I
The World
The place, the moment, and the part most accounts skip: the question it was answering.
Belief System / The complete series
A history of
world religion.
One tradition at a time.
Where it started, what carried it, who paid for it, and how it divided.
- The shelf
- 31 volumes, from c.3500 BCE to 1951
- The unit
- One tradition’s arc from ignition to first division. About three hours’ reading each.
- The evidence
- Chapter outlines, source lists and open questions for every tradition.
The shape
Five ways into every tradition.
Each book follows the same five movements, from the world a tradition emerged in to the divisions that changed it. Read one on its own, or follow the connections across the series.
II
The Machine
The transmission technology that made it possible, and would not have a century earlier.
III
The Canon
The texts. What is in, what is out, who decided, when, and what the decision cost.
IV
The Money
Land, tithes, endowments, temple economies. Who owned this, and how do we know?
V
The Split
What divided it, what it became, and what it handed to whatever came next.
The chronology
Ordered by the earliest thing that can be proved.
Not by what a tradition says about its own beginning. Eleven of these thirty-one have no defensible founding date, so the shelf is sorted on a different column altogether.
What the volume narrates
Earliest secure attestation
The stance
Five phrases, and no sixth.
So that a reader always knows which kind of claim is being made. These books do not adjudicate which tradition is true, do not report a miracle as fact, and never tell you what anybody was thinking. Where the tradition’s account and the earliest evidence disagree, both are given, attributed, and neither is given the last word.
- the record shows
- There is an object, a document or a dated inscription behind this sentence.
- the tradition holds
- The tradition’s own account, in its own vocabulary, given and not corrected.
- conventionally dated
- A date everyone uses that the evidence does not independently secure.
- is contested
- Specialists disagree, and the disagreement is named rather than settled.
- cannot be established
- The book stops here and says why, instead of writing over the gap.
Sets
Some traditions ignite more than once.
Christianity holds three slots on this shelf, separated by fifteen hundred years. Buddhism holds four. Each has its own room, its own machine, its own economy and its own split — which is why they are separate books rather than one long chapter.
Christianity, three ignitions
An illegal sect, a state religion, a print movement. Fifteen hundred years apart, and each one starts over.
- 14 Early Christianity 30 CE
- 16 Imperial Christianity 312 CE
- 25 The Reformation 1517
Buddhism, four ignitions
A north Indian forest, a sutra workshop, a lineage certificate, and a Tibetan printing house that never stopped.
- 10 Buddhism c.480 BCE
- 15 Mahayana Buddhism c.100 CE
- 20 Zen c.700 CE
- 21 Tibetan Buddhism c.779 CE
Islam, three ignitions
Mecca and the standardised codex, Karbala and the named chain, then the order as a franchise.
- 17 Islam 610 CE
- 18 Sunni and Shia 656 CE
- 22 Sufism 8th c. CE
Hinduism, three ignitions
Recitation with checksums, the deed engraved in copper, and the reform society with a printing press.
- 03 The Vedic World c.1500 BCE
- 12 Classical Hinduism c.400 BCE
- 27 Modern Hinduism 1828
Belief System
Explore the history.
Search across thirty-one traditions. Follow a chapter, compare historical periods, or trace an argument back to its sources.