A hymnal is where a community decides what it will sing together. These sixteen books, taken in order of publication, run from Calvin's Geneva to a twenty first century Lutheran worship book and show how psalters...
16 stops
This path walks the first twelve of the ninety-one Parts of the Earth in the order of Dee's Liber Scientiae, three for each of the first four Aethyrs, LIL, ARN, ZOM and PAZ. It shows how the tabulation pairs a territory...
12 stops
This path walks the lines of the first two hexagrams of the Book of Changes in order, as James Legge renders them: the six lines of The Creative, which follow a dragon from hiding to overreach, and then the lines of The...
11 stops
Ten works from the Metropolitan Museum of Art that follow stories of the Hebrew Bible in the order the biblical books tell them, from Nimrod's tower in Genesis to Josiah's reform in 2 Kings. Most are sixteenth century...
10 stops
This trail follows eleven films and series that put the founders and central figures of living religions on screen, from Moses and Jesus to the Prophet Muhammad, the Buddha, Confucius and Guru Nanak. Read in order, they...
11 stops
This path walks through fifteen years from 1925 to 1995 that the atlas ties to a turning point in religious life, from a courtroom over evolution to a gas attack on a subway. Each year page also names its place in the...
15 stops
Eight passages from eight traditions that each try to say what there was before there was a world. They are read in the translations the atlas holds, and they differ most in what they allow to exist at the start: a...
8 stops
This trail follows eleven Sufi orders, or tariqas, from the twelfth century to the twentieth, in roughly the order each took shape. It begins in Baghdad and southern Iraq, moves through India, Anatolia, Egypt and...
11 stops
Between 1807 and 1810 the English chemist Humphry Davy used electricity and careful reasoning to show that familiar substances such as potash, soda, lime, magnesia, baryta and the greenish gas from salt were built...
8 stops
This path follows eleven episodes in which rulers and church courts punished people for what they believed or refused to do, in rough time order. It begins with four persecutions of Christians by Roman emperors, then...
11 stops
This path runs roughly north to south through the hemisphere, from the Inuit of the Arctic to the Inca of the Andes, and shows how the atlas describes peoples whose religious life is living, often partly closed to...
12 stops
These ten disciplines each began when a European or colonial-era scholar learned to read the sacred texts of Asia in their own languages, from the Asiatic Society of Bengal in 1784 to the first sustained English study...
10 stops
In Human Design the Juxtaposition family is the smallest of the three cross angles, tied only to the four line one profile and read as the most fixed direction the system names. This path takes twelve of these crosses...
12 stops
Human Design groups pairs of I Ching hexagrams into incarnation crosses, and the Right Angle family is the largest of its three. This path takes three named Right Angle crosses, Laws, Penetration and Rulership, and...
12 stops
These ten elements reached the periodic table between 1794 and 1907, mostly by being coaxed out of the same few Scandinavian minerals, and their names preserve where and how that happened. Read in order of discovery...
10 stops
This path follows the events of the life of Jesus as the Christian gospels and the book of Acts tell them, from the announcement to Mary to the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. Each stop records what its sources say...
16 stops
Alchemy matched seven metals to the seven planets, and this path walks them in the order of the planetary week, from the Sun to Saturn. It then turns to sulfur, arsenic and carbon, which the alchemists used constantly...
10 stops
Twelve passages from twelve traditions, each chosen because what the text says depends on a decision the translator, editor or commentator had to make: a stanza number, a single Hebrew or Greek word, a rendering that...
12 stops
This path follows the scholarly disciplines that carry a scripture from a surviving object to an interpreted meaning: first the manuscript, its physical make-up and its handwriting, then the language and the comparison...
10 stops
Every large religious community must answer who leads it and how that person is chosen. This path moves through eleven offices of supreme or senior authority, from bishops elected by a synod to a child recognized as a...
11 stops
Human Design builds each incarnation cross from two gates, and the same two gates can be read in either order, so one pair of hexagrams yields two crosses. This path takes three Right Angle names (the Sphinx, the Four...
12 stops
This trail follows Buddhism from the Ganges plain, where the Buddha taught, outward to Sri Lanka, Central Asia, China, Korea, Japan, Tibet and Southeast Asia, then back to India, where the tradition was institutionally...
10 stops
This path follows ten peoples whose religions were once the public faith of their lands and who are known today mostly through ritual, text and the stories others told of them. It runs roughly in time and space, from...
10 stops
This path follows eleven European conflicts in which religion was the stated cause or the decisive stake, from Charlemagne's campaign to convert the Saxons to the Swiss civil war of 1847. Taken in order, they show how...
11 stops
This trail follows the questions on which Western Christians who left or reshaped the medieval church parted from one another. It begins with the Lord's Supper and the Calvinist and Arminian argument over grace, moves...
13 stops
This trail follows one question across very different settings: how do people train attention and breath to change inner experience? It begins with sacred sound and the classical mystical pursuits of union with the...
11 stops
This path lists eleven organizations in the atlas that run charitable, relief or welfare work connected to a religious tradition. The order is alphabetical by name, ignoring a leading The, and is this trail's own...
11 stops
Ten practices from several traditions, arranged alphabetically by the name the atlas gives each, from Agpeya to Upvas. The alphabetical order is this trail's own arrangement and does not rank the practices or the...
10 stops
Eight serpentine and dragon figures from different traditions, each described as its own tradition tells it. The order is this trail's own arrangement: alphabetical by the name used on each page, from Amphisbaena to...
8 stops
Nine winged beings from different traditions, each described as its own tradition tells it. The order is this trail's own arrangement: alphabetical by the name used on each page, from Fenghuang to Ziz. It is not a...
9 stops
This trail gathers belief pages in which different Jewish movements describe how they understand the Torah and Jewish law. The order is this trail's own chosen arrangement, running from the written text toward communal...
8 stops
This path follows languages in which the scriptures and services of several traditions were composed or kept, moving from the Hebrew of the Bible through the Greek, Slavonic, Coptic and Latin of Christian worship, then...
14 stops
This path follows a dozen northern constellations whose entries on the atlas preserve Greek and Roman stories as the tradition tells them: first the royal family of Aethiopia and the sea monster, then the bears of...
12 stops
This path follows the second through thirteenth degrees of Aries, the first two decans of the sign, as the Sabian images carry the newly emerged self from self-observation toward relationship, aspiration and social...
12 stops
Ten small countries show how a faith and a government can be bound together in very different ways. The path begins with four tiny European states where the Catholic Church holds a privileged place, moves to three...
10 stops
This path follows the Babi and Bahai story in the order its places entered history, from the Shiraz house where the Bab made his declaration in 1844, through the sieges and the prison of the persecution years, to the...
8 stops
Most visitors know the bright figures of the zodiac and the great myths. This path walks through sixteen smaller constellations that the atlas also holds, from the large faint northern ones to the ship and water figures...
16 stops
A flower can carry a meaning as plainly as a word. This path takes twelve blooms from the atlas in the order a reader might learn the language of flowers: faithful and declared love, purity and silence, hope, constancy...
12 stops
These twelve stories each send a hero or a god away from home on a task, a voyage or a trial, and the path runs from the oldest written quest in Mesopotamia through Greece, India, northern Europe, the Maya world...
12 stops
This path follows how Persian, Indian, Jewish and Islamic traditions sorted the unseen world into helpful, hostile and ambiguous beings, beginning with the Zoroastrian split between daevas and yazatas and ending with...
12 stops
This path follows languages that carry religious life outside the familiar canon of written scripture: inscriptions, claimed and received tongues, ritual speech, sacred song and the ordinary spoken word of worship. Each...
10 stops
A walk through the Christian calendar from December to November, taking one feast at a time in the order a worshipper meets them: the Marian and Nativity feasts of winter, the Easter-cycle days of spring and early...
16 stops
Most Hindu mythology and most Hindu temple practice rest on two families of Sanskrit texts rather than on the Vedas. This path moves from the Puranas, which tell of gods, ages of the world and sacred places, to the...
10 stops
This path walks ten common herbs as Nicholas Culpeper's planetary herbalism grouped them, beginning with two herbs of the Sun, then four of Mercury, then four of Venus. At each stop the atlas records both the kitchen...
10 stops
This path follows festivals that belonged to the calendars of ancient and pre-Christian peoples, from Athens and Rome through the Norse and Anglo-Saxon North, Zoroastrian Iran, and the Aztec and Inca worlds. Each stop...
11 stops
Sacred and quasi-sacred writing did not stop with antiquity. This trail follows twelve texts composed or published between 1794 and 1979, in the order they appeared, from a deist polemic and a positivist church to...
12 stops
These eight texts follow the first Christian generations from a letter to Corinth around 96 CE through hymns, bishops' letters, a martyr's story and an anonymous defense of the faith, showing how believers organized...
8 stops
This path follows one family of disciplines that read the world as a pattern of correspondences, from the Chinese scheme of five phases and the Book of Changes through the astrology and building arts built on them, then...
8 stops
These nine narratives share one shape: someone is taken below, hidden away or killed, and what follows is a question of whether and how they come back. Read in order, they move from ancient Mesopotamia and Greece...
9 stops
This trail follows what Buddhists believe as the teaching moved from the Buddha first sermon to the schools of Asia. It begins with the shared diagnosis and the Pali scripture, passes through the arhat and bodhisattva...
9 stops
After Muhammad there was no prophet left to settle who should lead the community or how scripture should be read, and Islam's major traditions answered in different ways. Sunni, Shia, Zaydi, Nizari Ismaili and Ibadi...
11 stops
This path follows the Islamic ritual prayer, salah, from the intention that precedes it through its postures and the rules that govern a prayer that goes wrong, is missed, or is lifted above the ordinary, ending with...
9 stops
Many of the constellations Ptolemy listed in the second century are small stories set in the sky, and several of them only make sense beside their neighbors. This path follows three of those story groups in turn: Orion...
12 stops
Plants and fungi used to open a ritual state are worked out very differently from one tradition to the next, from Mexico and the Andes through the Amazon to Eurasia, Africa and the Pacific. A cactus is eaten at an all...
14 stops
This path walks the first twenty-two letters of the Arabic script in their modern order, from alif to kaf. Along the way it shows how one outline is split into several letters by dots, which letters were inherited from...
22 stops
The Dead Sea Scrolls were not one book but a library. This path begins with the rules, hymns, commentary and war plans of the sectarian community, then moves outward to the texts it retold and shared with other Jewish...
9 stops
This trail follows religion as something the body does. It begins with the most widely shared acts of abstention and travel, moves through gesture, tantric ritual and the subtle body of yoga, and ends in the Chinese...
11 stops
This path follows the Buddhist titles that mark a person as liberated, ordained or authorised to teach. It begins with the arhat and the fully ordained monk and nun, moves through the teacher titles of Thailand, Burma...
12 stops
This path follows organised religious life in nine monasteries and monastic places, from a cliff church in Tigray to a Rhineland abbey. They span Ethiopian Orthodox, Chan, Shingon, Eastern Orthodox, Bon and Benedictine...
9 stops
Twelve small constellations of the far southern sky, named for birds, fish and other animals that northern observers never saw, show how this part of the heavens entered European star maps in the 1590s and early 1600s...
12 stops
These eight Central African countries share a region where Christian mission churches, Islam from the Sahel and older indigenous traditions meet. The path runs from the Christian and Muslim divide of Cameroon and Chad...
8 stops
This path follows the objects a Sikh community is built around, beginning with the initiation that creates the Khalsa in 1699, then the five articles of faith worn on the body, then the objects that mark and serve the...
9 stops
This trail follows nine ancient languages in which the religious texts of the Near East were written down, taking Egypt first, then Mesopotamia, Anatolia and the Aramaic world, and finally Iran. Each stop names a...
9 stops
This trail follows the Japanese mythic sequence the Kojiki and Nihongi tell, from the first divine couple and the death that divides them, through the sun, moon and storm kami born of Izanagi, the hiding of the sun in a...
14 stops
This path follows the Western occult revival through ten books, from Eliphas Levi in the 1850s to Aleister Crowley in the 1940s. It moves from the French founder of the revival, through Theosophy, American sex magic and...
10 stops
These nine narratives follow one thread through many traditions: a contest between a hero or god and a rival power, and the price or irony that comes with it. The path moves from Norse encounters with the great serpent...
9 stops
This trail follows twelve island countries, from the Caribbean through the western Indian Ocean to the Pacific, where a single colonial or missionary tradition arrived early and still marks the religious map. Each stop...
12 stops
This path follows organized and personal generosity across traditions, from the general duty of almsgiving to the tithe, the Islamic levies, Sikh and Hindu service, and a modern congregational program. Each stop shows a...
8 stops
This trail follows ten regions of Asia, from the hills of northeastern India across southwest China and the islands of Southeast Asia to Okinawa, where indigenous traditions still live alongside Buddhism, Hinduism...
10 stops
This path follows Hermetic and magical writing from Greco-Roman Egypt to the early twentieth century, in rough order of composition. It shows how a few ideas, correspondence between heaven and earth, power in divine...
9 stops
The modern list of 88 constellations descends from the Greek sky, but peoples around the world read the same heavens differently. This path begins with figures drawn from dark dust lanes rather than from stars, then...
12 stops
This path follows the disciplines through which people sought insight into hidden order, from the umbrella art of divination and the Roman reading of bird omens, through astrology, alchemy and the Kabbalah, to the...
10 stops
Fasting and penitence are among the oldest ways traditions mark time. This path moves from the Western and Orthodox Christian seasons that lead to Easter, through the Jewish day of mourning for the temples, to the...
10 stops
This path travels from the oldest recorded religion in Mesopotamia eastward to Japan, visiting the regions where the atlas places the major traditions. At each stop the atlas also admits where a placement is argued...
10 stops
This path visits the first degree of each of the twelve zodiac signs, from Aries 1 to Pisces 1, so the Sabian symbols read as a cycle that begins again twelve times. Each stop gives the opening image, the lesson it...
12 stops
This path follows eleven living or historical organizations of the modern Pagan, Druid, Heathen and Kemetic revival in the order they were founded, from 1964 to 2014. It shows how the movement moved from small circles...
11 stops
This path follows objects worn, carried or kept to protect or to draw good fortune, from the general terms amulet and talisman through Scandinavian gold pendants, Daoist paper charms, Japanese shrine charms and the...
8 stops
This path walks the numbers from zero through ten and then twelve, in the order the Pythagoreans counted them, from the void and the monad up to the decad that folds the first four numbers into one. Each stop shows what...
12 stops
This path follows worship that was tied to a particular kind of ground. It begins with two Roman temples built to imitate a cave, moves to a sacred spring and a healing sanctuary in Roman Britain, turns to the oaks and...
8 stops
Many traditions train the believer by taking something away, first food and drink, then speech, then ordinary company and finally even the movement of the body. This path moves from the widest account of fasting through...
12 stops
This path follows twelve plants that carry religious or devotional meaning across traditions, beginning with the lotus of Egypt and India and the ritual betel leaf of South Asia, moving through the blossoms of China and...
12 stops
This path walks through eleven of the thirteen principal Upanishads in the standard sequence the atlas records, from the short Isha to the theistic Svetasvatara. Each stop shows a different way these Sanskrit teaching...
11 stops
Every tradition on this path answers the same question: how did the world, and the people in it, begin? The stops run from cosmos-making stories, in which gods or a first mother shape sea, sky and land, through accounts...
11 stops
Ten hymns from the ancient Egyptian and Greek worlds, read in rough order of composition, show how worshippers addressed a god: with praise, narrative, philosophy, music and ritual instruction. The path runs from...
10 stops
This path begins with three beliefs nearly all Christians share, then follows the doctrines on which the churches have separated, from the creed and the papacy to the Reformation questions of authority, salvation and...
11 stops
This path follows eleven languages through the way sacred texts and rites were fixed, translated and kept alive, from the hieroglyphs of Egypt to the Quechua of the Andes. It moves roughly from the earliest written...
11 stops
This path crosses eleven countries where Islam is the faith of well over three quarters of the people, to show how differently their laws and governments handle that fact. It begins with states whose constitutions bind...
11 stops
This trail follows one question across several traditions: what a person or a people says to the divine when suffering has come, whether or not they believe they deserve it. It begins with laments that protest or...
10 stops
This path follows disciplined inner practice from the broad category of meditation through Indian breath, recitation and posture, into Buddhist sitting and insight, and on to Christian contemplative prayer. It shows how...
10 stops
This path moves outward from the hearth to the edge of the human world, following folk spirits that guard or haunt one particular place and answer to how the people there treat it. It begins with household guardians...
10 stops
This path picks up the Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet where the earlier trail leaves off and follows the later signs of the Ras Shamra school abecedary to its end, passing from the signs Ugaritic shares with Hebrew and...
11 stops
In the 1750s the French astronomer Nicolas-Louis de Lacaille mapped the southern sky and named a group of faint constellations after the tools of the Enlightenment: compasses, clocks, telescopes, a chisel and a table...
13 stops
This path follows the Christian mystical tradition through eight texts in rough order of composition, from the apophatic treatise that denies of God everything affirmed of him, through the English contemplatives and the...
8 stops
This path follows religious roles whose holders stand between people and the unseen, from Greek and Roman readers of signs to shamans, priestesses and healers in Asia, Northern Europe, Polynesia and Australia. Each stop...
11 stops
This path follows the Yoruba narrative tradition as the atlas records it, starting with the supreme being who withdraws from story and moving through the orisha who shaped the world, kept its knowledge, ruled, hunted...
12 stops
Walk the first sixteen places of the oldest alphabetic order we have, the order the school abecedary tablets from Ras Shamra record for the thirty-sign Ugaritic cuneiform alphabet. Each stop is a sign whose sound is...
14 stops
This path walks the band of sky the Sun crosses, from Aries to Pisces, in the order of the astrological year. Each stop gives the constellation's traditional figure, its brightest star and its neighbours as the atlas...
13 stops
A figure like "84.7 million" or "800 million" looks like a fact until you ask who counted, and how. This trail walks six traditions whose membership figures were reached by different, sometimes irreconcilable methods: a...
6 stops
Ten traditions, asked the same question: is time a line or a wheel, and if it is a wheel, where in the turning are we now? This trail moves from the Hindu yugas and the real scholarly dispute over how long they last...
10 stops
Religious and ideological organizations rarely publish one honest number for what they are worth. This trail follows eight institutions across very different traditions through what can actually be documented about...
8 stops
Nine cultures looked at the same object in the sky and did not arrive at the same god. This route runs roughly with the sun, from the earliest surviving name to the last, and asks at each stop what the tradition made...
9 stopsabout 27 minutes
A shape can travel further than the belief that made it, and it does not always carry its meaning with it. Seven marks, each of which turns up in traditions that never met, or that met and disagreed about what they were...
7 stopsabout 24 minutes
Seven places that a tradition treats as different in kind from anywhere else, one tradition at a time. What makes a city sacred is not the same answer twice: a burial, a river, a direction of prayer, a founder, a court...
7 stopsabout 17 minutes
Hermeticism is easier to name than to enter, because almost everything written about it assumes you already know who Hermes Trismegistus is meant to be. This route takes the long way in: the two gods behind the name...
6 stopsabout 30 minutes
Nine worlds hang from one tree, and everything this pantheon does eventually comes back to the ash at its center. This route runs from the god who sacrificed an eye for knowledge to the ending his own family cannot...
8 stopsabout 26 minutes
Every step in Egypt's afterlife has a job: create the world, become its sun, die and rise as its king, gather the pieces, write the verdict, weigh the heart, guide the reader through the danger, and arrive at the place...
8 stopsabout 26 minutes
Nine traditions, nine different jobs for whatever comes after death: punishment, pollution, administration, reward, or the end of needing a destination at all. Follow the same question through cultures that mostly never...
9 stopsabout 27 minutes
A life has more than one doorway, and every tradition marks its own set of them differently: at birth, at the edge of adulthood, at the choice to take up a religious life. Walk one life course through eight traditions'...
8 stopsabout 22 minutes
In under seventy years, Christianity moves from a capital offense to the Roman Empire's compulsory religion. Follow the edicts, the emperors and the one word, homoousios, that carried it there.
8 stopsabout 26 minutes
Every claim here carries a status: established, disputed, corrected, or simply unknown. This route follows that machinery in action: a gap named rather than hidden, two traditions recorded as genuinely different rather...
7 stopsabout 19 minutes