What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionLoving surrender to the divine — the heart's attachment as a path in itself.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Twin Flames Universe 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.
ShelfThe practices
Travels across17 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as58 rites · 53 figures · 35 tenets · 14 scriptures
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 — 43 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 14 faiths of this family hold it
The image is permitted — and the church fought a civil war to decide it.
Byzantium smashed its own icons from 726 and again from 815 before the Second Council of Nicaea and then the year 843 settled it: the incarnation makes God depictable, and the honour paid to the image passes to the one depicted, not to the wood. Rome agreed. Calvin did not, and Reformed churches still whitewash their walls.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The rosary.
Fifty-nine beads, fifteen minutes, and the only devotion most Catholic households own an object for. Its shape is medieval — a substitute psalter for people who could not read the 150 psalms — and it survived because the hands can do it while the mind is tired.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Tefillin and tallit.
Tefillin from the first century BCE were found at Qumran, and the four passages inside are the same four. Ashkenazi and Sephardi Jews disagree about the order of the parchments, and scrupulous Jews put on both sets to cover it.
Go deeper — context →
T
The Shechinah — the presence that went into exile.
Kabbalists say l'shem yichud before a commandment — for the sake of uniting the Holy One and his Shechinah. Friday night welcomes Shabbat as a bride, and Sephardi communities sing Lecha Dodi to a different melody every week of the year.
Meet them — context →
also here 12 more faiths of this family hold it
The Church of the NazareneThe Syriac Orthodox ChurchThe Jacobite Syrian Christian ChurchThe Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian ChurchCalvinism (the Reformed tradition)HasidismPeoples TempleRemnant Fellowship ChurchThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of GodThe New Church (Swedenborgianism)The Salvation Army
Vedic Religion
— 11 faiths of this family hold it
God is one, you are not God, and the difference is permanent.
Madhva's Dvaita holds five eternal distinctions — God from soul, God from matter, soul from soul, soul from matter, matter from matter — and goes further than anyone else in Vedanta by teaching that souls differ in kind, and that not all of them are going anywhere.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
The world and every soul are God's body.
Ramanuja's Vishishtadvaita: one reality, but a qualified one — Vishnu as the self, souls and matter as the body he animates and rules. It keeps the unity the Upanishads insist on and the relationship devotion requires, which is why it became the theology of the largest devotional network in the south.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Umrah.
The lesser pilgrimage — the circling and the walking, without the days at Arafat and Mina. It can be done any time of year in an afternoon, and for most of the world's Muslims, who will never afford the Hajj, it is the pilgrimage they actually make.
Go deeper — context →
The urs, and qawwali through the night.
The saint's death anniversary is called his wedding — union with God — and it is celebrated as one. At Nizamuddin in Delhi and Ajmer in Rajasthan the shrine is dressed in new cloth, food is given away, and qawwals sing until dawn to a crowd that has included Hindus and Sikhs for centuries.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
Aum Shinrikyo
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Aleph says the crimes were the acts of individuals. The state says the group is the same group.
Aleph's public material treats 1994 and 1995 as the work of members who have since been tried and executed, and points to the compensation it pays. The Public Security Intelligence Agency treats Aleph as the same organisation under a different name, with the same object of devotion. A reader is entitled to both statements and to the fact that they conflict.
⚖ contested within
Go deeper — context →
A
Asahara, after the execution.
He was hanged on 6 July 2018. What his images and recordings are now used for inside Aleph is the single disputed fact about the group: Aleph says they were withdrawn, the Public Security Intelligence Agency says devotion to him is intact and cites that finding as grounds for continued observation.
Meet them — context →
also here
Aum Shinrikyo
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Y
Yan Hui.
One bowl of rice, one ladle of water, a shabby lane, and he did not let it affect his joy. He wrote nothing, is quoted saying almost nothing, and died at about forty. He sits first among the disciples in every Confucian temple, and what the Analects actually preserves about him is his teacher's grief.
Meet them — context →
Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
You serve; you do not worship.
The verb is servi. Vodouwizan say they serve the lwa, and the relationship is described in the language of obligation, contract and family duty rather than adoration. A lwa that is served properly delivers; one that is neglected causes trouble, in the way a slighted relative does.
Go deeper — context →
To serve is the religion.
Sèvis: the lwa are fed, saluted, danced, and honored — and in return they hold up the lives of those who serve.
Go deeper — context →
Love Has Won
— one faith of this family holds it
A
Amy Carlson was revered as Mother of All Creation.
Followers revered Amy Carlson as Mother God, the embodied source of creation and guide for Earth’s ascension.
Meet them — context →
Pantheism
— one faith of this family holds it
The hunter who gave his eyes.
He worships the lingam by spitting water from his mouth, wearing his sandals, and bringing cooked meat: everything forbidden. When the image's eye begins to bleed he gouges out his own to replace it, and is feeling for the second when Shiva stops his hand.
Read it in full — context →
Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
Gratitude is the basic posture.
The clap at the shrine is not petition first — it is thanks: for rice, water, and the continuing world.
Go deeper — context →
The kamidana.
A miniature shrine on a high shelf holding the Ise talisman and the local shrine's, with rice, salt, water and sake set out each morning and the same two bows, two claps, one bow. The talismans are exchanged for new ones every New Year and the old ones burned. Fewer than half of households still keep one.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Grace decides. Effort only puts you in its way.
Nadar and kirpa run through the whole scripture: the Name is a gift, never a wage earned by discipline. Discipline is still demanded, on the reasoning that a cup does not make the rain fall but had better be outside when it does.
Go deeper — context →
Remember the Name.
Naam japna — continual remembrance of God, in the kitchen as much as the temple.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Offerings at the temple.
Incense and fruit before the immortals — religious Taoism keeps a crowded, friendly heaven.
Go deeper — context →
Asking the blocks.
Two wooden crescents thrown on the temple floor: one up and one down is yes, both flat is no, both curved is the god laughing at you. Or shake the barrel until a single numbered stick falls out and take the matching printed verse — then throw the blocks to check the god meant that one.
Go deeper — context →
The Church of the SubGenius
— one faith of this family holds it
Bob will cheat you, and you should follow him anyway.
The church describes its own god as a salesman who cannot be trusted, and asks for money in the same breath. Members treat the contradiction as the doctrine rather than a flaw in it — a religion honest about being a sales pitch is making a point about the ones that are not.
held by most
Go deeper — context →
J
J. R. Bob Dobbs.
A clip-art salesman from a 1950s advertisement, pipe clenched, smiling. He is assassinated repeatedly in church literature and returns each time. His face is the church's entire iconography and is reproduced more often than any doctrine it holds.
Meet them — context →
The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
The Great Being is Humanity, and most of it is dead.
Comte's object of worship is the species as a continuing organism. Since the dead outnumber the living enormously and built everything the living use, the dead are most of what is being worshipped.
Go deeper — context →
Sunday worship, in the only temple still open.
Porto Alegre, ten in the morning, in a building inaugurated on Comte's birthday in 1928. Just over thirty adherents remain in the state.
Go deeper — context & 2 sources →
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
M
Martine Rothblatt.
She founded the satellite radio company that became Sirius, then a biotechnology firm to treat her daughter's pulmonary hypertension, then a religion about not dying. The through-line is not obscure.
Meet them — context →
Twin Flames Universe
— one faith of this family holds it
Twin Flames are divinely connected romantic counterparts.
Twin Flames Universe teaches that partners can attain a lasting Harmonious Twin Flame Union through spiritual healing.
Go deeper — context →
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
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.
Go deeper — context →
Throwing the kola.
Four lobes of kola nut thrown on the ground, read by how many land face up. It is a simple oracle giving yes, no and shades of both, and anyone can use it without a priest. Ifa is for the difficult questions; obi is for asking whether the offering you just made was accepted.
Go deeper — context →
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
A
Anahita.
The waters, and the strength that comes with them. Kings sacrificed to her for victory, the Sasanians endowed her shrines heavily, and the ruined temple at Kangavar is one of the largest stone structures in Iran. Iranian Zoroastrians still make visits to springs and mountain shrines associated with her.
Meet them — context →
The house with the dead in it.
For ten days at the year's end the family's dead are invited home by name, given a clean room with flowers and sandalwood, and fed. Families report the room as occupied rather than commemorative. It is reliably the last observance people keep after they have let everything else go.
Go deeper — context →
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
The image is permitted — and the church fought a civil war to decide it.
Byzantium smashed its own icons from 726 and again from 815 before the Second Council of Nicaea and then the year 843 settled it: the incarnation makes God depictable, and the honour paid to the image passes to the one depicted, not to the wood. Rome agreed. Calvin did not, and Reformed churches still whitewash their walls.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
Kissing the icon.
On the hand or the hem, never the face. The seventh ecumenical council in 787 settled the distinction the whole argument turned on — honour passes through the image to the person, worship goes to God alone — after two waves of iconoclasm had destroyed most of what came before.
Go deeper — context & 1 source →
The urs, and qawwali through the night.
The saint's death anniversary is called his wedding — union with God — and it is celebrated as one. At Nizamuddin in Delhi and Ajmer in Rajasthan the shrine is dressed in new cloth, food is given away, and qawwals sing until dawn to a crowd that has included Hindus and Sikhs for centuries.
Go deeper — context →
Mawlid.
The Prophet's birthday, kept with poems, processions, lights and sweets in most of the Muslim world, and refused as an unwarranted innovation by Salafis and in Saudi Arabia. It began about three centuries after the Prophet, which both sides agree on and read in opposite directions.
Go deeper — context →