Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

This page groups religions by whether they are open to anyone who wishes to join or reserved for a closely defined community. Wikipedia notes that while some religions claim to be universal, "others are intended to be practiced only by a closely defined or localized group." Browsing this way separates missionary faiths that actively seek converts from traditions that restrict who may take part.

Facts
Overview
What Defines This Grouping
Traditions that honour many deities and hold that spirit is distributed through the world itself - in rivers, mountains, animals, ancestors and made objects - so that the sacred is met in the landscape and not only in temples. 2
Peoples and Traditions Covered
Unrelated traditions grouped by resemblance, not by descent: Akan, Dogon, Yoruba and Zulu in Africa; Inuit and Sami in the Arctic; Lakota, Dine and other Native American nations; Aboriginal Australian and Polynesian traditions; Shinto, Korean Muism, Bon, Tengrism and Siberian traditions in Asia. Each names its own world in its own terms. 2
Status
Status Today
Living: the traditions grouped here are practised today, several of them after long periods of suppression, and are described in the present tense. 2
Standing as a Comparative Category
Contested: the evolutionary scheme the word was coined to serve has been abandoned. It survives in current work as a description of relational ways of being in the world, not as a class of religions. 2
Directory
Category
Religions 1
Origins
Whose Classification This Is
Animism as a comparative category is E. B. Tylor's, set out in Primitive Culture in 1871 as the earliest stage of religion in an evolutionary scheme. It is an analytic coinage: no tradition grouped here calls itself animist. 3
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Polytheistic and Animist Religions

This group holds religions of a polytheistic-animist character, traditions that recognise many deities and also a world densely inhabited by spirits present in nature, place, ancestor and object. This is the largest classification among the religions covered here and spans many cultures.

The browser will find indigenous and traditional religions from across the world grouped by this shared outlook. The entries describe each in its own terms; the atlas presents these as living or historically living traditions, not as a single system.

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders
Filter Results6 entries

Ainu Religion

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

Bon

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

Native American Church

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

San Religion

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

Shinto

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders

Yorùbá Religion (Ifá)

Partly restricted: some elements are closed to outsiders
Sources
1. Divinity Atlas Directory Taxonomy, First Edition Category Tree
2. Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. AnimismView the Source
3. Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Religion, Art, and Custom
Edward Burnett Tylor, Murray, 1871vol. 1, ch. 11View the Source
Divinity Atlas Directory Prose, First Edition Category Descriptions
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