure, or any living man, although surrounded by divine and semi-divine monarchies. Rome's legendary kings had been its masters; with their removal, Republican Romans could identify Romulus, the founder of the city, with the god Quirinus and still retain Republican liberty. Similarly, Rome's ancestor-hero Aeneas was worshipped as Jupiter Indiges. The Romans worshipped several gods and demi-gods who had been human, and knew the theory that all the gods had originated as human beings, yet Republican traditions (mos maiorum) were staunchly conservative and anti-monarchic. The aristocrats who held almost all Roman magistracies, and thereby occupied almost all of the Senate, acknowledged no human as their inherent superior. No citizen, living or dead, was officially regarded as divine, but the honors awarded by the state-crowns, garlands, statues, thrones, processions-were also suitable to the gods, and tinged with divinity; indeed, when the emperors were later given state worship, it was done by a decree of the Senate, phrased like any other honor.

Among the highest of honors was the triumph. When a general was acclaimed by his troops, the Senate would then choose whether to award him a triumph, a parade to the Capitol in which the triumphator displayed his captives and spoils of war in the company of his troops; by law, all were unarmed. The triumphator rode in a chariot, bearing divine emblems, in a manner supposed to be inherited from the ancient kings of Rome, and ended by dedicating his victory to Jupiter Capitolinus. Some scholars have viewed the triumphator as impersonating or even becoming a king or a god (or both) for the day but the circumstances of triumphal award and subsequent rites also functioned to limit his status. Whatever his personal ambitions, his victory and his triumph alike served the Roman Senate, people, and gods and were recognised only through their consent.

In private life, however, tradition required that some human beings be treated as more or less divine; cult was due from familial inferiors to their superiors. Every head of household embodied the - the generative principle and guardian spirit - of his ancestors, which others might worship and by which his family and slaves took oaths; his wife had a juno. A client could call his patron "Jupiter on earth". The dead, collectively and individually, were gods of the underworld or afterlife (). A letter has survived from Cornelia, the mother of the Gracchi, expecting that when she was dead, her sons would venerate her as deus parens, a parental (or a nurturing) divinity; such piety was expected from any dutiful son.

A prominent clan might claim divine influence and quasi-divine honors for its leader. Death masks () were made for all notable Romans and were displayed in the of their houses; they were used to represent their ghostly presence at family funerals. The mask of Scipio Africanus, Cornelia's father and victor over Hannibal, was stored in the temple of Jupiter; his epitaph (by Ennius) said that he had ascended to Heaven. A tradition arose in the centuries after his death that Africanus had been inspired by prophetic dreams, and was himself the son of Jupiter.

There are several cases of unofficial cult directed at men viewed as saviors, military or political. In Further Spain in the 70s BC, loyalist Romans greeted the proconsul Metellus Pius as a savior, burning incense "as if to a god" for his efforts to quash the Lusitanian rebellion led by the Roman Sertorius, a member of the faction which called itself "men of the People" (). This celebration, in Spain, featured a lavish banquet with local and imported delicacies, and a mechanical statue of Victory to crown Metellus, who wore (extralegally) a triumphator's toga picta for the occasion. These festivities were organized by the quaestor Gaius Urbinus, but were not acts of the state. Metellus liked all this, but his older and pious ( veteres et sanctos) contemporaries thought it arrogant and intolerable. After the land reformers Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus were both murdered by their opponents, their supporters "fell down" and offered daily sacrifice at the statues of the Gracchi "as though they were visiting the shrines of the gods". After Gaius Marius defeated the Teutones, private citizens would offer food and drink to him alongside their household gods; he was called the third founder of Rome after Romulus and Camillus. In 86 BC, offerings of incense and wine were made at crossroad shrines to statues of the still-living Marius Gratidianus, the nephew of the elder Marius, who was wildly popular in his own right, in large part for monetary reforms that eased an economic crisis in Rome during his praetorship.

When the Romans began to dominate large parts of the Greek world, Rome's senior representatives there were given the same divine honours as were Hellenistic rulers. This was a well-established method for Greek city-states to declare their allegiance to an outside power; such a cult committed the city to obey and respect the king as they obeyed and respected Apollo or any of the other gods.

The cities of Ionia worshipped the Spartan general Lysander, when he personally dominated Greece, immediately following the Peloponnesian War; according to Plutarch, this was the first instance of ruler cult in Greek history. There were similar instances of divine cult to humans in the same century, although some rulers, like Agesilaus, declined it. Clearchus, tyrant of Heraclea, dressed up like Zeus and claimed godhood; this did not stop the Heracleots from assassinating him. Isocrates said of Philip II of Macedon that after he conquered the Persian Empire, there would be nothing for him to attain but to become a god; the city of Amphipolis, and a private society at Athens, worshipped him even without this conquest; he himself set out his statue, dressed as a god, as the thirteenth of the Twelve Olympians.

But it was Philip's son Alexander the Great who made the divinity of kings standard practice among the Greeks. The Egyptians accepted him as Pharaoh, and therefore divine, after he drove the Persians out of Egypt; other nations received him as their traditional divine or quasi-divine ruler as he acquired them. In 324 BC, he sent word to the Greek cities that they should also make him a god; they did so, with marked indifference, which did not stop them from rebelling when they heard of his death next year.

His immediate successors, the Diadochi, offered sacrifices to Alexander, and made themselves gods even before they claimed to be kings; they put their own portraits on the coinage, whereas the Greeks had always reserved this for a god or for an emblem of the city. When the Athenians allied with Demetrius Poliorcetes, eighteen years after the deification of Alexander, they lodged him in the Parthenon with Athena, and sang a hymn extolling him as a present god who heard them, as the other gods did not.

Euhemerus, a contemporary of Alexander, wrote a fictitious history of the world, which showed Zeus and the other established gods of Greece as mortal men, who had made themselves into gods in the same way; Ennius appears to have translated this into Latin some two centuries later, in Scipio Africanus' time.

The Ptolemies of Egypt and the Seleucids claimed godhood as long as they lasted; they may have been influenced in this by the Persian and Egyptian traditions of divine kings - although the Ptolemies had separate cults in Egyptian polytheism, as Pharaoh, and in the Greek. Not all Greek dynasties made the same claims; the descendants of Demetrius, who were kings of Macedon and dominated the mainland of Greece, did not claim godhead or worship Alexander (cf. Ptolemaic cult of Alexander the Great).

The Roman magistrates who conquered the Greek world were fitted into this tradition; games were set up in honor of Marcus Claudius Marcellus, when he conquered Sicily at the end of the Second Punic War, as the Olympian games were for Zeus; they were kept up for a century and a half until another Roman governor abolished them, to make way for his own honors. When Titus Quinctius Flamininus extended Roman influence to Greece proper, temples were built for him and cities placed his portrait on their coinage; he called himself godlike ( isotheos) in an inscription at Delphi - but not in Latin, or at Rome. The Greeks also devised a goddess Roma, not worshipped at Rome, who was worshipped with Flamininus (their joint cult is attested in 195 BC); she would become a symbol of idealised in the later Roman provinces, and a continuing link, whereas a Marcellus or Flamininus might only hold power for a couple years.

When King Prusias I of Bithynia was granted an interview by the Roman Senate, he prostrated himself and addressed them as "Saviour Gods", which would have been etiquette at his own court; Livy was shocked by Polybius' account of this, and insists that there is no Roman source it ever happened.

Worship and temples appear to have been routinely offered by Greeks to their Roman governors, with varied reactions. Cicero declined a temple proposed by the city officials of Roman Asia to his brother and himself, while the latter was proconsul, to avoid jealousy from other Romans; when Cicero himself was Governor of Cilicia, he claimed to have accepted no statues, shrines, or chariots. His predecessor, Appius Claudius Pulcher, was so pleased, however, when the Cilicians built a temple to him that, when it was not finished at the end of Claudius' year in office, Claudius wrote Cicero to make sure it was done, and complaining that Cicero was not active enough in the matter.

The Romans and the Greeks gave religious reverence to and for human beings in ways that did not make the recipients gods; these made the first Greek apotheoses easier. Similar middle forms appeared as Augustus approached official divinity.

The Greeks did not consider the dead to be gods, but they did pay them homage and gave them sacrifices, using different rituals than those for the gods of Olympus. The Greeks called the extraordinary dead - founders of cities and the like - heroes; in the simplest form, Greek hero cult was the burial and the memorials which any respectable Greek family gave their dead, but paid for by their City in perpetuity. Most heroes were the figures of ancient legend, but some were historical: the Athenians revered Harmodius and Aristogeiton as heroes, as saviours of Athens from tyranny; also, collectively, those who fell at the Battle of Marathon. Statesmen did not generally become heroes, but Sophocles was the hero Dexion ("the Receiver") - not as a playwright, nor a general, but because when the Athenians took Asclepius' cult during the Peloponnesian War, Sophocles housed an image of Asclepius until a shrine could be built. The Athenian leader Hagnon founded Amphipolis shortly before the Peloponnesian War; thirteen years later, while Hagnon was still alive, the Spartan general Brasidas liberated it from the Athenian Empire, and was fatally wounded in the process. The Amphipolitans buried him as a hero, declaring him the second founder of the city, and erased Hagnon's honors as much as they could.

The Greeks also honored founders of cities while they were still alive, like Hagnon. This could also be extended to men who did equally important things; during the period when Dion ruled in Syracuse, the Syracusans gave him "heroic honors" for suppressing the tyrants, and repeated this for Timoleon; these could also be described as worshipping his good spirit ( agathos daimon, agathodaemon; every Greek had an agathodaemon, and the Greek equivalent of a toast was offered to one's agathodaemon). Timoleon was called savior; he set up a shrine to Fortune ( Automatia) in his house; and his birthday, the festival of his daimon, became a public holiday.

Other men might claim divine favor by having a patron among the gods; so Alcibiades may have had both Eros and Cybele as patrons; and Clearchus of Heraclea claimed to be "son of Zeus". Alexander claimed the patronage of Dionysus and other gods and heroes; he held a banquet at Bactra which combined the toast to his agathos daimon and libations to Dionysus, who was present within Alexander (and therefore the celebrants saluted Alexander rather than the hearth and altar, as they would have done for a toast).

It was not always easy to distinguish between heroic honors, veneration for a man's good spirit, worship of his patron deity, worship of the Fortune of a city he founded, and worship of the man himself. One might slide into another: In Egypt, there was a cult of Alexander as god and as founder of Alexandria; Ptolemy I Soter had a separate cult as founder of Ptolemais, which presumably worshipped his daimon and then gave him heroic honors, but in his son's reign, the priests of Alexander also worshipped Ptolemy and Berenice as the Savior Gods ( theoi soteres).

Finally, a man might, like Philip II, assume some prerogatives of godhood and not others. The first Attalid kings of Pergamum, were not gods, and supported a cult of Dionysus Cathegemon, as their ancestor; they put the picture of Philetaerus, the first prince, on the coins, rather than their own. Eventually, like the Seleucids, they acquired an eponymous priest, and put themselves on the coinage; but they still were not called gods before their deaths. Pergamum was usually allied with Rome, and this may have influenced the eventual Roman practice.

In the last decades of the Roman Republic, its leaders regularly assumed extra-constitutional powers. The mos majorum had required that magistrates hold office collectively, and for short periods; there were two consuls; even colonies were founded by boards of three men; but these new leaders held power by themselves, and often for years.

The same men were often given extraordinary honors. Triumphs grew ever more splendid; Marius and Sulla, the rival leaders in Rome's first civil war, each founded cities, which they named after themselves; Sulla had annual games in his honor, at Rome itself, bearing his name; the unofficial worship of Marius is above. In the next generation, Pompey was allowed to wear his triumphal ornaments whenever he went to the Games at the Circus. Such men also claimed a special relationship to the gods: Sulla's patron was Venus Felix, and at the height of his power, he added Felix to his own name; his opponent Marius believed he had a destiny, and that no ordinary man might kill him. Pompey also claimed Venus' personal favour, and built her a temple. But the first Roman to become a god, as part of aiming at monarchy, was Julius Caesar.

Caesar could claim personal ties to the gods, both by descent and by office. He was from the , whose members contended to be descended from Aeneas and his mother Venus. In his eulogy for his aunt Julia, Caesar also indirectly claimed to be descended from Ancus Marcius and the kings of Rome, and so from Mars. Moreover, when he was a teenager, Marius had named him flamen Dialis, the special priest of Jupiter. Sulla had cancelled this appointment; however, relatively early in his career, Caesar had become pontifex maximus, the chief priest of Rome, who fulfilled most of the religious duties of the ancient kings. He had spent his twenties in the divine monarchies of the eastern Mediterranean, and was intimately familiar with Bithynia. Caesar made use of these connections in his rise to power, but not more than his rivals would have, or more than his other advantages. When he spoke at the funeral of his aunt Julia in 69 BC, Julius Caesar spoke of her descent from the Roman kings, and implied his own; but he also reminded his audience she had been Marius' wife, and (by implication) that he was one of the few surviving Marians.

When, however, he defeated his rivals in 45 BC and assumed full personal control of the Roman state, he asserted more. During the Roman Civil War, since 49 BC, he had returned to the Eastern Mediterranean, where he had been called god and savior, and been familiar with the Ptolemaic Egyptian monarchy of Cleopatra, called Cleopatra Thea because of the weight she placed on her own divinity. Also, he had a new Senate to deal with. Most of the more resolute defenders of the Senate had joined with Pompey, and - one way or another - they were not sitting in the Senate. Caesar had replaced them with his own partisans, few of whom were committed to the old Roman methods; some of them were not even from Italy. It was rumoured that Caesar intended a despotic removal of power and wealth from Rome eastwards, perhaps to Alexandria or Ilium (Troy).

During the Civil War, he had declared Venus his patron goddess: he vowed to erect a temple for Venus Victrix if she granted him the battle of Pharsalia, but he had built it, in 46 BC, to Venus Genetrix, which epithet combined her aspects as his ancestress, the mother of the Roman people, and the goddess invoked in the philosophical poem De rerum natura. The new Senate had also put up a statue of Caesar, with an inscription declaring him a demi-god, but he had it effaced, as not the claim he wished to make. Granted the same extension of rights to triumphal dress as Pompey had been given, Caesar took to wearing his triumphal head-wreath "wherever and whenever", excusing this as a cover for his baldness. He may also have publicly worn the red boots and the ("painted", purple toga) usually reserved to a triumphing general for the day of his triumph; a costume also associated with the rex sacrorum (the priestly "king of the sacred rites" of Rome's monarchic era, later the pontifex maximus), the Monte Albano kings, and possibly the statue of Jupiter Capitolinus.

When the news of his final victory, at the battle of Munda, reached Rome, the Parilia, the games commemorating the founding of the city, were to be held the next day; they were rededicated to Caesar, as if he were founder. Statues were set up to " Caesar's Liberty", and to Caesar himself, as "unconquered god." He was accorded a house at public expense which was built like a temple; his image was paraded with those of the gods; his portrait was put on the coins (the first time a living man had appeared on Roman coinage). Early in 44 BC, he was called parens patriae (father of the country); legal oaths were taken by his Genius; his birthday was made a public festival; the month Quinctilis was renamed July, in his honor (as June was named for Juno). At last a special priest, a flamen, was ordained for him; the first was to be Mark Antony, Caesar's adjutant, then consul. To be served by a flamen would rank Caesar not only as divine, but as an equal of Quirinus, Jupiter, and Mars. In Cicero's hostile account, the living Caesar's honours in Rome were already and unambiguously those of a full-blown god ( deus).

Caesar's name as a living divinity - not as yet ratified by senatorial vote - was Divus Julius (or perhaps Jupiter Julius); divus, at that time, was a slightly archaic form of deus, suitable for poetry, implying some association with the bright heavens. A statue of him was erected next to the statues of Rome's ancient kings: with this, he seemed set to make himself King of Rome, in the Hellenistic style, as soon as he came back from the expedition to Parthia he was planning; but he was betrayed and killed in the Senate on 15 March 44 BC.

An angry, grief-stricken crowd gathered in the Roman Forum to see his corpse and hear Mark Antony's funeral oration. Antony appealed to Caesar's divinity and vowed vengeance on his killers. A fervent popular cult to divus Julius followed. It was forcefully suppressed but the Senate soon succumbed to Caesarian pressure and confirmed Caesar as a divus of the Roman state. A comet interpreted as Caesar's soul in heaven was named the "Julian star" ( sidus Iulium) and in 42 BC, with the "full consent of the Senate and people of Rome", Caesar's young heir, his great-nephew Octavian, held ceremonial apotheosis for his adoptive father. In 40 BC Antony took up his appointment as flamen of the divus Julius. Provincial cult centres ( caesarea) to the divus Julius were founded in Caesarian colonies such as Corinth. Antony's loyalty to his late patron did not extend to Caesar's heir: but in the last significant act of the long-drawn civil war, on 1 August 31 BC, Octavian defeated Antony at Actium.

Caesar's heir

Augustus as Jove, holding scepter and orb (first half of 1st century AD)[47]

In 30-29 BC, the of Asia and Bithynia requested permission to worship Octavian as their "deliverer" or "saviour". This was by no means a novel request but it placed Octavian in a difficult position. He must satisfy popularist and traditionalist expectations and these could be notoriously incompatible. Marius Gratidianus's popular support and cult had ended in his public and spectacular death in 82 BC, at the hands of his enemies in the Senate; likewise Caesar's murder now marked an hubristic connection between living divinity and death. Octavian had to respect the overtures of his Eastern allies, acknowledge the nature and intent of Hellenic honours and formalise his own pre-eminence among any possible rivals: he must also avoid a potentially fatal identification in Rome as a monarchic-deistic aspirant. It was decided that cult honours to him could be jointly offered to dea Roma, at cult centres to be built at Pergamum and Nicomedia. Provincials who were also Roman citizens were not to worship the living emperor, but might worship dea Roma and the divus Julius at precincts in Ephesus and Nicaea.

In 29 BC Octavian dedicated the temple of the divus Julius at the site of Caesar's cremation. Not only had he dutifully, legally and officially honoured his adoptive father as a divus of the Roman state. He "had come into being" through the Julian star and was therefore the divi filius (son of the divinity). But where Caesar had failed, Octavian had succeeded: he had restored the pax deorum (lit. peace of the gods) and re-founded Rome through "August augury". In 27 BC he was voted - and accepted - the elevated title of .

Religion and Imperium under Augustus

Augustus appeared to claim nothing for himself, and innovate nothing: even the cult to the divus Julius had a respectable antecedent in the traditional cult to di parentes. His unique - and still traditional - position within the Senate as or primus inter pares (first among equals) offered a curb to the ambitions and rivalries that had led to the recent civil wars. As censor and pontifex maximus he was morally obliged to renew the mos maiores by the will of the gods and the "Senate and People of Rome" (Senatus Populusque Romanus). As tribune he encouraged generous public spending, and as princeps of the Senate he discouraged ambitious extravagance. He disbanded the remnants of the civil war armies to form new legions and a personal imperial guard (the Praetorian Guard): the patricians who still clung to the upper echelons of political, military and priestly power were gradually replaced from a vast, Empire-wide reserve of ambitious and talented equestrians. For the first time, senatorial status became heritable.

Ordinary citizens could circumvent the complex, hierarchic bureaucracy of the State, and appeal directly to the emperor, as if to a private citizen. The emperor's name and image were ubiquitous - on state coinage and on the streets, within and upon the temples of the gods, and particularly in the courts and offices of the civil and military administration. Oaths were sworn in his name, with his image as witness. His official (achievements) included his repair of 82 temples in 28 BC alone, the founding or repair of 14 others in Rome during his lifetime and the overhauling or foundation of civic amenities including a new road, water supplies, Senate house and theatres. Above all, his military pre-eminence had brought an enduring and sacred peace, which earned him the permanent title of and made the triumph an Imperial privilege. He seems to have managed all this within due process of law through a combination of personal brio, cheerfully veiled threats and self-deprecation as "just another senator".

In Rome, it was enough that the office, munificence, auctoritas and of Augustus were identified with every possible legal, religious and social institution of the city. Should "foreigners" or private citizens wish to honour him as something more, that was their prerogative, within moderation; his acknowledgment of their loyalty demonstrated his own moral responsibility and generosity; "his" Imperial revenue funded temples, amphitheatres, theatres, baths, festivals and government. This unitary principle laid the foundations for what is now known as "imperial cult", which would be expressed in many different forms and emphases throughout the multicultural Empire.[citation needed ]

In the Eastern provinces, cultural precedent ensured a rapid and geographically widespread dissemination of cult, extending as far as the Augustan military settlement at modern-day Najran. Considered as a whole, these provinces present the Empire's broadest and most complex syntheses of imperial and native cult, funded through private and public initiatives and ranging from the god-like honours due a living patron to what Harland (2003) interprets as privately funded communal mystery rites. The Greek cities of Roman Asia competed for the privilege of building high-status imperial cult centres ( neocorates). Ephesus and Sardis, ancient rivals, had two apiece until the early 3rd century AD, when Ephesus was allowed an additional temple, to the reigning Emperor Caracalla. When he died, the city lost its brief, celebrated advantage through a religious technicality.

The Eastern provinces offer some of the clearest material evidence for the imperial domus and familia as official models of divine virtue and moral propriety. Centres including Pergamum, Lesbos and Cyprus offered cult honours to Augustus and the Empress Livia: the Cypriot calendar honoured the entire Augustan familia by dedicating a month each (and presumably cult practise) to imperial family members, their ancestral deities and some of the major gods of the Romano-Greek pantheon. Coin evidence links Thea Livia with Hera and Demeter, and Julia the Elder with Venus Genetrix ( Aphrodite). In Athens, Livia and Julia shared cult honour with Hestia (equivalent to Vesta), and the name of Gaius was linked to Ares (Mars). These Eastern connections were made within Augustus' lifetime - Livia was not officially consecrated in Rome until some time after her death. Eastern imperial cult had a life of its own. Around 280, in the reign of the emperor Probus and just before the outbreak of the Diocletianic persecution, part of the Luxor Temple was converted to an imperial cult chapel.

The Western provinces were only recently "Latinised" following Caesar's Gallic Wars and most fell outside the Graeco-Roman cultural ambit. There were exceptions: Polybius mentions a past benefactor of New Carthage in Republican Iberia "said to have been offered divine honours". In 74 BC, Roman citizens in Iberia burned incense to Metellus Pius as "more than mortal" in hope of his victory against Sertorius. Otherwise, the West offered no native traditions of monarchic divinity or political parallels to the Greek koina to absorb the imperial cult as a romanising agency. The Western provincial concilia emerged as direct creations of the imperial cult, which recruited existing local military, political and religious traditions to a Roman model. This required only the willingness of barbarian elites to "Romanise" themselves and their communities.

Temple of Augustus and Livia, Vienne (modern France). Originally dedicated to Augustus and Roma. Augustus was deified on his death in 14 AD: his widow Livia was deified in 42 AD by Claudius.

The first known Western regional cults to Augustus were established with his permission around 19 BC in north-western ("Celtic") Spain and named arae sestianae after their military founder, L. Sestius Quirinalis Albinianus. Soon after, in either 12 BC or 10 BC, the first provincial imperial cult centre in the West was founded at Lugdunum by Drusus, as a focus for his new tripartite administrative division of Gallia Comata. Lugdunum set the type for official Western cult as a form of Roman-provincial identity, parcelled into the establishment of military-administrative centres. These were strategically located within the unstable, "barbarian" Western provinces of the new Principate and inaugurated by military commanders who were - in all but one instance - members of the imperial family.

The first priest of the Ara (altar) at Lugdunum's great imperial cult complex was Caius Julius Vercondaridubnus, a Gaul of the provincial elite, given Roman citizenship and entitled by his priestly office to participate in the local government of his provincial . Though not leading to senatorial status, and almost certainly an annually elected office (unlike the traditional lifetime priesthoods of Roman flamines), priesthood in imperial provinces thus offered a provincial equivalent to the traditional Roman cursus honorum. The rejection of cult spurned , priesthood and citizenship; in 9 AD Segimundus, imperial cult priest of what would later be known as Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium (sited at modern Cologne in Germany) cast off or destroyed his priestly regalia to join the rebellion of his kinsman Arminius.

In the early Principate, an altar inscribed Marazgu Aug(usto) Sac(rum) ("Dedicated to Marazgu Augustus"), identifies a local Ancient Libyan ( Berber) deity with the supreme power of Augustus. In the senatorial province of Africa Proconsularis, altars to the Dii Magifie Augusti attest (according to Potter) a deity who was simultaneously local and universal, rather than one whose local identity was subsumed or absorbed by an Imperial divus or deity. Two temples are attested to Roma and the divus Augustus: one dedicated under Tiberius at Leptis Magna, and another (Julio-Claudian) at Mactar. A third at Carthage was dedicated to the Gens Augusta in the very early empire.

Even as he prepared his adopted son Tiberius for the role of and recommended him to the Senate as a worthy successor, Augustus seems to have doubted the propriety of dynastic ; this, however, was probably his only feasible course. When Augustus died, he was voted a divus by the Senate, and his body was cremated in a sumptuous funeral; his soul was said to have ascended to the heavens, to join his adoptive father among the Olympians; his ashes were deposited in the Imperial Mausoleum, which tactfully identified him (and later, his descendants) by his Imperial names, rather than as divus. After Augustus, the only new cults to Roman officials are those connected to the Imperial household. On his death, the Senate debated and passed a lex de imperio which voted Tiberius princeps through his "proven merit in office", and awarded him the honorific Augustus as name and title.

Tiberius accepted his position and title as emperor with apparent reluctance. Though he proved a capable and efficient administrator, he could not match his predecessor's extraordinary energy and charisma. Roman historians described him as morose and mistrustful. With a self-deprecation that may have been entirely genuine, he encouraged the cult to his father, and discouraged his own. After much wrangling, he allowed a single temple in Smyrna to himself and the of the Senate in 26 AD; eleven cities had competed - with some vehemence and even violence - for the honour. His lack of personal auctoritas allowed increasing praetorian influence over the Imperial house, the Senate and through it, the state. In 31 AD, his praetorian prefect Sejanus - by now a virtual co-ruler - was implicated in the death of Tiberius' son and heir apparent Drusus, and was executed as a public enemy. In Umbria, the imperial cult priest (sevir Augustalis) memorialised "the providence of Tiberius Caesar Augustus, born for the eternity of the Roman name, upon the removal of that most pernicious enemy of the Roman people". In Crete, thanks were given to "the and foresight of Tiberius Caesar Augustus and the Senate" in foiling the conspiracy, but at his death the Senate and his heir Caligula chose not to officially deify him.

Caligula's rule exposed the legal and moral contradictions of the Augustan "Republic". To legalise his succession, the Senate was compelled to constitutionally define his role, but the rites and sacrifices to the living genius of the emperor already acknowledged his constitutionally unlimited powers. The princeps played the role of primus inter pares only through personal self-restraint and decorum. It became evident that Caligula had little of either. He seems to have taken the cult of his own genius very seriously and is said to have enjoyed acting the god - or rather, several of them. However, his infamous and oft-cited impersonations of major deities may represent no more than his priesthood of their cults, a desire to shock and a penchant for triumphal dress or simply mental illness. Whatever his plans, there is no evidence for his official cult as a living divus in Rome or his replacement of state gods, and none for major deviations or innovations in his provincial cult. His reported sexual relations with his sister Drusilla and her deification after death aroused scorn from later historians; after Caligula's death, her cult was simply allowed to fade. His reported extortion of priesthood fees from unwilling senators are marks of private cult and personal humiliations among the elite. Caligula's fatal offense was to willfully "insult or offend everyone who mattered", including the senior military officers who assassinated him. The histories of his reign highlight his wayward impiety. Perhaps not only his: in 40 AD the Senate decreed that the "emperor should sit on a high platform even in the very Senate house". Claudius (his successor and uncle) intervened to limit the damage to the imperial house and those who had conspired against it and had Caligula's public statues discreetly removed.

Claudius was chosen emperor by Caligula's Praetorian Guard and consolidated his position with cash payments () to the military. The Senate was forced to ratify the choice and accept the affront. Claudius adopted the cognomen Caesar, deified Augustus' wife, Livia, 13 years after her death and in 42 AD was granted the title pater patriae (father of the country), but relations between emperor and Senate seem to have been irreparable. Claudius showed none of Caligula's excesses. He seems to have entirely refused a cult to his own genius: but the offer of cult simultaneously acknowledged the high status of those empowered to grant it and the extraordinary status of the princeps - Claudius' repeated refusals may have been interpreted as offensive to Senate, provincials and the imperial office itself. He further offended the traditional hierarchy by promoting his own trusted freedmen as imperial procurators; those closest to the emperor held high status through their proximity.

It has been assumed that he allowed a single temple for his cult in Britain, following his conquest there. The temple is certain - it was sited at Camulodunum (modern Colchester), the main in the province, and was a focus of British wrath during the Boudiccan revolt of 60 AD. But cult to the living Claudius there is very unlikely: he had already refused Alexandrine cult honours as "vulgar" and impious and cult to living emperors was associated with arae (altars), not temples. The British worship offered him as a living divus is probably no more than a cruel literary judgment on his worth as emperor. Despite his evident respect for republican norms, he was not taken seriously by his own class, and in Seneca's fawning Neronian fiction, the Roman gods cannot take him seriously as a divus - the wild British might be more gullible. In reality, they proved resentful enough to rebel, though probably less against the Claudian divus than against brutal abuses and the financial burden represented by its temple.

Claudius died in 54 AD and was deified by his adopted son and successor Nero. After an apparently magnificent funeral, the divus Claudius was given a temple on Rome's disreputable Caelian Hill. Fishwick remarks that "the malicious humour of the site can hardly have been lost by those in the know... the location of Claudius' temple in Britain (the occasion for his "pathetic triumph") may be more of the same".

Once in power, Nero allowed Claudius' cult to lapse, built his Domus Aurea over the unfinished temple, indulged his sybaritic and artistic inclinations and allowed the cult of his own genius as pater familias of the Roman people. Senatorial attitudes to him appear to have been largely negative. He was overthrown in a military coup, and his institutions of cult to his dead wife Poppaea and infant daughter Claudia Augusta were abandoned. Otherwise, he seems to have been a popular emperor, particularly in the Eastern provinces. Tacitus reports a senatorial proposal to dedicate a temple to Nero as a living divus, taken as ominous because "divine honours are not paid to an emperor till he has ceased to live among men".

The Genius of Domitian, with aegis and cornucopia, found near the Via Labicana, Esquiline

Nero's death saw the end of imperial tenure as a privilege of ancient Roman (patrician and senatorial) families. In a single chaotic year, power passed violently from one to another of four emperors. The first three promoted their own genius cult: the last two of these attempted Nero's restitution and promotion to divus. The fourth, Vespasian - son of an equestrian from Reate - secured his Flavian dynasty through reversion to an Augustan form of principate and renewed the imperial cult of divus Julius. Vespasian could not validate his reign in the same way as the previous Julio-Claudian dynasty, who could trace their lineage back to the divine ancestry of Julius Caesar. Without the ability to trace their origins to any Roman deity, the new Flavian dynasty under Vespasian had to establish a new standard of policy in order to rule over a people predisposed to the divine imperial cult tradition. Vespasian was respected for his "restoration" of Roman tradition and the Augustan modesty of his reign. He dedicated state cult to genio populi Romani (the genius of the Roman people), respected senatorial "Republican" values and repudiated Neronian practice by removing various festivals from the public calendars, which had (in Tacitus' unsparing assessment) become "foully sullied by the flattery of the times". He may have had the head of Nero's Colossus replaced or recut for its dedication (or rededication) to the sun god in 75 AD. Following the first Jewish Revolt and the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem in 70 AD, he imposed the didrachmon, formerly paid by Jews for their Temple's upkeep but now re-routed to Jupiter Capitolinus as victor over them "and their God". Jews who paid the tax were exempt from the cult to imperial state deities. Those who offered it however were ostracised from their own communities. Vespasian appears to have approached his own impending cult with dry humour: according to Suetonius, his last words were puto deus fio ("I think I'm turning into a god"). Vespasian's son Titus reigned for two successful years then died of natural causes. He was deified and replaced by his younger brother Domitian.

Within two weeks of accession, Domitian had restored the cult of the ruling emperor's genius. He remains a controversial figure, described as one of the very few emperors to scandalously style himself a living divus, as evidenced by the use of "master and god" ( dominus et deus) in imperial documents. However, there are no records of Domitian's personal use of the title, its use in official address or cult to him, its presence on his coinage or in the Arval Acts relating to his state cult. It occurs only in his later reign and was almost certainly initiated and used by his own procurators (who in the Claudian tradition were also his freedmen). Like any other pater familias and patron, Domitian was "master and god" to his extended familia, including his slaves, freedmen and clients. Pliny's descriptions of sacrifice to Domitian on the Capitol are consistent with the entirely unremarkable "private and informal" rites accorded to living emperors. Domitian was a traditionalist, severe and repressive but respected by the military and the general populace. He admired Augustus and may have sought to emulate him but made the same tactless error as Caligula in treating the Senate as clients and inferiors, rather than as the fictive equals required by Augustan ideology. His assassination was planned and implemented from within his court, and his name officially but rather unsystematically erased from inscriptions.

The Senate chose the elderly, childless and apparently reluctant Nerva as emperor. Nerva had long-standing family and consular connections with the Julio-Claudian and Flavian families but proved a dangerously mild and indecisive princeps: he was persuaded to abdicate in favour of Trajan. Pliny the Younger's panegyric of 100 AD claims the visible restoration of senatorial authority and dignity throughout the empire under Trajan, but while he praises the emperor's modesty, Pliny does not disguise the precarious nature of this autocratic gift. Under Trajan's very capable civil and military leadership, the office of emperor was increasingly interpreted as an earthly viceregency of the divine order. He would prove an enduring model for Roman imperial virtues.

The emperor Hadrian's Hispano-Roman origins and marked pro-Hellenism changed the focus of imperial cult. His standard coinage still identifies with the genius populi Romani, but other issues stress his identification with Hercules Gaditanus (Hercules of Gades), and Rome's imperial protection of Greek civilisation. Commemorative coinage shows him "raising up" provincial deities (thus elevating and "restoring" the provinces); he promoted Sagalassos in Greek Pisidia as the Empire's leading imperial cult centre and in 131-2 AD he sponsored the exclusively Greek Panhellenion. He was said to have "wept like a woman" at the death of his young lover Antinous, and arranged his apotheosis. Dio claims that Hadrian was held to ridicule for this emotional indulgence, particularly as he had delayed the apotheosis of his own sister Paulina after her death.

The cult of Antinous would prove one of remarkable longevity and devotion, particularly in the Eastern provinces. Bithynia, as his birthplace, featured his image on coinage as late as the reign of Caracalla (r. 211-217). His popular cult appears to have thrived well into the 4th century, when he became the "whipping boy of pagan worship" in Christian polemic. Vout (2007) remarks his humble origins, untimely death and "resurrection" as theos, and his identification - and sometimes misidentification by later scholarship - with the images and religious functions of Apollo, Dionysius/Bacchus, and later, Osiris. In Rome itself he was also theos on two of three surviving inscriptions but was more closely associated with hero-cult, which allowed direct appeals for his intercession with "higher gods". Hadrian imposed the imperial cult to himself and Jupiter on Judaea following the Bar Kokhba revolt. He was predeceased by his wife Vibia Sabina. Both were deified but Hadrian's case had to be pleaded by his successor Antoninus Pius.

Marcus Aurelius' tutor Fronto offers the best evidence of imperial portraiture as a near-ubiquitous feature of private and public life. Though evidence for private emperor worship is as sparse in this era as in all others, Fronto's letters imply the genius cult of the living emperor as an official, domestic and personal practice, probably more common than cult to the divi in this and other periods.

Marcus' son Commodus succumbed to the lures of self-indulgence, easy populism and rule by favourites. He described his reign as a "golden age", and himself as a new Romulus and "re-founder" of Rome, but was deeply antagonistic toward the Senate - he reversed the standard "Republican" imperial formula to populus senatusque romanus (the people and senate of Rome). He increasingly identified himself with the demigod Hercules in statuary, temples and in the arena, where he liked to entertain as a bestiarius in the morning and a gladiator in the afternoon. In the last year of his life he was voted the official title Romanus Hercules; the state cult to Hercules acknowledged him as heroic, a divinity or semi-divinity (but not a divus) who had once been mortal. Commodus may have intended declaring himself as a living god some time before his murder on the last day of 192 AD.

The Nervan-Antonine dynasty ended in chaos. The Senate declared damnatio memoriae on Commodus, whose urban prefect Pertinax was declared emperor by the Praetorian Guard in return for the promise of very large . Pertinax had risen through equestrian ranks by military talent and administrative efficiency to become senator, consul and finally and briefly emperor; he was murdered by his Praetorians for attempting to cap their pay. Pertinax was replaced by Didius Julianus, who had promised cash to the Praetorians and restoration of power to the Senate. Julianus began his reign with an ill-judged appeal to the memory of Commodus, a much resented attempt to bribe the populace en masse and the use of Praetorian force against them. In protest, a defiant urban crowd occupied the senatorial seats at the Circus Maximus. Against a background of civil war among competing claimants in the provinces, Septimius Severus emerged as a likely victor. The Senate soon voted for the death of Julianus, the deification of Pertinax and the elevation of Septimius as emperor. Only a year had passed since the death of Commodus.

"Sit divus dum non sit vivus" (let him be a divus as long as he is not alive). Attributed to Caracalla, before murdering his co-emperor and brother Geta.

The Severan Tondo shows Septimius Severus, his wife Julia Domna, their younger son Caracalla (lower right of picture) and the obliterated image of his murdered co-heir, Geta. Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

In 193 AD, Septimius Severus triumphally entered Rome and gave apotheosis to Pertinax. He cancelled the Senate's damnatio memoriae of Commodus, deified him as a frater (brother) and thereby adopted Marcus Aurelius as his own ancestor through an act of filial piety. Severan coin images further re-enforced Severus' association with prestigious Antonine dynasts and the genius populi Romani.

Severus' reign represents a watershed in relations between Senate, emperors, and the military. Senatorial consent defined divine imperium as a republican permission for the benefit of the Roman people, and apotheosis was a statement of senatorial powers. Where Vespasian had secured his position with appeals to the genius of the Senate and Augustan tradition, Severus overrode the customary preferment of senators to senior military office. He increased plebeian privilege in Rome, stationed a loyal garrison there and selected his own commanders. He paid personal attention to the provinces, as sources of revenue, military manpower and unrest. Following his defeat of his rival Clodius Albinus at Lugdunum, he re-founded and reformed its imperial cult centre: dea Roma was removed from the altar and confined to the temple along with the deified Augusti. Fishwick interprets the obligatory new rites as those due any pater familias from his inferiors. Severus' own patron deities, Melqart/Hercules and Liber/ Bacchus, took pride of place with himself and his two sons at the Secular Games of 204 AD. Severus died of natural causes in 211 AD at Eboracum (modern York) while on campaign in Britannia, after leaving the Empire equally to Caracalla and his older brother Geta, along with advice to "be harmonious, enrich the soldiers, and scorn all other men."

By 212 AD, Caracalla had murdered Geta, pronounced his damnatio memoriae and issued the Constitutio Antoniniana: this gave full Roman citizenship to all free inhabitants of the Empire. and was couched as a generous invitation to celebrate the "victory of the Roman people" in foiling Geta's "conspiracy". In reality, Caracalla was faced by an endemic shortfall of cash and recruits. His "gift" was a far from popular move, as most of its recipients were humiliores of peasant status and occupation - approximately 90% of the total population. Humiliores they remained, but now liable to pay taxes, serve in the legions and adopt the name of their "liberator". Where other emperors had employed the mos maiorum of family obligation at the largely symbolic level of genius cult, Caracalla literally identified his personal survival with the state and "his" citizens. Caracalla inherited the devotion of his father's soldiery but his new citizens were not inclined to celebrate and his attempts to court popularity in Commodan style seem to have misfired. In Philostratus' estimation, his embrace of Empire foundered on his grudging, parochial mindset. He was assassinated in 217 AD, with the possible collusion of his praetorian prefect Macrinus.

The military hailed Macrinus as imperator, and he arranged for the apotheosis of Caracalla. Aware of the impropriety of his unprecedented leap through the traditional cursus honorum from equestrian to emperor, he respectfully sought senatorial approval for his "self-nomination". It was granted - the new emperor had a lawyer's approach to imperium, but his foreign policy proved too cautious and placatory for the military. After little more than a year, he was murdered in a coup and replaced with an emperor of Syrian background and Severan descent, Varius Avitus Bassianus, more usually known by the Latinised name of his god and his priesthood, Elagabalus.

The 14-year-old emperor brought his solar-mountain deity from his native Emesa to Rome and into official imperial cult. In Syria, the cult of Elagabalus was popular and well established. In Rome, it was a foreign and (according to some ancient sources) disgusting Eastern novelty. In 220 AD, the priest Elagabalus replaced Jupiter with the god Elagabalus as sol invictus (the unconquered Sun) and thereafter neglected his Imperial role as pontifex maximus. According to Marius Maximus, he ruled from his degenerate domus through prefects who included among others a charioteer, a locksmith, a barber, and a cook. At the very least, he appears to have been regarded as an unacceptably effete eccentric by the Senate and military alike. He was assassinated by the Praetorians at the age of 18, subjected to the fullest indignities of damnatio memoriae and replaced with his young cousin Alexander Severus, the last of his dynasty, who reigned for 13 years until killed in a mutiny in 235.

The end of the Severan dynasty marked the breakdown of central imperium. Against a background of economic hyperinflation and latterly, endemic plague, rival provincial claimants fought for supremacy and failing this, set up their own provincial Empires. Most emperors seldom even saw Rome, and had only notional relationships with their senates. In the absence of coordinated Imperial military response, foreign peoples seized the opportunity for invasion and plunder.

Maximinus Thrax (reigned 235-8 AD) sequestered the resources of state temples in Rome to pay his armies. The temples of the divi were first in line. It was an unwise move for his own posterity, as the grant or withholding of apotheosis remained an official judgment of Imperial worthiness, but the stripping of the temples of state gods caused far greater offense. Maximinus's actions more likely show need in extreme crisis than impiety, as he had his wife deified on her death, but in a rare display of defiance the Senate deified his murdered predecessor, then openly rebelled. His replacement, Gordian I, reigned briefly but successfully and was made a divus on his death. A succession of short-lived soldier-emperors followed. Further development in imperial cult appears to have stalled until Philip the Arab, who dedicated a statue to his father as divine in his home town of Philippopolis and brought the body of his young predecessor Gordian III to Rome for apotheosis. Coins of Philip show him in the radiate crown (suggestive of solar cult or a Hellenised form of imperial monarchy), with Rome's temple to Venus and dea Roma on the reverse.

In 249 AD, Philip was succeeded (or murdered and usurped) by his praetorian prefect Decius, a traditionalist ex-consul and governor. After an accession of doubtful validity, Decius justified himself as rightful "restorer and saviour" of Empire and its religio: early in his reign he issued a coin series of imperial divi in radiate (solar) crowns. Philip, the three Gordians, Pertinax and Claudius were omitted, presumably because Decius thought them unworthy of the honour. In the wake of religious riots in Egypt, he decreed that all subjects of the Empire must actively seek to benefit the state through witnessed and certified sacrifice to "ancestral gods" or suffer a penalty: sacrifice on Rome's behalf by loyal subjects would define them and their gods as Roman. Only Jews were exempt from this obligation. The Decian edict required that refusal of sacrifice be tried and punished at proconsular level. Apostasy was sought, rather than capital punishment. A year after its due deadline, the edict was allowed to expire and shortly after this, Decius himself died.

Valerian (253-60) identified Christianity as the largest, most stubbornly self-interested of non-Roman cults, outlawed Christian assembly and urged Christians to sacrifice to Rome's traditional gods. His son and co-Augustus Gallienus, an initiate of the Eleusinian Mysteries, identified himself with traditional Roman gods and the virtue of military loyalty. Aurelian (270-75) appealed for harmony among his soldiers ( concordia militum), stabilised the Empire and its borders and established an official, Hellenic form of unitary cult to the Palmyrene Sol Invictus in Rome's Campus Martius. The Senate hailed him as restitutor orbis (restorer of the world) and deus et dominus natus (god and born ruler); he was murdered by his Praetorians. His immediate successors consolidated his achievements: coinage of Probus (276-82) shows him in radiate solar crown, and his prolific variety of coin types include issues showing the temple of Venus and Dea Roma in Rome.

These policies and preoccupations culminated in Diocletian's Tetrarchy: the Empire was divided into Western and Eastern administrative blocs, each with an Augustus (senior emperor), helped by a Caesar (junior emperor) as Augustus-in-waiting. Provinces were divided and subdivided: their imperial bureaucracy became extraordinary in size, scope and attention to detail. Diocletian was a religious conservative. On his accession in AD 284, he held games in honour of the divus Antinous. Where his predecessors had attempted the persuasion and coercion of recalcitrant sects, Diocletian launched a series of ferocious reactions known in Church history as the Diocletianic Persecution. According to Lactantius, this began with a report of ominous haruspicy in Diocletian's domus and a subsequent (but undated) dictat of placatory sacrifice by the entire military. A date of 302 is regarded as likely and Eusebius also says the persecutions of Christians began in the army. However, Maximilian's martyrdom (295) came from his refusal of military service, and Marcellus' (298) for renouncing his military oath. Legally, these were military insurrections and Diocletian's edict may have followed these and similar acts of conscience and faith. An unknown number of Christians appear to have suffered the extreme and exemplary punishments traditionally reserved for rebels and traitors.

Under Diocletian's expanded imperial collegia, imperial honours distinguished both Augusti from their Caesares, and Diocletian (as senior Augustus) from his colleague Maximian. While the division of Empire and imperium seemed to offer the possibility of a peaceful and well-prepared succession, its unity required the highest investiture of power and status in one man. An elaborate choreography of etiquette surrounded the approach to the imperial person and imperial progressions. The senior Augustus in particular was made a separate and unique being, accessible only through those closest to him.

The near identical official images of the collegial Imperial Tetrarchs conceal Diocletian's seniority and the internal stresses of his empire.

Diocletian's avowed conservatism almost certainly precludes a systematic design toward personal elevation as a "divine monarch". Rather, he formally elaborated imperial ceremony as a manifestation of the divine order of Empire and elevated emperorship as the supreme instrument of the divine will. The idea was Augustan, or earlier, expressed most clearly in Stoic philosophy and the solar cult, especially under Aurelian. At the very beginning of his reign, before his Tetrarchy, Diocletian had adopted the of ; his co-Augustus adopted the title . During the Tetrarchy, such titles were multiplied, but with no clear reflection of implicit divine seniority: in one case, the divine signum of the Augustus is inferior to that of his Caesar. These divine associations may have followed a military precedent of emperors as to divinities (or divinities as comes to emperors). Moreover, the divine signum appears in the fairly narrow context of court panegyric and civil etiquette. It makes no appearance on the general coinage or statuary of the Tetrarchs, who are presented as impersonal, near-homogenous abstractions of imperial might and unity.

The Augustan settlement was promoted by its contemporary apologists as restorative and conservative rather than revolutionary. Official cult to the genius of the living princeps as "first among equals" recognised his exceptional powers, his capacity for self-restraint, and his pious respect for Republican traditions. "Good" emperors rejected offers of official cult as a living deity, and accepted the more modest honour of genius cult. Claims that later emperors sought and obtained divine honours in Rome reflect their bad relationship with their senates: in Tertullian's day, it was still "a curse to name the emperor a god before his death". On the other hand, to judge from the domestic ubiquity of the emperor's image, private cults to living emperors are as likely in Rome as elsewhere. As Gradel observes, no Roman was ever prosecuted for sacrificing to his emperor.

Dedicatory inscription (CIL 14.04319) to the "numen of the House of the Augustus", from Ostia Antica

The had some form of precedent in the di parentes, divine ancestors who received ancestral rites as (gods of the underworld) during the Parentalia and other important domestic festivals. Their powers were limited; deceased mortals did not normally possess the divine power () of the higher gods. Deceased emperors did not automatically become divi; they must be nominated for the privilege. Their case was discussed by the Senate, then put to the vote. As long as the correct rituals and sacrifice were offered, the divus would be received by the heavenly gods as a coelicola (a dweller in heaven), a lesser being than themselves. Popular belief held that the divus Augustus would be personally welcomed by Jupiter. In Seneca's Apocolocyntosis, on the other hand, the unexpected arrival of the divinised Claudius creates a problem for the Olympians, who have no idea who or what he is; and when they find out, they cannot think what to do with him. Seneca's sarcastic wit, an unacceptable impiety towards a deus, freely portrays the divus Claudius as just a dead, ridiculous and possibly quite bad emperor. Though their images were sacrosanct and their rites definitively divine divi could be created, unmade, reinstated or simply forgotten. Augustus and Trajan appear to have remained the ideals for longer than any, and cult to "good" divi appears to have lasted well into the late Imperial dominate.

The immense power of living emperors, on the other hand, was mediated through the encompassing agency of the state. Once acknowledged as pater familias to an empire, a princeps was naturally entitled to genius cult from Imperial subjects of all classes. Cult to a living emperor's numen was quite another matter and might be interpreted as no less than a statement of divine monarchy. Imperial responses to the first overtures of cult to the August numen were therefore extremely cautious. Only much later, probably in consequence of the hyperinflation of honours to living emperors, could a living emperor be openly, formally addressed as numen praesens (the numinous presence).

The obscure relationship between , and in imperial cult might simply reflect its origins as a pragmatic, respectful and somewhat evasive Imperial solution using broad terminology whose meanings varied according to context. For Beard et al., a practicable and universal Roman cult of deified emperors and others of the Imperial house must have hinged on the paradox that a mortal might, like the semi-divine "heroic" figures of Hercules, Aeneas and Romulus, possess or acquire sufficient measure of numen to rise above their mortal condition and be in the company of the gods, yet remain mortal in the eyes of Roman traditionalists.

Sacred offerings (sacrificium) formed the contract of public and private , from oaths of office, treaty and loyalty to business contracts and marriage. Participation in sacrificium acknowledged personal commitment to the broader community and its values, which under Decius became a compulsory observance. Livy believed that military and civil disasters were the consequence of error () in augury, neglect of due and proper sacrifice and the impious proliferation of "foreign" cults and superstitio. Religious law focused on the sacrificial requirements of particular deities on specific occasions.

In Julio-Claudian Rome, the Arval priesthood sacrificed to Roman state gods at various temples for the continued welfare of the Imperial family on their birthdays, accession anniversaries and to mark extraordinary events such as the quashing of conspiracy or revolt. On 3 January they consecrated the annual vows: sacrifice promised in the previous year was paid, as long as the gods had kept the Imperial family safe for the contracted time. If not, it could be withheld, as it was in the annual vow following the death of Trajan. In Pompeii, the genius of the living emperor was offered a bull: presumably a standard practice in imperial cult at this time, though lesser offerings of wine, cakes and incense were also given, especially in the later Imperial era. The divi and genii were offered the same kind of sacrifice as the state gods, but cult officials seem to have offered Christians the possibility of sacrifice to emperors as the lesser act.

By ancient tradition, presiding magistrates sought divine opinion of proposed actions through an augur, who read the divine will through the observation of natural signs in the sacred space () of sacrifice. Magistrates could use their right of augury ( ius augurum) to adjourn and overturn the process of law, but were obliged to base their decision on the augur's observations and advice. For Cicero, this made the augur the most powerful authority in the Late Republic.

In the later Republic augury came under the supervision of the college of pontifices, a priestly-magistral office whose powers were increasingly woven into the cursus honorum. The office of pontifex maximus eventually became a de facto consular office. When the consul Lepidus died, his office as pontifex maximus passed to Augustus, who took priestly control over the State oracles (including the Sibylline books), and used his powers as censor to suppress unapproved oracles. Octavian's honorific title of Augustus indicated his achievements as expressions of divine will: where the impiety of the Late Republic had provoked heavenly disorder and wrath (ira deorum), his obedience to divine ordinance brought divine peace (pax deorum).

Genius and household cults

The mos maiorum established the near-monarchic familial authority of the ordinary pater familias ("the father of the family" or the "owner of the family estate"), his obligations to family and community and his priestly duties to his and domestic . His position was hereditary and dynastic, unlike the elected, time-limited offices of republican magistrates. His family - and especially his slaves and freedmen - owed a reciprocal duty of cult to his .

A winged genius raises Antoninus Pius and his Empress Faustina in apotheosis, escorted by two eagles. From the column-base of Antoninus Pius, Vatican.

Genius (pl. genii) was the essential spirit and generative power - depicted as a serpent or as a perennial youth, often winged - within an individual and their clan (, pl. gentes), such as the Julli (Julians) of Julius Caesar. A pater familias could confer his name, a measure of his genius and a role in his household rites, obligations and honours upon those he adopted. As Caesar's adopted heir, Octavian stood to inherit the genius, heritable property and honours of his adoptive father in addition to those obtained through his own birth gens and efforts. The exceptionally potent genius of living emperors expressed the will of the gods through Imperial actions. In 30 BC, libation-offerings to the genius of Octavian (later Augustus) became a duty at public and private banquets, and from 12 BC, state oaths were sworn by the genius of the living emperor.

The Roman pater familias offered daily cult to his lares and penates, and to his di parentes/ divi parentes, in domestic shrines and in the fires of the household hearth. As goddess of all hearths, including the ritual hearth of the State, Vesta connected the "public" and "private" duties of citizens. Her official cults were supervised by the pontifex maximus from a state-owned house near the temple of Vesta. When Augustus became pontifex maximus in 12 BC he gave the Vestals his own house on the Palatine. His penates remained there as its domestic deities and were soon joined by his lares. His gift therefore tied his domestic cult to the sanctified Vestals and Rome's sacred hearth and symbolically extended his domus to the state and its inhabitants. He also co-opted and promoted the traditional and predominantly plebeian Compitalia shrines and extended their festivals, whose lares were known thereafter as Augusti.

Rome's citizen legionaries appear to have maintained their Marian traditions. They gave cult to Jupiter for the emperor's well-being and regular cult to State, local and personal divinities. Cult to the Imperial person and familia was generally offered on Imperial accessions, anniversaries and renewal of annual vows: a bust of the ruling emperor was kept in the legionary insignia shrine for the purpose, attended by a designated military imaginifer. By the time of the early Severans, the legions offered cult to the state gods, the Imperial divi, the current emperor's numen, genius and domus (or familia), and special cult to the Empress as "mother of the camp." At around this time, Mithraic cults became very popular with the military and provided a basis for syncretic imperial cult which absorbed Mithras into Solar and Stoic Monism as a focus of military concordia and loyalty.

Altars, temples and priesthoods

An imperial cult temple was known as a (Latin) or sebasteion (Greek). In Fishwick's analysis, cult to Roman state divi was associated with temples, and the genius cult to the living emperor with his altar. The emperor's image, and its siting within the temple complex, focused attention on his person and attributes, and his position in the divine and human hierarchies. Expenditure on the physical expression of imperial cult was vast and was only curbed by the Imperial crisis of the 3rd century. As far as is known, no new temples to state divi were built after the reign of Marcus Aurelius.

The Imperial divi and living genii appear to have been served by separate ceremonies and priesthoods. Emperors themselves could be priests of state gods, the divi and their own genius cult images. The latter practice illustrates the Imperial genius as innate to its holder but separable from him as a focus of respect and cult, formally consistent with cult to the personification of ideas and ideals such as Fortune (), peace () or victory () et al. in conjunction with the genius of the emperor, Senate or Roman people; Julius Caesar had showed his affinity with the virtue of clemency (), a personal quality associated with his divine ancestor and patron goddess Venus. Priests typically and respectfully identified their function by manifesting the appearance and other properties of their deus. The duties of Imperial priests were both religious and magisterial: they included the provision of approved Imperial portraits, statues and sacrifice, the institution of regular calendrical cult and the inauguration of public works, Imperial games (state ) and to authorised models. In effect, priests throughout the empire were responsible for re-creating, expounding and celebrating the extraordinary gifts, powers and charisma of emperors.

As part of his religious reforms, Augustus revived, subsidised and expanded the Compitalia games and priesthoods, dedicated to the Lares of the (neighbourhoods), to include cult to his own Lares (or to his genius as a popular benefactor). Thereafter, the Lares Compitales were known as Lares Augusti. Tiberius created a specialised priesthood, the Sodales Augustales, dedicated to the cult of the deceased, deified Augustus. This priestly office, and the connections between the Compitalia cults and the Imperial household, appear to have lasted for as long as the imperial cult itself.

Greek philosophies had significant influence in the development of imperial cult. Stoic cosmologists saw history as an endless cycle of destruction and renewal, driven by (luck or fortune), fatum (fate) and (the universal divine principle). The same forces inevitably produced a (saviour) who would transform the destructive and "unnatural disorder" of chaos and strife to pax, fortuna and salus (peace, good fortune and well-being) and is thus identified with solar cults such as Apollo and Sol Invictus. Livy (in the early to mid 1st century BC), and Lucan (in the 1st century AD) interpreted the crisis of the late Republic as a destructive phase which led to religious and constitutional renewal by Augustus and his restoration of peace, good fortune and well-being to the Roman people. Augustus was a messianic figure who personally and rationally instigated a "golden age" - the Pax Augusta - and was patron, priest and protege to a range of solar deities. The Imperial order was therefore not merely justified by appeals to the divine; it was represented as an innately natural, benevolent and divine institution.

The imperial cult tolerated and later included specific forms of pluralistic monism. For imperial cult apologists, monotheists had no rational grounds for refusal, but imposition of cult was counter productive. Jews presented a special case. Long before the civil war, Judaism had been tolerated in Rome by diplomatic treaty with Graeco-Judaean rulers. It was brought to prominence and scrutiny after Judaea's enrollment as a client kingdom in 63 BC. The following Jewish diaspora helped disperse early "Judaic" Christianity. Early Christians appear to have been regarded as a sub-sect of Judaism and as such were sporadically tolerated.

Jewish sources on emperors, polytheistic cult and the meaning of Empire are fraught with interpretive difficulties. In Caligula's reign, Jews resisted the placing of Caligula's statue in their Temple and pleaded that their offerings and prayers to Yahweh on his behalf amounted to compliance with his request for worship. According to Philo, Caligula was unimpressed because the offering was not made directly to him (whether to his genius or his numen is never made clear) but the statue was never installed. Philo does not challenge the imperial cult itself: he commends the god-like honours given Augustus as "the first and the greatest and the common benefactor" but Caligula shames the Imperial tradition by acting "like an Egyptian". However, Philo is clearly pro-Roman: a major feature of the First Jewish Revolt (AD 66) was the ending of Jewish sacrifices to Rome and the emperor and the defacement of imperial images.

To pagan Romans a simple act of sacrifice, whether to ancestral gods under Decius or state gods under Diocletian, represented adherence to Roman tradition and loyalty to the pluralistic unity of the Empire. Refusal to adhere to the cult was treason. Christians, however, identified "Hellenistic honours" as parodies of true worship. Under the reign of Nero or Domitian, according to Momigliano, the author of the Book of Revelation represented Rome as the "Beast from the sea", Judaeo-Roman elites as the "Beast from the land" and the charagma (official Roman stamp) as a sign of the Beast. Some Christian thinkers perceived divine providence in the timing of Christ's birth, at the very beginning of the Empire that brought peace and laid paths for the spread of the Gospels; Rome's destruction of Jerusalem and its Temple was interpreted as divine punishment of the Jews for their refusal of the Christ. With the abatement of persecution Jerome could acknowledge Empire as a bulwark against evil but insist that "imperial honours" were contrary to Christian teaching.

As pontifex maximus Constantine I favoured the "Catholic Church of the Christians" against the Donatists because:

it is contrary to the divine law... that we should overlook such quarrels and contentions, whereby the Highest Divinity may perhaps be roused not only against the human race but also against myself, to whose care he has by his celestial will committed the government of all earthly things. Official letter from Constantine, dated AD 314.

In this change of Imperial formula Constantine acknowledged his responsibility to an earthly realm whose discord and conflict might arouse the ira deorum; he also recognised the power of the new Christian priestly hierarchy in determining what was auspicious or orthodox. Though unbaptised, Constantine had triumphed under the signum of the Christ (probably some form of Labarum as an adapted or re-interpreted legionary standard). He may have officially ended - or attempted to end - blood sacrifices to the genius of living emperors but his Imperial iconography and court ceremonial elevated him to superhuman status. Constantine's permission for a new cult temple to himself and his family in Umbria is extant: the cult "should not be polluted by the deception of any contagious superstition". At the First Council of Nicaea Constantine united and re-founded the empire under an absolute head of state by divine dispensation and was honoured as the first Christian Imperial divus. On his death he was venerated and was held to have ascended to heaven. Philostorgius later criticised Christians who offered sacrifice at statues of the divus Constantine. His three sons re-divided their Imperial inheritance: Constantius II was an Arian - his brothers were Nicene.

Constantine's nephew Julian, Rome's last non-Christian emperor, rejected the "Galilean madness" of his upbringing for a synthesis of neo-Platonism, Stoic asceticism and universal solar cult and actively fostered religious and cultural pluralism. His restored Augustan form of principate, with himself as primus inter pares, ended with his death in 363, after which his reforms were reversed or abandoned. The Western emperor Gratian refused the office of pontifex maximus and, against the protests of the Senate, removed the altar of (Victory) from the Senate House and began the disestablishment of the Vestals. Theodosius I briefly re-united the Western and Eastern halves of the Empire, officially adopted Nicene Christianity as the Imperial religion and ended official support for all other creeds and cults. He refused to restore Victoria to the Senate House, extinguished Vesta's sacred fire and vacated her temple. Even so, he accepted address as a living divinity, comparable to Hercules and Jupiter, by his overwhelmingly pagan Senate. After his death the sundered Eastern and Western halves of Empire followed increasingly divergent paths: nevertheless both were Roman and both had emperors. Imperial ceremonial - notably the Imperial or ceremony of arrival, which derived in greater part from the Triumph - was embedded within Roman culture, Church ceremony and the Gospels themselves.

The last Western divus was probably Libius Severus, who died in 465 AD. Very little is known about him. His Imperium was not recognised by his Eastern counterpart and he may have been a puppet-emperor of the Germanic general Ricimer. In the west, imperial authority was partly replaced by the spiritual supremacy and political influence of the Roman Catholic Church.

In the Eastern Empire, sworn adherence to Christian orthodoxy became a prerequisite of Imperial accession - Anastasius I signed a document attesting his obedience to orthodox doctrine and practice. He is the last emperor known to be consecrated as divus on his death (AD 518). The title appears to have been abandoned on grounds of its spiritual impropriety but the consecration of Eastern emperors continued: they held power through divine ordinance and their rule was the manifestation of sacred power on earth. The adventus and the veneration of the Imperial image continued to provide analogies for devotional representations ( Icons) of the heavenly hierarchy and the rituals of the Orthodox Church.

The Roman imperial cult is sometimes considered a deviation from Rome's traditional Republican values, a religiously insincere cult of personality which served Imperial propaganda. It drew its power and effect, however, from both religious traditions deeply engrained in Roman culture, such as the veneration of the of each individual and of the ancestral dead, and on forms of the Hellenistic ruler cult developed in the eastern provinces of the Empire.

The nature and function of imperial cult remain contentious, not least because its Roman historians employed it equally as a topos for Imperial worth and Imperial hubris. It has been interpreted as an essentially foreign, Graeco-Eastern institution, imposed cautiously and with some difficulty upon a Latin-Western Roman culture in which the deification of rulers was constitutionally alien, if not obnoxious. In this viewpoint, the essentially servile and "un-Roman" imperial cult was established at the expense of the traditional Roman ethics which had sustained the Republic. For Christians and secularists alike, the identification of mortal emperors with godhead represented the spiritual and moral bankruptcy of paganism which led to the triumph of Christianity as Rome's state religion.

Very few modern historians would now support this point of view. Some - among them Beard et al. - find no distinct category of imperial cult within the religio-political life of Empire: the Romans themselves used no such enveloping term. Cult to living or dead emperors was inseparable from Imperial state religion, which was inextricably interwoven with Roman identity and whose beliefs and practices were founded within the ancient commonality of Rome's social and domestic mos maiorum. Descriptions of cult to emperors as a tool of "Imperial propaganda" or the less pejorative "civil religion" emerge from modern political thought and are of doubtful value: in Republican Rome, cult could be given to state gods, personal gods, triumphal generals, magnates, benefactors, patrons and the ordinary paterfamilias - living or dead. Cult to mortals was not an alien practise: it acknowledged their power, status and their bestowal of benefits. The Augustan settlement appealed directly to the Republican mos maiorum and under the principate, cult to emperors defined them as emperors.

With rare exceptions, the earliest institution of cult to emperors succeeded in providing a common focus of identity for Empire. It celebrated the charisma of Roman Imperial power and the meaning of Empire according to local interpretations of romanitas, firstly an agency of transformation, then of stability. Cult to Imperial deities was associated with commonplace public ceremonies, celebrations of extraordinary splendour and unnumbered acts of private and personal devotion. The political usefulness of such an institution implies neither mechanical insincerity nor lack of questioning about its meaning and propriety: an Empire-wide, unifying cult would necessarily be open to a multitude of personal interpretations but its significance to ordinary Romans is almost entirely lost in the critical interpretations of a small number of philosophically literate, skeptical or antagonistic Romans and Greeks, whether Christian or Hellene. The decline of prosperity, security and unity of Empire was clearly accompanied by loss of faith in Rome's traditional gods and - at least in the West - in Roman emperors. For some Romans, this was caused by the neglect of traditional religious practices. For others - equally Roman - breakdown of empire was God's judgment on faithless or heretical Christians and hardened pagans alike.

As Roman society evolved, so did cult to emperors: both proved remarkably resilient and adaptable. Until its confrontation by fully developed Christian orthodoxy, "imperial cult" needed no systematic or coherent theology. Its part in Rome's continued success was probably sufficient to justify, sanctify and "explain" it to most Romans. Confronted with crisis in Empire, Constantine matched the Augustan achievement by absorbing Christian monotheism into the Imperial hierarchy. Cult to emperors was not so much abolished or abandoned as transformed out of recognition.

1. Taylor, p.48; she cites ^ Macrobius, Saturnalia, 3.13.9, which is largely an otherwise unknown quotation from Sallust; quasi deo supplicabatur is from Sallust. The year is uncertain, possibly 77 BC, after a battle at Saguntum.

2. When the messengers of ^ Thasos announced to him that the city had declared him a god, he told them that if they could make men into gods, they should make themselves into gods; he would then believe that they could make him into one. Taylor, p. 12, citing Plutarch, Moralia, 210d.

3. In general, see Price, 48; Fishwick, Vol 1, 1, 6-20; for details, Taylor, Chapter 2 and 3, ^ passim. Attested statuary of Roman magistrates in Rome may well have been largely commissioned by Greek allies, unaware of the potential for controversy aroused by public display of "Hellenised" images of the Roman military aristocracy. See Christopher Hallett, The Roman Nude, Oxford University Press, 2005. (limited preview available) Books.Google.co.uk, citing descriptions in Plutarch, Lives, Flamininus, & Cicero, Rabiurus Postumus, 10.26

4. Taylor, pp. 9-10, citing ^ Diodorus, 16.20; Cornelius Nepos, Timoleon 5, Plutarch, Moralia 542 E, Dion 46 and Timoleon 36,39; Timoleon is the first Greek whose birthday is recorded.

5. And ^ Nicomedes IV of Bithynia was intimately familiar with Caesar, or so rumor sang about the streets of Rome. Suetonius, Divus Julius 49

6. This statue showed him standing on the globe: the dedication is offered by Cassius Dio in Greek: ^ hēmitheos (demigod), Dio 43.14.6 & 21.2. This may be Dio's late, anachronistic and approximate equivalent of divus. Gradel, 61-69 reconstructs the original Latin inscription as Senatus populusque Romanus Divo Caesaris but Taylor suggests Dio's form as an accurate rendition, with no strict Latin equivalent.

7. For instance, at the ^ pompa circensis, the procession held before games presented at the circus.

8. Howgego, in ^ Howgego et al., 4-6: coinage celebrating state deities conspicuously features the restorer of their temples. Ibid 53: Imperial themes, including the Imperial family, dominate Roman coin issues from Augustus to Claudius.

9. Well into the third century AD, the merit of each imperial candidate would be debated as basis for a new ^ lex de imperio. In most cases this simply confirmed his possession of imperial power, acquired through dynastic inheritance or acclamation by the soldiers but its legality was Republican in form, "probably a continuation of the old Republican tradition, of the Lex curiata de imperio which conferred imperium on the higher Roman magistrates." Justinian's law later refers to a , consistent with Byzantine conceptions of Imperial power as "kingship". The same association is precisely avoided under the early Lex de imperio Vespasiani of 69-70 AD. See Berger, A., Encyclopedic Dictionary of Roman Law, Philadelphia: (Transactions of the American Philosophical Society; New Series, Volume 43, Part 2, 1953, p551). Reprint, The Lawbook Exchange Ltd., 2002. ISBN 1-58477-142-9. Preview from googlebooks; [2]

10. This surmise is based on a combination of ^ Seneca's satirical Apocolocyntosis, Suetonius' sneering "Life" and Tacitus's sharp observations of Julio-Claudian failings.

11. Mons Caelus had "ambiguous Etruscan connections" (Claudius had a historian's interest in Etruscan culture and language). It was also notorious for its brothels and meat-market. Claudius had a reputed liking for "low company", and butchers and prostitutes were classified as . Suetonius has Claudius add an extra day to the festival of ^ Saturnalia - for Seneca he is a Lord of Misrule, at whose demise it can be said: "I told you the Saturnalia could not last forever" (Apocolocyntosis 12).

12. A dedication of the Colossus to the sun god is consistent with Neronian iconography - any resemblance to Nero would be appropriate to his imperial representation as the "second sun" of the in ^ Stoic and Cynic cosmology. Subsequent alterations or remodeling of a recognisable figure - assuming they happened at all - and rededication were standard responses to an original subject's damnatio memoriae. On the other hand, the heads of some Imperial statues appear to have been recut or replaced as a matter of economy, rather than of legal or moral insult or effacement.

13. Gradel, 265, citing the unreliable ^ Historia Augusta, Antoninus Geta Aeli Spartiani, II, 8: (Latin version online at thelatinlibrary - TheLatinLibrary.com (accessed 18 August 2009). At the very least, the attribution confirms the later devaluation of divus as a divine category.

14. Drinkwater, in Bowman et al. (eds), 46: Under Gallienus, any remaining senatorial rights to military leadership were virtually at an end. The bitterness of the senatorial class towards him on this account almost certainly distorts their histories. See, for example, ^ Aurelius Victor, De Caesaribus (epitome), 33-34, in Banchich's translation online at roman-emperors.org (accessed 7 August 2009.) See also Weigel, at www.roman-emperors.org roman-emperors.org (accessed 7 August 2009.)

15. Holland's 1606 English language version of Suetonius' ^ Lives of the Caesars (Claudius) translates Claudius as "canonised... a saint in heaven". Holland's interpretation is consistent with the later use of divus under Christian emperors: saints function as intercessors but some have also been demoted or quietly lapsed from their religious calendars. See Suetonius, History of the twelve Caesars, trans. Philemon Holland, 1606, for Holland's English rendition of divus Claudius, Archive.org

16. Smallwood's application of ^ religio licita (licensed religion) to Judaism in this and possibly any period is disputed by Rajack in: Tessa Rajack, "Was there a Roman Charter for the Jews?" Journal of Roman Studies, 74, (1984) 107-23. Rajack finds no evidence for an early "charter": Josephus seems to have inferred a charter from local, ad hoc attempts to deal with anti-Jewish acts. Religio licita is first found in Tertullian. Cicero, pro Flacco, 66, refers to Judaism as superstitio, not religio but a later change in Roman policy is possible.

17. Price, 204-5, and footnote 171, citing Basil, ^ Homily 24: "on seeing an image of the king in the square, one does not allege that there are two kings" (therefore veneration of the image venerates the original: the analogy is implicit in imperial cult but is not found in the Gospels. See also articles on Iconodules and Iconoclasm).

Ando, Clifford (2000). Imperial ideology and provincial loyalty in the Roman Empire (Illustrated ed.). University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-22067-6.

Elsner, J., "Cult and Sculpture; Sacrifice in the Ara Pacis Augustae", in the Journal of Roman Studies, 81, 1991, 50-60.

Fishwick, Duncan, "Numen Augustum," Zeitschrift für Papyrologie und Epigraphik, Bd. 160 (2007), pp. 247-255, Dr. Rudolf Habelt GmbH, Bonn (Germany).

Harland, P., "Honours and Worship: Emperors, Imperial Cults and Associations at Ephesus (First to Third Centuries C.E.)", originally published in Studies in Religion/Sciences religieuses 25, 1996. Online in same pagination: Philipharland.com

Harland, P., "Imperial Cults within Local Cultural Life: Associations in Roman Asia", originally published in Ancient History Bulletin / Zeitschrift für Alte Geschichte 17, 2003. Online in same pagination: Philipharland.com

Howgego, C., Heuchert, V., Burnett, A., (eds), Coinage and Identity in the Roman Provinces, Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-926526-8

MacCormack, Sabine, Change and Continuity in Late Antiquity: the ceremony of "Adventus", Historia, 21, 4, 1972, pp 721-52.

Niehoff, Maren R., Philo on Jewish identity and culture, Mohr Siebeck, English trans GW/Coronet Books, 2001. ISBN 978-3-16-147611-2

Nixon, C.E.V., and Rodgers, Barbara S., In Praise of Later Roman Emperors: The Panegyric Latini, University Presses of California, Columbia and Princeton, 1995. ISBN 978-0-520-08326-4

Rees, Roger (2004). Diocletian and the Tetrarchy. Edinburgh, UK: Edinburgh University Press. ISBN 9780748616602.

Rosenstein, Nathan S., Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Ark.CDlib.org

Rüpke, Jörg (Editor), A Companion to Roman Religion, Wiley-Blackwell, 2007, ISBN 978-1-4051-2943-5

Taylor, Lily Ross, The Divinity of the Roman Emperor, American Philological Association, 1931; repr. Arno Press, 1975.

Versnel, H S: Triumphus: An Inquiry into the Origin, Development and Meaning of the Roman Triumph, Leiden, 1970.

Weinstock, Stefan. Divus Iulius. Oxford (Clarendon Press/OUP). 1971.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
The Roman imperial cult identified emperors and some members of their families with the divinely sanctioned authority (auctoritas ) of the Roman State. Its framework was based on Roman and Greek precedents, and was formulated during the early Principate of Augustus.

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, usually small group devoted to a person, idea, or philosophy. The term is often applied to a religious movement that exists in some degree of tension with the dominant religious or cultural inclination of a society. In recent years the word cult has been most commonly used as a pejorative term for a religious group that falls outside the mainstream and, by implication, engages in questionable activities. Many new religions are controversially labeled as cults.

In historiography, there are no negative connotations to the use of the term cult. It is especially common in works on Classical history, as the ancient Mediterranean world was home to a large variety of mystery cults. These were small groups whose elite members were initiated into secret rituals for a particular deity. Far from existing at tension with the society at large, many Roman cults were heavily integrated into the surrounding society. In Pompeii one of the most lavishly decorated temples was that of the cult of Isis. An inscription records that the individual who paid for the temple's refurbishment was rewarded with a position as town councilor, indicating a strong interconnection between this mystery cult and the civic order of the city. Furthermore, one of the most prominent Roman cults was the imperial cult, which was dedicated to the worship of deceased and deified Roman emperors and their deified family members. Imperial cult worship reinforced the power of the dominant political system, and most or all of pre-Christian Roman society had some degree of membership in it.

Other groups referred to as cults can also reinforce the dominance of a religious and social order. Within the Roman Catholic Church, the cult of the Virgin Mary and cults of other saints have gained many adherents and a high degree of influence, especially artistically. Even today, people who intensely worship particular saints are sometimes identified as being members of that saint's cult.

In more recent decades, groups designated cults have been those at tension with the rest of society. However, beyond this feature, there is no general consensus about what differentiates a cult from any other religious group. Some scholars have argued that, by the simplest definition, many, if not all, religious sects originated as cults. Over time, some cults became culturally accepted and the tension between them and society resolved, leading to the cult being recognized as a sect or church. Recent examples of this transition from so-called cult to religious group are Seventh-day Adventists and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Other scholars have advanced a more narrow definition of the term cult as a religious group with some or all of the following characteristics: a charismatic leader who exercises total control; an apocalyptic vision (doomsday cult); isolation from society; an emphasis on a transcendent spiritual experience; rigid rules governing group members' behaviour; and the exploitation of members, including sexually and financially. In popular use, the term cult has accumulated a strong negative connotation and is often used to cast aspersions on a religious group's validity as a form of religious practice. From the 1960s onward, a number of new cults developed in the United States and attracted large numbers of worshippers. The actions of these cultists, who sometimes isolated themselves from their families and oriented their lives fully around the cult, triggered widespread alarm. So, too, did the actions of violent cults such as the Peoples Temple, headed by Jim Jones, and the Manson Family, which was led by Charles Manson.

The anti-cult movement reached its peak in the 1970s, when the idea emerged that cult members were being " brainwashed," having their free will systematically taken away. The trial of Patty Hearst-an heiress kidnapped by leftist radicals in 1974 and allegedly brainwashed into committing crimes-played a key role in the growth of this belief. According to the brainwashing theory, cult members are not choosing an alternative way of life but are instead victims of exploitative and dangerous fanatics. This justified the rise of forcible deprogramming, which involves the kidnapping and holding of cult members until the deprogrammer judges that they are no longer in the thrall of the cult.

Many deprogrammed former cult members went on to launch challenges in court. Some sued the cults that they had been members of, accusing them of brainwashing. A few psychologists and psychiatrists testified in support of the deprogrammed cultists at those trials. However, other former cult members sued their deprogrammers, claiming to have been kidnapped and abusively coerced into giving up their "brainwashing." With brainwashing accusations at the heart of these cases, a variety of medical researchers as well as such organizations as the American Psychological Association researched cults and cult members during the 1980s and '90s. Their conclusion was that accusations of brainwashing and coercive persuasion against cults lacked a factual basis. Studies which suggested proof of brainwashing were methodologically flawed or based on insufficient data. After a cult member won a lawsuit against his deprogrammer ( Jason Scott v. Rick Ross ) in 1995, the practice of forcible deprogramming was largely discontinued.

Academic research has revealed a more fluid and varied reality than the one advanced by the anti-cult movement. In fact, many people who join a cult choose to leave it. Other members of cults do not become entirely isolated from society, maintaining jobs and relationships outside the cult. In addition, some studies have suggested that those who leave a cult and experience psychological damage are more likely to have left involuntarily. A wide range of religious groups fall under the definition of cult, and the vast majority are benign or even have a positive impact on society.

Given the continued negative associations with the term cult, many sociologists and researchers now prefer to use the term new religious movement (NRM) to describe groups previously called cults. This term is meant to dissociate NRMs from the connotation that their forms of religious expression lack legitimacy, an idea which is now perhaps permanently ingrained in the term cult.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cult, usually small group devoted to a person, idea, or philosophy. The term cult is often applied to a religious movement that exists in some degree of tension with the dominant religious or cultural inclination of a society.

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Masterson's siblings, including "The Walking Dead" star Alanna Masterson, also have ties to the church.

The Daily Mail reported in 2015 that Masterson's half-sister, Alanna, who starred on "The Walking Dead" is also a Scientologist.

Former Scientologist Joe Reaiche told The Daily Mail that his four kids - Danny Masterson, Alanna Masterson, Jordan Masterson, and Chris Masterson - were "brainwashed" into believing he was a "threat to their faith" after quitting the church himself.

John Travolta has practiced Scientology since the '70s.

"Grease" alum John Travolta has been a practicing Scientologist since the 1970s and is one of the church's most prized members.

In a 2001 appearance on "Friday Night With Jonathan Ross," Travolta said Scientology has " given me all the tools to survive in life that I need."

When the HBO documentary "Going Clear: Scientology and the Prison of Belief" aired, he defended the church and offered his own opinions about it all.

"I've been so happy with my [Scientology] experience in the last 40 years that I really don't have anything to say that would shed light on [a documentary] so decidedly negative," he said to the Tampa Bay Times in 2015. "I've been brought through storms that were insurmountable, and [Scientology has] been so beautiful for me, that I can't even imagine attacking it."

Travolta reportedly was breaking away from the church following the death of his wife and fellow Scientologist Kelly Preston in July 2020.

Michael Peña says Scientology made him a better actor.

The "Ant-Man" actor became a member of the church in 2000, telling The Guardian the religion's Study Tech program made him more confident, saying it "made me a better actor because I felt like it helped my understanding of scripts."

At the time, Peña said he avoided reading the controversy around the organization.

"Fatal Attraction" star Anne Archer has been a longtime member.

During an interview with The Guardian in 2014, Archer said "Scientology has been very meaningful in my life. It's taught me a lot of good information. A lot of sanity. It's a lot about responsibility and it's very smart stuff that has helped me in my life."

Her son, Tommy Davis, was a former Church of Scientology spokesman.

Tom Cruise is basically the face of Scientology.

Cruise often speaks at their conferences and events and has even been in videos promoting the religion.

In a nine-minute video reportedly shown at a 2004 International Association of Scientologists meeting, according to The Daily Beast, Cruise described being a Scientologist as "a privilege."

"He or she has the ability to create new and better realities and improve conditions. Being a Scientologist, you look at someone and you know absolutely that you can help them," Cruise said of the religion at the time.

Cruise additionally said they are "the authorities on getting people off drugs" and that they have the ability to "rehabilitate criminals" and bring about peace by uniting cultures in the video.

In the past decade, he's spoken once briefly about the impact it's had on his life.

"It's something that has helped me incredibly in my life," he said on the "Jack Reacher" red carpet in 2016. "It's something, you know, without it, I wouldn't be where I am... I'm incredibly proud."

Katie Holmes left the church when she divorced Tom Cruise.

Cruise's ex-wife, on the other hand, wasn't nearly as enamored with the religion.

Holmes, along with Cruise's other ex, Nicole Kidman, left the church after leaving Tom Cruise.

Since then Holmes has been quiet about it all. Some even speculated she signed some sort of NDA.

While she's been reluctant to discuss her experiences in the church, plenty of others have spoken on her behalf.

One of them is Ron Miscavige, whose son is a leader in the church.

He gave an exclusive interview with Daily Mail, saying "She and Tom had big differences about the way life should be lived," he told Daily Mail. "The big issue really was raising Suri as a Scientologist. If that happened, some day it was a possibility that she would disconnect from Katie."

Leah Remini famously left the church in 2013.

Remini made it clear that she is out of the church for good, writing a tell-all book titled " Troublemaker: Surviving Hollywood and Scientology," which became a docu-series called "Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath."

"My mother got involved when we were very young, so it's all we ever really knew. But over time my eyes opened, and I could no longer be affiliated with the organization, and my family felt the same, so we left," she explained to Ellen DeGeneres back in 2013. "We lost friends that can no longer talk to us who are still in the organization."

Remini is currently suing the church and leader, David Miscavige, over harassment, defamation, emotional distress, and more.

Following Masterson's sentencing, Remini claimed the Church of Scientology tried to "cover up Danny's crimes with the help of its intelligence agency, the Office of Special Affairs" and followers.

Jerry Seinfeld previously studied the religion.

In 2007, the comedian told Parade he studied the religion about 30 years ago, and really enjoyed it.

"It was interesting. Believe it or not...it's extremely intellectual and clinical in its approach to problem-solving, which really appealed to me," Seinfeld said.

He added that it even helped him in his career, saying, "In my early years of stand-up it was very helpful. I took a couple of courses... I learned some things about communication that really got my act going."

In 2020, Seinfeld talked about his experience with Scientology again briefly on the " WTF With Marc Maron" podcast, saying he did a Scientology course in New York around 1975 saying, "I found it very interesting, never pursued it."

Beck says he was never a Scientologist.

"I think there's a misconception that I am a Scientologist. I'm not a Scientologist. I don't have any connection or affiliation with it," the musician told the Sydney Morning Herald in 2019.

He continued: "My father has been a Scientologist for a long time, but I've pretty much just focused on my music and my work for most of my life, and tended to do my own thing ... I think it's just something people ran with."

Beck formerly declared he was a member of the church as he fumbled through an explanation of Scientology to the Sunday Tribune back in 2005.

"Yeah, I'm a Scientologist, " Beck said. "My father has been a Scientologist for about 35 years, so I grew up in and around it and stuff."

When asked to explain Scientology he said: "What it actually is is just sort of, uh, you know, I think it's about philosophy and sort of, uh, all these kinds of, you know, ideals that are common to a lot of religions."

The singer and songwriter previously held concerts supporting the Scientologist-affiliated program Educating Children International.

Laura Prepon left the church years ago.

Masterson wasn't the only cast member on "That '70s Show" with ties to Scientology.

A former Scientologist, Prepon told People in 2021 that she stopped practicing years ago.

"I've always been very open-minded, even since I was a child. I was raised Catholic and Jewish. I've prayed in churches, meditated in temples. I've studied Chinese meridian theory. I haven't practiced Scientology in close to five years and it's no longer part of my life," Prepon told People.

Lisa Marie Presley was a member of Scientology as a child and reportedly helped gather information in HBO's "Going Clear" documentary.

Elvis' daughter reportedly helped gather information from 2007 to 2015 that would appear in Alex Gibney's HBO documentary "Going Clear."

In January 2023, journalist Tony Ortega released an interview he conducted with Presley in 2015 in which she called out current church leader David Miscavige, saying, "Dave was a good friend of mine. Now he's fucking Hitler."

Presley said she started getting into Scientology after her father's death in 1977 and once she turned 25, her relationship with the church changed.

"At 25, after I got the inheritance, they started grooming me to be this person who would go out and get everyone else in," Presley told Ortega of how the church wanted her to recruit other celebrities after acquiring money from her famous father's estate.

Presley also claimed that Scientology drove a wedge between her and Michael Jackson, leading her to file for divorce.

Of leaving the church, she said, "It was bullshit. It was just about control. It was just a way of getting more money."

Presley died at 54 in January 2023 of complications from bariatric surgery.

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25 celebrities who have been linked to Scientology

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These actors, singers, and personalities have gone on the record about their involvement in the highly debated Church of Scientology.

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what makes someone charismatic and convincing enough

do only a certain type of people get roped in

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Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious cult based near San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931-1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927-1985). On March 26, 1997, deputies of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, including that of Applewhite, in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe. They had participated in a mass suicide, a coordinated series of ritual suicides, in order to reach what they believed was an extraterrestrial spacecraft following Comet Hale-Bopp.

Just before the mass suicide, the group's website was updated with the message: "Hale-Bopp brings closure to Heaven's Gate... Our 22 years of classroom here on planet Earth is finally coming to conclusion-'graduation' from the Human Evolutionary Level. We are happily prepared to leave 'this world' and go with Ti's crew."

The son of a Presbyterian minister and a former soldier, Marshall Applewhite began his foray into biblical prophecy in the early 1970s. After being fired from the University of St. Thomas in Houston, Texas over an alleged relationship with one of his male students, he met Bonnie Nettles, a 44-year-old married nurse with an interest in theosophy and biblical prophecy, in March 1972. According to Applewhite's writings, the two met in a hospital where she worked while he was visiting a sick friend there. It has been rumored that it was a psychiatric hospital, but Nettles was substituting for another nurse working with premature babies in the nursery. Applewhite later recalled that he felt as though he had known Nettles for a long time and concluded that they had met in a past life. She told him their meeting had been foretold to her by extraterrestrials, persuading him that he had a divine assignment.

Applewhite and Nettles pondered the life of St. Francis of Assisi and read works by authors including Helena Blavatsky, R. D. Laing, and Richard Bach.[incomplete short citation ] They kept a King James Bible with them and studied several passages from the New Testament, focusing on teachings about Christology, asceticism, and eschatology. Applewhite also read science fiction, including works by Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke. By June 19, Applewhite and Nettles's beliefs had solidified into a basic outline. They concluded that they had been chosen to fulfill biblical prophecies, and that they had been given higher-level minds than other people. They wrote a pamphlet that described Jesus' reincarnation as a Texan, a thinly veiled reference to Applewhite. Furthermore, they concluded that they were the two witnesses described in the Book of Revelation and occasionally visited churches or other spiritual groups to speak of their identities, often referring to themselves as "The Two", or "The UFO Two". They believed they would be killed and then restored to life and, in view of others, transported onto a spaceship. This event, which they referred to as "the Demonstration", was to prove their claims. To their dismay, these ideas were poorly received by existing religious communities.

Eventually, Applewhite and Nettles resolved to contact extraterrestrials, and they sought like-minded followers. They published advertisements for meetings, where they recruited disciples, whom they called "the crew". At the events, they purported to represent beings from another planet, the Next Level, who sought participants for an experiment. They stated that those who agreed to take part in the experiment would be brought to a higher evolutionary level. In 1975, during a group meeting with eighty people in Joan Culpepper's Studio City home, they shared their "simultaneous" revelation that they had been told they were the two witnesses written into the Bible's story of the end time.

Later in 1975, the crew assembled at a hotel in Waldport, Oregon. After selling all "worldly" possessions and saying farewell to loved ones, the group vanished from the hotel and from the public eye. That night on the CBS Evening News, Walter Cronkite reported that the group had disappeared, in one of the first national reports on the developing religious group: "A score of persons... have disappeared. It's a mystery whether they've been taken on a so-called trip to eternity-or simply been taken." In reality, Applewhite and Nettles had arranged for the group to go underground. From that point, "Do and Ti" (pronounced "doe and tee"), as the two now called themselves, led the nearly one-hundred-member crew across the country, sleeping in tents and sleeping bags and begging in the streets. Evading detection by the authorities and media enabled the group to focus on Do and Ti's doctrine of helping members of the crew achieve a "higher evolutionary level" above human, which they claimed to have already reached.

Applewhite and Nettles used a variety of aliases over the years, notably " Bo and Peep" and " Do and Ti". The group also had a variety of names-prior to the adoption of the name Heaven's Gate (and at the time Vallée studied the group), it was known as Human Individual Metamorphosis (HIM). The group re-invented and renamed itself several times and had a variety of recruitment methods. Applewhite believed he was directly related to Jesus, meaning he was an "Evolutionary Kingdom Level Above Human".

Indeed, Applewhite's writings, which combined aspects of Millennialism, Gnosticism, and science fiction, suggest he believed himself to be Jesus' successor and the "Present Representative" of Christ on Earth. Do and Ti taught during the religious movement's early beginnings that Do's bodily "vehicle" was inhabited by the same alien spirit which belonged to Jesus; likewise, Ti (Nettles) was presented as God the Father.

The crew used numerous methods of recruitment as they toured the United States in destitution, proclaiming the gospel of higher level metamorphosis, the deceit of humans by false-god spirits, envelopment with sunlight for meditative healing, and the divinity of the "UFO Two". Throughout the late 70s and early 80s, as their belief system developed around the cult of personalities, membership grew. Some sociologists agree that the popular movement of alternative religious experience and individualism found in collective spiritual experiences during that period helped contribute to the growth of the new religious movement. "Sheilaism", as it became known, was a way for people to merge their diverse religious backgrounds and coalesce around a shared, generalized faith, which followers of new religious sects like Applewhite's crew found a very appetizing alternative to traditional dogmas in Judaism, Catholicism and evangelical Christianity. Many of Applewhite and Nettle's crew hailed from these very diverse backgrounds; most of them are described by researchers as having been "longtime truth-seekers", or spiritual hippies who had long since believed in attempting to "find themselves" through spiritual means, combining faiths in a sort of cultural milieu well into the mid-80s. However, remarkably, many of those same researchers note that not all of Applewhite's crew were hippies recruited from far-left alternative religious backgrounds-in fact, one such recruit early on was John Craig, a respected Republican running for the Colorado House of Representatives at the time of joining in 1975. As recruit numbers grew in its pre-Internet days, the clan of "UFO followers" all seemed to have in common a need for communal belonging in an alternative path to higher existence without the constraints of institutionalized faith.

It was not until the death of Nettles due to liver cancer in 1985 and Applewhite's subsequent revision of the group's doctrines that the crew gained an eventual reputation as a "cyberculture" form of religious thought reform; by the mid-90s, the group had become reclusive, identifying themselves using the business name "Higher Source", and using their website to proselytize and recruit followers. Rumors began spreading throughout the group in the following years that the upcoming Comet Hale-Bopp housed the secret to their ultimate salvation and ascendance into the kingdom of heaven.

Heaven's Gate received coverage in Jacques Vallée's book Messengers of Deception (1979), in which Vallée described an unusual public meeting organized by the group. Vallée frequently expressed concerns within the book about contactee groups' authoritarian political and religious outlooks, and Heaven's Gate did not escape criticism. Known to the mainstream media (though largely ignored through the 1980s and 1990s), Heaven's Gate was better known in UFO circles, as well as through a series of academic studies by sociologist Robert Balch.

In January 1994, the ran an article on the group, then known as "The Total Overcomers". Richard Ford, who would later play a key role in the 1997 group suicide, discovered Heaven's Gate through this article and eventually joined them, renaming himself Rio DiAngelo.

Coast to Coast AM host Art Bell featured the theory of the "companion object" in the shadow of Hale-Bopp on several programs, as early as November 1996; speculation has been raised as to whether his programs on the subject contributed to Heaven's Gate's group suicide months later.

Louis Theroux contacted the Heaven's Gate group while making a program for his BBC2 documentary series, Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, in early March 1997. In response to his e-mail, Theroux was told that Heaven's Gate could not take part in the documentary because "at the present time a project like this would be an interference with what we must focus on."

In October 1996, members of Ti's clan began renting a large home which they called "The Monastery", a 9,200 square feet (850 m ²) mansion located near 18341 Colina Norte (later changed to Paseo Victoria) in Rancho Santa Fe, California. They paid $7,000 per month, in cash. In the same month, the group purchased alien abduction insurance that would cover up to fifty members and would pay out $1 million per person (the policy covered abduction, impregnation, or death by aliens).

On March 19-20, 1997, Marshall Applewhite taped himself in Do's Final Exit, speaking of mass suicide and "the only way to evacuate this Earth". After asserting that a spacecraft was trailing Comet Hale-Bopp and that this event would represent the "closure to Heaven's Gate", Applewhite persuaded 38 followers to prepare for ritual suicide so their souls could board the supposed craft. Applewhite believed that after their deaths an unidentified flying object (UFO) would take their souls to another "level of existence above human", which he described as being both physical and spiritual. Their preparations included each member's videotaping a farewell message.

To kill themselves, members took phenobarbital mixed with apple sauce or pudding and washed it down with vodka. Additionally, they secured plastic bags around their heads after ingesting the mix to induce asphyxiation. All 39 were dressed in identical black shirts and sweat pants, brand new black-and-white Nike Decades athletic shoes, and armband patches reading "Heaven's Gate Away Team" (one of many instances of the group's use of the fictional universe's nomenclature). Each member had on their person a five-dollar bill and three quarters in their pockets: the five-dollar bill was to cover vagrancy fines while members were out on jobs, while the quarters were to make phone calls. Once a member was dead, a living member would arrange the body by removing the plastic bag from the person's head, followed by posing the body so that it lay neatly in its own bed, with faces and torsos covered by a square purple cloth for privacy. The identical clothing was used as a uniform for the mass suicide to represent unity, whilst the Nike Decades were chosen because the group "got a good deal on the shoes".

The 39 adherents, 21 women and 18 men between the ages of 26 and 72, are believed to have died in three groups over three successive days, with remaining participants cleaning up after each prior group's deaths. The suicides occurred in groups of fifteen, fifteen, and nine, between approximately March 22 and March 26. Among the dead was Thomas Nichols, brother of the actress Nichelle Nichols, who is best known for her role as Uhura in the original television series. Leader Applewhite was the third to last member to die; two people remained after him and were the only ones who would be found without bags over their heads and not having purple cloths covering their top halves. Before the last of the suicides, similar sets of packages were sent to numerous Heaven's Gate affiliated (or formerly affiliated) individuals, and at least one media outlet, the BBC department responsible for Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends, for which Heaven's Gate had earlier declined participation.

Among those in the list of recipients was Rio DiAngelo. The package DiAngelo received on the evening of March 25, as other packages sent had, contained two VHS videotapes, one with Do's Final Exit, and the other with the "farewell messages" of group followers. It also contained a letter, stating that among other things, "we have exited our vehicles, just as we entered them." Upon informing his boss of the contents of the packages, DiAngelo received a ride from him from Los Angeles to the Heaven's Gate home in Rancho Santa Fe so he could verify the letter. DiAngelo found a back door purposely left unlocked to allow access, and used a video camera to record what he found. After leaving the house, DiAngelo's boss, who had waited outside, encouraged him to make calls to authorities alerting them to his discovery.

The San Diego County Sheriff's Department received an anonymous tip through the 911 system at 3:15 p.m. on March 26, suggesting they "check on the welfare of the residents". Days after the suicides, this caller was revealed to be DiAngelo.

Caller: Yes, I need to report an anonymous tip, who do I talk to?

Sherriff's Department: Okay, this is regarding what?

Caller: This is regarding a mass suicide, and I can give you the address...

-  San Diego County 911 call, March 26, 1997, 3:15 p.m. PST

The single deputy who first responded to the call entered the home through a side door, saw ten bodies, and was nearly overcome by a "pungent odor". (The bodies were already decomposing in the hot California spring.) After a cursory search by two deputies found no one alive, both retreated until a search warrant could be procured. All 39 bodies were ultimately cremated.

The Heaven's Gate event was widely publicized in the media as an example of mass suicide. When news broke of the suicides and their relation to Comet Hale-Bopp, the co-discoverer of the comet, Alan Hale, was drawn into the story. Hale's phone "never stopped ringing the entire day". He did not respond until the next day, when he spoke on the subject at a press conference, but only after researching the details of the incident. Speaking at the Second World Skeptics Congress in Heidelberg, Germany on July 24, 1998:

Dr. Hale discussed the scientific significance and popular lore of comets and gave a personal account of his discovery. He then lambasted the combination of scientific illiteracy, willful delusions, a radio talk show's deception about an imaginary spacecraft following the comet, and a cult's bizarre yearnings for ascending to another level of existence that led to the Heaven's Gate mass suicides.

Hale said that well before Heaven's Gate, he had told a colleague:

'We are probably going to have some suicides as a result of this comet.' The sad part is that I was really not surprised. Comets are lovely objects, but they don't have apocalyptic significance. We must use our minds, our reason.

News of the 39 deaths in Rancho Santa Fe motivated the copycat suicide of a 58-year-old man living near Marysville, California. The man left a note dated March 27, which said, "I'm going on the spaceship with Hale-Bopp to be with those who have gone before me," and imitated some of the details of the Heaven's Gate suicides as they had been reported in the media up to that point. The man was found dead by a friend on March 31, and had no known connection with Heaven's Gate.

At least three former members of Heaven's Gate ultimately died by suicide themselves in the months after the mass suicide event. On May 6, 1997, Wayne Cooke and Chuck Humphrey attempted suicide in a hotel in a manner similar to that used by the group. Cooke died and Humphrey survived this attempt. Another former member, James Pirkey Jr., died by suicide by a self-inflicted gunshot wound on May 11. Humphrey, who had survived his first suicide attempt, ultimately killed himself in Arizona in February 1998.

Faye Kellerman's novel Jupiter's Bones (1998) and Travis Jeppesen's novel, Victims (2003), were inspired in part by the Heaven's Gate group.

Two former members, Marc and Sarah King of Phoenix, Arizona still maintain the group's website, which now contains a large passage addressing the mass suicide and the reasons for it. The two do not identify themselves in interviews.

In July 2018, American rapper Lil Uzi Vert posted promotional art for his upcoming studio album Eternal Atake, which would release on 6th of March 2020, to his Instagram. The artwork incorporated a reworking of the Heaven's Gate "keyhole" logo. The group's two survivors threatened Lil Uzi Vert, who at the time used a picture of Marshall Applewhite as his Instagram avatar, with copyright infringement litigation.

The infamy caused by the mass suicides, limited availability and its sudden and unceremonious discontinuation has been cited as the reason why Nike Decades command such high resale value. One seller has reportedly tried to sell them at $6,660.

Heaven's Gate members believed the planet Earth would be "recycled" ("wiped clean, renewed, refurbished, and rejuvenated") before 2027 and the only chance for their consciousness (defined sometimes as soul or mind) to survive was to leave their human bodies at an appointed time. Initially the group had been told that they would be transported with their bodies aboard a spacecraft that would come to Earth and take the crew to heaven, referred to as the "next level". When Bonnie Lou Nettles (Ti) died of cancer in 1985, it confounded Applewhite's doctrine because Nettles was allegedly chosen by the next level to be a messenger on Earth, yet her body died instead of leaving physically to outer space. The belief system was then refined to include the leaving of consciousness from the body as equivalent to leaving the Earth in a spacecraft.

While the group was against suicide, they defined "suicide" in their own context to mean "to turn against the Next Level when it is being offered" and believed their "human" bodies were only vessels meant to help them on their journey. Suicide, therefore, would be not allowing their consciousness to leave their human bodies to join the next level; remaining alive instead of participating in the group suicide was considered suicide of their consciousness. In conversation, when referring to a person or a person's body, they routinely used the word "vehicle".

The members of the group added -ody to the first names they adopted in lieu of their original given names, which defines "children of the Next Level". This is mentioned in Applewhite's final video, Do's Final Exit, filmed March 19-20, 1997, just days prior to the suicides.

They believed that, "to be eligible for membership in the Next Level, humans would have to shed every attachment to the planet". This meant all members had to give up all human-like characteristics, such as their family, friends, sexuality, individuality, jobs, money, and possessions.

"The Evolutionary Level Above Human" (TELAH) was as a "physical, corporeal place", another world in our universe, where residents live in pure bliss and nourish themselves by absorbing pure sunlight. At the next level, beings do not engage in sexual intercourse, eating or dying, the things that make us "mammalian" here. Heaven's Gate believed that what the Bible calls God is actually a highly developed Extraterrestrial.

Members of Heaven's Gate believed that evil space aliens-called Luciferians-falsely represented themselves to Earthlings as "God" and conspired to keep humans from developing. Technically advanced humanoids, these aliens have spacecraft, space-time travel, telepathy, and increased longevity. They use holograms to fake miracles. Carnal beings with gender, they stopped training to achieve the Kingdom of God thousands of years ago. Heaven's Gate believed that all existing religions on Earth had been corrupted by these malevolent aliens.

Although these basic beliefs of the group stayed generally consistent over the years, "the details of their ideology were flexible enough to undergo modification over time." There are examples of the group's adding to or slightly changing their beliefs, such as: modifying the way one can enter the Next Level, changing the way they described themselves, placing more importance on the idea of Satan, and adding several other New Age concepts. One of these concepts was the belief of extraterrestrial walk-ins; when the group began, "Applewhite and Nettles taught their followers that they were extraterrestrial beings. However, after the notion of walk-ins became popular within the New Age subculture, the Two changed their tune and began describing themselves as extraterrestrial walk-ins." The idea of walk-ins is very similar to the concept of being possessed by spirits. A walk-in can be defined as "an entity who occupies a body that has been vacated by its original soul". Heaven's Gate came to believe an extraterrestrial walk-in is "a walk-in that is supposedly from another planet".

The concept of walk-ins aided Applewhite and Nettles in personally starting from what they considered to be clean slates. In this so-called clean slate, they were no longer considered by members of this Heaven's Gate group to be the people they had been prior to the start of the group, but had taken on a new life; this concept gave them a way to "erase their human personal histories as the histories of souls who formerly occupied the bodies of Applewhite and Nettles". Over time Applewhite also refined his identity in the group to encourage the belief that the "walk in" that was inhabiting his body was the same that had done so to Jesus 2,000 years ago. Similar to Nestorianism this belief stated that the personage of Jesus and the spirit of Jesus were separable. This meant that Jesus was simply the name of the body of an ordinary man that held no sacred properties that was taken over by an incorporeal sacred entity to deliver "next level" information.

Another New Age belief Applewhite and Nettles adopted was the ancient astronaut hypothesis. The term "ancient astronauts" is used to refer to various forms of the concept that extraterrestrials visited Earth in the distant past. Applewhite and Nettles took part of this concept and taught it as the belief that "aliens planted the seeds of current humanity millions of years ago, and have to come to reap the harvest of their work in the form of spiritually evolved individuals who will join the ranks of flying saucer crews. Only a select few members of humanity will be chosen to advance to this transhuman state. The rest will be left to wallow in the spiritually poisoned atmosphere of a corrupt world." Only the individuals who chose to join Heaven's Gate, follow Applewhite and Nettle's belief system, and make the sacrifices required by membership would be allowed to escape human suffering.

According to Heaven's Gate, once the individual has perfected himself through the "process", there were four methods to enter or "graduate" to the next level:

1. Physical pickup onto a TELAH spacecraft and transfer to a next level body aboard that craft. In this version, what Professor Zeller calls a "UFO" version of the "Rapture", an alien spacecraft would descend to Earth and collect Applewhite, Nettles, and their followers, and their human bodies would be transformed through biological and chemical processes to perfected beings. This and other UFO-related beliefs held by the group have led some observers to characterize the group as a type of UFO religion.

2. Natural death, accidental death, or death from random violence. Here, the "graduating soul" leaves the human container for a perfected next-level body.

3. Outside persecution that leads to death. After the deaths of the Branch Davidians in Waco, Texas, and the events involving Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Applewhite was afraid the American government would murder the members of Heaven's Gate.

4. Willful exit from the body in a dignified manner. Near the end, Applewhite had a revelation that they might have to abandon their human bodies and achieve the next level as Jesus had done. This occurred on March 22 and 23 when 39 members died by suicide and "graduated".

In a group open only to adults over the age of 18, members gave up their possessions and lived a highly ascetic life devoid of many indulgences. The group was tightly knit and everything was communally shared. In public, each member of the group always carried only a five-dollar bill and one roll of quarters. Eight of the male members of the group, including Applewhite, voluntarily underwent castration in Mexico as an extreme means of maintaining the ascetic lifestyle. The group initially attempted castration by having one of the members, a former nurse, perform the castration, but this initial attempt was very unsuccessful, almost resulted in the patient's death, and caused at least one member to leave Heaven's Gate. Every castration that followed this initial one was done in a hospital.

The group earned revenues by offering professional website development for paying clients under the business name Higher Source.

The cultural theorist Paul Virilio has described the group as a cybersect, owing to its heavy reliance on computer mediated communication as a mode of communication prior to its collective suicide.

In its first live episode following the mass suicide, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch where the cult members really did end up in space. It was followed by a commercial parody, featuring footage of the Nike-clad corpses. The ad was for Keds, marketed "for level headed Christians".

The sect is briefly and indirectly mentioned in a scene in the 1997 film directed by Robert Zemeckis and starring Jodie Foster in which, after the receiving of a message from outer space located in the star Vega, CNN's journalist Natalie Allen (playing herself in a cameo) talks about its religious implications by "recent cult deaths near San Diego".

The sect is briefly and indirectly mentioned in the 1998 song Swim by Madonna in her album Ray of Light. The incident took place after the appearance of the comet Hale-Bopp during the eclipse in China. "Comets fly across the sky While the churches burn their preachers We can't carry these sins on our back Don't want to carry anymore"

Episode 23 ("Brain Scratch") of the popular Japanese anime series Cowboy Bebop centers on a sect dedicated to its members' "ascension" into the technological singularity. The sect's leader, Londes, resembles Applewhite and speaks through wild-eyed camera closeups reminiscent of Applewhite's own videos on the Heaven's Gate web page.

The English electronic act Meat Beat Manifesto features samples of Marshall Applewhite speaking in the song "Hail to the Bopp" on their 1998 album Actual Sounds + Voices.

The Irish band Therapy? released a song titled "Heaven's Gate" on their 1998 album Semi-Detached.

In the April 11, 1999 episode "Chitty Chitty Death Bang", Meg Griffin is recruited into a cult similar to Heaven's Gate where male members of the group were eunuchs, all members wore matching tracksuits and shoes, lived together in a large house, and planned to die by mass suicide.

In the 2000 film Dude, Where's My Car? the main characters stumble onto a UFO cult based on Heaven's Gate. The cult members all wear the same type of sneakers, like the members of Heaven's Gate.

In the 2009 film Up In The Air, George Clooney's character briefly references Heaven's Gate when he says "Now those cult members in San Diego, with the Kool-Aid and the sneakers? They didn't die alone."

The English band Porcupine Tree referenced the cult in their 2000 song "Last Chance to Evacuate Planet Earth Before It Is Recycled", which features the cult leader's speech.

The song " Propane Nightmares" by Australian/British drum and bass band Pendulum features many references to their mass suicide in the music video and the song itself.

In 2012, Captain Murphy released a 34-minute-long video album titled focusing on the theme of Heaven's Gate.

The band Andrew Jackson Jihad has a song referencing Heaven's Gate titled "Do, Re, and Me" on their 2014 album Christmas Island.

Musician Isabelle Reine has two songs referencing Heaven's Gate called "Gates of Heaven" and "Beyond The Gates" in her 2019 album " I'll Be Dead By Tomorrow"

Techno artist Joel Dunn has been releasing music under the stage name Marshall Applewhite since 2014.

English indie pop band The Go! Team released a song titled "The Art of Getting By (Song for Heaven's Gate)" on their 2015 album The Scene Between.

Rapper Ghostemane released a song titled "Heavens Gate Has the Best Punch" on his 2015 album For the Aspiring Occultist.

The 2017 album The Demonstration by the darkwave band Drab Majesty was heavily inspired by and full of references to the events surrounding Heaven's Gate.

New Orleans rap duo $uicideboy$ used an image of the Heaven's Gate suicides as the art for their 2017 EP KILL YOURSELF Part XX: The Infinity Saga.

American thrash metal band Testament recorded "Children of the Next Level" on their 2020 album Titans of Creation, which refers to the mass suicide. An animated music video was made for the song which further referenced the mass suicide and depicted the cultists being brainwashed by Applewhite.

In the 2016 film Deadpool, Wade Wilson compares Professor X's appearance to the leader of Heaven's Gate.

In their song "1997", the band Saint Motel mentions a "dangerous crowd" and that "it happened in 1997". In the video, the band members drink something and their spirits leave their bodies.

The plot of the video game Far Cry 5 involves battling against the fictional cult Eden's Gate, an ultra-conservative doomsday sect.

In March 2020, American rapper Lil Uzi Vert released the album Eternal Atake, which has many references to Heaven's Gate, including an image that is heavily inspired by the Heaven's Gate logo.

Balch, Robert W. (1982). Roy Wallis (ed.). "Bo and Peep: A Case Study of the Origins of Messianic Leadership". Millennialism and charisma. Belfast: Queen's University.

Balch, Robert W. (1985). Rodney Stark (ed.). "When the Light Goes Out, Darkness Comes: A Study of Defection from a Totalistic Cult". Religious Movements: Genesis, Exodus and Numbers. Paragon House Publishers. pp. 11-63.

Balch, Robert W. (1995). James R. Lewis (ed.). "Waiting for the ships: disillusionment and revitalization of faith in Bo and Peep's UFO cult". The Gods have Landed: New Religions from Other Worlds. Albany: SUNY.

Chryssides, George D. (2005). "'Come On Up and I Will Show Thee': Heaven's Gate as a Postmodern Group". In James R. Lewis and Jesper Aagaard Petersen (ed.). Controversial New Religions. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-515682-9.

DiAngelo, Rio (2007). Beyond Human Mind: The Soul Evolution of Heaven's Gate. Rio DiAngelo Press.

Lalich, Janja (2004). Bounded Choice: True Believers and Charismatic Cults. University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-23194-5.

Lewis, James R., ed. (2001). Odd Gods: New Religions & the Cult Controversy. Prometheus Books. ISBN 1-57392-842-9.

Theroux, Louis (2005). The Call of the Weird. Pan Macmillan. pp. 207-21.

Lewis, James R. (2003). "Legitimating Suicide: Heaven's Gate and New Age Ideology". In Christopher Partridge (ed.). UFO Religions. Psychology Press. ISBN 978-0-415-26324-5.

Raine, Susan (2005). "Reconceptualising the Human Body: Heaven's Gate and the Quest for Divine Transformation". . Elsevier. 35 (2): 98-117. doi:10.1016/j.religion.2005.06.003.

Lifton, Robert Jay (2000). Destroying the World to Save it: Aum Shinrikyō, Apocalyptic Violence, and the New Global Terrorism. Macmillan Publishers. ISBN 978-0-8050-6511-4.

Balch, Robert; Taylor, David (2002). "Making Sense of the Heaven's Gate Suicides". In David G. Bromley and J. Gordon Melton (ed.). Cults, Religion, and Violence. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0-521-66898-9.

Urban, Hugh (2000). "The Devil at Heaven's Gate: Rethinking the Study of Religion in the Age of Cyber-Space". Nova Religio. University of California Press. 3 (2): 268-302. doi:10.1525/nr.2000.3.2.268.

Bearak, Barry (April 28, 1997). "Eyes on Glory: Pied Pipers of Heaven's Gate". The New York Times.

Goldwag, Arthur (2009). Cults, Conspiracies, and Secret Societies, The Straight Scoop on Freemasons, The Illuminati, Skull & Bones, Black Helicopters, The New World Order, and many, many more. Vintage Books. pp. 75-78. ISBN 978-0-307-39067-7.

Bearman, Joshua. "Heaven's Gate: The Sequel". LA Weekly.

Feinburg, Ashley. "The Online Legacy of a Suicide Cult and the Webmasters Who Stayed Behind". Gizmodo.com.

Monmaney, Terence (1997). "Free Will, or Thought Control? Were the Deaths of Heaven's Gate Members the Result of Brainwashing?; The Debate Reflects Larger Cultural Questions about the Role of Choice and the Issue of Vicitimization". Los Angeles Times. Times Mirror Company.

Zeller, Benjamin E. (2010). "Extraterrestrial Biblical Hermeneutics and the Making of Heaven's Gate". Nova Religio. University of California Press. 14 (2): 34-60. doi:10.1525/nr.2010.14.2.34.

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Heaven's Gate was an American UFO religious cult based near San Diego, California. It was founded in 1974 and led by Marshall Applewhite (1931-1997) and Bonnie Nettles (1927-1985). On March 26, 1997, deputies of the San Diego County Sheriff's Department discovered the bodies of 39 members of the group, including that of Applewhite, in a house in the San Diego suburb of Rancho Santa Fe.

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The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ( FLDS Church) is a religious sect of the fundamentalist Mormon denominations whose members practice polygamy. It is estimated that 6,000 to 10,000 members reside in Hildale, Utah; Rocky Ridge, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona (raided); Eldorado, Texas ( raided); Westcliffe, Colorado; Mancos, Colorado; Creston and Bountiful, British Columbia (sold); and Pringle, South Dakota (sold).

While originally located in Short Creek (now Colorado City), its headquarters shifted to Eldorado, Texas; and Ruso, North Dakota after the Yearning for Zion raid. The Texas Attorney General's Office ruled the state could seize the Yearning for Zion ranch on January 6, 2014, and by April 17 they took full custody.

The residents in the area of Hildale and Colorado City have a long history of practicing polygamy, dating to the mid-19th century. It is taught in the community that Brigham Young, then president of the LDS Church, once visited the area and said "this will someday be the head and not the tail of the church. This will be the granaries of the Saints. This land will produce in abundance sufficient wheat to feed the people." The twin cities were once known as Short Creek, officially founded in 1913 as a ranching community.

The FLDS traces its claim to spiritual authority to accounts, starting with a statement published in 1912 by Lorin C. Woolley, of a purported 1886 divine revelation to then- LDS Church President John Taylor. They see the 1886 Revelation as precluding validity of the 1890 Manifesto against new plural marriages by church members, issued by Wilford Woodruff, whom the LDS Church recognizes as Taylor's successor. After the formal abandonment of plural marriage by the LDS Church, many members around Short Creek and elsewhere continued, and even solemnized, plural marriages. In 1904 the LDS Church issued the Second Manifesto, and eventually excommunicated those who continued to solemnize or enter into new plural marriages.

Short Creek soon became a gathering place for polygamist former members of the LDS Church. In 1935, the LDS Church excommunicated the Mormon residents of Short Creek who refused to sign an oath renouncing polygamy. Following this, John Y. Barlow began to lead a group of Mormon fundamentalists who were dedicated to preserving the practice of plural marriage. The location on the Utah-Arizona border was thought to be ideal for the group because it allowed them to avoid state raids by moving across the state line. Ben Bistline has called it a "popular misconception" that the spot was chosen because it straddled the state line, rather than being where the property offered to the Priesthood Council happened to be.

Some of the locally prominent men in Short Creek, after being excommunicated by the LDS Church, later became leaders of the Mormon fundamentalist movement, including Lorin C. Woolley, J. Leslie Broadbent, John Y. Barlow, Charles Zitting, Joseph White Musser, LeGrand Woolley, and Louis A. Kelsch. In 1932, these men created the organization known as the Council of Friends, a group of seven high priests that was said to be the governing priesthood body on Earth. The Council of Friends became the governing ecclesiastical body over the Mormon fundamentalists at Short Creek.

The early years of the movement were contentious and saw many differing interpretations and opinions among leaders as to how plural marriage should be practised. These contentions eventually led to the subsequent schisms that created the multiple Mormon fundamentalist organizations that now exist, including the FLDS Church, the Apostolic United Brethren, and the Latter-day Church of Christ or Kingston group. It is commonly believed by all of these sects that the early leaders of the fundamentalist movement claimed to receive revelations from God commanding that plural marriage should not cease.

One researcher has suggested that the concept of the FLDS as a separate church entity did not fully arise until a 1987 lawsuit when the full name of the church first appears. According to this interpretation, the original authority conferred by Lorin C. Woolley was only for the purpose of initiating plural marriages, not for the establishment of a new church, and many early Short Creek polygamists continued to regard the LDS Church as authoritative but "out of order" on the matter of polygamy. Such members held hope that the LDS Church would one day come back "into order" and re-establish the practice of polygamy.

The first leader of the FLDS Church was John Y. Barlow, who led the community of Short Creek until his death on December 29, 1949. He was succeeded by Joseph White Musser, who was the church's leader during a government crackdown on polygamy known as the Short Creek raid, in 1953, in which all the FLDS Church members of Short Creek were arrested, including 236 children.

Musser led the community until a contentious appointment of Rulon Allred to a high position of authority in 1951 angered some members of the Short Creek community. Musser had appointed Allred to be his successor, but Allred was not accepted as his successor by the Short Creek community. This led to a schism, with many followers breaking off and joining Allred; this offshoot became known as the Apostolic United Brethren. The core group in the Short Creek area instead followed Charles Zitting as its leader.

Future FLDS leader Leroy S. Johnson talking to journalists following the raid

In the morning of July 26, 1953, 102 Arizona state police officers and National Guard soldiers raided the fundamentalist Mormon community of Short Creek, Arizona. They arrested the entire populace, including 236 children. Of those 236 children, 150 were not allowed to return to their parents for more than two years. Other parents never regained custody of their children.

The Short Creek raid was the largest mass arrest of polygamists in American history, and it received a great deal of press coverage. After the raid, polygamists continued to live there; in 1960, Short Creek was renamed Colorado City.

Charles Zitting died in 1954 and Leroy S. Johnson was chosen to lead the church in Short Creek. Johnson led the FLDS Church until his death in 1986. In 1984, a schism formed within the FLDS Church just before the death of Leroy S. Johnson. A small group of FLDS (known as the Centennial Park group) took issue with the "one-man rule" doctrine that altered the leadership structure of the church and that was implemented fully when Rulon Jeffs assumed his position as sole leader of the organization. These followers took up residence just south of Colorado City, in Centennial Park, Arizona, calling themselves "The Work of Jesus Christ", or "The Work" for short.

After Warren Jeffs assumed leadership, Winston Blackmore, who had been serving in Canada as the Bishop of Bountiful for the FLDS Church, was excommunicated by Jeffs in an apparent power struggle. This led to a split within the community in Bountiful, British Columbia, with an estimated 700 FLDS members leaving the church to follow Blackmore.

Legal troubles, 2003-2006

The home of former FLDS leader Warren Jeffs in Colorado City

Polygamy is illegal in all 50 states of the United States as well as Canada and Mexico. Attempts to overturn the illegality based on right of religious freedom have been unsuccessful. In 2003, the church received increased attention from the state of Utah when police officer Rodney Holm, a member of the church, was convicted of unlawful sexual conduct with a 16- or 17-year-old and one count of bigamy for his marriage to and impregnation of plural wife Ruth Stubbs. The conviction was the first legal action against a member of the FLDS Church since the Short Creek raid.

In November 2003, church member David Allred purchased "as a hunting retreat" the 1,371-acre (555-hectare) Isaacs Ranch four miles (six kilometers) northeast of Eldorado, Texas, on Schleicher County Road 300 and sent 30 to 40 construction workers from Colorado City-Hildale to begin work on the property. Improvements soon included three 3-story houses, each 8,000 to 10,000 square feet (930 m ²), a concrete plant, and a plowed field. After seeing high-profile FLDS Church critic Flora Jessop on the ABC television program Primetime Live on March 4, 2004, concerned Eldorado residents contacted Jessop. She investigated, and on March 25, 2004, Jessop held a press conference in Eldorado confirming that the new neighbors were FLDS Church adherents. On May 18, 2004, Schleicher County Sheriff David Doran and his Chief Deputy visited Colorado City, and the FLDS Church officially acknowledged that the Schleicher County property would be a new base for the church. It was reported in the news media that the church had built a temple at the YFZ Ranch; this is supported by evidence, including aerial photographs of a large stone structure (approximately 88 feet (27 m) wide) in a state of relative completion. A local newspaper, the Eldorado Success, reported that the temple foundation was dedicated January 1, 2005 by Warren Jeffs.

On January 10, 2004, Dan Barlow (the mayor of Colorado City) and about 20 other men were excommunicated from the church and stripped of their wives and children (who would be reassigned to other men), and the right to live in the town. The same day two teenage girls reportedly fled the towns with the aid of activist Flora Jessop, who advocates plural wives' escape from polygamy. The two girls, Fawn Broadbent and Fawn Holm, soon found themselves in a highly publicized dispute over their freedom and custody. After the allegations against their parents were proven false, Flora helped them flee state custody together on February 15, and they ended up in Salt Lake City at Fawn Holm's brother Carl's house.

In October 2004, Flora Jessop reported that David Allred purchased a 60-acre (240,000 m ²) parcel of land near Mancos, Colorado, (midway between Cortez and Durango) about the same time he bought the Schleicher County property. Allred told authorities the parcel was to be used as a hunting retreat.

In July 2005, eight men of the church were indicted for sexual contact with minors. All of them turned themselves in to police in Kingman, Arizona, within days.

On July 29, 2005, Brent W. Jeffs filed suit accusing three of his uncles, including Warren Jeffs, of sexually assaulting him when he was a child. The suit also named the FLDS Church as a defendant. On August 10, former FLDS Church member Shem Fischer, Dan Fischer's brother, added the church and Warren Jeffs as defendants to a 2002 lawsuit claiming he was illegally fired because he no longer adhered to the faith. Fischer, who was a salesman for a wooden cabinetry business in Hildale, claimed church officials interfered with his relationship with his employer and blacklisted him. The district court granted summary judgment in favor of the company and found that Fischer was not fired from his job, but quit instead. The district court ruling was overturned in part on the basis that Fischer was discriminated against on the basis of religion when he reapplied for his position and was denied employment because he had left the FLDS church. The parties eventually settled the case for an agreed payment of damages to Shem Fischer.

In July 2005, six young adult " Lost Boys" who claimed they were cast out of their homes on the Utah-Arizona border to reduce competition for wives, filed suit against the FLDS Church. "The [boys] have been excommunicated pursuant to that policy and practice and have been cut off from family, friends, benefits, business and employment relationships, and purportedly condemned to eternal damnation", their suit says. "They have become 'lost boys' in the world outside the FLDS community."

On May 7, 2006, the FBI named Warren Jeffs to its Ten Most Wanted Fugitives list on charges of unlawful flight to avoid prosecution. He was captured on Interstate 15 on August 28, 2006, just north of Las Vegas, Nevada, after a routine traffic stop.

The mayor of Colorado City, Terrill C. Johnson, was arrested on May 26, 2006, for eight fraudulent vehicle registration charges for registering his vehicles in a different state than he lived, which is a felony. He was booked into Purgatory Correctional Facility in Hurricane, Utah, and was released after paying the $5,000 bail in cash.

Leadership struggles, 2007-11

On September 25, 2007, after trial by a jury in St. George, Utah, Jeffs was found guilty of two counts of being an accomplice to rape and was sentenced to ten years to life in prison. This conviction was later overturned, but he was subsequently sentenced to life in prison plus 20 years and fined $10,000 after being convicted on charges of aggravated sexual assault and sexual assault.

From 2007 to 2011, the leadership of the FLDS Church was unclear. On November 20, 2007, following Warren Jeffs's conviction, attorneys for Jeffs released the following statement: "Mr. Jeffs resigned as President of The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, Inc." The statement did not address his position as prophet of the church, but merely addressed his resignation from his fiduciary post as president of the corporation belonging to the FLDS Church.

According to a Salt Lake Tribune telephone transcript, there is evidence that, when incarcerated, Warren Jeffs made statements naming William E. Jessop, a former first counselor, as his successor or, alternatively, that Jeffs had told Jessop on January 24, 2007, that he (Jeffs) had never been the rightful leader of the FLDS. Many press accounts suggested that Merril Jessop, who had been leading the Eldorado compound, was the de facto leader of the church. Additionally, on January 9, 2010, documents filed with the Utah Department of Commerce named Wendell L. Nielsen as the president of the sect. The FLDS incorporation charter does not require the church president to be the church's prophet, but the previous president Rulon Jeffs had also been prophet. In 2010, Willie Jessop, the church's spokesman, refused to name the incumbent prophet "out of fear there'd be retaliation by the government".

On January 28, 2011, Jeffs reasserted his leadership of the denomination, and Nielsen was removed as the church's legal president. According to affidavits submitted by FLDS church leaders, Jeffs was acclaimed as leader at mass meetings of 4,000 church members in February and April 2011, and on April 10, 2011, a group of 2,000 male FLDS members voted unanimously to "uphold and sustain" Jeffs's authority. By that time Willie Jessop had publicly broken with Jeffs, putting himself forward as a challenger for the leadership, but he was subsequently declared an apostate and left the church. A 2012 CNN documentary confirmed that Jeffs still led the church from prison.

The FLDS temple at Yearning for Zion ranch in 2006

In April 2008, acting on the outcry of an alleged teen victim of physical and sexual abuse at the FLDS compound in Schleicher County, Texas, Texas Child Protective Services and Department of Public Safety officers entered the compound to serve search and arrest warrants and carry out court orders designed to protect children. Over the course of several days, from April 3 through April 10, Texas CPS removed 439 children under age 18 from the church's YFZ Ranch, while law enforcement, including Texas Rangers, executed their search and arrest warrants on the premises. The April 2008 events at the YFZ Ranch generated intense press coverage in the U.S., especially in the Southwest, and also garnered international attention.

On April 18, 2008, following a two-day hearing, Judge Barbara Walther of the 51st Judicial District Court ordered all of the FLDS children to remain in the temporary custody of Child Protective Services. Judge Walther's ruling was subsequently reversed by the 3rd Court of Appeals in Austin, Texas in a ruling that Texas CPS was not justified in removing every child from the ranch. The 3rd Court of Appeals granted mandamus relief and ordered the trial court to vacate the portion of its order giving CPS temporary custody of the FLDS children. CPS petitioned the Texas Supreme Court requesting that the 3rd Court of Appeals' ruling be overturned, but the Texas Supreme Court, in a written opinion issued May 29, 2008, declined to overturn the ruling of the 3rd Court of Appeals.

The abuse hotline calls that prompted the raid are now believed to have been made by Rozita Swinton, a non-FLDS woman with no known connection to the FLDS community in Texas. Nevertheless, the search warrants executed at the YFZ compound were determined by the court to have been legally issued and executed, and the evidence seized cannot be excluded on the basis that the initial outcry may have been a hoax.

On November 5, 2009, a Schleicher County, Texas jury found Raymond Merril Jessop, 38, guilty of sexual assault of a child. According to evidence admitted at trial, Jessop sexually assaulted a 16-year-old girl to whom he had been "spiritually married" when the girl was 15 years old. The same jury sentenced Jessop to 10 years in prison and assessed a fine of $8,000.

On December 18, 2009, a Schleicher County, Texas jury found Allan Keate guilty of sexual assault of a child. Keate fathered a child with a 15-year-old girl. According to documents admitted at trial, Keate had also given three of his own daughters away in "spiritual" or "celestial" marriage, two of them at 15 and one at 14, to older men. The youngest of the three went to Warren Jeffs. He was sentenced to 33 years in prison. The conviction and sentence was later upheld on appeal.

On January 22, 2010, Michael George Emack pleaded no contest to sexual assault charges and was sentenced to seven years in prison. He married a 16-year-old girl at YFZ Ranch on August 5, 2004. She gave birth to a son less than a year later.

On March 17, 2010, a Tom Green County, Texas jury found Merril Leroy Jessop guilty of sexual assault of a child after deliberating only one hour. Evidence admitted at the criminal trial proved beyond a reasonable doubt that Jessop, 35, sexually assaulted a 15-year-old girl while living at the FLDS Ranch in Schleicher County, Texas. The jury sentenced Jessop to 75 years in prison and assessed a $10,000 fine.

On April 6, 2010, Arizona officials executed search warrants at governmental offices of the towns of Colorado City, Arizona and Hildale, Utah. According to one report, the warrants involved the misuse of funds and caused the Hildale Public Safety Department to be shut down. According to another report, city personnel and volunteers were ordered out of the buildings while the search was being conducted, prompting protests from Colorado City Fire Chief Jake Barlow. Despite these protests, public safety did not appear to be affected, as the county law enforcement agencies involved routed calls for emergency service through the county offices. A search warrant was also executed at Jake Barlow's residence.

The search warrant affidavit states that the Mohave County District Attorney sought records relating to personal charges on an agency credit card from the Colorado City Fire Department under the open records laws. Chief Barlow indicated that there were no personal charges, therefore there were no records to disclose. Records obtained by subpoena from the banks involved showed a series of purchases made by Chief Barlow and Darger that are questionable, including diapers, child's clothing, and food, although the firefighters are not fed by the department.

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In November 2012, the Texas Attorney General's Office instituted legal proceedings to seize the FLDS ranch property in Eldorado, Texas. The basis for the forfeiture and seizure proceeding was cited as the use of FLDS property as "...a rural location where the systemic sexual assault of children would be tolerated without interference from law enforcement authorities", therefore, the property is contraband and subject to seizure. On April 17, 2014, Texas officials took physical possession of the property.

In 2012, Warren Jeffs published a volume titled Jesus Christ Message to All Nations containing various revelations, including one proclaiming his innocence and others serving as warnings to specific countries around the world.

By 2023, investigators stated that the members of the FLDS Church had spread out to avoid the attention of authorities, some moving north into North Dakota, and were communicating regularly with Warren Jeffs over Zoom. Warren Jeffs's son Helaman Jeffs had also emerged as a figure of authority within the church by this time. The revelations in 2022 were to be distributed by Helaman Jeffs, and he was also given the authority to perform polygamous marriages.

Warren Jeffs, current leader

As senior member of the Priesthood Council in Short Creek:

As president of the FLDS Church:

Warren Jeffs became head of the FLDS Church in 2002. In the years immediately following Jeffs's imprisonment in 2007, the leadership of the church was unclear. Other claimed leaders in this period include:

In 2011, Warren Jeffs retook legal control of the church and purged 45 of its members.

As of 2018:

The FLDS Church teaches the doctrine of plural marriage, which states that God commands in order for a man to receive the highest form of salvation to have a minimum of three wives. Connected with this doctrine is the patriarchal doctrine, the belief that wives are required to be subordinate to their husbands and placement marriage. The prophet elects to take wives from men as well as give wives to men according to their worthiness. This practice is also called the law of placing or placement marriage.

The land and houses formerly occupied by the FLDS Church on the Utah/Arizona border are owned by the United Effort Plan (UEP), established in 1942 as a subsidiary organization of the church. The UEP also owns most of the property of the businesses that were controlled by FLDS Church members in that area. The church viewed this " United Order" as a means of living the traditional Latter Day Saint doctrine of the " Law of Consecration". In 2005, the UEP was seized by the state of Utah following a lawsuit by the Attorney General. The UEP was worth $100 million at this time. State control of the UEP ended in 2019, with the trust reformed into a "religiously neutral" entity benefiting the original donors and their heirs, including those who had left the FLDS Church.

The FLDS Church teaches that Satan's union with God's wife produced the Black race, and was necessary for our right to chose between good and evil as Eve had. It is taught that the seed of Cain survived the flood through Egyptus: in Warren Jeffs's words, "So Ham's wife that was preserved on the Ark was a Negro of the seed of Cain and there was a priestly purpose in it, that the Devil would have a representation as well as God."

Men and women are forbidden to have any tattoos or body piercings. In general, women do not cut their hair short or wear makeup, trousers, or any skirt above the knees. Men wear plain clothing, usually long-sleeved collared shirt and full-length trousers. Women and girls usually wear pastel-colored homemade long-sleeved prairie dresses, with hems between ankle and mid-calf, along with long stockings or trousers underneath, usually keeping their hair coiffed.

The FLDS Church is the seventh Latter Day Saint denomination to have built a temple.

In 2000, the Colorado City Unified School District had more than 1,200 students. When Warren Jeffs ordered that FLDS Church members remove their children from public schools, the number declined to around 250.

A view of the FLDS ranch in Eldorado, Texas

At the time of his death, FLDS Church leader Rulon Jeffs was confirmed to have married 46 women and fathered more than 60 children. It was estimated in 2018 that Warren Jeffs might have over 79 wives. Because the type of polygamy which is practiced is actually polygyny, the practice of it inevitably leads to bride shortages, child marriages, incest, and child abuse.

The FLDS Church members are known to violate laws when they practice polygamy. Additionally, former members of the FLDS Church have testified that incest and child sexual abuse are also prevalent among its members.

In 2015, Lyle Jeffs's estranged wife Charlene Jeffs claimed in a custody dispute that the FLDS Church currently enforces a doctrine which only allows women to have sex with men who are members of the group which is appointed to be "seed bearers", defined as "elect" men of a "worthy blood line chosen by the Priesthood to impregnate" women. Under this doctrine, men no longer are allowed to have children with their wives. Charlene Jeffs wrote in her custody petition: "It is the husband's responsibility to hold the hands of their wives while the seed bearer 'spreads his seed'. In layman terms, the husband is required to sit in the room while the chosen seed bearer, or a couple of them, rape his wife or wives." She also described the "Law of Sarah", in which FLDS women perform sex acts on each other in order to prepare for a sexual encounter with a man who is in the FLDS leadership. Lorin Holm, who claimed to have been part of Jeffs's "inner circle" before he was excommunicated from the group in 2011, later described the "Law of Sarah" practice in Jeffs's community as being akin to a lesbian sex show with Jeffs participating and sermonizing. Holm also said that mothers who would not take part were sent away to "redeem themselves", and their children were given to other women. This interpretation of the "Law of Sarah" differs from the description of it which was given in the 1843 polygamy revelation of Joseph Smith, because Smith only referred to it as a basis for consent to polygamous marriages by wives.

In 2022, FLDS Church leader Samuel Bateman was found to have 20 wives, which included underage girls, and, according to his family, also sought to marry his teenage daughter. According to criminal charges which were filed against him for destroying evidence linked to a federal investigation on sexual abuses, Bateman, who acted as the self-proclaimed " prophet" of a Colorado City-based splinter sect of the FLDS Church, used his position in the church to also sexually abuse 10 underage girls who he took as his wives in "atonement" ceremonies.

The FLDS Church has been suspected of trafficking underage female children across state lines, and it has also been suspected of trafficking underage girls across the U.S. borders with Canada and Mexico, for the purpose of involuntary plural marriage and child sexual abuse. The Royal Canadian Mounted Police also suspects that the FLDS Church trafficked more than 30 underage girls from Canada to the United States between the late 1990s and 2006 so they could be entered into polygamous marriages. RCMP spokesman Dan Moskaluk said of the activities of the FLDS Church: "In essence, it's human trafficking in connection with illicit sexual activity." According to the Vancouver Sun, it is unclear whether Canada's anti-human trafficking statute can be effectively applied against the FLDS Church's pre-2005 activities, as it may not apply retroactively. An earlier three-year-long investigation by local authorities in British Columbia into allegations of sexual abuse, human trafficking, and forced marriages by the FLDS resulted in no charges, but did result in legislative change.

FLDS Church leaders have encouraged their flock to take advantage of government assistance in the form of welfare and the WIC (woman-infant-child) programs. Since the government only recognizes one woman as the legal wife of a man, the rest of his wives are considered single mothers and as a result, they are eligible to receive government assistance. The more wives and children one has, the more welfare checks and food stamps one can receive. By 2003, for example, more than $6 million in public funds were being channeled into the community of Colorado City, Arizona. In his book Under the Banner of Heaven (p. 15), Jon Krakauer writes that, "Fundamentalists call defrauding the government 'bleeding the beast' and regard it as a virtuous act." Carolyn Campbell ("Inside Polygamy in the '90s", 102) adds, "The attitude of some polygamists is 'the government is untrustworthy and corrupt, and I'm above it, but give me those food stamps and free medical care.'"

Former members have reported that the FLDS Church has excommunicated more than 400 teenage boys for offenses such as dating or listening to rock music. Some former members claim that the real reason for these excommunications is the fact that there are not enough women for each male to receive three or more wives. Six men, aged 18 to 22, filed a conspiracy lawsuit against Jeffs and Sam Barlow, a former Mohave County deputy sheriff and close associate of Jeffs, for the "systematic excommunication" of young men to reduce competition for wives.

In its Spring 2005 Intelligence Report, the Southern Poverty Law Center added the FLDS Church to its list of hate groups because of the church's racist doctrines, which include its fierce condemnation of interracial relationships. Warren Jeffs has said, "the black race is the people through which the devil has always been able to bring evil unto the earth".

Former FLDS Church member Robert Richter reported to the Phoenix New Times that Warren Jeffs has repeatedly alluded to the 19th-century teaching of " blood atonement" in church sermons. Under the doctrine of blood atonement, certain serious sins, such as murder, can only be atoned for by the sinner's death.

The Colorado City/Hildale area has the world's highest incidence of fumarase deficiency, an extremely rare genetic disease. Geneticists attribute this to the prevalence of cousin marriages between descendants of two of the town's founders, Joseph Smith Jessop and John Yeates Barlow. It causes encephalopathy, severe intellectual disability, unusual facial features, brain malformation, and epileptic seizures.

On April 20, 2015, the U.S. Department of Labor assessed fines which totaled US$1.96 million against a group of FLDS Church members, including Lyle Jeffs, a brother of the church's controversial leader, Warren Jeffs, for alleged child labour violations which were committed during the church's 2012 pecan harvest at an orchard near Hurricane, Utah.

In April 2017, filings in U.S. District Court stated that Paragon Contractors, a company with ties to the FLDS Church, and Brian Jessop agreed to pay $200,000 in federal fines over the following year. These fines were levied against Paragon Contractors because it previously violated federal child labor laws. This settled a dispute with the U.S. Department of Labor hours before Paragon Contractors was due to face a potential contempt of court citation before a federal judge. The company was facing sanctions because in 2012, hundreds of children who were members of the Hildale-based FLDS Church were put to work harvesting pecans on a farm which was located in southern Utah under orders from FLDS Church leaders.

LDS Church's attitude

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) has stated that "the polygamists and polygamist organizations in parts of the Western United States and Canada have no affiliation whatsoever with The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints", and it has also declared that polygamy is strictly prohibited by the current doctrine of the LDS Church. Additionally, the LDS Church states that the term " Mormon" is incorrectly applied to the FLDS adherents and it also discourages its own members from using the term "Mormon" as a descriptive term for members of the LDS Church themselves.

Popular media, including books and television programs, have focused on the FLDS Church.

In 2013 and 2014, the TV Channel TLC aired two reality television series named Breaking the Faith and Escaping the Prophet. Both center on members of the FLDS leaving the group and adjusting to the outside world.

On June 28, 2014, Lifetime premiered a new movie called Outlaw Prophet: Warren Jeffs which stars Tony Goldwyn as Warren Jeffs. Lifetime has also made an original movie titled Escape from Polygamy (2013) which is inspired by the FLDS.

In 2011, the history of the FLDS Church was featured in Escaping Evil: My Life in a Cult on the Crime & Investigation Network cable channel.

On August 29, 2018, Great Big Story uploaded a short documentary-styled cinematic storytelling video titled "She Escaped a Cult and Now Helps Others" as part of its documentary series "Defenders" and follows Briell Decker, one of Warren Jeffs's 79 former wives, in her journey to help others walk out of the terrors that she experienced when she was a member of the church. She started the Short Creek Dream Center with Director Jena Jones to help other ex-FLDS members embrace freedom in one of Warren Jeffs's former homes through giving themon and providing residents with counselling therapy sessions, meals, temporary lodging as well as future job preparations and arrangements.

In 2017 "Evil Lives Here" (Season 2 Episode 3 'My Brother, the Devil') features Wallace Jeffs, half-brother to Warren Jeffs and nephew Brent Jeffs, revealing some of the horrors of the FLDS Church and the crimes of Warren Jeffs.

In 2022, Netflix premiered the documentary mini-series Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey which features the rise and fall of Warren Jeffs.

1. ^ "LDS Church wins, Canadian polygamist loses in fight for 'Mormon' name". The Salt Lake Tribune. 14 January 2015. Finally giving up the fight, Blackmore has agreed to change his group's corporate name to 'the Church of Jesus Christ (Original Doctrine) Inc.'

2. ^ "Polygamous church dispute may head to Utah court". Associated Press. 1 May 2011. Archived from the original on 6 May 2011.

3. ^ Walters, Joanna (16 March 2015). "Fleeing the FLDS: Followers are abandoning the notorious sect in droves". Al Jazeera America. There are no official statistics, but Sam Brower, a Utah-based private investigator who has worked on local and federal probes into the FLDS, says that more are leaving 'than we have seen for many years'. He believes that 500 to 1,000 members have left in the last one to two years and about 10,000 remain, mostly in Short Creek, with others scattered in small groups elsewhere.

4. ^ Winslow, Ben (11 August 2007). "37,000 'fundamentalists' counted in and near Utah". Deseret News. The FLDS are now believed to have only 8,000 members.

5. ^ Driggs, Ken (Winter 2001). "'This Will Someday Be the Head and Not the Tail of the Church': A History of the Mormon Fundamentalists at Short Creek". Journal of Church and State. Baylor University. 43 (1): 49-80. doi:10.1093/jcs/43.1.49. ISSN 0021-969X. JSTOR 23920013. OCLC 1000387150.

6. ^ Anderson, J. Max (1979). The Polygamy Story: Fiction and Fact. SHIELDS (Scholarly & Historical Information Exchange for Latter-Day Saints).

7. ^ Dougherty, John (13 March 2003). "Polygamy's Odyssey: A brief history of the Mormon tenet". Phoenix New Times. Archived from the original on 21 October 2014.

8. ^ Adams, Brooke. "Polygamy leadership tree: Religious ideal grows, branches out" (PDF). The Salt Lake Tribune. Archived from the original (PDF) on October 21, 2013.

9. ^ Driggs, Ken (Winter 1992), "Who Shall Raise the Children? Vera Black and the Rights of Polygamous Utah Parents", Utah Historical Quarterly, 60 (1): 27-46, doi:10.2307/45063508, JSTOR 45063508, S2CID 254436238

10. ^ "Polygamy, Freedom of Religion, and Equality: What Happens When Rights Collide?". LAWNOW.

11. ^ "Jeffs dedicates FLDS temple site at YFZ Ranch". The Eldorado Success. January 11, 2005. Archived from the original on January 22, 2009.

12. ^ "HAVE YOU SEEN THIS MAN? FBI Announces New Top Tenner, FBI Headline Archives" (Press release). FBI. May 6, 2006. Archived from the original on April 9, 2010.

13. ^ "Polygamist 'prophet' to serve at least 10 years in prison". CNN. November 20, 2007.

14. ^ "Raid shines light on secretive polygamous sect". CNN. April 8, 2008. Archived from the original on September 23, 2008.

15. ^ Wojtecki, Katherine (April 15, 2008). "At the green gate, and then a glimpse of the polygamist's life". CNN.

16. ^ Wagner, Dennis (February 24, 2011). "Jailed sect leader retakes legal control of church". . Utah records show Nielson formally quit that post Jan. 28.

17. ^ Richardson, Kent S. (November 28, 2012). "The State of Texas v. 2420 County Road 300, Eldorado, Schleicher, County, Texas 76936: Plaintiff's Original Notice of Seizure and Intended Forfeiture" (PDF). Cause No.: 3164. The State of Texas Attorney General. Archived from the original (PDF) on February 17, 2017.

18. ^ Martinez, Sergeant Marcos (27 November 2012). "Affidavit for Search and Seizure Warrant - 2420 County Road 300, Eldorado, Schleicher County, Texas 76936" (PDF). Cause No.: 3164. The State of Texas Attorney General. Archived from the original (PDF) on 8 September 2018.

19. ^ McKinley, Carol (March 5, 2011), "Inside a troubled fundamentalist Mormon sect", , In just a few weeks, Jeffs has gone on a rampage, kicking out at least 40 of his most pious men. One of those faithful is Merril Jessop, a 70year-old FLDS bishop.

20. ^ Tuchman, Gary (February 24, 2011). "Sources: Jailed polygamist retakes control of church, ousts 45 members". . Archived from the original on January 26, 2013.

21. ^ House, Dawn (June 28, 1998), "Polygamist matriarch knows her place in Colorado City society", The Salt Lake Tribune, Archive Article ID: 100F3981B9AED0AD (NewsBank), archived from the original on March 6, 2000

22. The other six are the ^ Church of Christ, the LDS Church, the Community of Christ, the Apostolic United Brethren, the Church of Christ (Wightite), and the Righteous Branch of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

23. ^ D'Onofrio, Eve (2005). "Child Brides, Inegalitarianism, and the Fundamentalist Polygamous Family in the United States". International Journal of Law, Policy and the Family. 19 (3): 373-394. doi:10.1093/lawfam/ebi028.

24. ^ "Polygamist sect 'demands husbands watch while seed bearers impregnate their wives'". The Independent. October 1, 2015.

25. "Dozens of girls may have been trafficked to U.S. to marry". CTV News. August 11, 2011.

26. Moore-Emmett, Andrea (July 27, 2010). ^ "Polygamist Warren Jeffs Can Now Marry Off Underaged Girls With Impunity". Ms. blog. Retrieved December 8, 2012.

27. ^ Robert Matas (March 30, 2009). "Where 'the handsome ones go to the leaders'". The Globe and Mail.

28. ^ Matthew Waller (November 25, 2011). "FLDS may see more charges: International sex trafficking suspected". San Angelo Standard-Times.

29. ^ Perkins, Nancy (August 28, 2004). "FLDS Church, leaders sued by 6 'lost boys'". Deseret Morning News. Archived from the original on October 21, 2014.

30. ^ "Hate Groups Map: Utah". Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLCenter.org). Archived from the original on December 8, 2007.

31. ^ Bayley JP; Launonen V; Tomlinson IP (2008). "The FH mutation database: an online database of fumarate hydratase mutations involved in the MCUL (HLRCC) tumor syndrome and congenital fumarase deficiency". BMC Med. Genet. 9 (1): 20. doi:10.1186/1471-2350-9-20. PMC . PMID 18366737.

32. ^ Kerrigan JF; Aleck KA; Tarby TJ; Bird CR; Heidenreich RA (2000). "Fumaric aciduria: clinical and imaging features". 47 (5): 583-588. doi:10.1002/1531-8249(200005)47:5<583::AID-ANA5>3.0.CO;2-Y. PMID 10805328. S2CID 10448322.

Brower, Sam (2011). Prophet's Prey: My Seven-Year Investigation into Warren Jeffs and the Fundamentalist Church of Latter-Day Saints. New York City: Bloomsbury USA. ISBN 9781608192755.

Bradley, Martha Sontag (1993). Kidnapped from That Land: The Government Raids on the Short Creek Polygamists. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press. ISBN 0874804159. OCLC 28183503.

Hales, Brian C. (2006). Modern Polygamy and Mormon Fundamentalism: The Generations After the Manifesto. Salt Lake City: Greg Kofford Books. ISBN 1-58958-035-4. OCLC 64510545.

Foster, Craig L.; Watson, Marianne T. (2015). American Polygamy: A History of Fundamentalist Mormon Faith. Charleston, SC: The History Press. ISBN 9781467137522.

"Polygamy". Mormon Newsroom. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Hoffman, Claire (June 2008). "Satan's Accountant". Condé Nast Portfolio. American City Business Journals. - An article about Bruce Wisan, who was brought in to try to return property to the members of the FLDS group at Short Creek, and was met with great resistance. As featured on This American Life.

Quinn, D. Michael (Summer 1998). "Plural marriage and Mormon fundamentalism". Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 31 (2): 1-68. doi:10.2307/45226443. JSTOR 45226443. S2CID 254325184.

Van Wagoner, Richard S. (1989) [1986], Mormon Polygamy: A History (2nd ed.), Salt Lake City: Signature Books, ISBN 0941214796, OCLC 19515803.

Watson, Marianne T. (Spring 2007). "The 1948 Secret Marriage of Louis J. Barlow: Origins of FLDS Placement Marriage". Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought. 40 (1): 83-136. doi:10.2307/45227157. JSTOR 45227157. S2CID 254401041.

Wright, Stuart A. (Editor) and James T. Richardson (Editor) (2011). Saints Under Siege: The Texas State Raid on the Fundamentalist Latter Day Saints. New and Alternative Religions. NYU Press. ISBN 0814795293.

Official sites

Journalism

Legal

Other

Keep Sweet: Pray and Obey (2022)-A Netflix series where survivors of the organization discuss their experiences in the organization.

Prophet's Prey (2015)-A Showtime documentary about the life of Warren Jeffs with interviews from insiders & survivors.

Lifting the Veil of Polygamy (2007)-A documentary film critical of the history and modern-day expressions of Mormon polygamy, including numerous testimonials, by the Main Street Church of Brigham City.

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Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints - Wikipedia

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The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints ( FLDS Church) is a religious sect of the fundamentalist Mormon denominations whose members practice polygamy. It is estimated that 6,000 to 10,000 members reside in Hildale, Utah; Rocky Ridge, Utah, and Colorado City, Arizona (raided); Eldorado, Texas ( raided); Westcliffe, Colorado; Mancos, Colorado; Creston and Bountiful, British Columbia (sold); and Pringle, South Dakota (sold).

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noun

1. 1.

the quality of being appealing in a pretty or endearing way.

"the innocence, exuberance, and overall cuteness of all these children"

2. 2.

INFORMAL•NORTH AMERICAN

the quality of being sexually attractive.

"this actress has cuteness written all over her face"

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Cuteness is a subjective term describing a type of attractiveness commonly associated with youth and appearance, as well as a scientific concept and analytical model in ethology, first introduced by Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz proposed the concept of baby schema ( Kindchenschema), a set of facial and body features, that make a creature appear "cute" and activate ("release") in others the motivation to care for it. Cuteness may be ascribed to people as well as things that are regarded as attractive or charming.

Juvenile traits

Doug Jones, a visiting scholar in anthropology at Cornell University, said that the proportions of facial features change with age due to changes in hard tissue and soft tissue, and Jones said that these "age-related changes" cause juvenile animals to have the "characteristic 'cute' appearance" of proportionately smaller snouts, higher foreheads and larger eyes than their adult counterparts. In terms of hard tissue, Jones said that the neurocranium grows a lot in juveniles while the bones for the nose and the parts of the skull involved in chewing food only reach maximum growth later. In terms of soft tissue, Jones said that the cartilaginous tissues of the ears and nose continue to grow throughout a person's lifetime, starting at age twenty-five the eyebrows descend on the " supraorbital rim" from a position above the supraorbital rim to a position below it, the "lateral aspect of the eyebrows" sags with age, making the eyes appear smaller, and the red part of the lips gets thinner with age due to loss of connective tissue.

Biological function

Konrad Lorenz argued in 1949 that infantile features triggered nurturing responses in adults and that this was an evolutionary adaptation which helped ensure that adults cared for their children, ultimately securing the survival of the species. Some later scientific studies have provided further evidence for Lorenz's theory. For example, it has been shown that human adults react positively to infants who are stereotypically cute. Studies have also shown that responses to cuteness-and to facial attractiveness in general-seem to be similar across and within cultures. In a study conducted by Stephan Hamann of Emory University, he found using an fMRI, that cute pictures increased brain activity in the orbital frontal cortex.

Growth pattern of children

Desmond Collins, who was an Extension Lecturer of Archaeology at London University, said that the lengthened youth period of humans is part of neoteny.

Gender differences

The perceived cuteness of an infant is influenced by the gender and behavior of the infant. In the Koyama et al. (2006) research, female infants are seen as cute for the physical attraction that female infants display more than male infants; whereas research by Karraker (1990) demonstrates that a caregiver's attention and involvement in the male infant's protection could be solely based on the perception of happiness and attractiveness of the child.

The gender of an observer can determine their perception of the difference in cuteness. In a study by Sprengelmeyer et al. (2009) it was suggested that women were more sensitive to small differences in cuteness than the same aged men. This suggests that reproductive hormones in women are important for determining cuteness.

This finding has also been demonstrated in a study conducted by T.R. Alley in which he had 25 undergraduate students (consisting of 7 men and 18 women) rate cuteness of infants depending on different characteristics such as age, behavioral traits, and physical characteristics such as head shape, and facial feature configuration.

Preference in young children

Borgi et al. stated that young children demonstrate a preference for faces with a more "infantile facial" arrangement i.e. a rounder face, a higher forehead, bigger eyes, a smaller nose and a smaller mouth. In a study that used three- to six-year-old children, Borgi et al. (2014) asserted that the children showed a viewing time preference toward the eyes of "high infantile" faces of dogs, cats and humans as opposed to "low infantile" faces of those three species.

Hormones and cuteness variation

There are suggestions that hormone levels can affect a person's perception of cuteness. Konrad Lorenz suggests that "caretaking behaviour and affective orientation" towards infants as an innate mechanism, and this is triggered by cute characteristics such as "chubby cheeks" and large eyes. The Sprengelmeyer et al. (2009) study expands on this claim by manipulating baby pictures to test groups on their ability to detect differences in cuteness. The studies show that premenopausal women detected cuteness better than same aged postmenopausal women. Furthermore, to support this claim, women taking birth control pills that raise levels of reproductive hormones detect cuteness better than same aged women not taking the pill.

Sprengelmeyer gathered 24 young women, 24 young men, and 24 older women to participate in his study. He ran three studies in which images of white European babies were shown, and the participants were asked to rate them on a cuteness scale of one to seven. The study found differences among the groups in cuteness discrimination, which ruled out cohort and social influences on perceived cuteness. In the second study it was found that premenopausal women discriminated cuteness at a higher level than their postmenopausal female peers. This finding suggested a biological factor, which was then investigated further in the third study. Here, Sprengelmeyer compared cuteness sensitivity between premenopausal women who were, and were not taking oral contraceptives. The study concluded that post-perceptual processes were impacted by hormone levels ( progesterone and estrogen specifically) in females, and thus impacted sensitivity to cuteness.

Caregiving correlates

A study by Konrad Lorenz in the early 1940s found that the shape of an infant's head positively correlated with adult caregiving and an increased perception of "cute". However a study by Thomas Alley found no such correlation and pointed out faulty procedures in that study. Alley's study found that cephalic head shape of an infant did induce a positive response from adults, and these children were considered to be more "cute". In his study, Alley had 25 undergraduate students rate line drawings of an infant's face. The same drawing was used each time, however the cephalic head shape was changed using a cardioidal transformation (a transformation that models cephalic growth in relation to ageing process) to adjust the perceived age; other features of the face were not changed. The study concluded that a large head shape increased perceived cuteness, which then elicited a positive response in adult caretaking. The study also noted that perceived cuteness was also dependent on other physical and behavioural characteristics of the child, including age.

In a study by McCabe (1984) of children whose ages ranged from toddlers to teenagers, the children with more "adult-like" facial proportions were more likely to have experienced physical abuse than children of the same age who had less "adult-like" facial proportions.

A study by Karraker (1990) suggested that "an adult's beliefs about the personality and expected behavior of an infant can influence the adult's interaction with the infant", and gave evidence that in this way "basic cuteness effects may occasionally be obscured in particular infants". Koyama (2006) said that an adult caregiver's perception of an infant's cuteness can motivate the amount of care and protection the caregiver provides, and the admiration demonstrated toward the infant, and concluded that "the adults' protective feeling for children appeared to be a more important criterion for the judgment of a boy's cuteness."

Melanie Glocker (2009) provided experimental evidence that infants' cuteness motivates caretaking in adults, even if they are not related to the infant. Glocker asked individuals to rate the level of cuteness of pictured infants and noted the motivation that these participants had to care for the infants. The research suggested that individuals' rating of the perceived cuteness of an infant corresponded to the level of motivation an individual had to care for this infant. Glocker and colleagues then used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), to demonstrate that baby faces with higher content of baby schema features, generated more activation in the nucleus accumbens, a small brain area central to motivation and reward. This work elucidated the neural mechanism through which baby schema ( Kindchenschema) may motivate ("release") caretaking behavior. Furthermore, cute infants were more likely to be adopted and rated as more "likeable, friendly, healthy and competent" than infants who were less cute. There is an implication that baby schema response is crucial to human development because it lays the foundation for care giving and the relationship between child and caretaker.

Cultural significance

Doug Jones, a visiting scholar in anthropology at Cornell University, said that the faces of monkeys, dogs, birds and even the fronts of cars can be made to appear cuter by morphing them with a " cardioidal" ( heart-shaped) mathematical transformation. Jones said that negative cardioidal strain results in faces appearing less mature and cuter by causing facial features at the top of the face to expand outward and upward while causing features at the bottom of the face to contract inward and upward.

Nancy Etcoff, Ph.D. in psychology from Boston University, said "cartoonists capitalize on our innate preferences for juvenile features", and she mentioned Mickey Mouse and Bambi as examples of this trend. She said Mickey Mouse's bodily proportions "aged in reverse" since his inception, because "[h]is eyes and head kept getting bigger while his limbs kept getting shorter and thicker", culminating in him resembling a "human infant". She further mentioned the "exaggerated high forehead" and the " doe eyes" of Bambi as another example of this trend.

Mark J. Estren, Ph.D. in psychology from the University at Buffalo, said cute animals get more public attention and scientific study due to having physical characteristics that would be considered neotenous from the perspective of human development. Estren said that humans should be mindful of their bias for cute animals, so animals that would not be considered cute are also valued in addition to cute animals.

The perception of cuteness is culturally diverse. The differences across cultures can be significantly associated to the need to be socially accepted.

Cute animals

William R. Miller, assistant professor of biology at Baker University in Kansas, said that most people, upon seeing tardigrades, say that they are the cutest invertebrates.

Kenta Takada (2016) said that Miyanoshita (2008) said that the design of chocolates made to look like rhinoceros beetle larvae is a design that is both cute and disgusting.

Evolutionary biologists suspect that "puppy dog eyes", a trait absent from wild wolves, were unintentionally selected for by humans during the domestication of dogs.

References

1. Gould, S.J. (1980)."A Biological Homage to Mickey Mouse", in The Panda's Thumb: More Reflections in Natural History. W.W. Norton & Company.

2. Lorenz, Konrad. ^ Studies in Animal and Human Behavior. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univ Press; 1971

3. Glocker ML, Langleben DD, Ruparel K, Loughead JW, Valdez JN, Griffin MD, Sachser N, Gur RC. "Baby schema modulates the brain reward system in nulliparous women." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences - U.S.A 2009 June 2;106(22):9115-9119.

4. ^ "cute, adj.". OED Online. March 2012. Oxford University Press. (accessed April 29, 2012).

5. Jones, D.; et al. (December 1995). "Sexual Selection, Physical Attractiveness, and Facial Neoteny: Cross-cultural Evidence and Implications [and Comments and Reply]". Current Anthropology. 36 (5): 723-748. doi:10.1086/204427.

6. ^ Schneider, Avie (10 January 2013). "Agreed, Baby Pandas Are Cute. But Why?". National Public Radio.

7. (1970). Special Issue: Early Man. World Archaeology Volume 2, Issue 1, DOI: 10.1080/00438243.1970.9979467 page 112 ^ link

8. ^ Bogin, B. (1997). Evolutionary Hypotheses for Human Childhood. Yearbook of Physical Anthropology, vol. 40, pp. 63-89

9. ^ Borgi, M. et al. (2014). Baby schema in human and animal faces induces cuteness perception and gaze allocation in children. In Frontiers in Psychology. 5(411).

10. Sherman, G. D., Haidt, J., & Coan, J.A. (2009). Viewing Cute Images Increases Behavioral Carefulness. Emotion, 9(2). Pages 283 - 285. Link.

11. ^ Kleck, Robert E.; Stephen A. Richardson; Ronald, Linda (1974). "Physical appearance cues and interpersonal attraction in children". Child Development. 45 (2): 305-310. doi:10.2307/1127949. JSTOR 1127949.

12. Miller, W.R. (2011). Tardigrades: These ambling, eight-legged microscopic "bears of the moss" are cute, ubiquitous, all but indestructible and a model organism for education. ^ American Scientist, 99(5). Page 384. Link.

13. Takada, K. (2016). Gummi Candy as a Realistic Representation of a Rhinoceros Beetle Larva. ^ American Entomologist, 62(3). Page 154. Link.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.description
Cuteness is a subjective term describing a type of attractiveness commonly associated with youth and appearance, as well as a scientific concept and analytical model in ethology, first introduced by Konrad Lorenz. Lorenz proposed the concept of baby schema ( Kindchenschema), a set of facial and body features, that make a creature appear "cute" and activate ("release") in others the motivation to care for it.

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All artwork is © copyright 2017 the artists. Photos by American Benchers.