This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Manuals gathers seven practical texts that instruct religious specialists in a craft or a procedure, rather than setting out doctrine or telling a story.
Three are architectural and iconographic treatises from India. The Manasara and the Mayamata are Sanskrit treatises of the shilpa shastra tradition, covering site selection, temple design and the proportions of images; Mayamata is South Indian and generally placed around the Chola period, while Manasara's own date is unsettled, ranging across the middle centuries of the first millennium CE. The Chitrasutra, a section of the Vishnudharmottara Purana dated to about the fifth to seventh centuries CE, teaches that the painter must understand dance and music before an image can live.
Two are manuals for icon painters. The Hermeneia of Dionysius of Fourna, compiled on Mount Athos around 1730, gathers Byzantine workshop knowledge, materials, technique and scene by scene prescriptions for the feasts and saints, and remains the standard codification of Orthodox iconography. The Podlinnik is the Russian name for a related genre of pattern books circulating from at least the sixteenth century, some illustrated for tracing, some descriptive, ordered by the church calendar.
The remaining two are institutional compendia. The Engishiki, completed at the Heian court in 927 CE, codifies Shinto court ceremony in its first ten volumes, including a register of 2,861 shrines and the oldest collected liturgical prayers of the tradition. The Rituale Romanum, promulgated in 1614, is the Roman Rite's manual for sacraments and blessings a priest gives outside the Mass, including the 1614 rite of exorcism that fixed the church's ordinary text until 1999.