This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
History reconstructs the past by weighing surviving sources against one another, testing each for its reliability and its proximity to the events it describes rather than accepting any single account at face value. Classified among the humanities, its critical method is generally dated to 1824, when Leopold von Ranke's history of the Latin and Germanic peoples argued that a historian's task is to show the past merely as it actually was, not to instruct or to praise it, a standard that made source criticism itself the discipline's central method rather than a mere preliminary to narrative.
For an atlas of religion and belief, history is the discipline this atlas leans on wherever a tradition's own account of its past is tested against outside record. A community's founding narrative, a claimed lineage of teachers, a chronicle of persecution or triumph, each makes historical claims that Ranke's method can weigh against other surviving evidence, textual, documentary and material, from inside and outside the tradition itself, rather than repeating the tradition's own account as settled fact.
That weighing is why the discipline matters here specifically. A religious tradition's memory of its own past is itself a historical source, valuable and often irreplaceable, but not immune to the same critical comparison every other historical source receives, and history is the discipline built to perform exactly that comparison honestly.