Confession and history

For many of these figures the tradition's account and the historical record diverge, and the atlas keeps the two distinct. It reports what a tradition holds about its prophets, saints and heroes, their role in the narrative and their principal associations, while noting, where relevant, what historians can and cannot establish about a figure's existence or life.

The characters group by kind (prophets, apostles, saints, heroes, demons, valkyries, bodhisattvas and the rest), so a reader can move through the personnel of sacred story by type. Some are dual-modelled with a deity or historical-figure page and are kept complementary.