This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Prayer, in the atlas's use, is any communicative or contemplative act a tradition directs toward a divine or transcendent reality: a petition asking for something, an act of praise or thanksgiving, a confession, a fixed liturgical text repeated in common, or a silent contemplative practice with no spoken words at all. What holds the type together is direction rather than form; a prayer can be as short as a single repeated phrase or as long as a full liturgy, spoken aloud or held entirely in silence.
Each entry describes a prayer's form, its place within its tradition's life and what the tradition itself says the prayer is for, without functioning as an instruction to say it. Some prayers recorded here belong to traditions that restrict who may recite them, when, or under what preparation, and where that is so the atlas states the restriction as a fact about the tradition rather than supplying the prayer's wording as something to be used. Description and instruction are kept apart on purpose throughout this type.
An entry also records, where it is known, what a prayer is understood to accomplish within its own tradition, comfort, communion, obligation fulfilled, a request answered, since traditions themselves disagree sharply on that question and the atlas records each tradition's own answer rather than adopting one.