What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionThe teaching passes living from teacher to student, hand to hand across generations.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Transhumanism 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 carriers
Travels across27 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderAnalog Sabbath · 2026 CE
Turns up as67 figures · 40 communitys · 25 tenets · 21 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 — 84 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 43 faiths of this family hold it
Ordination.
The bishop lays on hands in silence — the silence is the ordination, not the words around it. Whether a given bishop stands in an unbroken line from the apostles is the technical question on which Rome, Constantinople, Canterbury and Geneva have refused to recognise each other for centuries.
held by most
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A
Antony of Egypt — the first one to leave.
He heard one verse read in church, sold everything, and walked into the desert around the year 270. Others followed him out, which was not the plan, and monasticism — Coptic first, then Greek, then Latin, then everything — starts there.
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also here 42 more faiths of this family hold it
Oriental OrthodoxyThe Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchJudaismThe Armenian Apostolic ChurchThe Syro-Malabar ChurchThe Maronite ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Malankara Orthodox Syrian ChurchThe MennonitesThe Eritrean Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Syriac Orthodox ChurchThe Jacobite Syrian Christian ChurchThe Malankara Mar Thoma Syrian ChurchThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)The Syro-Malankara Catholic ChurchThe Amish (Old Order)The Church of the EastThe Assyrian Church of the EastThe Christian Church (Disciples of Christ)The Syriac Catholic ChurchThe International Churches of ChristThe Church of the BrethrenThe HutteritesThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The ChristadelphiansThe BruderhofChristian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)CongregationalismHasidismPresbyterianismSecular HumanismThe Ancient Church of the EastThe Armenian Catholic ChurchThe Brethren in ChristThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Eastern Catholic ChurchesThe Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day SaintsThe Moravian Church (Unitas Fratrum)The Old Catholic ChurchThe Plymouth BrethrenThe Salvation ArmyTraditionalist Catholicism
Vedic Religion
— 9 faiths of this family hold it
Ekalavya's thumb.
A tribal boy refused instruction learns archery in front of a clay image of the teacher who turned him away, and outshoots the prince. Drona asks for his right thumb as the teacher's fee, and receives it.
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The guru and the lineage.
Teaching flows through sampradayas — master-to-student lines with their own initiations, texts, and monasteries.
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Islam
— 4 faiths of this family hold it
Leadership was appointed, not chosen.
Shia Islam holds that God designated Ali, and through him a line of Imams: the imamate is an article of faith, not a political arrangement. Sunni Islam holds that the community chose, and chose rightly. Nearly everything else that separates the two follows from this one disagreement.
⚖ contested within
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The hafiz.
The whole book — about 6,236 verses — carried in memory, with a chain of teachers behind it. Millions of people hold it, many of them children, and Indonesia, Egypt, Turkey, Nigeria and Iran run competitions for it on national television. It is the reason the text has a second, independent transmission line.
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Aum Shinrikyo
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The practice Asahara taught is still the path.
This is the position of the main body of Aleph and the reason the 2000 reform did not hold. The meditation, the stages and the cosmology are the ones Aum taught; what Aleph says it has abandoned is the apocalyptic conclusion drawn from them.
held by most
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The renaming, and the split.
Joyu Fumihiro renamed the group Aleph in February 2000 and tried to build a version of it that did not centre on Asahara. By 2007 the majority had gone back to Asahara-centred practice and Joyu left with a few hundred people to found Hikari no Wa. Aleph is what stayed.
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also here
Aum Shinrikyo
Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
D
Diogenes of Sinope — the dog.
The nickname was an insult he kept: a dog eats in public, sleeps anywhere, has no shame and bites its friends. Asked what philosophy had given him, he said he was prepared for any fortune.
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also here
Stoicism
Sikhism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Guru now lives in the book and the body.
Guru Gobind Singh ended the human succession in 1708: authority passed jointly to the Guru Granth Sahib — the scripture as living Guru — and the Guru Panth, the community itself.
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Ram Rai, disowned.
Sent to explain a line of Nanak's verse to Aurangzeb, the Guru's elder son changed one word to avoid offending the court. His father Guru Har Rai barred him from the community and never saw him again — the succession passed to his younger brother, aged five.
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also here
The Long Now Assembly
Yoruba Religion
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Initiation makes the priesthood.
The orisha is seated in the head (kariocha); lineage godparents carry the ashe forward — no self-made santeros.
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Kariocha — the seating of the orisha.
Seven days of seclusion, the head crowned, a year in white to follow — the making of a priest.
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also here
Yoruba Religion
Confucianism
— one faith of this family holds it
Reciting before understanding.
Children chant the Analects or the Three Character Classic aloud, in unison, years before anyone explains it, on the theory that a text in memory can be understood later while a text understood once cannot be recalled. Denounced as feudal for most of the twentieth century and revived from the 1990s, now with weekend academies and phone apps.
held by most
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The genealogy.
Every male descendant entered by generation, each generation sharing a name character so that a stranger's name tells you where he stands relative to you. It is compiled by subscription, revised every generation or two, and functions as constitution, census and property register at once. Women appeared as a surname, if at all.
held by most
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Dudeism (The Church of the Latter-Day Dude)
— one faith of this family holds it
The philosophy is old; only the packaging is 1998.
Dudeism claims descent from Laozi, Epicurus, the Zen masters, Montaigne and Whitman, and treats The Big Lebowski as a restatement rather than a source. Its founder makes this argument at length and it is the reason the church resists being read as a film-fan club.
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Eckankar
— one faith of this family holds it
Where the teaching came from.
Twitchell described an ancient order rediscovered. David C. Lane traced his membership in Kirpal Singh's Ruhani Satsang and hundreds of passages taken from Julian Johnson. Eckankar and its historians have not converged.
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T
The Mahanta, the Living ECK Master.
One man holds the office at a time — Twitchell to 1971, and Harold Klemp since 1981. Members write to him and report meeting him in dreams; he is the teaching's point of entry.
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Epicureanism
— one faith of this family holds it
Forty doctrines, and a library being read out of the ash.
The Kyriai Doxai were meant to be memorised. The rest of the Epicurean library is in the carbonised scrolls of the Villa of the Papyri at Herculaneum, which are now being read without being opened.
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Haitian Vodou
— one faith of this family holds it
Kanzo.
Initiation: seclusion in the djèvo for a week or more, the washing of the head, ordeals initiates do not describe, and emergence in white with a new name and a permanent tie to a house. It costs a great deal. A large majority of Vodouwizan never take it and are not regarded as lesser for it.
held by most
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The songs.
Hundreds of them, in Kreyòl and in langaj — African-derived phrases nobody can now translate and everyone still sings. Each belongs to a lwa and to a point in the service. The theology is in them, along with the complaints, the jokes and the history, and a manbo's standing is measured by how many she holds.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
T
Ti and Do.
Nettles and Applewhite named themselves after notes in a scale and refused any other title. They insisted they were staff rather than saviours, and the group's materials are notably free of the language of worship — which did not stop the class from taking their instructions as final.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
P
Pyrrho of Elis — who wrote nothing.
His pupil Timon preserved him in satirical verse, and Diogenes Laertius collected the anecdotes. He is a school's founder in the way a saint is: by having been watched.
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Russian Cosmism
— one faith of this family holds it
The museum is the first instrument.
Fyodorov's working life was the reading room, and in his system that is not incidental: the archive holds the traces from which the dead are to be recovered, so cataloguing is the beginning of the resurrection.
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The rocket theorist came to the library.
Tsiolkovsky arrived in Moscow as a nearly deaf teenager with no money and was guided in his reading by the librarian. He later described Fyodorov as having taken the place of university teachers.
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Shinto
— one faith of this family holds it
The descent, and the three things.
Amaterasu sends her grandson Ninigi down onto a peak in Kyushu with a mirror, a sword and a curved jewel, and the imperial house descends from him. Between 1890 and 1945 this was taught in Japanese schools as history. The regalia still exist, no one alive has seen the mirror and the jewel, and the accession rite still uses them.
⚖ contested within
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Motoori Norinaga's commentary.
Nobody could read the Kojiki by the eighteenth century; the script was a wreck of Chinese characters used for sound and for sense at once. Norinaga spent thirty-four years reconstructing it. He also invented the argument that there is a native Japanese way underneath the Chinese overlay — an idea the state later put to uses he did not anticipate.
⚖ contested within
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
Receiving the register.
A Zhengyi priest is ordained by receiving a lu, a document listing by name the spirit officials he is now authorised to command. Without it his rituals have no standing, in the same way an unlicensed lawyer's filings have none. Quanzhen ordination instead confers the precepts over a long assembly, which is a different theory of what a cleric is.
held by most
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The covenant at Heming Mountain.
In 142 Lord Lao descended and appointed Zhang Daoling to govern the spirits under a written covenant, and his first act was to abolish the blood sacrifices the old local cults had been extracting from villages. Institutional Taoism dates from that year — five centuries after Laozi, and about a covenant rather than a book.
held by most
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
The OT levels are confidential.
The advanced material, including the account associated with Xenu, is released only after preparation and payment; the church says premature exposure is harmful. Courts in three countries have published it anyway.
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The Ethical Culture Movement
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Ethical Culture Movement
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Missionary Church of Kopimism
The Neo-American Church
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Neo-American Church
The Order of the Solar Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Order of the Solar Temple
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Rajneesh Movement (Osho)
The Religion of Humanity
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Religion of Humanity
Transhumanism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Transhumanism
Wicca
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Wicca
Zoroastrianism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Zoroastrianism
Where it is argued
passages a tradition marks as contested inside itself — the disagreement is theirs, not ours
Leadership was appointed, not chosen.
Shia Islam holds that God designated Ali, and through him a line of Imams: the imamate is an article of faith, not a political arrangement. Sunni Islam holds that the community chose, and chose rightly. Nearly everything else that separates the two follows from this one disagreement.
Go deeper — context →
The four books.
Al-Kafi, Man la yahduruhu al-Faqih, Tahdhib al-Ahkam and Al-Istibsar — the Twelver Shia hadith corpus, compiled in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Much of the content overlaps the Sunni collections; almost none of the chains do, because the two traditions disagree about which of the first generation to trust.
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A
Ali — and the fork in the road.
The Prophet's cousin, raised in his house, married to his daughter, and the first male to believe on most countings. Sunnis rank him fourth among the rightly guided caliphs. Shia hold he was designated at Ghadir Khumm and passed over three times before he was allowed the job.
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T
The Imams — and the one who did not die.
Twelver Shia count twelve, from Ali to Muhammad al-Mahdi, who entered occultation in the ninth century and is held to be alive and hidden. Ismailis broke away at the seventh and still have a living Imam, the Aga Khan. Zaydis take any qualified descendant who rises with a sword.
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