Tradition

This category holds the named figures of scripture, myth and legend who are not themselves gods: prophets, patriarchs and matriarchs, apostles and disciples, saints, sages, founders, kings, heroes and heroines, and their adversaries, demons, monsters and titans. They are the persons who act within a tradition's sacred story without being worshipped as divine.

The boundary with deity is drawn differently in different traditions and is sometimes internally disputed. A figure may be a revered but wholly human teacher in one community and an object of devotion approaching worship in another, and the atlas notes such cases rather than forcing a single classification.

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.