Languages of Ritual, Revelation and Oral Tradition

Etruscan is attested from about 700 BC to 50 AD in roughly 13,000 inscriptions, and many of the surviving Etruscan-language artifacts are votive or religious, so the sacred life of this civilization reaches us through short dedications rather than a scripture.

Reformed Egyptian is a language known only from the Book of Mormon, whose compiler Moroni describes modified Egyptian characters in Mormon 9:32-34. The atlas records both the believing view and the finding of outside scholars that no attested writing system matches it.

Enochian is said by its originators to have been received from angels and was recorded in the journals of John Dee and Edward Kelley in late sixteenth-century England. Dee also called it Angelical, and the name Enochian comes from his claim that the patriarch Enoch was the last human to know it.

Habla Congo is a Kongo-based liturgical language of the Palo religion that arose in Cuba among enslaved Bakongo people. It mixes Kongo-derived words with Bozal Spanish, and it is not secret but is intended to be impenetrable to the uninitiated.

Gorani, with its main dialect Hawrami, is a Northwestern Iranian language and the first language of the scriptures of the Ahl-e Haqq sect, or Yarsanism. It shows a living faith whose sacred writing is in a regional literary language.

Yolngu Matha, a family of languages whose name means tongue, has no indigenous script and is carried by song, ceremony and design. It is the language of the Yolngu account of Djulpan, the canoe of three brothers.

Maori, or te reo Maori, is the language of whakapapa and karakia, and the language in which Matariki and Te Waka o Rangi are named. It was suppressed for much of the twentieth century and is now an official language of New Zealand.

Yucatec Maya is spoken today across Yucatan, Campeche, Quintana Roo and parts of Belize. The atlas keeps it distinct from Classic Maya and from the K'iche' Maya of the Popol Vuh, and it holds the sky lore term Tzab, the Maya reading of the Pleiades.

Ainu is a language isolate of Hokkaido that carries the yukar, long chanted epics in which a kamuy speaks in the first person. It was an oral language, and an organised revival now follows a century of assimilation.

The path closes with the vernacular, the ordinary spoken language of a worshipping community as opposed to a fixed sacred language. Records that say a tradition worships in the vernacular without naming a language are grouped here.