What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe world is inhabited: rivers, trees, and places have spirits of their own.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Islam and The Deep Water People are both here because each says something this word covers, and what they say may flatly contradict each other. The idea is the place they can be set side by side.
Travels across12 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderThe Compost Rite · 2026 CE
Turns up as23 figures · 17 tenets · 5 rites · 5 storys
Where it turns up
every faith that holds it, by founding date — time is half real and half rank order, because a straight axis crushes three millennia against the left wall. Hover a dot for the faith.Across the faiths
one family at a time, and every family speaks before any family speaks twice — 14 of 171 faithsVedic Religion
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
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The family deity, and the goddess at the edge of the village.
Weddings pause so the couple can be taken to the kuladevata's shrine, sometimes several hundred miles away. The village goddess — Mariamman, Sitala, Renuka, Yellamma — handles fever, rain and disputes, is often served by a non-Brahmin priest, and is the layer of the religion Sanskrit texts barely mention and most Hindus never leave.
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The devas — gods, and beside the point.
Indra and Brahma turn up in the suttas, ask questions, and lose arguments. Buddhism does not deny the gods; it demotes them. They are long-lived, powerful, and still stuck on the wheel.
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The dharmapalas — the wrathful protectors.
Skull cups, flayed skins, rings of fire. The guardians of the teaching are terrifying by design, and the terror is aimed at the practitioner's complacency rather than at enemies.
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Life is everywhere, and it is graded.
Souls occupy earth, water, fire, air and plants with one sense; worms with two; ants with three; bees with four; humans, animals and gods with five. The whole ethic follows from the count — you may not avoid killing one-sensed beings, but you may weight your life to kill fewer and lower.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Bondye is far; the lwa are near.
God made the world and does not micromanage it — the lwa handle the particulars, and it is with them one works.
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The lwa have nations.
They are grouped into nanchon. Rada are cool, ancient, Dahomean in origin, patient and correct; Petwo are hot, quick, created in the Caribbean out of the conditions there, and effective. It is not good against evil — the same person serves both, and there are situations that only a Petwo lwa will deal with.
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Heathenry (Ásatrú)
— one faith of this family holds it
The gods are kin, not kings.
Odin, Thor, Freyja and their kind are honored as elder family — gifted and toasted, not groveled to. A gift for a gift.
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Thor — the defender.
Thunder as protection: the common folk's god, whose hammer was worn against the new god's cross — and is worn again.
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Islam
— one faith of this family holds it
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The jinn.
Free-willed beings of smokeless fire, living unseen alongside humanity — some believing, some not. Shaytan is of them, not a fallen angel.
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Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
Attention, and a celebrant at the turns of a life.
There is no liturgy and no holy day. What the organised wing supplies is trained celebrants for weddings, namings and funerals, and an encouragement to go outside.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Eight million kami — meaning uncountable.
Yaoyorozu no kami. The number is a figure of speech for too many to list, and the category is open: a mountain, a waterfall, a fox, a sword, a dead scholar, a rice field and a company founder can all be kami, and new ones are still being made.
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Kami inhabit all things.
Waterfalls, foxes, ancestors, a striking tree — the sacred is local, plural, and nearby.
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Everything is qi.
Breath, vapour, energy, matter — one substance in different states of condensation. Rock is dense qi and thought is thin qi, and there is no second kind of stuff and no line between physical and spiritual. This is why Chinese medicine, meditation, martial arts and liturgy are one continuous field rather than four.
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The body is a country.
It has provinces, an administration, officials in every organ, a capital in the head and fields of cinnabar where things are cultivated. Taoist meditation is largely a matter of visiting these places and knowing the names of who lives there — the same gods as in the temple, at domestic scale.
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The Compost Rite
— one faith of this family holds it
The body is borrowed matter.
Nothing you are made of was made for you, and none of it stops when you do.
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Tending.
Turn it, water it, wait. The rite has no end state, which is the doctrine.
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The Deep Water People
— one faith of this family holds it
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The sea.
Not a god, and not asked to be one. It does not need your belief, your praise, or your name for it — it needs you to pay attention and stay warm afterward.
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Yazidism
— one faith of this family holds it
The world is kept by seven angels.
God entrusted creation to the Heptad — remote sovereignty above, angelic administration below.
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The world from a pearl.
Before the world, God was alone with a pearl, and the pearl burst into creation; the seven angels were set over it, the Peacock Angel at their head, and Lalish is where the world first solidified. Yazidi cosmology survives entirely in song.
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Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
Olodumare has no shrine.
The source of everything receives no sacrifice, no image, no priesthood and no festival. There is no myth about Olodumare's doings and no story in which Olodumare appears as a character with a temperament. What is worshipped is the orisha, who are near, specific and manageable.
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The orisha are living forces with personalities.
Ogun is iron and every blade's edge; Yemoja is the sea and motherhood; Shango is thunder and kingship. One approaches them as persons, not concepts.
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Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Six creations, six guardians.
The Amesha Spentas are attributes of Ahura Mazda and also persons, and each has a piece of creation in their charge: sky, water, earth, plants, cattle and humanity. Caring for those six things is therefore not stewardship in the modern environmental sense but direct service to a divine being.
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Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
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The mothers.
Iyami Aje — my mothers — the collective power of women, capable of making or destroying anything, never named individually and never addressed lightly. Translating the term as witchcraft loses the tone: this is not a crime, it is a power, and the entire Gelede masquerade tradition exists to keep its owners in a good mood.
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Seating a spirit in a pot.
A lwa or a spirit can be fixed in an object — a pot, a stone, a wrapped packet — which then lives in the altar room and is fed on a schedule. The obligation transfers with the object and cannot be walked away from; getting rid of one requires a ceremony of its own, and families inherit them.
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