Let’s say that the Industrial Revolution is on trial for a triple homicide.
“Are there more victims than three?”
Surely. But we’re working with three bodies.
The unfortunate victims are three related words: (1) Culture, (2) Agriculture and (3) Cult.
Don’t be too broken up.
In this introductory narrative, you are a detective, or perhaps you’re at the trial- but not the funeral.
Whichever the case, your focus is to be directed toward a mysterious catch: witnesses report that the perpetrator only shot one of the deceased. Specifically, the Industrial Revolution shot the Agricultural Revolution, it was at point-blank range and done with a single bullet with no exit wound.
Nevertheless, three bodies bled out and died.
Furthermore, the autopsies conclude the same cause and time of death for each.
“Weird.”
Yes. It raises many questions. Of central concern; are we to assume the relationship between culture, agriculture and cult stops at their name - i.e., is their shared root-word, “cult” arbitrary, or does it point toward something deeper?
Can we connect the death of each victim?
Do we charge Industrialization with three counts or one?
That is what we’re calling into question.
What does the word “cult” mean—? To begin our exploration, I must first address my distaste for the word’s contemporary usage. When a group is labeled as a cult, it is rarely complimentary. As a flippant charge, it can mean a broad variety of things with varying degrees of severity. And while I am certain that there are many out there deserving of such vague defamation, the issue of imprecision remains. So to clarify at the outset, we are not isolating our understanding of the word 'Cult' to the modern standard. When used in this piece, it should not be met with a negative connotation. It is instead to be treated neutrally, and it will lend itself to valid description of even mild organizations (e.g., ones tending to meet on Sunday).
Whether you interpreted the parenthetical conclusion of the last sentence as implicating church-related or football-related rituals makes little difference here. In any case, this essay is about more than cults. In fact, it primarily concerns itself with culture, but as you may have noticed, 'cult-' is embedded in the word 'Culture,' and each word is nested in 'Agriculture.' What strikes me as curious about this relationship goes beyond an otherwise unremarkable commonality, and extends to my central claim:
I argue that the shared cognate between these words is not arbitrary, and submit that culture and the cultic meaning that originally bound culture has "died" due to the gradual loss of an agricultural base.
I am suggesting that the three words indicate, and have always indicated an interdependent phenomena. Regardless of their spelling, all words are tied at the semantic level. This is because culture itself was the cause and consequence of the Agricultural Revolution, which settled previously nomadic hominins on land through farming (i.e., through cultivation). Both culture and early agricultural settlements were then bound, reinforced and defined by cults, i.e., through the settlements’ shared rituals, symbols and religion. So, this theory views the origin of culture as the origin of agriculture, and cultic ritual as necessary, if not entirely synonymous with culture at its root.
This mutualistic process began in the Neolithic period and lasted until around AD 1800. It was the era of culture in its truest sense, as this is the period from which the words and definitions find their origin, and it has gradually “ended” in relation to industrial societies' growth. That is to say that, for better or worse, industrialization occurred at the expense of agrarian society, and culture declined in due course.
As a contingency, if there is culture in the post-industrial present, (in some novel sense of the word), I will grant that it is a culture removed of the conditions that once created and sustained it: agriculture and cults.
Another solidifying component of the three cognate-bound processes was that each catalyzed genetic drift as various post-nomadic peoples fixed themselves to cultivable land, and as populations then became separated by novel physical and non-physical borders. Farms implied territory, which would instill cultural emergence; a group’s culture and genetics then coevolved in relation to their given linguistic, genetic, climactic, geographic, dietary, social, and behavioral environments1. The genetic adaptations accrued by generations of humans living in these separate environments, over evolutionary time, would help ensure the distinct and recognizable presence of culture (and explain an observable correlation between culture and ethnicity).
When suggesting that there is some degree of mutual interdependence between the three words, I must emphasize again that the etymology behind ‘cult,’ ‘culture’ and ‘agriculture’ are not what binds them, or at least, not necessarily. The shared cognate only hints at the unifying causes and consequences. The words reflect a deeper historical or semantic "reality" rather than merely containing shared symbols. With that, I would implore my lovely reader to go beyond asking what a word means, and also ask what the meaning does (intentionally or otherwise) in relation to humans and their history.
Duh in advance, but words are not concepts, and certainly not realities. As I argue however; they point toward both, so we’ll the need the interplay of 'the lexical', 'the semantic', and the history for our exploration to take us anywhere worth going. This is where I maintain that etymology proves to be a most revealing tool toward that end. Understanding the words at their root will take’s us back to an environment where the differing meanings were not yet estranged from one another.
This leads us back to Cult-, which finds provenance in Proto-Indo-European. It was derived from the reconstructed base, “kwel-” (also appearing as “kwol-,” “quel-,” or “quol-”) which signified concepts like “residing,” “turning” and “movement.”2 In the latter cases it aligns with modern English words like wheel.3 But in the original tongue, the movement-oriented terms would be generalized and eventually mean things like “busy,” perhaps implying labor as a metaphoric extension of movement.4
The various meanings packaged in the word would later bifurcate into two semantic directions: “inhabiting a place” and “making a wild place suitable for crops.”5 Functionally speaking, both meanings ran together in the sense that; it’s hard to make a place suitable for crops if not first inhabiting it. So one seems to be a prerequisite for the other. In any case, both of these concepts would later be integrated into a single Latin word, Colere, housing three definitions: to ‘inhabit,’ to ‘cultivate,’ and to ‘worship.’6
The semantic notions of inhabitance would be reflected by another descendent of Colere: the word ‘colony’, and ‘colonization.’ Colony would get at the literal- then the metaphorical 'planting of seeds' and 'embedding of roots' - with colonus originally meaning farmer.7
“If semantics take priority here, then how did we start with wheel and end up with colony—?” A very fair question to ask if semantics took priority here, and not least because Colony has since deviated from the “farm-oriented” definition just described. Using the modern definition of Colony, we get: “an area over which a foreign nation or state extends or maintains control.”8 ←Now, with that in mind, let’s play a word-association game:
Did you think of wheel? I seriously doubt it. Again, this is why we need the interplay of history to demonstrate the way in which wheel and colonial empire are, in fact, effectually synonymous.
Wheel seems so innocent in comparison, but let's not be naive. There’s a reason Indo-Europeans spread their language to the point of its embedded status in (probably) every word used on this digital page. Millenia ago, these inventors of 'cult-,' and their less-than-innocent wheel would eventually go on to apply the word to chariots. Also implying mobility, the word cannot be separated from the Indo-European cultivation of an entire continent - an expansionistic endeavor. They made a wild place suitable before inhabiting their many victims' lands. And yes, they were certainly engaged in colonization. They colonized in every sense of the word: archaeological evidence finds that after an invasion, Indo-Europeans of the Yamnaya culture “exterminated the men in the farming and hunter-gatherer populations they encountered, while incorporating the surviving women into their community;” this is precisely why DNA samples still find that “most people in Europe share Yamnaya ancestry.”9
Strictly in the Darwinian sense, and putting quality of art, general manners and all that aside; the presence of genes and language certainly imply cultural success. Certain behaviors are rewarded more so than others, and this reality for genes can be effectively applied to a given culture. Today, simply the presence of language and genes are an indication of past cultural success, and vice versa; the presence of a culture implies an extant language and surviving genes.
The spread of each correlates for obvious-enough reasons: language, culture and genes tend to descend from parent to offspring. But another obvious metric to measure success could relate to the territorial expanse of a culture, its language, and its genes - which again, all jointly-correlate, and are all designated forms of colonization. It is the mobility of their spread that attaches such concepts to “quel-” / “quol-.”
Regarding the Agricultural Revolution, the domestication of plants and animals tends to occupy the most attention, and fair enough; domestication was the key technical innovation of the Agricultural Revolution. But the interdependent social innovation of this Neolithic event was settlement. Just like the former, the latter solved a set of problems, (hence the innovation’s wide adoption) and the problems it solved are inseparable from the Revolution’s occurrence. Which is why settlement cannot be removed from agriculture. Simply, farming cannot occur absent of land from which one farms.
So, "to cultivate" in the original sense was effectually the same as "to colonize" in the current sense; to farm is inherently expansionistic so long as there is demand for sustenance. If demand for food induced the settlement, then as long as the incipient demands were met, the population grew, and so too would this multiply the demand for food as a consequence, which would cyclically incentivize further settlement.
There’s much more to be said on this far-reaching topic. I still must address the ways in which cultic religion bound infant cultures; (2) explain how that further bound people to land; (3) emphasize the distinction between Kultur and Zivilisation; (4) show why culture is dead (which means something rather specific here, and demands elaboration of how it emerged to begin with), and finally; (5) I must highlight the word “domestication” to explain that it went both ways: the domestication of plants and animals symmetrically domesticated mankind.
So again, there is much to be said. Fortunately these notions build from each other. For now, I only offer a simplifying restatement: the conditions that created and sustained culture have fundamentally changed. Until next time.
W. Penn Handwerker, “The Origins and Evolution of Culture,” American Anthropologist, new series, 91, no. 2 (June 1989): 318–20.
John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), 149–50.
Eugene Halton, “The Cultic Roots of Culture,” in Theory of Culture, ed. Neil J. Smelser and Richard Münch (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 43–44.
John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), 149–50
John Ayto, Dictionary of Word Origins: The Histories of More Than 8,000 English-Language Words (New York: Arcade Publishing, 2011), 149–50.
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 77.
Oxford English Dictionary, “colon (n.3), Etymology,” December 2025, https://doi.org/10.1093/OED/3699241812.
Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary, s.v. “colony,” accessed April 29, 2026, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/colony.
Bojan Pancevski, “The Ancient Horsemen Who Created the Modern World,” Wall Street Journal, March 8, 2025, 4-5.