Home›Divinatory Disciplines›Belongs To TraditionBrowse ByBelongs To TraditionThis page groups disciplines by the religion whose beliefs they study from the inside. Wikipedia notes that "theology is the study of religious belief from a religious perspective, with a focus on the nature of divinity and the history behind religion." Browsing by belongs-to-tradition lets a visitor find every discipline built to study the same religion.FactsLearn MoreBelongs To TraditionSourcesComments (0)Reader Challenges (0)FactsDirectoryCategoryWell-attestedDisciplines 1Learn MoreWhere the Line Between Divination and Science Used to Sit The boundary this atlas now draws around divinatory disciplines, tarot, astrology, palmistry, and the many regional and traditional methods gathered under one heading here, is a comparatively recent one. For most of the history these methods share, reading the sky, the shells or the entrails for guidance was not set apart from the systematic study of the natural world; it was frequently the same scholarly activity pursued for the same institutional patrons. Ancient Mesopotamian celestial divination, the subject of a substantial cuneiform record, treated the observation and recording of planetary and stellar positions as knowledge production serving the state, the same observational discipline that also, over centuries, produced the mathematical astronomy later cultures inherited. Astrology and astronomy were not yet two different pursuits; they were one practice whose outputs served both prediction and calendar keeping. The separation into a legitimate science on one side and a divinatory art on the other happened gradually and unevenly across different cultures and centuries, driven as much by shifting institutional and religious judgment about which kinds of knowledge counted as reliable as by any change in the methods themselves. What this atlas classifies as divinatory today, tarot, cartomancy, geomancy, cleromancy and astrology among them, is not a natural category the practices themselves declare; it is what remained on one side of a boundary that used to run somewhere else entirely, and in a few cultures still does.Belongs To TraditionFilter Results31 entriesAdherents TodayAllBrazil's 2010 national census recorded 3,848,876 people, about two percent of the population, self declaring as Espirita, making Spiritism the country's third largest religious category behind Catholicism and Protestantism. Smaller Kardecist communities also practise elsewhere in Latin America, Europe and North America, but Brazil's census is the count of record for this figure. (1)Demographic study of the Zoroastrian community puts the worldwide population at approximately one hundred twelve thousand to one hundred twenty two thousand people, concentrated among the Parsis of India and the Zoroastrians of Iran, with smaller communities in North America, the United Kingdom and Australia. The number has fallen across the twentieth and twenty first centuries and is a central concern inside the community itself. (1)Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, the tradition's largest formal organization anywhere, reported 6,250 registered members in 2025, up from about 1,000 in 2006 and about a dozen founding members in 1972; no comparable count exists for Norse Paganism or Heathenry worldwide. (1)Pew Research Center's 2023 report on Confucianism, Taoism and Chinese folk religion states plainly that it does not estimate the number of Confucians, because many people in China do not consider Confucianism a religion at all. No reliable count of Confucian adherents exists for that reason, though its ethical teaching remains embedded across East Asian societies well beyond anyone who would name it as a religious affiliation. (1)Pew Research Center's 2023 survey work on Chinese religion found that fewer than zero point five percent of adults in China identified their religion as Taoist, in both its 2018 and 2021 surveys, a share Pew describes as far smaller than the number who engage with Taoist beliefs and practices informally. Formal identification with a named religion is unusual in China, where these traditions do not emphasize exclusive membership, so this figure understates real practice considerably. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report estimates the global Jewish population at about 14.8 million as of 2020, the smallest of the major world religions measured, concentrated primarily in Israel and the United States. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Buddhist population at 324 million as of 2020, about 4 percent of the world's population, down 19 million from 2010, the only major world religion measured to shrink in absolute numbers over that decade. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Christian population at 2.3 billion as of 2020, about 28.8 percent of the world's population, up 122 million from 2010 even as its share of world population fell. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Hindu population at nearly 1.2 billion as of 2020, up 126 million from 2010, with about 99 percent of the world's Hindus living in the Asia-Pacific region and roughly 95 percent in India alone. (1)Pew Research Center's Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020 report puts the global Muslim population at 2.0 billion as of 2020, about 26 percent of the world's population, up from 1.7 billion in 2010 and growing about twice as fast as the world's population as a whole over that decade. (1)The 2021 census of England and Wales recorded thirteen thousand people identifying their religion as Wiccan, the largest single national count available anywhere. Wicca's following elsewhere, especially in North America, has no comparable census count, and scholarly estimates that include the wider Pagan and Witchcraft milieu run considerably higher. (1)The Baha'i community's own worldwide estimate is approximately five million adherents, gathered across virtually every country and territory. As with most new religious movements, no independent national census breaks the figure down apart from the community's own reporting. (1)Thelema is organised through multiple initiatory bodies, Ordo Templi Orientis, A A and smaller independent orders such as Fraternitas Saturni, each of which keeps at most its own internal membership rolls, and much of that material is itself oathbound. No external census or survey of practising Thelemites worldwide was found for this record. (1)Adherents Today MaximumAll4722 (1)13,000 (1)121,962 (1)5,000,000 (1)14,800,000 (1)324,000,000 (1)1,200,000,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Adherents Today MinimumAll4722 (1)13,000 (1)111,691 (1)5,000,000 (1)14,800,000 (1)324,000,000 (1)1,200,000,000 (1)2,000,000,000 (1)2,300,000,000 (1)Also Known AsAllHeathenry is also called Asatru, particularly among practitioners tracing an Icelandic naming, or Germanic Neopaganism more broadly in scholarly literature. (1)Thelemites (1)Ban or Official WatchlistAllIran's 1979 Constitution names in Article 13 only Zoroastrian, Jewish and Christian Iranians as the country's recognised religious minorities, free within the law to perform their own rites and follow their own canon in personal affairs; the Baha'i Faith, Iran's largest non-Muslim religious minority, is not among them and has no legal recognition or protected status under the Iranian constitution. (1)Basis of the Membership FigureAllChurch-Reported Rolls (1)Independent Survey (9)National Census (5)Scholarly or Demographic Estimate (8)Current StatusAllIceland's Asatruarfelagid broke ground on Hofid in Reykjavik in 2015, the first purpose built hof for Norse religious ritual raised since Christianization around the year 1000. Construction was delayed by the 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic; the building was structurally complete by 2023 and is opening in stages. (1)Neoplatonism survives today chiefly as a subject of philosophical and historical study rather than as a practised religion, though its emanationist framework influenced later Jewish, Christian and Islamic mysticism. (1)Traditional Maya religious practice continues today, often blended with Catholicism, in living communities across the Maya region. (1)Wicca has spread from Britain into a range of denominations, or traditions, including Gardnerian, Alexandrian and various eclectic forms, and is recognised as a religion for legal purposes in the United States and several other countries. (1)Era of DeclineAllAztec public religion was suppressed following the Spanish conquest of Tenochtitlan, with temples destroyed and conversion to Christianity enforced through the sixteenth century. (1)Celtic paganism gave way to Christianity across Ireland and Britain in a gradual process spanning roughly the fifth to seventh centuries CE. (1)Confucian institutions and the imperial examination system built on Confucian classics were dismantled in China's early twentieth century reforms and further suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. (1)Conversion to Christianity across Scandinavia between the tenth and twelfth centuries brought the public practice of Norse paganism to an end. (1)Local temple and ancestral practice was heavily suppressed during the Cultural Revolution, from 1966 to 1976. (1)Organised Gnostic movements of the sort attested at Nag Hammadi largely disappeared as distinct communities by the early medieval period, surviving afterward mainly through the categories that heresiologists such as Irenaeus used to describe them. (1)Public cult practice faded following the region's conquest by successive empires and the spread of Christianity and later Islam, with cuneiform religious writing itself dying out by the first centuries CE. (1)Public pagan sacrifice was banned by the emperor Theodosius I in 391 CE, and traditional Roman religion was gradually suppressed as Christianity became the empire's official religion. (1)Religious Taoism was heavily suppressed during the Cultural Revolution in China, from 1966 to 1976. (1)The cult declined sharply in the fourth century as Christianity became the favoured and then established religion of the empire, and it left no continuous surviving community. (1)The Greek texts are lost to the Latin West until 1463 (1)The ideas continue as a philosophical current (1)The Neoplatonic school at Athens is closed in 529 CE (1)The temple of Philae closes in the 6th century (1)Zoroastrianism lost its position as the state religion of Persia after the Arab Muslim conquest of the Sasanian Empire in the seventh century, and most of its adherents converted to Islam over the following centuries. (1)Era of Decline End YearAll300 BCE (1)100 (1)400 (2)500 (1)529 (2)550 (1)600 (1)700 (1)1200 (1)1600 (1)1976 (3)Era of Decline Start YearAll450 BCE (1)100 BCE (1)300 (3)350 (1)380 (3)529 (1)651 (1)1000 (1)1521 (1)1966 (3)Era of Modern RevivalAllLocal temple and festival practice has revived since the 1980s under state toleration of registered religious activity. (1)State sponsored revival of Confucian study and public veneration of Confucius has proceeded in China since the 1980s and 1990s. (1)Taoist practice has revived since the 1980s under state toleration of registered religious activity in China. (1)The Corpus Hermeticum's rediscovery and Latin translation by Marsilio Ficino in 1471 sparked a major revival of Hermetic thought in early modern Europe. (1)Era of Modern Revival End YearAll1471 (1)1976 (1)Era of Modern Revival Start YearAll1463 (1)1972 (1)Establishment StatusAllDeclared Not Established (1)Disestablished (1)Established (1)No Establishment (1)Varies by Province (4)Form of the ConfessionAllHinduism has no single creed and no central authority to issue one. Adherence centers on orthopraxy, correct ritual and social practice, rather than a shared confession, and schools agreeing on almost no metaphysical claim, including atheistic Samkhya and materialist Charvaka, are still counted within the tradition. A formula such as the Gayatri Mantra marks a school, not the whole of Hinduism. (1)Its central precept, Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law, is drawn directly from The Book of the Law and paired there with the companion principle, Love is the law, love under will. (1)Taking refuge in the Three Jewels, the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha, functions as Buddhism's basic profession of faith. (1)The Nicene Creed and the Apostles' Creed are the two most widely shared credal statements across the branches of Christianity. (1)The shahada, the declaration that there is no god but God and Muhammad is His messenger, is Islam's central creed and the first of the five pillars. (1)The Wiccan Rede, an ethical maxim usually rendered an it harm none, do what ye will, functions as Wicca's closest equivalent to a creed. (1)FounderAllAleister Crowley (1875-1947) (1)Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Leon Denizard Rivail, 1804-1869) (1)Baha'u'llah (1817-1892), preceded by the Bab (1819-1850) (1)Confucius (Kongzi, 551-479 BCE) (1)Gerald Gardner (1884-1964) (1)Jesus of Nazareth; the movement was organised by his followers after his death (1)Laozi is the traditional attribution, and Zhang Daoling founded the first organised Daoist church in 142 CE (1)Muslims hold Islam to be the restoration of the primordial religion rather than a new founding (1)Ngo Van Chieu, with Le Van Trung as the first pope (1)None (1)None as a single figure (1)None attested (1)None in the historical sense (1)None single; Sveinbjorn Beinteinsson led the Icelandic Asatruarfelagid from 1972 (1)None single; Valentinus, Basilides and Marcion led distinct schools (1)None; Hinduism has no founder and no founding event (1)None; the Hermetica are attributed to the legendary Hermes Trismegistus (1)Plotinus (c. 204-270 CE) (1)Pythagoras of Samos (c. 570-495 BCE) (1)Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha (1)The Prophet Muhammad (c. 570-632) (1)Tradition traces the covenant to Abraham and the Torah to Moses (1)Zarathushtra (Zoroaster); his date is contested (1)How the Expectation Is EnforcedAllCodified Obligation With Consequences (2)Customary Norm (6)Legal StatusAllArticle 9 of the Constitution of Sri Lanka (1978, as amended) states that the Republic shall give Buddhism the foremost place and that it shall be the duty of the State to protect and foster the Buddha Sasana, while assuring to all religions the rights granted by Articles 10 and 14(1)(e). (1)China: one of five officially sanctioned religions, registered and supervised through the Chinese Taoist Association (1)Egypt's national identity card system recognized only Islam, Christianity and Judaism in its religion field, leaving Bahais unable to obtain identity documents essential to daily civic life. Egypt's Supreme Administrative Court ruled on 16 March 2009 that a dash could be entered in the field instead, and the Interior Ministry implemented the ruling by decree the following month; the first identity cards issued to Bahais under the new policy were dated 8 August 2009. (1)Heathen organizations hold full state recognition in several countries: Iceland's Asatruarfelagid since 1973, Norway's Asatru groups since 1994, and Denmark's Forn Sidr since 2003, each entitled to perform legally binding ceremonies including marriage. (1)Recognised by the Vietnamese state as a registered religion. Recognition attaches to the organised body rather than to the movement in the abstract, and has not been held continuously since the movement was founded. (1)The US Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit held in Dettmer v. Landon, 799 F.2d 929 (1986), affirming the district court, that the Church of Wicca's doctrine constitutes a religion entitled to First Amendment protection for a Virginia state prisoner; the court nonetheless vacated the specific injunction requiring prison officials to provide the inmate certain ritual objects, finding it rested on an erroneous legal premise and that officials had shown some requested items posed a genuine security risk. (1)The US Supreme Court ruled unanimously in Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520 (1993), that Hialeah, Florida's ordinances banning ritual animal sacrifice violated the Free Exercise Clause of the First Amendment, because they specifically targeted Santeria's central sacrificial practice while permitting comparable killing of animals for other, non-religious reasons; the decision holds that a law targeting a specific religious practice, even if facially neutral, must survive strict scrutiny. (1)Marriage Position DetailAllbahai.org states marriage is "a union between two consenting adults: a man and a woman," quoting Baha'u'llah: "God hath prescribed matrimony unto you... Enter into wedlock, O people, that ye may bring forth one who will make mention of Me amid My servants." On divorce it quotes Baha'u'llah's statement that "the Lord loveth union and harmony and abhorreth separation and divorce," counseling that "should resentment or antipathy arise between husband and wife, he is not to divorce her but to bide in patience throughout the course of one whole year, that perchance the fragrance of affection may be renewed between them." Divorce is permitted after that year of patience if reconciliation has not occurred. (1)Qur'an 4:3 states: "And if you fear that you shall not be able to deal justly with the orphan girls then marry (other) women of your choice, two or three, or four." Classical and contemporary Sunni and Shia jurisprudence alike reads this as permitting, not requiring, a man to be married to up to four wives at one time, on two conditions: material justice between the wives, in spending, clothing, and time, which Qur'an 4:129 immediately qualifies by noting that perfect justice in feeling, as opposed to material treatment, is not humanly possible and so is not what is required; and the financial capacity to support each wife. Monogamy remains the ordinary practice for most Muslims worldwide; the ruling recognizes polygynous marriage as licit rather than mandating it. (1)Membership Figure As OfAll1969-12-31 (1)1990-01-01 (1)1993-01-01 (1)2000-01-01 (1)2001-01-01 (1)2004-01-01 (1)2006-01-01 (1)2008-01-01 (1)2010-01-01 (7)2011-01-27 (1)2011-12-19 (1)2012-01-01 (1)2012-12-18 (2)2013-01-01 (1)2014-01-01 (1)2015-01-01 (2)2016-01-01 (2)2018-01-01 (3)2019-01-01 (1)2020-01-01 (5)2021-01-01 (2)2022-01-01 (2)2023-03-01 (1)2023-08-30 (1)2025-01-01 (1)2026-08-13 (1)2026-08-14 (1)Membership Over TimeAllA United Nations finding as of January 2015 put the number of Caodaists in Vietnam specifically at about 2.5 million, a figure well below what the religion's own Tay Ninh Holy See separately claims for the same period. (1)Brazil's 2010 national census (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, IBGE) recorded 0.3 percent of the population under the combined Umbanda and Candomble category, the only way IBGE's census form categorizes these two Afro-Brazilian traditions, so this figure is not Candomble alone. (1)Brazil's 2010 national census (IBGE) recorded 2.0 percent of the population, about 3.8 million people, self-identifying as Spiritist (Kardecist), the religion's documented peak share. (1)By 2010, three independent outside demographic estimates converged in a narrow range: the World Religion Database gave 7.3 million, the Association of Religion Data Archives gave 7.6 million, and the CIA World Factbook gave 7.8 million (0.11 percent of world population). All three sit well above the Baha'i World Centre's own current figure recorded below, a divergence in the opposite direction from the Church of Scientology's case in this axis, where the tradition's own claim runs far ABOVE outside counts. (1)By 2019, the same registry recorded 4,473 members, a genuine, dramatic rise, up from 879 in 2005 and 1,402 in 2010, making Heathenry the fastest growing religious registration in Iceland over that period. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Buddhist population had fallen further to 324 million (just over 4 percent of world population), a 5 percent decline over the decade, the only major religious group worldwide to shrink in absolute numbers, attributed to religious disaffiliation in East Asia and a comparatively low birth rate among Buddhist-majority populations. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Christian population had risen by 122 million to 2.3 billion, even as its share of world population fell from 31 percent to 28.8 percent, as Sub-Saharan Africa overtook Europe as home to the largest share of the world's Christians. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Hindu population had grown 12 percent to nearly 1.2 billion, remaining stable as a share of world population since non-Hindus grew at about the same rate; 99 percent of Hindus worldwide live in the Asia-Pacific region and about 95 percent in India alone. (1)By 2020, the same Pew study found the global Muslim population had grown 21 percent to 2.0 billion (26 percent of world population), growing twice as fast as the rest of the world's population over the decade, driven by Muslims having more children and a younger average age than members of any other major religion. (1)By 2025, Asatruarfelagid's registered membership had grown to 6,250, per Statistics Iceland, making it the largest non-Christian religious organization in Iceland. (1)By contrast, the 2016 China Family Panel Studies (CFPS) found 26 percent of Chinese adults burning incense to worship deities at least a few times a year, a practice figure nearly nine times the 3 percent formal-identification rate, the same identification-versus-practice gap this axis has already documented for Taoism and Confucianism. (1)By Pew's 2020 "Jewish Americans in 2020" survey, that share had grown to 2.4 percent of US adults, an estimated 7.5 million people, a national self-identification measure rather than any single body's own membership rolls. (1)By the 2022 census, Spiritist self-identification had fallen to 1.84 percent of the population, a genuine reversal after the religion's 2010 peak. (1)By the 2022 census, the same combined Umbanda and Candomble category had more than tripled to 1.05 percent of the population, a genuine rise over twelve years, though the category still cannot be split between the two traditions in IBGE's own published figures. (1)By the early 1990s, Cao Dai, the syncretic Vietnamese religion founded in 1926, was estimated to have about two million adherents worldwide, across Vietnam, Cambodia, France and the United States. (1)Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, founded in 1972 with about a dozen members, had grown to roughly 1,000 registered members by 2006, according to Statistics Iceland. (1)Iceland's Asatruarfelagid, the country's state recognized Heathen organization and the largest single Heathen organization anywhere, had 280 registered members as of 2000, per Statistics Iceland's (Hagstofa Islands) population registry, after decades in which membership had not exceeded 100. (1)In its December 19, 2011 Global Christianity report, Pew Research Center estimated 2.18 billion Christians worldwide as of 2010, nearly a third of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from a country-by-country analysis of about 2,400 sources including censuses and nationally representative surveys. (1)In its December 2012 Global Religious Landscape study, Pew Research Center estimated about 1 billion Hindus worldwide as of 2010, 15 percent of the global population, while noting a lack of census or survey data on Hindu subgroups in most countries. (1)In its December 2012 Global Religious Landscape study, Pew Research Center estimated about 488 million Buddhists worldwide as of 2010, 7 percent of the global population, a figure the study notes includes members of groups that identify as Buddhist such as Soka Gakkai and Hoa Hao. (1)In its January 27, 2011 report, Pew Research Center estimated about 1.6 billion Muslims worldwide as of 2010, 23.4 percent of the estimated 6.9 billion global population, compiled from roughly 1,500 sources across 232 countries and territories. (1)In Pew Research Center's 2013 "A Portrait of Jewish Americans" survey, 2.2 percent of US adults, an estimated 6.7 million people, identified as Jewish, according to Pew's 2020 follow-up report summarizing both waves. (1)No census or survey counts Santeria practitioners, since the tradition is initiatory, often practiced privately, and frequently alongside Catholicism or another religion rather than exclusively; scholars have estimated the number at at least in the hundreds of thousands and possibly in the millions, a wide, undated range rather than a precise figure, honestly reflecting the measurement difficulty rather than manufacturing false precision. (1)No organization collects formal Chinese Folk Religion membership. The 2018 Chinese General Social Survey (CGSS), analyzed by Pew, found 3 percent of Chinese adults identifying as adherents of folk religions specifically when offered that as a distinct category, a formal-identification figure far below the broader practice figures the same survey family finds. (1)Outside Iceland, the 2021 England and Wales census recorded 4,722 people writing in "Heathen" as their religion, a far smaller figure than the census's broader "Pagan" (74,000) and "Wicca" (13,000) write in totals, showing Heathenry as one strand within a larger modern Pagan revival rather than its dominant form in that country. (1)Pew Research Center's 2014 U.S. Religious Landscape Study found 0.3 percent of US adults identified as Pagan or Wiccan, grouped within the study's broader "New Age" family, a continuation of the American Religious Identification Survey series' growth trend under a different survey house and methodology; no comparable headcount is stated by Pew itself, so none is estimated here from the percentage. (1)Pew's analysis of the 2015 Chinese General Social Survey found about two-thirds of Chinese adults support relying at least partly on the Confucian tradition to restore societal morals; Pew reports no formal Confucian membership figure at all, since Confucianism is not organized around membership in China's survey instruments or in practice. (1)Pew's analysis of the 2018 Chinese General Social Survey found fewer than 0.5 percent of Chinese adults formally identify as Taoist, a figure Pew itself cautions understates Taoist practice, since Taoism does not organize around membership the way Abrahamic traditions do and Chinese respondents rarely classify it as zongjiao, religion, at all. (1)Pew's June 2025 update put its own 2010 Hindu estimate at a little under 1.1 billion, close to but modestly higher than the 2012 report's figure for the same year, a mild revision rather than the sharp divergence seen in the same pair of studies' Buddhist figures. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Christian estimate down slightly to 2.1 billion (31 percent of world population), a mild revision of the 2011 report's 2.18 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to its global religion modeling revised its own 2010 Muslim estimate upward to 1.7 billion (24 percent of world population), a modest revision of the 2011 report's 1.6 billion figure for the same year, both recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Pew's June 2025 update to the same study revised its own 2010 Buddhist estimate sharply downward, to 343 million (just under 5 percent of world population), citing East Asian religious identity being deeply embedded with local folk religions, so many practitioners do not formally self-identify as Buddhist in survey terms. Both the 2012 report's 488 million and this 343 million figure describe the same year, 2010, under two different Pew methodologies, and are recorded here side by side rather than one replacing the other. (1)Rivetna's 2012 revision of the same study (Revision 3, dated October 28, 2012, published in the FEZANA Journal's Fall 2013 issue) put the global Zoroastrian total at 111,691 to 121,962 depending on which Iranian population estimate is used, an 11.0 percent decline from the 2004 study driven mainly by sharp drops in Iran (down 37.5 percent), India (down 12.4 percent) and Pakistan (down 21.0 percent), partly offset by growth in diaspora countries such as the United States (up 32.5 percent). (1)Roshan Rivetna's worldwide Zoroastrian demographic study, published in the FEZANA Journal's Winter 2004 issue, estimated the global Zoroastrian population (Parsis in India, Iranian Zoroastrians, and the worldwide diaspora combined) at 124,953. (1)The 2016 China Family Panel Studies found 26 percent of Chinese adults burn incense to deities a few times a year or more, including 11 percent monthly, a further practice measure Pew reports separately from both formal identification and stated belief. (1)The 2018 Chinese General Social Survey found 75 percent of Chinese adults visited a family gravesite at least once that year, a filial-piety practice tied to Confucian values that Pew treats as a practice measure standing in for the affiliation figure Confucianism does not otherwise produce. (1)The 2021 wave of the same Chinese General Social Survey again found fewer than 0.5 percent of Chinese adults formally identifying as Taoist, confirming the 2018 reading rather than showing a change, per Pew's own analysis. (1)The Baha'i World Centre's own statistics page currently states, as an undated ongoing figure, that there are more than 5 million Baha'is worldwide, present in well over 100,000 localities, notably lower than the outside demographic estimates of 7.3 to 7.8 million recorded above for 2010; the page names no counting method behind the total, unlike the church-reported figures this axis records for PC(USA), the ELCA and the UCC. (1)The CUNY Graduate Center's 1990 National Survey of Religious Identification, the first in what became the American Religious Identification Survey series, found about 8,000 US adults self-identifying as Wiccan, the earliest year for which this survey series recorded the group. (1)The CUNY Graduate Center's 2001 American Religious Identification Survey found 134,000 US adults self-identifying as Wiccan (self-proclaimed witches), a more than sixteenfold rise from 1990; a separate finding from the same November 2001 survey put the broader pagan-identifying population at more than 140,000. (1)The Encyclopedia of Religion (2nd edition, 2005) states that worldwide Baha'i numbers stood at a little more than one million at the end of the 1960s, rising to close to six million by the early 21st century, as compiled in a BahaiTeachings.org survey of population estimates. (1)The gap between identification and practice is large: the 2018 China Family Panel Studies found 18 percent of Chinese adults express belief in Taoist deities or immortals, thirty-six times the formal-identification figure from the same period, exactly the belief-versus-affiliation gap Pew's report names as the central measurement difficulty for Chinese traditional religion. (1)The Vietnamese government's own March 2023 White Book on Religion, a registration-based national count rather than a door-to-door census, puts Cao Dai adherents at about 1 percent of Vietnam's population, a figure that has held steady across the government's registration statistics since at least 2018. (1)Trinity College's 2008 American Religious Identification Survey, the last wave to collect this data before the series ended, found about 342,000 US adults self-identifying as Wiccan and a further 340,000 as Pagan, a combined 682,000, up 148.9 percent from the 2001 wave. (1)Observance NoteAllReading the sky was formal state theology, not private divination. The omen series Enuma Anu Enlil catalogued thousands of correlations between celestial events and royal fortune, and in the Neo-Assyrian period professional scholars wrote directly to the king reporting lunar eclipses, planetary positions and other sky readings as matters of state, their letters preserved in the royal archives at Nineveh. A king who ignored these reports was understood to be ignoring the gods' own communication. (1)Sacrifice at open air altars, civic festivals such as the Panathenaea at Athens, and the great Panhellenic games at Olympia and Delphi were central to its practice. (1)Origin AccountAllAncient Egyptian religion developed over three millennia without a single founder, from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BCE to the religion's gradual eclipse under Roman era Christianisation. (1)Aztec, or Mexica, religion developed within the broader Mesoamerican religious tradition and reached its best documented form in the Triple Alliance centred on Tenochtitlan before the Spanish conquest of 1519 to 1521. (1)Buddhism traces its origin to the awakening of Siddhartha Gautama, the historical Buddha, in the fifth century BCE in northern India. (1)Cao Dai grew out of a Saigon spiritualist seance circle active from 1925, run by four clerks in the French colonial government: Cao Quynh Cu, Cao Hoai Sang, Le Van Trung and Pham Cong Tac. Following a seance revelation naming Cao Dai as the one supreme being, Ngo Van Chieu signed the religion's founding declaration on 7 October 1926, then declined the papal seat himself; Le Van Trung became the first pope in his place. (1)Celtic paganism refers to the pre-Christian religious practices of Celtic speaking peoples across ancient Gaul, Britain and Ireland, known mostly through Roman and later Christian era written sources rather than the tradition's own texts, since Celtic religious teaching was generally not committed to writing. (1)Chinese folk religion has no single founder, drawing on ancestor veneration, local deity cults, and elements of Taoism, Buddhism and Confucian ethics blended over more than two millennia. (1)Christianity traces its origin to the life, teaching, crucifixion and, in the faith of its adherents, resurrection of Jesus of Nazareth in Roman Judea in the first century. (1)Confucianism traces its origin to the teaching of Confucius, a Chinese philosopher and teacher of the sixth to fifth century BCE, whose sayings were collected by his disciples in the Analects. (1)Gnostic traditions of the early Christian centuries generally held that the material world was created by a flawed or ignorant lesser deity, and that salvation lay in secret knowledge, gnosis, of a true divine origin beyond it. (1)Greek religion developed from Bronze Age Mycenaean and, further back, Indo-European antecedents, without a single founder or founding revelation. (1)Hermeticism takes its name and its supposed original teacher from Hermes Trismegistus, a legendary sage merging the Greek god Hermes and the Egyptian god Thoth; its core texts, the Corpus Hermeticum, were composed in Greco-Roman Egypt in the early centuries CE, though long believed in the Renaissance to be far older. (1)Hinduism has no single founder or founding event; scholars trace its roots to the blending of Vedic religion, brought by Indo-Aryan migration, with indigenous religious traditions of the Indian subcontinent over more than a millennium. (1)Islam traces its origin to the revelations received by the prophet Muhammad in Mecca and Medina in the early seventh century, collected as the Quran. (1)Jewish tradition traces its origin to God's covenant with Abraham and, most definitively, to the covenant given to Moses and the people of Israel at Sinai after the exodus from Egypt. (1)Later Pythagorean tradition, particularly among the Neopythagoreans, developed increasingly religious and mystical readings of number and the transmigration of the soul, ideas that the Golden Verses attributed to Pythagoras himself sum up in ethical form. (1)Maya religion developed across Mesoamerica over more than two thousand years among Maya speaking peoples, with no single historical founder, and is documented through inscriptions, painted ceramics and surviving books such as the Popol Vuh. (1)Mesopotamian religion developed across Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian and Assyrian civilisations over some three thousand years, without a single founder, and is known through cuneiform temple archives and myth texts such as the Enuma Elish and the Epic of Gilgamesh. (1)Modern Heathenry emerged from the twentieth century revival of pre-Christian Germanic and Norse religious practice, drawing on the Eddas and sagas while adapting them for contemporary practitioners. (1)Neoplatonism developed from the philosophy of Plotinus in the third century CE, describing reality as emanating in successive stages from a single, transcendent source called the One. (1)Norse paganism has no founder; its mythology and practice developed among Germanic peoples of Scandinavia before Christianisation, and is known today chiefly through medieval Icelandic sources such as the Prose and Poetic Eddas, written down after conversion. (1)Roman religion developed from early Latin and Etruscan cult practice and absorbed extensive Greek mythology and ritual through contact with Greek colonies in Italy, without a single founder. (1)Spiritism holds that the practice of consulting spirits through mediums can be systematically investigated and codified into a coherent doctrine covering the nature of the soul, reincarnation and moral progress across successive lives. (1)Taoism traces its philosophical origin to the Tao Te Ching, traditionally attributed to Laozi, and developed its religious institutions from the second century CE onward around movements such as the Way of the Celestial Masters. (1)The Baha'i Faith traces its origin to the teaching of Baha'u'llah in nineteenth century Persia, preceded by the Bab, a herald whose own movement, Babism, Baha'is regard as a distinct precursor faith. (1)The Roman cult of Mithras spread through the empire from around the first century CE, organised in small, closed cells that met in artificial caves called mithraea rather than in public temples. (1)Thelema was founded by the English occultist Aleister Crowley following his reception in Cairo in 1904 of Liber AL vel Legis, The Book of the Law. (1)Wicca was introduced publicly by Gerald Gardner in England in the 1950s, following the 1951 repeal of the Witchcraft Act, and Gardner presented it as a survival of an older witch religion, a claim not accepted by most historians of the movement. (1)Yoruba religion has no single historical founder; tradition places its sacred centre at Ile-Ife, held in Yoruba cosmology to be the site of the world's creation. (1)Zoroastrianism traces its origin to the teaching of Zarathushtra, whose date remains genuinely unsettled among scholars. A linguistic case built on the archaic language of his own hymns, the Gathas, places him roughly between 1500 and 1000 BCE in greater Iran or Central Asia, while Zoroastrian tradition and the Greek writers who preserved reports of him place him around the sixth century BCE. Neither dating rests on independent, externally verifiable evidence, and the two positions have not been reconciled. (1)Origin PeriodAll"Gnosticism" as one religion is a modern scholarly construct (1)Attested by Greek and Roman observers from the 4th century BCE, and in insular sources far later (1)Established as state doctrine under the Han (1)Gerald Gardner's coven material takes shape in England in the late 1940s and is published from 1954 (1)Judaism proper takes shape after the Babylonian exile (1)No datable founding (1)No founding event (1)Organised religious Daoism from the Way of the Celestial Masters, 142 CE (1)The Asatruarfelagid is recognised in Iceland in 1973 and comparable groups form in Britain and North America (1)The Buddha's dates are contested (traditional 563-483 BCE, critical scholarship c. 480-400 BCE) (1)The Casa Branca terreiro dates from about 1830 (1)The orisha and Ifa system is long established in Yorubaland before European contact (1)The Panhellenic system is in place by the 8th century BCE (1)Origin Period End YearAll3000 BCE (2)1046 BCE (1)1000 BCE (1)700 BCE (1)600 BCE (1)500 BCE (2)490 BCE (1)479 BCE (1)400 BCE (2)100 BCE (1)50 (1)120 (1)142 (1)200 (1)270 (1)300 (1)632 (1)800 (1)1428 (1)1850 (1)1857 (1)1863 (1)1900 (1)1904 (1)1926 (1)1954 (1)1976 (1)Origin Period Start YearAll3500 BCE (1)3300 BCE (1)2000 BCE (1)1600 BCE (1)1500 BCE (2)1400 BCE (1)750 BCE (1)586 BCE (1)551 BCE (1)530 BCE (1)500 BCE (3)400 BCE (1)1 (1)30 (1)80 (1)100 (1)245 (1)610 (1)1325 (1)1500 (1)1800 (1)1844 (1)1857 (1)1904 (1)1926 (1)1946 (1)1972 (1)Place of OriginAllBahia, Brazil (1)Cairo, Egypt; developed in Britain, Italy and the United States (1)China (1)China: the Warring States south, and later Sichuan (1)Croton, in Greek southern Italy (1)Cuba (1)England (1)Gaul, Britain and Ireland (1)Iceland, Britain and North America (1)Mainland Greece, the Aegean islands and the Greek colonies (1)Paris, France (1)Persia and Ottoman Iraq: Shiraz, Baghdad and Acre (1)Roman Egypt, chiefly Alexandria (1)Roman Egypt, Syria and Mesopotamia (1)Roman Judaea and Galilee, spreading through the eastern Mediterranean (1)Rome and central Italy (1)Rome, and afterwards Alexandria, Athens and Syria (1)Scandinavia and the Norse settlements of the North Atlantic (1)Southern Mesopotamia (Sumer), and later Babylonia and Assyria (1)Tay Ninh, in southern Vietnam (1)The eastern Iranian world, in Central Asia or eastern Iran (1)The Hijaz, in western Arabia: Mecca and Medina (1)The Indian subcontinent, chiefly the Indo-Gangetic plain (1)The Maya lowlands and highlands of southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras (1)The middle Ganges plain of north-eastern India: Magadha and Kosala (1)The Nile valley (1)The Roman empire, carried by its army along the Rhine and the Danube (1)The southern Levant: the highlands of Israel and Judah (1)The state of Lu, in eastern China (1)The Valley of Mexico, centred on Tenochtitlan (1)Yorubaland, in what is now south-western Nigeria and Benin (1)Point in DisputeAllHeathenry is split, publicly and sometimes bitterly, between a universalist position holding that anyone drawn to the gods may practice regardless of ancestry, and a folkish position holding the religion belongs by right to people of northern European descent. The divide has produced separate organizations: the Asatru Folk Assembly and elements of the Asatru Alliance take the folkish position, while the Troth is organized explicitly around the universalist one. Scholarship on the movement, including Jennifer Snook's ethnographic study, treats the split as a defining and unresolved feature of American Heathenry rather than a fringe disagreement. (1)Scholars have increasingly questioned whether Gnosticism names a single coherent ancient religion at all, arguing that the category was constructed by later heresiologists and modern historians from a diverse range of texts and groups. (1)Position on MarriageAllMarriage is held to be monogamous, with remarriage after divorce sanctioned under specified conditions (1)Marriage may licitly be polygynous (1)Position on SexualityAllSame-sex orientation or practice is held to bar full membership or participation (1)Same-sex sexual relationships are held contrary to teaching; LGBT individuals are welcomed as members but not ordained, and same-sex unions are not blessed (1)The body holds no single settled position; the question is actively and openly contested within it (2)Position on UsuryAllInterest is permitted but bound by ethical constraints against exploiting the poor (1)Interest of any kind on a loan is forbidden (1)Practice StatusAllClosed ceremonial knowledge, described but not reproduced (3)Discontinued as a state religion (7)Living, and in active revival (1)Living, and practised in varied local forms (8)Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders (9)Practice Status DetailAllWitchTok has driven a documented rise in public self-identification with witchcraft and Pagan practice broadly, Wicca included, among a young and disproportionately female audience; the same platform ecosystem has simultaneously commercialized the aesthetic, selling witchcraft-branded merchandise, courses and tarot decks alongside the instructional content, an entanglement of religious practice with consumer culture that scholarship on the phenomenon treats as a genuine feature of it rather than a corruption of some separate, purer offline practice. (1)Restoration ClaimAllAdherents describe Heathenry as continuing or reviving the pre-Christian religion of the Germanic and Norse peoples; scholars class it as a modern reconstruction drawing on the Eddas and sagas, since no institution carried the old religion forward after the Christianization of Scandinavia and the Germanic world in the centuries around the year 1000. (1)Sexuality Position DetailAllbahai.us states "sexual relations are only permissible between a couple who are married to each other," and marriage is "between a man and a woman," so "it is not possible to recognize same-sex marriage within the Baha'i community." A person with same-sex attraction "should be treated like any other people seeking admittance to the Baha'i Faith, and be accepted on the same basis," with membership carrying the same expectation of aligning conduct to Baha'i teaching as any other member's. Quoting the Universal House of Justice's letter of 11 September 1995, the page states "to regard those with a homosexual orientation with prejudice or disdain would be entirely against the spirit of the Baha'i Faith." (1)Christianity is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its major bodies read at every point on this question today. The Roman Catholic Church's Catechism of the Catholic Church holds that homosexual acts are contrary to natural law while insisting that persons with homosexual tendencies must be accepted with respect, compassion and sensitivity, and reserves marriage to a man and a woman. The Russian Orthodox Church's Basis of the Social Concept, adopted at its Jubilee Bishops Council in August 2000, names homosexuality a sinful distortion of human nature and bars anyone who promotes it as a norm from work with children or youth or from military or reformatory positions, reaching beyond ordination. The United Methodist Church, one of the tradition's largest global bodies, ended its forty-year ban on LGBTQ clergy and same-sex marriage at its 2024 General Conference. The Anglican Communion, in its own 2022 Lambeth Conference Call on Human Dignity, states that its forty-two member provinces hold differing convictions and pastoral practices on this question, some blessing same-sex unions and others continuing to hold that marriage is exclusively the lifelong union of a man and a woman. No statement speaks for Christianity as a whole. (1)Classical Islamic jurisprudence treats homosexual acts, generally termed liwat in the legal literature, as unlawful across all four Sunni schools, though the schools differ on the exact legal category and punishment. The Shafi'i, Hanbali and main Maliki position hold the punishment mirrors that for zina under the hadd category, a fixed penalty applied only under strict evidentiary conditions such as four eyewitnesses or a clear confession; the Maliki school's own harshest reading holds both parties subject to execution regardless of marital status; the Hanafi school instead leans toward a discretionary punishment, ta'zir, set by a judge rather than a fixed hadd penalty, on the reasoning that the specific evidentiary threshold hadd requires was not met by the available textual evidence. Across all four schools, the same-sex attraction itself is treated as distinct from the act and is not, on its own, held to be sinful; the legal rulings address conduct. (1)Judaism is governed by no single worldwide teaching authority, and its recognized movements read at every point on this question today. The Reform movement's Central Conference of American Rabbis authorized rabbis to officiate at same-sex ceremonies in 2000 and, in a 2014 responsum, held that a same-sex union may constitute Jewish marriage, kiddushin, in the full sense. The Reconstructionist and Humanistic movements likewise affirm same-sex marriage and ordain LGBTQ clergy. The Conservative movement's Committee on Jewish Law and Standards issued a combined responsum in 2006 that itself left the question unsettled, approving some liberalizing opinions on ordination and commitment ceremonies alongside others that retained the traditional prohibition, so both readings stand as valid within the movement. Orthodox Judaism, including its Modern Orthodox and Haredi streams, holds that the Torah forbids homosexual acts and sanctions only the marriage of a man and a woman, generally without denying a gay Jew ordinary synagogue membership. No statement speaks for Judaism as a whole. (1)Standard Rate ExpectedAllNineteen percent. (1)Ten percent. (1)Two and a half percent. (1)Standing Giving ExpectationAllChinese folk religion has no fixed donation or tithe expected of a worshipper. Temple incense and offerings are priced by custom rather than tariff: a 2026 ethnographic study of Qinglong Temple in the Chaozhou region records that incense sold at the temple's own counter carries no set price, and that staff asked what to pay answer with phrases such as offer as you wish or offer with reverence, leaving the amount to the worshipper's own sincerity. Money given at a temple is understood within a logic of reciprocity, offered in thanks for a favor granted or a vow fulfilled, rather than owed as a standing religious duty, and no central body exists across Chinese folk religion's many local temple cults that could set one shared rate for all of them. (1)Dana, giving, is a shared ethical foundation across the Buddhist tradition, asked of every lay follower with no fixed rate or amount, in explicit contrast to a percentage-based tithe. A Buddhist Publication Society compilation of Pali Canon teaching on dana, already cited on this axis for the Theravada school fact, states that a gift's merit rests chiefly on the giver's intention rather than the gift's size. Each of the tradition's major branches, already recorded individually on this axis, carries its own documented expression of the same no-fixed-rate ethic: Theravada's daily almsround supporting monastics, Mahayana's dana paramita as one of the perfections and its historic role financing temple institutions, and Vajrayana's ngondro mandala offering, a formally counted practice with a set numerical target rather than an open-ended one. This religion-level fact records the shared ethic those three branch-level facts already document in its own tradition-specific detail. (1)Dana, giving, is not a single uniform rule in Hindu tradition but a textual category examined at length across dharmashastra literature. Maria Heim's academic study Theories of the Gift in South Asia traces how thinkers writing across roughly 1100 to 1300 CE debated whether a gift is fully voluntary or carries an obligatory dimension, a live question precisely because the dharmashastra sources themselves classify gifts along a spectrum running from daily, expected household giving to occasional, circumstance-bound giving and freely chosen giving, without resolving which end of that spectrum binds an ordinary householder. Dakshina, the gift or fee traditionally owed an officiating priest at the close of a ritual, sits at the more expected end of the same spectrum: its Vedic root, traced to a fee due the priest, originally a cow, makes it read as more customary and completion-bound than a purely charitable dana, though its scale is set by custom and the giver's own means rather than by any stated rate. Hinduism has no single hierarchical body, no synod and no magisterium, that could codify either dana or dakshina into a binding rule with a stated percentage or a stated penalty for falling short; what the textual and scholarly record shows is a customary norm of long standing, carried by tradition and ritual expectation rather than by institutional enforcement. (1)Heathenry has no central authority able to impose a shared financial obligation on its adherents. Individual kindreds are largely autonomous, loosely networked with other Heathen groups in their own region rather than answering to a governing body, and many kindreds hold that any member may serve as priest, sharing organisational duties among themselves rather than supporting a professional clergy that a tithe would exist to fund. No tithe, due owed to the wider religion, or other formal giving requirement is documented in the available sources on the movement; where money changes hands it is at the level of an individual kindred's own informal arrangements for shared costs. (1)Huququ'llah (the Right of God), established by Baha'u'llah in the Kitab-i-Aqdas, obliges a Baha'i whose possessions reach a set threshold (nineteen mithqals of gold) to pay nineteen percent of that value once, and again on each further increase of the same size. Unlike this arm's other codified obligations, payment is explicitly left to individual conscience: the law itself states that no believer is to be approached individually to pay it, so there is no administrative consequence, such as a membership or participation gate, for not paying. (1)Ma'aser kesafim, giving one tenth of income to charitable causes (tzedakah), is a widely practiced Jewish norm modeled on the Torah's agricultural tithes. Most halachic authorities today hold that it is not itself a biblical or rabbinic commandment but a minhag, a custom, though a small number of authorities have argued it carries binding force; the debate itself is long standing and unsettled rather than resolved in either direction. (1)No codified giving obligation is documented for Cao Dai. Members and visitors make devotional ritual offerings, incense, fruit, flowers, and sometimes tea or alcohol, at daily temple ceremonies, but no source found states a fixed due, a percentage of income or a consequence for not giving, the shape every other body recorded here carries. (1)Wicca has no overarching organisational structure and no centralized clergy: every initiated practitioner is considered a priest or priestess in their own right, and the religion is practiced through autonomous covens or by solitary practitioners with no body positioned above them to set, collect or enforce a shared financial obligation. This holds across its major named lineages, Gardnerian, Alexandrian, Dianic and eclectic solitary practice alike: none of them is documented as maintaining a central treasury or a doctrine of tithing. Where money changes hands it is at the coven or teacher level, covering the cost of ritual materials or paid instruction, an informal and local arrangement rather than a documented religious duty. (1)Zakat, one of the five pillars of Islam, obliges a Muslim whose accumulated wealth exceeds a minimum threshold (nisab) to give 2.5 percent of that qualifying wealth annually. The Quran (9:60) names eight categories of recipients. In several Muslim-majority countries zakat is collected by the state itself rather than left to the individual, giving the obligation a legal as well as a religious force there; elsewhere it is a personal duty of conscience understood to be as central to Islamic practice as prayer and fasting. (1)Status TodayAllHistorical; not practised continuously (12)Living tradition, practised today (19)Revived or reconstructed in the modern era (2)Supreme BeingAllA single, unknowable God, held to have revealed himself progressively through a succession of messengers or manifestations including Abraham, Krishna, Moses, Buddha, Jesus, Muhammad, the Bab and Baha'u'llah. (1)Allah, God, held to be one and without partner or equal. (1)Ancient Greek religion recognised no single supreme being; Zeus held authority as king of the gods among the Olympians without being their sole creator or an object of exclusive worship. (1)Hindu theology ranges from devotion to a single supreme deity, most often Vishnu or Shiva depending on the tradition, to a broader vision in which many deities are held to be manifestations of a single underlying reality, Brahman. (1)Olodumare, also called Olorun, is held as the supreme, distant creator god, approached through the intermediary orishas rather than worshipped directly in the way individual orishas are. (1)Philosophical Taoism centres on the Tao, an impersonal generative principle rather than a personal deity; religious Taoism venerates a large pantheon headed by figures such as the Jade Emperor and the Three Pure Ones. (1)The God of Israel, understood as one, without partner or physical form, referred to in the Hebrew Bible by the name written as the tetragrammaton. (1)The triune God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit, one being in three persons. (1)TheologyAllAncestor-centred (5)Animist: persons and powers in land, water and living things (1)Dualist: two opposed cosmic principles (2)Duotheistic: a divine pair (1)Emanationist: reality proceeds from an ineffable One (3)Henotheistic: a supreme being above served lesser divinities (3)Monistic: one ultimate reality behind all appearance (5)Monotheistic: one God (7)Non-theistic: no creator god is central (2)Panentheistic: the divine both within the world and beyond it (1)Polytheistic: many gods (14)Theology DetailAllThe cult left no scripture, no liturgy and no doctrinal statement. The single line usually cited is a damaged painted inscription in the mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome, restored by its excavators to read as thanks for having been saved by shed blood, but the restoration supplies missing letters and even as restored does not say what an initiate was saved from or for. (1)Transgression CategoryAllAdharma, action contrary to one's dharma or to cosmic and moral order, is the broad Hindu category of wrongdoing. (1)Akl mal al-yatim: consuming the wealth of an orphan. (1)Al-tawalli yawm al-zahf: fleeing from the battlefield. (1)Avon: iniquity, a sin arising from desire or moral failure, held more culpable than chet. (1)Byapada: ill will, the second of the Five Hindrances. (1)Chet: an unintentional sin, literally a missing of the mark, wrongdoing through error rather than intent. (1)Dvesha (dosa): hatred or aversion, the second of the Three Poisons. (1)Kama-chanda: sensory desire, the first of the Five Hindrances (pancha nivarana) to meditative clarity. (1)Moha: delusion, or ignorance of the true nature of things, the third and most fundamental of the Three Poisons. (1)Pesha: transgression, a willful rebellion against God, the most severe of the three, an intentional defiance rather than a lapse. (1)Qadhf: slandering chaste, believing women with unchastity. (1)Qatl al-nafs: killing a soul that Allah has forbidden, except by right. (1)Raga (lobha): greed, craving or attachment, the first of the Three Poisons said to bind beings to samsara. (1)Riba: consuming usury or interest. (1)Shirk: associating partners with Allah, the first and gravest of the Seven Destructive Sins (as-sab al-mubiqat). (1)Sihr: magic or sorcery. (1)Sin, understood as thought, word, deed or omission contrary to the will of God, ranging in Catholic moral theology from venial to mortal sin. (1)Thina-middha: sloth and torpor, the third of the Five Hindrances. (1)Uddhacca-kukkucca: restlessness and worry, the fourth of the Five Hindrances. (1)Vicikiccha: doubt, the fifth of the Five Hindrances. (1)Usury Position DetailAllThe heter iska, literally a permit for a joint venture, restructures what would otherwise be an interest bearing loan between Jews into a shared business investment: the party supplying the capital and the party using it become partners sharing profit and loss rather than creditor and debtor, so any return the capital earns is a business profit, not loan interest, and the Torah's prohibition on taking interest from a fellow Jew (Exodus 22:24, Leviticus 25:36-37, Deuteronomy 23:19) is honestly not triggered rather than evaded on paper. The mechanism's formalization is credited to named medieval authorities, Rabbi Baruch ben Isaac's Sefer Ha-Terumah and Rabbi Yisrael Isserlin's Terumat Ha-Deshen among them, developed across the medieval period rather than at a single settled date. It remains in common use today, including for interest bearing accounts at banks under rabbinical supervision. (1)The Quran's treatment of riba came in stages rather than all at once. An early Meccan verse, Surah Al-Rum 30:39, contrasted interest unfavorably with charity as moral guidance, without yet imposing a legal ban. After the migration to Medina the tone sharpened: Surah Al-Nisa 4:161 rebukes an earlier community for taking interest despite being forbidden it, and Surah Al-Imran 3:130, revealed after the Battle of Uhud, specifically condemns compounding interest. The final and complete prohibition, covering interest of any kind, came in Surah Al-Baqarah 2:275-281, revealed near the end of the Prophet's life and describing persistence in the practice as tantamount to war against God and His messenger. This is why contemporary Islamic finance avoids interest bearing loans altogether, structuring transactions instead as profit and loss sharing partnerships or cost-plus sales. (1)BrowseCompareAncient Egyptian ReligionBelongs To Tradition2 entriesAncient Greek ReligionBelongs To Tradition3 entriesAztec ReligionBelongs To Tradition1 entryBahá’í FaithBelongs To Tradition1 entryBuddhismBelongs To Tradition1 entryCandombléBelongs To Tradition1 entryCao ĐàiBelongs To Tradition1 entryCeltic PaganismBelongs To Tradition1 entryChinese Folk ReligionBelongs To Tradition3 entriesChristianityBelongs To Tradition1 entryConfucianismBelongs To Tradition2 entriesGnosticismBelongs To Tradition1 entryHeathenryBelongs To Tradition1 entryHermeticismBelongs To Tradition2 entriesHinduismBelongs To Tradition3 entriesIslamBelongs To Tradition4 entriesJudaismBelongs To Tradition3 entriesMaya ReligionBelongs To Tradition1 entryMesopotamian ReligionBelongs To Tradition2 entriesMithraismBelongs To Tradition2 entriesNeoplatonismBelongs To Tradition1 entryNorse PaganismBelongs To Tradition1 entryPythagoreanismBelongs To Tradition1 entryRoman ReligionBelongs To Tradition2 entriesSantería (Lucumí)Belongs To Tradition2 entriesSpiritismBelongs To Tradition1 entryTaoismBelongs To Tradition3 entriesThelemaBelongs To Tradition1 entryWiccaBelongs To Tradition1 entryYorùbá Religion (Ifá)Belongs To Tradition2 entriesZoroastrianismBelongs To Tradition2 entriesSources1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Treetier 1Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptionstier 1Comments (0)No comments yet. Be the first to share a thought.Sign in to join the discussion.Reader Challenges (0)No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.