sacred texts archive

http://www.sacred-texts.com/about.htm

This site is a freely available archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, legends and folklore, and occult and esoteric topics. Texts are presented in English translation and, in some cases, in the original language.

This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship.

The texts presented here are either original scans from books and articles clearly in the public domain, material which has been presented elsewhere on the Internet, or material included under fair use conditions in printed anthologies.

Text Categories include:

African         England         Pacific
Age of Reason   Esoteric/Occult Paleolithic
Alchemy         Evil            Piri Re'is Map
Americana       Fortean         Prophecy
Ancient Near Et Freemasonry     Sacred Books of the East
Asia            Gothic          Sacred Sexuality
Atlantis        Grimoires       Shamanism
Australia       Hinduism        Shinto
Basque          I Ching         Sikhism
Baha'i          Islam           Sky Lore
Bible           Icelandic       Tantra
Book of Shadows Jainism         Taoism
Buddhism        Journals        Tarot
Celtic          Judaism         Thelema
Christianity    Legends/Sagas   Theosophy
Classics        LGBT            Time
Confucianism    Miscellaneous   Tolkien
DNA             Mormonism       UFOs
Earth Mysteries Native American Utopia
Egyptian        Neopagan/Wicca  Women
                Nostradamus     Zoroastrianism
                Oahspe

Many of the texts included here were originally posted in ftp archives or on bulletin boards before the growth of the World Wide Web and have been lost. In some cases, the texts were posted in such a form as to make them unusable by non-technically oriented users. Some of these texts were on the web at some point but have completely disappeared because the site they were posted on has closed. Thus the need for an archive which organizes this material in a persistent location.

When few or no primary texts are available for a given religion, secondary texts have been included. In many cases, there are no primary texts for a given religion because the tradition is primarily oral. In this case, texts which contain transcriptions or retellings of these traditions have been used.

To round out the collection, we have been actively scanning original material from books and articles in the public domain. We have scanned over two hundred books in the past four years. A comprehensive bibliography of the texts scanned at sacred texts is available here. In particular, comprehensive translations of the Shinto texts, the Kalevala, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda have never appeared anywhere else on the Net, to our knowledge. The African and Polynesian texts are also unique to this site.

We welcome email regarding typographical or factual errors in any file at sacred-texts. Please write us if you spot an error; include the URL and a few lines of context so we can pin down the location.

While all due care has been taken in the reproduction of the texts here, none of the texts or translations here are represented to be sanctioned by any particular religious body or institution. We welcome advice as to errors of fact or transcription.