Sacred Texts, Revisited

February 7, 2022 11:22 AM

The Internet Sacred Text Archive is an online archive of electronic texts about religion, mythology, and various esoteric topics. The site has many complete books from a wide variety of traditions, including the only (to their knowledge) comprehensive online translations of the Kalevala, Shinto texts, and the Upanishads. There's a lot of fascinating stuff here.
Since the original 2003 FPP 2003, sacred-texts has been referenced in passing in a number of other posts. John Bruno Hare, the site’s creator, passed away in 2010.
posted by Going To Maine (4 comments total)

such a useful resource. a perennial favorite.
posted by 20 year lurk at 1:45 PM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

It's truly impressive how little of the overall story is lost in John Martin Crawford's English translation of the Kalevala. Sadly, the astonishing inventiveness of the original Finnish word choices does not and cannot carry over, at least not while preserving the meter (which is crucial, I think). Masterful work.
posted by jklaiho at 2:03 PM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

Another resource for Christian literature is the Christian Classics Ethereal Library, which included, among other things, a comprehensive collection of the early church fathers.
posted by Pater Aletheias at 7:14 PM on February 7, 2022 [2 favorites]

For the times you really need access to Renaissance Neo-Platonism sources there's The Esoteric Archives (previously) - a lot of the texts are in Latin (in Giordano Bruno's case, notoriously horrible Latin) but most of Doctor John Dee's work is in English.
posted by thatwhichfalls at 9:35 AM on February 8, 2022 [2 favorites]