Atlas of the Sacred
Humanity’s Maps of Reality, Meaning, and Transformation
The seventh principal title in Rodney Ashfield’s body of work: a companion and reference work to the six-volume Sacred Ideas in Our Material Universe series.
Why an Atlas?
Because humanity has never lived by one map.
Religions, philosophies, sciences and cultures have all offered ways of locating human beings inside reality. Some describe what exists. Some tell us what matters. Some prescribe how a person should change. Most do all three at once.
The Atlas places those frameworks beside one another so they can be understood comparatively rather than only from inside their own claims.
Reality
What kind of universe is this?
Material, divine, created, cyclic, empty, conscious, lawful, purposeless, enchanted—or something harder to name?
Meaning
What makes a life matter?
Duty, salvation, flourishing, liberation, belonging, virtue, pleasure, truth, service, transcendence or the sacred itself.
Transformation
What are we supposed to become?
Saved, awakened, disciplined, reconciled, virtuous, free, wise, compassionate—or simply more fully human.
Maps and life
A map can orient us. It cannot live for us.
The Atlas helps us see the containers. Incandescence returns to the fire: inwardness, attention, reverence, responsibility and shared sacred life within nature.
Relationship to the series
The six books make an argument. The Atlas gives the reader a wider map.
The series moves from questioning inherited belief toward reconstructing a sacred life in a material universe. The Atlas complements that movement by mapping the major frameworks humanity has used to understand reality, meaning and transformation.
The deeper experience
The Atlas belongs inside the Sacred Ideas platform.
RodneyAshfield.com introduces the work. The evolving Atlas experience belongs at SacredIdeas.org.