The Cult

38 days till departure

Yesterday was Purim for Jews and Holi for Hindus. These holidays have some similarity in both their season and their rituals. On Purim, the tradition is to get so drunk that you cannot differentiate between Haman the Wicked and Mordechai the Righteous. On Holi, you are supposed to drink bhang lassis and throw colored powder and paint at others. I still don’t know the religious significance of Holi, but I’d really like to celebrate it just the same.

Alas, commonality in religious traditions across the most disparate and diverse cultures is as human marriage and funeral rites. Many religions celebrate both the winter solstice and spring equinox. Bodhi, Christmas and Hanukah come to mind for the former; Easter and Passover, while hardly exhaustive, make the point for the latter.

Reflecting on the likeness of various faiths in their beliefs, one can also discern a common thread regarding human religious institutions. Using the formula, I could give flight to my just-so-barely suppressed lust for ultimate power by starting my very own new age religion. This could go over particularly well in India, where so many travelers go to find Answers. What are the things I need to get started?

Charismatic Leader
All such movements revolve around a charismatic leader. The Rebbes of various Hasidic courts enjoy almost slavish devotion. Sometimes smallish movements venerate their law-givers even more. Heck, Juche as a religion made Kim Il Sung into a quasi-deity.

The charismatic leader inspires devotion through his greatness, wisdom and holiness. People cleave to the big daddy who promises rewards to the good and punishment to evildoers, and of course attention to the disquiet of the individual follower. As the Messenger, I do feel that a proper personality cult is the order of the day. And I can do the charismatic thing without much ado.

Message of Enlightenment and Salvation
I’ll offer my acolytes a vision of a better world. People are searching for answers. Invariably, over the course of this spiritual quest, answers are provided by those who purport to bestow wisdom. Yet so often, these answers come up short. They are not articulated in a sufficiently accessible manner. They conflict with the vestiges of belief systems ingrained from childhood. And so on.

My doctrine will shorten that cognitive gap between the end of rationality and the beginning of faith; the leap will not have to be so great. You can find the answer through joy. (Breslev or Osho, anyone?)

It goes without saying that achieving the ultimate wisdom, inner peace, and overall enlightenment requires a lifetime of devotion to the cause. Since the doctrine is a rather central element to a religion, obviously I’ll need to flesh this one out a bit. But you get the general idea.

Group Speak
In putting the aforementioned doctrine into practice, I will make an effort to coin neologisms for common use among devotees, thus creating a wink-and-nod bond among the group. This is coupled with the next element.

Distrust of Outsiders
While intolerance of other belief systems is not my style, it could certainly prove handy to employ the former element and others like it to foster a certain distrust of other, let’s say, approaches. That said, I don’t envision any enforcement regime.

Inner Circle or pseudo-Clergy
I finally get it. The entire hierarchy of the Roman Catholic Church now makes perfect sense to me. If the clergy can make itself into the kind yet authoritative big daddy, bolstered by an aura of holy infallibility, assisted by a coterie of handsome young men who are not supposed to have sex ever, the senior clergy can pretty much cherry-pick from all the earthly desires it can manage to lust after. Vast wealth helps, too.

I’m not so ambitious as to aspire to the Church of Rome. But a coterie of 20-30 well groomed disciples would certainly fit the bill.

Alternative Career Change
Who am I fooling here? Whatever religious doctrine I could come up with, fertile imagination notwithstanding, would be a load of bunk in the final analysis. Without meaning disrespect to anyone’s beliefs, at the end of the day, isn’t it all? Don’t we all cozy up to those particular parts of religious doctrine that appeal to us most? And downplay the more bothersome bits (until we are exhorted to rely on faith in the face of it)? I could not be the leader of a movement whose doctrine I did not fully subscribe to, even if I invented it myself.

Fortunately, there will soon be a job opening which has all the romantic ideological trappings of my misspent youth. As we all know, Fidel Castro is on the ropes. How agreeable to be the benevolent dictator of a pleasant Caribbean island!

A little analysis brings me rapidly to the conclusion that I am eminently qualified for the position:

• I speak Spanish
• I can do the charismatic leader shtick
• I like the tropical climate
• I like to eat yellow rice, black beans and pork
• I can dance salsa
• I think that some modified version of socialism, while having its costs, is a just and utilitarian economic model
• I wouldn’t mind thumbing my nose at the current world order
  

Indeed, I could get used to being addressed as El Presidente. It becomes me. And I get all the perks of power, without feeling sheepish about it.

Any advice on how to proceed?