← the contents·the plates · faith
Where traditions begin
Religions by recorded origin region, and the thraldom relation read from both ends.
nothing is drawn on this plate
30 religions recorded. None carry coordinates.
30 religions recorded, none carry coordinates. origin_region is free text at mixed grain - "South Asia" and "Bight of Benin (Fon/Ewe)" sit in the same column - and no gazetteer in this database resolves it. Placing these would mean typing coordinates the atlas does not hold, which is the one failure this atlas exists to avoid. The relation below is the finding; the map is not.
0 of 30 religions are plotted. This is a recorded absence, not an empty subject: the rows exist and are shown, the coordinates do not exist and were not manufactured.
IWhat the column actually holds
Every one of the 30 traditions carries an origin region, so the failure is not that the field is blank. It is that the field is prose. 30 religions occupy 25 distinct region strings and the largest of them holds 2. A column that is almost a unique key is a caption per row, not a classification anything can be grouped by — and certainly not one a coordinate can be looked up in.
Grain is mixed on purpose and must not be silently flattened: family 5, local_practice 3, tradition 22. A family and a local practice counted together counts a tradition twice.
22
tradition
5
family
3
local practice
A family and a local practice in one column counts a tradition twice. The grain is carried on every row below rather than flattened away.
IIThe regions, exactly as they are written
This is the map, in the only form the record supports: the traditions grouped under the strings the register actually stores. Nothing is normalised, nothing is merged into a tidier region, and no string is resolved to a point. A subcontinent and a coastal culture appear side by side because that is how they were entered.
Candomble · Umbanda
Confucianism · Taoism
Roman Catholicism · Protestantism
Buddhism · Hinduism
Tlingit Orthodoxy · Tlingit ancestral practice
Islam
West African Vodun
Modern Druidry
Santeria / Regla de Ocha
Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo
Kardecist Spiritism
Druidic practice (pre-Roman)
Great Basin round dance tradition
Ghost Dance (1890)
Rastafari
Druze
Community of Christ (RLDS)
Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
Sikhism
Russian Orthodoxy
Haitian Vodou
Norse (Old Norse) religion
Cao Dai
Restorationism
Yoruba orisha tradition
a zero that is not a zero
separately_enumerated records when a tradition is absorbed into a parent by the very datasets used to count it. A zero in a joined series can then mean "not enumerated separately" rather than "not there".
One tradition here is flagged that way: Tlingit Orthodoxy — absorbed into Russian Orthodoxy.
IIITwo ends of one relation, and they are not the same kind
The thraldom table looks like one column of opinions about slavery, and read that way it is five entries on a spectrum from integral to abolitionist. It is not one column. 3 of the records are a tradition taking a POSITION on thraldom. 2 of them are not a position at all: formed_under says the tradition is an OUTCOME of the traffic. Haitian Vodou did not hold a view about the Middle Passage. It exists because of it.
So the figure puts the axis through the middle and the two ends on opposite sides of it. Above the line a tradition argues. Below it, a tradition is what the argument produced.
the source end · 3 records · a position is held
The tradition holds a position ON thraldom - it is the source end of the relation. integral is the strongest of these.
Thraldom is named inside the sacred material, not merely tolerated beside it: Rigsthula gives thrall as one of three estates with a divine origin, and the Icelandic law codes regulate thrall status directly.
source · Rigsthula (Poetic Edda); Gragas
falsifier · A reading showing thrall in Rigsthula is a later Christian-era interpolation would weaken 'integral' to 'permitted'.
Thralldom disappears across Scandinavia over the 12th-13th c. Sweden's end is dated to 1335 (Skara).
source · Brink, Thraldom (Oxford 2021)
driver contested · Economic historians argue tenancy simply became cheaper than chattel, and that Christianisation is co-occurring rather than causal.
falsifier · A dated ecclesiastical instrument ordering manumission, ahead of the economic shift, would move this from co-occurrence to cause.
Utah Territory legalised Black servitude by statute — An Act in Relation to Service, 1852 — under a territorial legislature with the church president as governor. It was the only western territory to do so. Federal abolition in the territories, 1862, ends it.
source · Utah Territory, An Act in Relation to Service (1852); US federal act 1862
falsifier · Evidence the 1852 act was passed over church objection would separate the civil position from the religious one.
the only reversal in the table
One tradition appears twice, on both sides of 1100 — thraldom integral to the sacred material, then abolitionist. It is the only record in the relation that changes, and the driver of the change is marked contested in the row itself rather than in a footnote: the economic reading has tenancy becoming cheaper than chattel, with Christianisation co-occurring rather than causing. The register carries the contest and the falsifier that would settle it, and does not pick.
The same four polities are worked through date by date in the thraldom appendix, and the thraldom lane has its own plate at norse.
the destination end · 2 records · no position is held
The tradition was FORMED UNDER thraldom - it is the destination end, an outcome of the traffic rather than a stance on it.
Constituted by enslaved people in Saint-Domingue. The religion is the product of the flow, not a party to it.
source · commodity_flow F_MIDDLE (enslaved_people, West Africa -> Caribbean)
Constituted by enslaved Yoruba people in Cuba.
source · commodity_flow F_MIDDLE
Neither destination record has an end year, and neither is given one. A stance can be dated out of existence; a formation cannot, so the bars fray rather than stop. Both cite the same movement of people — the commodity flow the trade plate cannot draw, because its regions are names and not coordinates either.
IVThe record that does not publish
1 row(s) withheld at T0 (unsourced). They are counted here so the relation's totals cannot be read as complete.
Unsourced. Not publishable. unsourced - the lowest tier, no source_ref.
It is counted in the figure as an empty slot rather than dropped. 5 visible bars against 6 rows in the table is the difference between a published subset and a complete relation, and only one of those is what this page shows.
Every figure on this page is read from war-atlas db/export_map_suite.py, exported 2026-09-08. Nothing is computed here except the counts of what is on the page, which are derived from the payload at render so they cannot go stale.
Built from the war-atlas database, the hand-maintained coordinate gazetteer and the public atlas payload. Seshat and Cliopatria are CC BY-NC-SA (non-commercial) and are NOT used here: admin_capacity and variable_confound are denied by name, not by source-string scan.
basemap · Natural Earth 110m land, public domain. Natural Earth is public domain and publishes. Caveat carried openly: no script in war-atlas/tools emits this file, so the source string is a self-assertion with no reproducible provenance.
gate · 6 tiered rows examined, 1 excluded at the unsourced tier — religion_thraldom:id=6 druidry-ancient. The exporter refuses to write a file containing one, and the excluded record is the withheld row rendered in IV rather than a row silently dropped.
⚠ defect in the exporter, carried here rather than smoothed over · this payload reports 1 row excluded AND declares its positive control “ABSENT”. A gate that caught a real row is a gate with a control, so the per-view field is wrong; the suite manifest records the same check as passing with a control present. The named exclusion above is the evidence. Read the field, not the tick.