Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Practical Disciplines

2 of 116 entries in Disciplines. Click any to see everything it connects to.

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This group holds the disciplines classified as practical: bodies of applied skill carried as trained knowledge rather than as belief or as a method of reading signs. The group is deliberately narrow, and Polynesian wayfinding sits in it, the open ocean navigation of the Pacific by star risings and settings, the run of the swell, and the behaviour of wind, cloud and bird. It excludes the divinatory and cosmological disciplines that also read the sky, which are classified here by what they are consulted for rather than by the craft they train.

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Two Disciplines of Bodily Endurance, One at Sea and One at Rest

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

Practical Disciplines gathers two disciplines that train the body directly rather than the mind, one aimed outward at reading the ocean and one aimed inward at burning off what binds the soul.

Polynesian Wayfinding is the Polynesian art of open ocean navigation without instruments, holding a course by star risings and settings, the run of ocean swells, winds, clouds and birds. The knowledge that settled the Pacific survived in Micronesia after it lapsed in Hawaii, and its revival is open history: the Polynesian Voyaging Society built the voyaging canoe Hokule'a, and in 1976 the Satawalese master navigator Mau Piailug guided her from Hawaii to Tahiti without instruments, then agreed to teach Hawaiian students, among them Nainoa Thompson.

Tapas, Jain asceticism, is the disciplined practice of austerity in Jainism, twelve prescribed forms, six external, including fasting, and six internal, including meditation and study, undertaken to burn off accumulated karma and restrain the passions that bind the soul to rebirth.

The two disciplines share almost nothing in content, a seafaring craft addressed outward at wind and star against a monastic discipline addressed inward at the self, and what groups them here is only that both train through sustained bodily practice rather than through study, ritual object or altered state, the criterion the atlas's other discipline categories in this band are organised around instead.

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