Welcome to the largest freely available archive of online books
about religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric on the Internet.
The site is dedicated to religious tolerance and scholarship, and has
the largest readership of any similar site on the web.
About Intangible Textual Heritage#
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All ancient books which have once been called
sacred by man, will have their lasting place in the history of mankind,
and those who possess the courage, the perseverance, and the self-denial
of the true miner, and of the true scholar, will find even in the
darkest and dustiest shafts what they are seeking for,--real nuggets of
thought, and precious jewels of faith and hope.
-- Max Müller, Introduction to the Upanishads Vol. II.
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, where possible,
in the original language.
This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious
tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed at this site are solely those
of specific authors, and are not endorsed by Intangible Textual Heritage. Intangible
Textual Heritage is not sponsored by any religious group or
organzation.
Intangible Textual Heritage went live on March 9th, 1999. The traffic started to
increase when Intangible Textual Heritage was listed at Yahoo! under 'Society and
Religion | Texts'. In its first year of operation Intangible Textual Heritage had
about a quarter million hits. By 2004, it was receiving well over a
quarter million hits per day.
Today, site traffic often exceeds a million hits a day. Intangible Textual Heritage is
one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic,
consistently one of the top 10,000 sites in Australia, the US and India,
and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source:
Alexa.com).
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.
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.
From the start, we have had a special focus on remedying the
under-representation of traditional cultures on the Internet. The site
has one of the largest collections of transcriptions of complete books
on Native American, Pacific, African, Asian and other traditional
people's religion, spiritual practices, mythology and folklore. While
many of these pre-20th century books are flawed due to orientalist or
colonialist biases, they are also eye-witness accounts by reliable
observers, typically at the moment of contact. These texts are crucial
to the study of tribal traditions, and in many cases, the only link with
the past. Locked up in academic libraries for decades, Intangible Textual Heritage has
made them freely accessible anywhere in the world.
We welcome email regarding typographical or factual errors in any file
at Intangible Textual Heritage.
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.
Some of the material here may be copyrighted. It is our hope that the
copyright holders may allow these texts to be posted here in the public
interest. If you are the copyright holder of record of a text which you
believe has been archived at this site in error, please contact us at
the email address listed at the bottom of this page. We have made a
good-faith effort to determine the provenance of each text and apologize
if we have posted a text in error. Note: If you are requesting the
removal of a file, you must be the copyright holder of the file, and you
must specify the exact URL of the file.