INTERVIEW — Aug 13, 18:40
Interviewee: 43 years old, male, main language Italian, speaking in English, lives in Berlin, Germany, Italian nationality.
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Interviewer: When you hear the word cult, what comes to your mind?
Interviewee: So, "cult" — if we translate it properly in Italian, should be "la setta". So, uh, usually it's related to a collective, a group of people following some sort of belief, and related to religion — I guess it's always connected to religion, right? I guess. But non-conventional religion, so that's why they are, most of the time, concentrated in small groups. And, somehow, when I think about cult, I think about something like dark religious — like praying to the devil, or something like that.
Interviewer: Yes
Interviewee: I don't know, I guess this is more or less the idea that I have. It's really easy to get kind of convinced to join a cult, by using some kind of false induction, false information. Somehow they try to convince people to join the cult.
Interviewer: Well — do you have specific examples of cults that, like, immediately come to your mind?
Interviewee: I mean, those ones connected to the devil — I'd just say, like, Satanists.
Interviewer: Yes
Interviewee: Or maybe Scientology is also a cult, maybe? Not sure about it.
Interviewer: What are the characteristics, you know, the details — that make a group of people set as a cult?
Interviewee: I'm not sure, actually, what is actually the right definition of it, you know. But, yeah, the first thing I think of is, like, Satan — Satan is somehow.
Interviewee: I mean, they always name it this way — like "the cult of Satan," "the cult of the Archangels," I don't know, stuff like that — so it's easy to relate it to this kind of Satanism, or dark cult.
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