I may not be the best person to ask ,Susan .I'm going through a suspicious phase where I see vestiges of cultism everywhere.

My late mother was brought up fairly strictly in the Jewish faith in the large community that existed in those days in East London.Her family kept the Shabbos and on Saturday mornings my mum went to the Synagogue and learnt hebrew ( mostly prayers which she could still recite by heart until her death ).Most of all her family fastidiously obeyed all the "food" laws ( Deuteronomy Chap.12 onwards  )  ...and my mother continued to do this ( increasingly difficult to find kosher meat) and to keep all the "fasts"  throughout her life.She wasn't really " religious" though, it was just the way she had been brought up. However I don't think it was really cult-like , more like the kind of customs and traditions a nation might have . There was a certain " Fear of God" thing hanging around , but only in respect of most of the ten commandments and ( strangely) the food rules.My Grandmother was a music- hall singer on the stage in Hackney and my Grandfather a fleet-street journalist doing obituaries for the Telegraph and starting his own Jewish newspaper.In his free time he was a gambler....so for them anyway,if it was a cult they seemed to have quite a good time and were really very liberal minded.Some parts of her family were far stricter though and maybe more isolated and cultish. Although Rabbis are respected I never feel they have the same apartness as Christian ministers......they are much more " just another bloke" in a nice way.

Maybe all religions  start as cults ( see Numbers,Deuteronomy and Leviticus in the O.T.) and liberalise into something more flexible and inclusive .They also retain the possibility of regressing ,sometimes almost imperceptibly ,once more into cultism.

Mum had no time for Maharaj Ji ( insisting on calling him Maharishi ) and being shrewd in matters of finance herself, always knew that money was  important to him.