Tradition

This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.

The Study of Religion gathers thirty two doctrines belonging not to a tradition but to the discipline that studies traditions, its working categories, its revised theories and its arguments about method.

The classical analytic vocabulary supplies the largest cluster: charisma, liminality, communitas and rite of passage carry Weber's, Turner's and Van Gennep's own terms into general use, the numinous and the sacred and the profane state Otto's and Eliade's accounts of what religious experience confronts, and myth and ritual, purity and pollution, and sacred time and sacred space name the Frazerian myth-ritual school, Douglas's anthropology, and Eliade's further category.

A second cluster names theories the discipline has since revised or rejected: the gift-bringer complex and tooth fairy tradition name comparative folklore categories built to explain modern custom by ancient parallel, the Mother Goddess names a once-dominant universal theory now heavily qualified, the Hermetica as wisdom older than Moses names a dating claim scholarship overturned, and what Pythagoras himself taught states how little of the tradition attributed to him can be confirmed as his. Entheogen theories of religious origins and sacred prostitution name two contested claims, and revival not survival names the correction that modern reconstructed traditions are new rather than unbroken.

Canon formation, civil religion, ecumenism, inculturation, lived religion, religious conversion, religious experience, sectarianism, syncretism, menstruation and the sacred, temple sleep, weather ritual, Tengrism as a modern name and the conflict thesis and the complexity thesis close the group as working categories for what traditions actually do.