Curious Cults

The people in these pages went looking for a family, a future, and a truth too complete to doubt.

The believers were rarely fools. They were teachers, doctors, farmers, and engineers, and they followed prophets who promised new worlds. Joanna Southcott left a sealed box to be opened only before twenty-four bishops, and the bishops never assembled. Cyrus Teed led his followers to a Florida beach in 1897 to demonstrate that humanity lives on the inside of a hollow earth. Some Millerites sold their farms and gathered in meeting houses to wait for the end of the world. The Shakers built plain, perfect furniture and danced their worship.

Curious Cults gathers thirty documented movements into five chapters: prophets and their voices, reckonings with the end of days, invented gods, utopian settlements and their shadows, and the strange faiths of the modern age. Some stories end in craftsmanship and quiet decline. Others end in tragedy, and the book treats the people who suffered with care. Every account keeps to the established record, hedges where the evidence is uncertain, and is told with sympathy for the believers and clear eyes about what belief can cost.

Each entry opens with a full-page engraving-style plate, and a chapter-by-chapter bibliography points to the sources. The question these histories ask is how easily, given the right voice at the right moment, any of us might believe.