Sacred Books of the World

Esotericism has always read across traditions, looking for the shared insight beneath different scriptures. This library gathers the sacred books themselves, from the Vedas and Upanishads to the Quran, from the Zohar to the Mayan Popol Vuh, in the translations through which Western readers first met them.

Read each scripture on its own terms before comparing. The Sacred Books of the East series and similar nineteenth-century projects are superb resources, but they also carry the assumptions of their translators, which is worth noticing as you read.

No single reading order suits scriptures from so many traditions. A good principle is to start with a text from a tradition you already know, read with a commentary, and then move outward. The nineteenth-century anthologies, above all the Sacred Books of the East, remain useful for browsing, but their translations reflect the assumptions of their time. Wherever the archive holds two versions of a scripture, compare them. Read each book within its own religious life, its liturgy, law and commentary, before drawing parallels, and resist the temptation to reduce very different faiths to a single message.