This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Oceans gathers the three bodies of water the atlas treats not chiefly as places but as passages, each one a route religious traditions were carried across rather than a site where they began.
The Indian Ocean is the only ocean with a wind that reverses, and the monsoon made it a road rather than a barrier for two thousand years: Hinduism and Buddhism crossed it eastward into Southeast Asia, Islam travelled it in every direction with merchants and the Hadrami sayyid families, the Saint Thomas Christians of the Malabar coast trace their church to an apostolic voyage across it, and the hajj came by sea along it until the age of the aeroplane.
The Atlantic Ocean is, in religious history, less a place than a passage of its own. The transatlantic slave trade carried West and Central African traditions to Brazil, Cuba, Haiti and the American South, where they were remade as Candomble, Santeria, Vodou and their relatives, while the same ocean carried European Christianity west in the colonial missions and gave the Puritan settlers who crossed it the language of Exodus for their own voyage.
The Pacific Ocean, the largest body of water on earth, was the setting for the Polynesian expansion, in which navigators carried a shared body of gods, genealogies and ritual practice across thousands of miles of open sea to Hawaii, Aotearoa and Rapa Nui, and from the early nineteenth century it carried a sustained Christian mission effort in the other direction, so that most Pacific societies today live with both inheritances at once rather than one alone.