What it means here
our wording, so the faiths below can be compared — never any tradition's own definitionImpurity accumulates and can be washed away — renewal through cleansing.
Every passage on this page is one faith's own phrasing. Sharing an idea is not agreement: Christianity and Transcendental Meditation 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 across22 of 52 families in the tree
Oldest holderZoroastrianism · c. 1200 BCE
Newest holderDave Stevism · 2026 CE
Turns up as44 rites · 36 codes · 28 tenets · 11 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 — 56 of 171 faithsJudaism
— 24 faiths of this family hold it
Something in us is bent at the root.
Not that people do wrong, but that they arrive already wanting to. Augustine called it original sin and read it as inherited guilt; the Greek East calls it ancestral sin and inherits mortality without the guilt. Same story, two very different bills.
held by most
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Confession.
Said aloud, to a priest, under an absolute seal — a Catholic priest who repeats what he hears is automatically excommunicated, and the seal has held in court cases and cost priests prison. Protestants mostly dropped the office and kept the practice informally, which is not the same thing.
held by most
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also here 23 more faiths of this family hold it
The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo ChurchThe Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day SaintsJudaismThe Coptic Orthodox ChurchThe Church of the NazareneThe Restoration Movement (Churches of Christ)RastafariThe Chaldean Catholic ChurchThe Amish (Old Order)The International Churches of ChristThe Church of the BrethrenThe Plymouth Brethren Christian Church (the Exclusive Brethren)The BruderhofThe Shakers (United Society of Believers in Christ's Second Appearing)Christian Science (the Church of Christ, Scientist)Seventh-day AdventismThe Branch DavidiansThe Brethren in ChristThe Christian Churches and Churches of ChristThe Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of GodThe Plymouth BrethrenThe Salvation ArmyThe Unification Church (Family Federation)
Vedic Religion
— 6 faiths of this family hold it
The doorway, the tulsi, and the kitchen.
A rice-flour kolam at the door before sunrise, a lamp at the tulsi plant at dusk, lemons and chillies against the evil eye, and a kitchen with rules about who cooks and who may walk in. The domestic religion is run almost entirely by women and needs no priest at all.
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The fire, and then the exile.
Recovered after a war fought for her, Sita is asked to prove her chastity by fire. She does — and is later banished anyway, pregnant, because a subject was overheard doubting her. At the end she asks the earth to take her back, and it opens.
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Islam
— 3 faiths of this family hold it
Wudu — the ablution.
Hands, mouth, face, arms, head, feet — the same sequence before every prayer: the body rinsed as the threshold of attention.
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Aqiqah — the first words.
The call to prayer is whispered into a newborn's right ear, so the first thing a Muslim hears is the thing they will hear five times a day for the rest of their life. On the seventh day the child is named, the head shaved, and the weight of the hair given in silver.
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Cynicism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Custom is counterfeit currency.
Nomisma means both the money and the convention — property, rank, marriage, citizenship, the shame that keeps people indoors. All of it was struck by someone, and none of it is worth its face value.
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also here
Stoicism
Pantheism
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
The Earth is not a resource, because it is not separate from you.
The World Pantheist Movement asks members to take an Earth pledge and funds habitat conservation, which is what happens when reverence has no other object.
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also here
Pantheism
Shinto
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Purity is restored, not earned.
Misfortune and wrongdoing are pollution (kegare); water, salt, and rite wash the slate — harae, the great reset.
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Tsumi is pollution, not sin.
What separates a person from the kami is a state — contact with death, blood, illness, disorder — and it is washed off with water rather than repented of. There is no confession, no absolution and no permanent stain, which is why the vocabulary of guilt barely appears in the tradition.
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also here
Tenrikyo
The Deep Water People
— 2 faiths of this family hold it
Cold water tells the truth.
Whatever you were performing ends at immersion; what remains is you.
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Immersion.
Enter, stay past the gasp, come out changed by two degrees.
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also here
The Salt Line
Church Universal and Triumphant
— one faith of this family holds it
S
Saint Germain and the violet flame.
The master of the age, holding the seventh ray. The violet flame invocation attached to him is the single practice most widely borrowed from this church by people who have never heard of it.
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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 bath.
Leaves crushed into water with rum, perfume and other ingredients set by the lwa, poured over the body from the head down at a particular hour, sometimes for a set number of days. Every serious practitioner is a herbalist, and the plant knowledge and the ritual knowledge are one subject.
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Heaven's Gate
— one faith of this family holds it
Checking, at the interval.
At a fixed interval through the day every student stopped and audited their own thinking for drift. It is the most characteristic practice of the group and the least dramatic: a small, constant, self-administered correction, repeated for twenty-two years.
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Give up sex, family, name and opinion.
Members took names ending in -ody, cut their hair the same way, wore the same clothes, ate the same food at the same time, and did not choose their own tasks. Several men, Applewhite among them, were surgically castrated in the mid-1990s; the operation was elective and members sought it out.
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Mandaeism
— one faith of this family holds it
Living water is the sacrament.
Baptism is not an event but a rhythm: flowing river water, every Sunday, in white — renewal as repetition.
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Masbuta — the weekly baptism.
Into the living river in white, three times under, marked with water — the soul rinsed of the week and reoriented toward the light.
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Pyrrhonism (Scepticism)
— one faith of this family holds it
Say how it appears, not how it is.
The sceptical phrases — no more this than that, perhaps, I suspend judgement — are reports of a state, not claims about the world. Sextus is explicit that they do not even assert themselves.
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Raëlism
— one faith of this family holds it
The transmission of the cellular plan.
Water on the forehead, on one of four fixed dates a year, understood to place the person's genetic code in the makers' records. It requires formal apostasy from any previous religion first.
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Sikhism
— one faith of this family holds it
Haumai is the disease; the five thieves are the symptoms.
Kaam, krodh, lobh, moh and ahankar — lust, rage, greed, attachment, pride — are described as thieves already living in the house. Haumai, the I-am, is what unlocked the door: nothing external is blamed for the human condition.
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Whether Sikhs should eat meat.
The Rehat Maryada bans kutha — meat from an animal killed slowly by ritual method — and says nothing whatever about the rest. Damdami Taksal and the Akhand Kirtani Jatha hold to strict vegetarianism and every langar kitchen is meatless, while Nihangs practise jhatka and eat it, and rural Punjab never stopped.
⚖ contested within
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Taoism
— one faith of this family holds it
The talisman.
A fu drawn in cinnabar on yellow paper in a script only ordained priests can write, then activated with breath and a seal. It is pasted over a door, carried, or burned and the ash drunk in water. Its logic is documentary — it is a written order to a named spirit, issued by an officer with the register to issue it.
held by most
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The Yellow Turbans.
The tradition's uncomfortable beginning. The Way of Great Peace and the Five Pecks of Rice were mass movements with clergy, tithes and free hostels for travellers, which treated illness by having the sick write out their faults and confess them — and which raised armies. The Han dynasty came apart fighting them in 184.
⚖ contested within
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The Brahma Kumaris
— one faith of this family holds it
Amrit vela — four in the morning.
Meditation at the quietest hour, eyes open, in front of a soft red light. Students describe it as the hinge the rest of the day hangs on.
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Purity, including celibacy inside marriage.
The demand is unusual and stated plainly: brahmacharya for committed students, married or not, with a strict vegetarian diet cooked in remembrance. Many households negotiate it for years.
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The Church of Scientology
— one faith of this family holds it
Engrams are recordings, and they can be discharged.
An engram is a moment of pain and unconsciousness recorded whole. Auditing locates it, runs it through until the charge is gone, and the church holds that the ability lost with it comes back.
held by most
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Auditing on the E-meter.
Two tin cans, a needle, and a question repeated until the reading flattens. It is the central practice, it is paid for by the hour, and the cost of the full Bridge is the criticism most often made of it.
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The Missionary Church of Kopimism
— one faith of this family holds it
Copying is a sacrament.
Not a metaphor for one. Kopimism holds that duplicating information is a holy act in itself, that the copy has the same standing as the original, and that a work withheld from copying is diminished rather than protected.
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The Satanic Temple
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
The Satanic Temple
Yazidism
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yazidism
Yoruba Religion
— one faith of this family holds it
also here
Yoruba Religion
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
Marriage, and what the churches ask of it.
The common ground is fidelity; almost nothing past that is common. Rome forbids remarriage after divorce without annulment and forbids contraception, the Orthodox permit a second marriage with a penitential rite, and Western Protestant churches are currently splitting over same-sex marriage rather than agreeing about it.
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Being born again.
A datable before and after. The evangelical tradition treats it as the pivot of a life and asks for the date; the sacramental traditions locate the same change at an infant baptism nobody remembers, and the two have never really understood each other.
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The Shinto funeral.
It exists, it is rare, and it is instructive: the spirit is called into a wooden tablet, the corpse is handled as pollution, mourners throw salt over themselves afterwards, and the memorials run to the fiftieth year, at which point the dead becomes an ancestral kami. Only a few percent of funerals are done this way — death was ceded to Buddhism a thousand years ago.
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Misogi — standing under the water.
Cold water directly on the body, in a river or under a waterfall, often in midwinter, with breathing exercises first and someone experienced watching. It follows Izanagi, who washed after the underworld; the account has Amaterasu born from his left eye, Tsukuyomi from his right, and Susanoo from his nose.
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