Four: Did you mean...?

The Medicine Arrows and the Sacred Hat is a short essay by anthropologist George Bird Grinnell (l. 1849-1938) explaining the origin and significance of the medicine arrows and buffalo hat, central to Cheyenne culture. The essay provides a...

Mahayana Buddhism is the largest Buddhist sect in the world, and its beliefs and practices are what most non-adherents recognize as "Buddhism" in the modern era. It developed as a school of thought sometime after 383 BCE, possibly from the...

The Kiowa nation has at least two different versions of their origin myth concerning death: How Death Came into the World and Why the Ant is Almost Cut in Two. Both explain the origin of death but differ significantly in characterization...

Siddhartha Gautama (better known as the Buddha, l. c. 563 - c. 483 BCE) was, according to legend, a Hindu prince who renounced his position and wealth to seek enlightenment as a spiritual ascetic, attained his goal and, in preaching his path...

The Secret History of the Mongols is a chronicle written in the 13th century CE (with some later additions) and is the most important and oldest medieval Mongolian text. The book covers the origins of the Mongol people, the rise to power...

Religion in ancient Egypt was fully integrated into the people's daily lives. The gods were present at one's birth, throughout one's life, in the transition from earthly life to the eternal, and continued their care for the soul in the afterlife...

Ancient India in the Vedic Period (c. 1500-1000 BCE) did not have social stratification based on socio-economic indicators; rather, citizens were classified according to their Varna or castes. 'Varna' defines the hereditary roots of a newborn...

Mahasanghika (“Great Congregation”, also given as Mahasamghika) was an early Buddhist school of thought which is thought to have been formed after the Second Buddhist Council of 383 BCE when it separated itself from another school, the Sthaviravada...

The Jicarilla-Apache Creation Story and Origin of the Animals are two origin myths of the Jicarilla-Apache nation of modern-day New Mexico. The Apache people as a whole have many different creation tales, as do the Jicarilla, but all follow...

The New Testament contains four gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. The four gospels are not biographies of Jesus, nor are they history as we define it. What each gospel attempted to do was write a theological explanation...