Did you know that the Ancient Egyptians believed in more than 2,000 different gods? These fascinating people had deities dedicated to everything from their duties to dangers to keep their daily lives in balance.
As the largest religion in the world with over 2.3 billion adherents, Christianity has had one of the largest roles to play in the forming of the modern world and much of human history. Christianity is neither the more diverse religion nor the oldest, but its widespread nature across much of the world and its many variants makes it a fascinating subject to scholars of both history and theism.
Hinduism is one of the oldest religions in the world, dating back thousands of years. In that time, Hinduism transformed into a localised belief system into a major religious sect that incorporates many countless gods and deities, with some Hindus believing that there are, in fact, millions of different gods in the pantheon, each with their own story to tell. Hinduism is also a religion that has spread across the world, and millions of people that don’t live in India…
Since the dawn of recorded history, humankind has been worshiping a deity in one form or another.
The practice of Shamanism centres on practitioners reaching altered states of consciousness in order to interact with what they believe to be the spirit world and channel these transcendental energies into our plane of existence. Through typically entering into a trance-like state, Shamans are regarded as having access to, and influence upon, the world of both benevolent and malevolent spirits and are able to perform divination and healing. Shamans are said to enter supernatural realms and dimension which in turn…
Buddhism is one of the oldest religions in the world and has over 500 million practitioners worldwide. Said to be started by Buddha himself, Buddhism is a spiritual tradition founded over 2,000 years ago. In Nepal, a young man sat beneath a Bodhi tree to meditate and after becoming enlightened he began to lay down the foundations of this ancient spiritual tradition. What Does ‘Buddha’ Mean? In Sanskrit – the classical language of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism – the word…
Dating as far back as 4th century BCE, the teachings of Druidism are fixed in the observation of Nature, in tradition, and in inspiration. With a deep love and reverence for the Earth, her seasons, and nature, the curriculum of Druidism focuses on the lore of stars, stones, plants, animals, and trees and combines scholarship with spiritualism and science. The practices and teachings of Druidism grow and develop as humanity evolves. What is Druidism? Druidism is a spiritual practice and…
All major religions and belief systems in the world are the ultimate outcomes of thousands of years of evolution and adaption – and they can all be traced back to one, single belief system that spanned the entirety of the human race: animism. Animism was what our oldest ancestors first believed in; it’s what all of our modern religions stem from, and it can be traced back to at least 40000 years ago, when humans began migrating across the world…
The Greek gods were the deities within ancient Greek religion and mythology, and were personified as human-like entities that inhabited Mount Olympus. These gods were not the benevolent, kind, and all-knowing beings that we imagine a god would be today, but rather vengeful, violent, petty, and insane incarnations of a tumultuous universe before the invention of modern science and the understanding that came with it. The ancient Greeks used created these gods as personifications of the parts of nature they…
While many ancient religions such as Manichaeism, Mithraism, and Tengriism have all but disappeared, there have been a few who have stood the test of time and are still practised today. Here we examine the world’s oldest religions from Hinduism to Shintoism. 15th-5th Century BCE: Hinduism While Hinduism isn’t an organised religion in the traditional sense, all Hindus are bound by the same principles, the most important of which is their belief in the Vedas. The Vedas are 4 texts…