This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Scholarly Disciplines gathers ten academic fields that study religion, myth or claimed anomalous experience rather than practise any tradition, spanning the founding fields of religious studies to two disciplines still taking shape today.
Comparative mythology and comparative religion are the closest siblings here: comparative mythology traces shared themes and figures, the flood, the dying and rising god, the trickster, across separated traditions, explained through common descent, diffusion, universal patterns of mind or the older nature myth schools, while comparative religion, grown from the same philology, compares belief, practice, text and institution across traditions directly. Phenomenology, sociology, anthropology and psychology of religion approach the same subject through a different lens, describing experience on its own terms, reading religion as a social fact, studying it through fieldwork, or as a feature of mind.
Parapsychology is the group's most contested member, a century of controlled testing, including Daryl Bem's 2011 precognition studies that helped trigger psychology's own replication crisis, having produced no result the wider scientific community accepts as reliable evidence of a genuine psychic effect. Ethnobotany sits opposite as the discipline behind much of what the atlas records about sacred plants, since a claim about a ritual plant needs species identification and context to mean anything.
Astral Religion and Digital Religion are the newest fields: Astral Religion names the pattern of worship organised around the sun, moon and stars across unrelated traditions from Mesopotamia to Mesoamerica, and Digital Religion, founded by Heidi Campbell, studies how religious belief now forms and is contested on networked digital media.