Traditions & Paths

This section holds the religious and spiritual traditions as wholes, together with their internal divisions and the disciplines of practice that grew up around them: the religions of the world, their denominations and schools, and the esoteric and divinatory disciplines (astrology, alchemy, tarot, Kabbalah and the rest), treated as fields in their own right.

Where other sections take a single kind of thing across many traditions, all the gods, all the calendars, this one takes the traditions themselves as the unit, and asks what each holds, how it is divided within, and what practices define it.

The three categories nest. A religion is a whole tradition: Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and also the non-theistic worldviews that answer the same questions differently. A denomination is a branch within one: a church, a school of law or philosophy, a movement. A discipline cuts across religions, astrology and alchemy belong to no single faith, and is included as a field of knowledge and practice.

The atlas holds the major living religions, those of historical importance that are no longer practised, and the non-theistic and secular worldviews, describing each in its own terms and noting where scholarship and self-description diverge.