This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
A religious order entry records an organized body of vowed or formally affiliated members who follow a shared rule, spiritual method or discipline within a larger tradition, structured around a founder, a rule and, in many traditions, a documented lineage of transmission from teacher to successor. J. Spencer Trimingham's study of the Sufi orders, the tariqas, is the model an entry follows for describing that structure: each order's own documented formation, its founder, its distinctive method and its historical spread, treated as its own institution rather than folded into one undifferentiated account of the wider tradition it belongs to.
An entry records an order's founder, its rule or spiritual method, its lineage or line of transmission where the tradition documents one, and the broader tradition it belongs to, distinct from the individual houses, lodges or branches it maintains across different regions and periods.
Because an order's own initiatory teaching or ceremony is often reserved to its formally admitted members, an entry describes the order's documented history, structure and public reputation from outside that reserved teaching rather than setting out its closed content, naming what is not disclosed here as closed rather than omitting the fact of it silently.