The first was the late 7th century Deuteronomistic reform of official Judean religion under king Josiah, who banned many elements of the old polytheistic cult from the Temple, and the sudden collapse of Assyria and the rise of Babylon to take its place ; the second was exile of the royal court, the priests and other members of the ruling elite following the Babylonian destruction of Jerusalem c. 586 BCE.

Mudbrick buildings just south of Khufu's Valley Temple contained mud sealings of Khufu and have been suggested to be a settlement serving the cult of Khufu after his death.

In the Temple of Hera at Olympia, Hera's seated cult figure was older than the warrior figure of Zeus that accompanied it.

* 1978 – In Jonestown, Guyana, Jim Jones led his Peoples Temple cult to a mass murder-suicide that claimed 918 lives in all, 909 of them in Jonestown itself, including over 270 children.

Christianity as it emerged out of Second Temple Judaism ( or Hellenistic Judaism ) stood in competition with other religions advocating " pagan monotheism ", including Neoplatonism, Mithraism, Gnosticism, Manichaeanism, and the cult of Dionysus.

* The two most popular depictions of the cult in film are the 1939 film, Gunga Din, and the 1984 film, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom.

Both films have the heroes fighting secret revivals of the cult to prevent them from resuming their reigns of terror, although Temple of Doom included features that were never part of the Thuggee, such as the removal of the heart during a ritual.

* November 18 – Jonestown incident: In Guyana, Jim Jones leads his Peoples Temple cult in a mass murder-suicide that claims 918 lives in all, 909 of them at Jonestown itself, including over 270 children.

Jonestown, the Guyana location of the Jim Jones cult and Peoples Temple mass suicide, was thought to be a test site for MKUltra medical and mind control experiments after the official end of the program.

Her Aventine Temple served the plebeians as cult centre, legal archive, treasury and possibly law-court ; its foundation was contemporaneous with the passage of the Lex Sacrata, which established the office and person of plebeian aediles and tribunes as inviolate representatives of the Roman people.

The instances closest to " ritual killing " in the criminal history of modern society would be pathological serial killers such as the Zodiac Killer, and mass suicides with doomsday cult background, such as the Peoples Temple, Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, Order of the Solar Temple or Heaven's Gate incidents.

The Stone-Cone Temple, named for the mosaic of colored stone cones driven into the adobe brick façade, may be the earliest water cult in Mesopotamia.

In the city of Rome itself, the earliest known state cult to dea Roma was combined with cult to Venus at the Hadrianic Temple of Venus and Roma.

Examples of American cult leaders ( the dark side of charismatic authority ) include Jim Jones ( leader of the Peoples Temple ), David Koresh ( leader of the Branch Davidians ), Charles Manson ( leader of the Manson Family ), and Theodore Rinaldo ( leader of Eden Farms ).

* CBC Digital Archives-Solar Temple: A cult gone wrong

In 1977, the cult classic Shaw Brothers film Shaolin Temple was released and in 1982 a film by the same name starring Jet Li is credited as a major reason for the revival of the Shaolin Temple in China after the Cultural Revolution.

Temple was abducted and taken to a mountain lair of the cult.

During the ceremony intended to invest Temple with leadership, however, King Snake rebelled, declared himself the next Naja-Naja, and his followers healed his eyes in a Lazarus Pit the cult has access to ( which could only be opened by Temple, explaining Sir Edmund's subterfuge ).

His eyesight restored, Sir Edmund battled against Robin ( who was attempting to rescue Danny Temple ), while Kobra ( the prior leader of the cult ) attempted to regain control of the Kobra cult.

However, the name Artemis ( variants Arktemis, Arktemisa ) is most likely related to Greek árktos ‘ bear ’ ( from PIE * h₂ŕ ̥ tḱos ), supported by the bear cult that the goddess had in Attica ( Brauronia ) and the Neolithic remains at the Arkouditessa, as well as the story about Callisto, which was originally about Artemis ( Arcadian epithet kallisto ).

W. S. Ferguson suggested that Artemis Soteira and Artemis Kalliste were joined in a common cult administered by a single priest.

According to Françoise Hélène Pairault's study, historical and archaeological evidence point to the fact that both Diana of the Aventine and Diana Nemorensis were the product of the direct or indirect influence of the cult of Artemis spread by the Phoceans among the Greek towns of Campania Cuma and Capua, which in turn passed it over to the Etruscans and the Latins by the VI and V centuries BC.

The cult introduced by Orestes at Nemi is apparently that of the Artemis Tauropolos.

Another theory is that the name was borrowed from a cult of devotees to Artemis in Asia Minor, whose demeanor and dress somewhat resembled those of the group in Judaea.

It existed in some local cults like the cult of the vegetation goddess Helena ( dendron, " tree ") in Rhodes, and a cult of Artemis in Peloponnese.

In this cult Artemis is hanged from a tree, just like Ariadne in Greek mythology, who was hanged from a tree when she was abandoned by Theseus.

It had a large temple of the cult of Apollo of Delphi on a hilltop overlooking the port, and a temple of the cult of Artemis of Ephesus at the other end of the city.

Temples dedicated to her existed in Athens, Sparta, Massalia and between Ambrosus and Anticyra in Phocis, where, as Artemis Diktynna, her cult object was a black stone worked by Aeginetans, but she was primarily a goddess of local importance in Western Crete, such as Lysos and West of Kydonia.

While in Tauris Orestes is to carry off the xoanon ( carved wooden cult image ) of Artemis which had fallen from heaven, and bring it to Athens.

These close identifications of Iphigenia with Artemis have encouraged some scholars to believe that she was originally a hunting goddess whose cult was subsumed by the Olympian Artemis.

* Ephesus: The site of a cult of Artemis ( Diana of the Ephesians ) whose devotees included Lydians.

Often the epithet is the result of fusion of the Olympian divinity with an older one: Poseidon Erechtheus, Artemis Orthia, reflect intercultural equations of a divinity with an older one, that is generally considered its pendant ; thus most Roman gods and goddesses, especially the Twelve Olympians, had traditional counterparts in Greek, Etruscan, and most other Mediterranean pantheons, e. g. Jupiter as head of the Olympian Gods with Zeus, but in specific cult places there may even be a different equation, based on one specific aspect of the divinity.

They adopted the cult of Dionysus, known amongst them as Dyalus or Dryalus, and Herodotus mentions that the Thracian and Paeonian women offered sacrifice to Queen Artemis ( probably Bendis ).

These remarks of Pausanias find confirmation in the form of the cult in historic times, centering on a many-breasted icon of the " Lady of Ephesus " whom Greeks called Artemis.

His cult believed that Artemis asked Asclepius to resurrect the young man since he had vowed chastity to her.

There is a good deal of evidence to connect the Greek goddess Artemis with a cult of the bear.

The name of the early town is recorded on a long inscription on stone which deals with a local cult of Ephesian Artemis.

It recovered however quickly its prosperity, as one can judge by the construction of an Artemis temple and the commissioning of the cult statue to the famous sculptor Praxiteles, already by 330 BC.

In Rome the cult of Diana should have been almost as old as the city itself as Varro mentions her in the list of deities to whom king Titus Tatius vowed a shrine.

The presence of a Hellenised Diana at Nemi should be related to the presence of the cult in Campania, as Diana Tifatina was appelled Trivia in an imperial age inscription which mentions a flamen Virbialis dedicated by eques C. Octavius Verus.

Her cult was closely identified with that of Diana, who seems to have been represented in the processions that started Circus games, and with Sol Indiges, usually identified as her brother.

In medieval Europe a widespread belief held Herodias to be the supernatural leader of a supposed cult of witches, synonymous with Diana, Holda and Abundia.

The word is earlier found in a book titled Apologia della Congresso Notturno Delle Lamie by Girolamo Tartarotti ( 1751 ), who uses stregheria to describe Italian witchcraft as the cult of the goddess Diana.

Although this view has been disputed by American scholars, Italian ethnohistorian, Paolo Portone, has demonstrated reference to the cult of Diana in the records of the earliest witch trials, including in the Canon Episcopi.

James Frazer's seminal Golden Bough centres around the cult of Diana Nemorensis.

In the 1890s he wrote a series of pamphlets and books denouncing Freemasonry, charging their lodges with worshiping the devil and alleging that Diana Vaughan had written for him her confessions of the Satanic " Palladism " cult.

Egeria as a nymph or minor goddess of the Roman religious system is of unclear origin ; she is consistently, though not in a very clear way, associated with another figure of the Diana type ; their cult is known to have been celebrated at sacred groves, such as the site of Nemi at Aricia, and another one close to Rome, expedient for her presumed regular meetings with King Numa ; both goddesses are also associated with water gifted with wondrous, religious or medical properties ( the source in that grove at Rome was dedicated to the exclusive use of the Vestals ); their cult was associated with other, male figures of even more obscure meaning, such as one named Virbius, or a Manius Egerius, presumably a youthful male, that anyway in later years was identified with figures like Atys or Hippolyte, because of the Diana reference ( see Frazer ).

Exploring themes of love, loss, parenthood, and the cult of celebrity, it is set against the backdrop of New Labour's rise to power, the death of Princess Diana, and the ill-advised development of the Millennium Dome.

One ship was a shrine dedicated to ceremonies for the Egyptian Isis cult or the cult of Diana Nemorensis, designed to be towed, and the other was a pleasure boat with buildings on it.

A Touch of Brimstone is the twenty-first episode of the fourth series of the 1960s cult British spy-fi television series The Avengers, starring Patrick Macnee and Diana Rigg.

On more level ground, diannic endemic plants can be found ( the town of Denia takes its name from the cult to the roman goddess Diana ) such as the valencian rock violet and also diannic pitiusic vegetation ( in reference to the nearby archipelago Pitiusas ) such as rock thistle and valerian can be found.