The Places the Traditions Come From

This category holds the geographic and cultural regions in which the traditions recorded here arose, used to place a system in the world rather than to define it. A region entry names the area, gives its modern equivalent where the historical name differs, and describes what arose there: the pantheons, texts, practices and figures the place gave rise to.

Regions are containers of context. Mesopotamia, the Nile valley, the Indus and Ganges plains, Greece, Scandinavia, Mesoamerica and West Africa each nurtured distinctive religious worlds, and knowing the setting helps make sense of the systems that grew in it.