Death Cults

Communism is the biggest death cult in world history, but it's more esoteric. You think you're creating a paradise, but you're really just filling pits with dead bodies. And then when your economic system fails, you have a bunch of middle class western people try and repeat it all again.

If there was a death god that was fed with the souls of the deceased, Communism would be his tool.

Precolumbian indios used to kill people daily believing blood keeps the sun from going away if i recall correctly

It is something of a ruling council, made up of four Speakers and led by the Listener, representing the five fingers of the hand.

this would be the closest thing to OP
Guy joins a travelling caravan and make friends then at night he strangles a few poor fuckers in their sleep and runs

literally all of the central 'merrica (aztecs, mayas, inca)

Sparta had the tradition of sending its young men to strangle helots as an initiation, I guess that's kinda a death cultish thing to do. But it's more of a slave-master dominance relationship.

Go on.

the goal of buddhism is total annihilation

Typically they'd be more thorough than that.

One guy would join the caravan to scope it out, and then the rest of the gang would show up and strangle everyone in their sleep, bury the bodies, steal the stuff, and then fuck off before sunrise.

Not him, but the Spartans had a sort of secret police made specifically to keep the helots in their place.

They would spy on the helots until they figured out who among them was particularly strong/capable/rebellious, then give the task to a Spartan about to pass into adulthood to go and kill him. Some real spy shit. Assuming it's true, and since we have no Spartan documents, who knows.

But despite the Spartans being considered so honorable by their neighbors, we have countless reports (again, maybe they're just propaganda from Athens) of them being complete dicks to the helots. Like getting the best together, only to slaughter them wholesale.

>en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crypteia

More there.

Please, don't talk about things you know nothing about.

I forgot to mention, almost all ancient historians now agree that Carthage baby-killings weren't propaganda and they really did happen.

>theguardian.com/science/2014/jan/21/carthaginians-sacrificed-own-children-study

Random Google result, but the guy who wrote Carthage Must Be Destroyed and is an expert on the topic also agrees.

>muh semitism

The Aztecs.

There was an ancient Carthaginian cult that murdered babies.

What makes a culture kill its babbies?

It wasn't a cult, though, it was its citizens. Unless you consider the entirety of Carthage a death cult.

Fuck knows why exactly. Probably to get some sort of blessing from the gods, or to release the souls of the babies into the ether.

Still, you have to realize that this was in a time when babies (and children) perished all the time. From what I know, ancient people were rather detached from their kids. It wasn't until they started believing with certainty that they would live to adulthood that they started loving them as kids.

Life as a kid must've been fucking hardcore in antiquity if even your parents don't give one single fuck about your existence..

Maybe the Carthaginians had some calamity happen, decided to sacrifice a baby as an ultimate gift, the calamity/crisis got better and this was attributed to the baby being sacrificed?

Well, like I said, it depended a lot on how old the kids were. If they made it past the first 3-4 years people started to care. That was the most dangerous period. Some people could lose three kids in a row before any of them made it to 3-4.

The whole "average lifespan is 30" is a dumb meme. People only calculate what you would by adding up and dividing everything we've found. But you don't have societies of people that lived up to 30 and keeled over from disease (only war).

What you have is a disproportionate amount of children dying. Once you were past 16-18, assuming you didn't get fucked in a war or get some weird illness, it was very likely you would live into a late, late age. Even 80-90.

But, yeah, even leaving aside the chances of dying and the way your parents often treated you as a slave, life as a kid back then was fucking terrible. Even for Roman elites.

You should read how the school system worked. It was misery. Instead of a professor taking the kids and teaching them a basic rule, like say, addition, they would only teach them the sums of each different operation without ever mentioning the general rule. They learned the alphabet in a similar, extremely retarded way.

Most writings we have from Romans from that period have at least a few passages of them saying how fucking shitty school was. And then you have people like Marcus Aurelius, who was grateful above all else to the fact that his parents didn't send him to a public school and home-schooled him. He attributed his intelligence to that.

Tfw actual death cults are probably more tame than all the torture and blood letting done by monotheists.

One of my great grand uncles was killed by Thuggees... That's pretty much a death cult. Granted, he was part of an occupying army at the time.

Pretty much any agricultural civilization that's gotten so close to the edge that they start breaking their crop rotation goes full murder-hobo sacrifice-everyone mode shortly thereafter (such as the Aztecs, among others) but it's not really a "cult" at that point, so much as mainstream.

There's been lots of religious sub cults that might be more accurately described as elite military forces... And pissed off subsets there of - such as ISIS.

Tiny cults, either homicidal or suicidal, or both, such as various angry voodoo priests, Matamoros, Order of the Solar Temple, Heaven’s Gate, Jones's Town, Aum Shinrikyo, Russian Doomsday Cult... Far too common and numerous to list, sadly. Usually they are cults of personality though, centered around one madman.

There were no doubt similar, ancient ones, we never hear about. Some of those ancient gods, like Set or Hades, just kinda beg for them.

...and there's always secret and semi-secret organizations, such as the entirely independent branches the CIA forms when anyone in charge is stupid enough to use those four magic words: "By any means necessary."

not exactly uncommon in the ancient world. rome was just as guilty of killing infants via abandonment or deliberate euthanasia. if they're already killing babies, might as well devote it to something.

Do the Circumcellions count?

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Circumcellions

probably more of pragmatism rather than callousness. if a doctor told you your newborn was likely to die you'd probably deliberately avoid attaching to it as well.

gotta be cavalier till the coast is clear.

30 is a meme, but a commoner was unlikely to see past 50.

Judaism
pastebin.com/429ZnnsU

>What you have is a disproportionate amount of children dying. Once you were past 16-18, assuming you didn't get fucked in a war or get some weird illness, it was very likely you would live into a late, late age. Even 80-90.

This is as big a meme as thinking everyone died at 30, it was very rare for people to live until 80 or 90.

>ywn earn the right to call yourself a man by discreetly murdering subhuman shit farmers
I'm sad now.

I had a lesson in uni about how spartans had an initiation training for their youth where the youngling had to run through a corridor naked while getting whipped by older males on both sides in order to retrieve/steal a piece of cheese on an altar. Trying o find sauce as we speak.

ok found this. too lazy to look more though I think this is sufficient as a source

civilization.org.uk/greece/greece-extra/sparta/the-shrine-of-artemis-orthia

“Our Lord with the flayed skin”