Working under the heading of Max MÜller’s statement in the introduction of his book Upanishads Vol. 2 “All books which have once been called sacred by man will have a lasting place in the history of mankind,” the Internet Sacred Text Archives have been searching out, translating and making public the world’s most sought after public domain texts since 1999.
The Internet Sacred Text Archive is dedicated to ancient texts ranging in date from pre-biblical to the 20th century. The only conditions are that they be of a religious nature or highly related to world religions such as anthropology books and that they be in the public domain in the US. Despite this stipulation the site houses a lot of texts which the average reader would not consider religious such as “Aesop’s Fables.”
The site was started by John B. Hare an anthropologist and linguist from Southern California as a way to archive texts that were hard to find or had been housed elsewhere online but since disappeared because the sites they were on previously had been shut down.
“This site is like a public library,” says John Hare on the site’s FAQ page, “It’s accessible to anyone, contains unfiltered information and does not advocate any particular point of view. However, no one will shush you for making too much noise while using this site.”
Among the list of books in the archive’s bibliography are such diverse texts as “Early Life of the Pennsylvania Germans” by Ammon Monroe Aurand, Jr. and “Ceasar’s Column” by Ignatius Donnelly a utopian novel written in 1890. The site is run by volunteers from all over the world typically who have visited the site and viewed its “Wishlist” of texts the site owner would like to see translated and added to the collection.
The point of the site was never to make money it was “To do something nice for people,” as the sites founder says but they have begun to sell DVD-ROM versions of some of the widely-known religious texts housed at the site namely the Quran, The Holy Bible and The Apocrypha. A collection which readers have touted as “A lovingly chosen library…”
Topics on the site range from African, Christianity and Hindu to the more obscure Grimoires, Oahspe and Zoroastrianism. While there is a bibliography of the texts housed on the site there is no comprehensive count of the number of finished and unfinished texts but it does say there are well over a thousand with more being added and new volunteers being recruited every day.
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