Lost Faiths
Religions that once shaped whole civilisations and are no longer practised as living traditions: their gods, their rites, how they ended and what survives of them.
These pages describe beliefs from the evidence that survives: archaeology, inscriptions and texts often written by outsiders. Where a tradition lives on or has been revived, the page says so.
Ancient Europe
The old gods of the Norse, Celts, Slavs and Etruscans, known from stones, graves and the writings of their neighbours.
- Etruscan religion The Etruscans of ancient Italy read the will of their gods in livers and lightning, painted tombs for the afterlife and passed their sacred lore, the disciplina etrusca, on to Rome.
- Celtic religion The gods of the ancient Gauls, Britons and Irish, from Lugus to Brigid, and the druids who served them, known mostly through Roman writers, inscriptions, archaeology and medieval Irish tales.
- Slavic religion Before Christianity, Slavic peoples honoured Perun the thunderer, Veles, Mokosh and the many-headed gods of the Baltic coast, known from chronicles, a few finds and enduring folk customs.
- Norse religion The gods of the Vikings, Odin, Thor and Freyja, were honoured with feasts and sacrifices across Scandinavia until conversion, and are known mostly through later Christian-era texts.
The ancient Near East
The temple cities of Mesopotamia and the gods of Canaan and Phoenicia.
- Mesopotamian religion The gods of Sumer, Babylon and Assyria, from An, Enlil and Inanna to Marduk, worshipped in ziggurat temples for three thousand years before the last cuneiform scribes fell silent.
- Canaanite religion El, Baal, Asherah and Anat, the gods of Canaan known from the clay tablets of Ugarit, and their Phoenician heirs Melqart, Baal Hammon and Tanit from Tyre to Carthage.
The Americas
The religions of the Aztec, Maya and Inca worlds before the Spanish conquest, and what lives on in their peoples today.
- Maya religion The religion of the ancient Maya, from Classic-period city temples and divine kings to the Popol Vuh, the ballgame and the Long Count, and the Maya peoples who keep traditions alive today.
- Aztec religion The religion of the Mexica of Tenochtitlan, with its sun and rain gods, twin calendars, Templo Mayor and human sacrifice, until the Spanish conquest of 1521 and what survives today.
- Inca religion The religion of the Inca Empire, with Inti the sun, Viracocha the creator, Pachamama and the sacred huacas, the Coricancha of Cusco and the Andean traditions that continue today.
Mysteries and heresies
Secret cults and dualist faiths that rivalled the great religions of late antiquity and then disappeared.
- Mithraism A secret Roman cult of soldiers, officials and merchants who met in cave-like temples around the image of Mithras slaying a bull, leaving scholars with many questions.
- Gnosticism Gnosticism, a modern label for early Christian-era movements that taught salvation through knowledge, a flawed creator and a hidden divine realm, rediscovered through the Nag Hammadi codices.
- Manichaeism Founded by the prophet Mani in third-century Persia, Manichaeism taught a cosmic struggle of light and darkness and spread from Roman North Africa to China before fading away.