Descent is a stronger claim than resemblance. A solid line means one tradition came out of another and says so about itself. A dotted line means only that two faiths hold ideas in common — it is drawn from Panfaith’s own tagging of elements, weighted so that a rare agreement counts for more than a universal one. Nearly everybody prays; almost nobody holds wu-wei. The second is worth a line and the first is not.

Size is an estimate about the real world, and the only such number on this site. 79 of the 171 faiths carry a scholarly adherent estimate; the rest carry none, because counting them would be a category error — Sufism is a current within Islam, Advaita is a school rather than a membership, and the Vedic religion has no living adherents at all. Those are drawn at a default size and say uncounted when you open them. They used to be drawn hollow, which was fair when it marked a handful of exceptions and became misleading once it described half the map: a faith nobody can put a number on is not a small faith. Where a figure exists it is drawn on area with a fourth root, so Christianity reads as roughly three times Judaism across rather than a hundred and sixty times. Encoded literally it would be one continent and eighty-two islands, which is true and tells you nothing. Read the bubbles as rank, not ratio; the figure itself is in the panel.

Time is not to scale, deliberately. The horizontal axis is half real years and half rank order, because a straight timeline crushes everything before the common era against the left wall to give the twentieth century room it has not earned.

Colour is family, not doctrine. Each family owns one band of the colour wheel and every faith sits inside its family’s band, so a cloud reads as one colour. It is the same hue the faith wears on its own page and in its mark, because it is the same stored value — nothing is re-tinted here. Two bubbles being the same colour tells you they are related, not that they agree; the dotted lines are the only thing here that speaks to agreement.

Kind is a shape, not a rank. Every faith here is filed as a tradition, a denomination, a school, a movement, a folk religion, a philosophy or a parody faith — and that is a claim about how the thing is organised, never about whether it is worth anything. Nothing on this site is ordered by kind and nothing is ordered by how many people hold it. A parody faith with twelve adherents gets the page Catholicism gets. Where the filing is genuinely argued — whether Confucianism is a religion, whether the Druze are Muslim — the faith’s own page carries the argument rather than settling it here. Where it could not be confirmed at all, the field is empty, which is why some faiths answer the Kind filter and some do not.

Some of these are over. A faith is marked as no longer practised, dissolved, suppressed or reconstructed where that is documented — the Vedic religion has no living adherents, the Peoples Temple ended in 1978, Heathenry was rebuilt in the twentieth century from texts rather than handed down. Everything else is marked as living and says nothing, because that is the default and a label on it would be noise.