Sacred Text Archive
From SkepticWiki
[edit] Definition
The Sacred Text Archive describe themselves as "a repository on the Internet of public domain (and redistributable) etexts of books on religion, mythology, folklore, esoteric and related topics".
[edit] Discussion
It is difficult to summarise in a short article the sheer scope of the website: the index alone has sixty-seven different categories from "African" to "Zoroastrianism".
Here, obviously, are such sacred texts as the Bible, the Qur'aan, the Rig Vedas, the Guru Granth Sahib and so forth; there are also the texts of dead religions, such as the Norse Eddas, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the Babylonian Gilgamesh Chronicles, the poems of Homer and Hesiod, and so forth. Religions with an oral tradition, such as the religions of Africa, the Pacific, Australia and America are represented by anthropologists' collections of oral lore: here you will find such texts as the Hawaiian creation myth translated by the last Queen of Hawaii.
Nor do the archivists confine themselves to the core texts of each religion: the section on Judaism, for example, contains not just the Hebrew Bible, but also translations of the Babylonian Talmud, the Haggada, the Madrash, Kabbalistic writings, the History of Josephus, and Moses Maimonides' Guide to the Perplexed.
Here too are texts in ethics and philosophy such as the writings of Hume, Kant, Plato, Nietzsche, Descartes, Berkeley and so on; seminal texts of the women's rights and gay rights movements; Darwin is represented by the Origin of Species, the Descent of Man and the Voyage of the Beagle;
Mythology is equally thoroughly represented: the archives include such things as the source documents for the Arthurian and grail legends, such as the writings of Mallory and Chretien de Troyes; folk tales such as the Mabinogion; some translations of Icelandic sagas; a translation of Beowulf; medieval grimoires such as the Key of Solomon; the Centuries of Nostradamus; the pseudohistory of that amiable medieval liar Geoffrey of Monmouth; Plato on Atlantis; and other similar delights.
The sources of modern crankery are well represented: here you will find the original book on leylines by Alfred Watkins; the writings of Charles Fort; a reproduction of the Piri Re'is map; the writings of the "Heaven's Gate" UFO cult; the book by Ignatius Donnelly that started the Atlantis craze, together with the original books on Lemuria and Mu; the writings of Gerald Gardner, founder of Wicca, and so forth.
Besides primary texts, there is secondary literature from the late nineteenth and early twentieth century on subjects ranging from ancient Babylonian religion to the folklore of German Pennsylvanians, including such celebrated secondary texts as The Golden Bough.
There are also documents which seem to only very slightly fit the remit of the site, such as the legal code inscribed on the pillars of Hammurabi; The Book of Noodles (a compilation of "traditional stories about simpletons, fools, and idiots from many cultures"); and the complete works of Shakespeare.
Anyone who can't find something on this website to interest them is quite probably dead.
The site has running costs of over $6000 annually. To help maintain their service, they accept donations here.
