Sacred Places

This section gathers the places traditions treat as holy (temples, mountains, rivers, oracles, stone circles and pilgrimage destinations), together with the cultural regions the traditions themselves come from. It holds both the specific sacred site and the wider region that gives a system its setting.

Many sites have been sacred to more than one tradition in turn, and the entries record the layered history where that is so, rather than assigning a place to a single owner.

Pairing individual sites with the regions that produced whole systems lets a browser move between scales: from a single temple or mountain to the cultural world it belongs to, and from a region to the sites within it. Each site entry gives a location and the tradition or traditions that hold it sacred; each region entry names the area, its modern equivalent where the historical name differs, and what arose there.

The sites group by tradition (Hindu, Buddhist, Christian, Islamic, Indigenous and many more), so a reader can narrow from all sacred places to those of one culture.