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About Sacred-Texts

sacred-texts.com collage of texts, (c) 1999, J.B. Hare
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, in some cases, in the original language.

This site has no particular agenda other than promoting religious tolerance and scholarship. Views expressed here are not necessarily endorsed by the hosting organization (sacred-texts.com), our ISP or any sponsoring individuals or organizations.

Sacred texts went live on March 9th, 1999. The traffic started to increase when sacred-texts was listed at Yahoo! under 'Society and Religion | Texts'. In its first year of operation sacred-texts had about a quarter million hits. By 2004, it was receiving well over a quarter million hits per day. In 2005, site traffic regularly started to exceed a half million hits a day, and often spikes as high as one to two million hits a day. Sacred texts is one of the top 20,000 sites on the web based on site traffic, and is one of the top 5 most visited general religion sites (source: Alexa.com). On some days in 2005, sacred-texts' traffic was higher than the Vatican's (source: Alexa.com). We thank all of our visitors for your contiued support.

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.

When few or no primary texts are available for a given religion, secondary texts have been included. In many cases, there are no primary texts for a given religion because the tradition is primarily oral. In this case, texts which contain transcriptions or retellings of these traditions have been used.

To round out the collection, the founder of sacred-texts and a few brave volunteers have been actively scanning original material from books and articles in the public domain. We have scanned over three hundred books in the past six years. A comprehensive bibliography of the texts scanned at sacred texts is available here. In particular, comprehensive translations of the Shinto texts, the Kalevala, the Upanishads, and the Rig Veda have never appeared anywhere else on the Net, to our knowledge. The African and Polynesian texts are also unique to this site.

We welcome email regarding typographical or factual errors in any file at sacred-texts. Please write us 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.

Sacred-texts.com by the numbers:
6,878,202 average Kb bandwidth per day, March 2004
3,373,290 average Kb bandwidth per day, June 2003
647,168 total Kb files at site, March 2004
484,638 average hits per day, March 2004
274,844 average hits per day, June 2003
250,000 total hits in entire first year of operation (1999-2000)
45,000 approximate number of individual files at the site
22,354 Number of sites on web with more traffic than sacred-texts, March 2004 (Alexa number)
16,868 Number of sites on web with more traffic than sacred-texts, September 2005 (Alexa number)
10,000 number of etexts in Project Gutenberg, 2004
$5,580.81 total cost of bandwidth, 2003
4,336 number of sites linked to sacred-texts (source: Alexa)
$1,312.65 Quarterly payment for bandwidth (Feb 2004)
1,000 number of books on the ISTA CD-ROM
300 number of etexts created at sacred-texts
$189 price offered for a mint 1.0 ISTA CD-ROM on EBay
$125 price for 5 copies of the ISTA CD-ROM
$99 price for 3 copies of the ISTA CD-ROM
95 Years a US copyright lasts currently
82 Years since publication in US for a book to enter public domain (2004)
$49.95 price for 1 copy of the ISTA CD-ROM
28 Years a US copyright lasted until 1998 (plus 47 years if renewed)
5 Years since site launched (3/9/1999)
$0.05 approximate price per book on ISTA CD-ROM

SACRED TEXTS NEEDS YOUR SUPPORT

It costs thousands of dollars a year to pay for this sites' bandwidth and maintenance. Without your continued support, sacred-texts would go offline or have to be scaled back. Your support is crucial; this site does not receive grants or institutional support.

The best way to support the site is to purchase the CD-ROM. The Sacred-texts CD-ROM has hundreds of books on it that are extremely hard to locate, including all of the major world scriptures. If you buy a copy, you can feel good knowing that you are helping keep this site online.

--J.B. Hare

This site is available on CD-ROM!

Buy it now

"Stunning"
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The Internet Sacred Text Archive CD-ROM includes electronic texts of nearly a thousand of the most important books and articles ever written, including over two hundred transcribed specially for sacred-texts. Years of extensive research and scholarship went into this CD-ROM: all the core texts of religion, mythology, folklore and the esoteric are on one disk.

"worth far more than the price"
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This collection includes the full text of each book, many with footnotes and illustrations. To buy all of these books you would have to spend tens of thousands of dollars, even if you could find them: many are out of print and hard to obtain at any price. You pay just pennies a book: the CD-ROM costs just $49.95; worldwide shipping is free when you buy direct!

"Phenomenal collection"
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Everything on the disk can be viewed in a standard web browser on your PC or Macintosh. Proceeds from sales of the CD-ROM go to support free access to the Internet Sacred Text Archive on the web and development of new etexts.