sacred stories
Religious traditional tales
Sacred stories are narratives holding religious or spiritual significance within a culture—creation myths, accounts of divine beings, tales of ancestors or heroes with supernatural dimensions.
Unlike ordinary folklore, sacred stories carry weight of belief and often explain cosmic order, moral law, or a people's origin and purpose: The elders passed down sacred stories around the fire.
The term sometimes distinguishes indigenous oral traditions from written scripture.
- creation mythOrigin narrative of existence
- creation storyAccount of existence's origin
- scriptureSacred religious writings
- QuranIslam's central scripture
- ancient wisdomLong-held profound understanding
cosmic battle · legend · Torah · trickster figure · burning bush · promised land · tribal lore · oral tradition · icon · theogony · fable · hero's journey · flood myth · dreamtime · spirit world · parable · Vedas · hagiography
- Buddhist lorekoans, moral fables, bodhisattvas, nagas, Mara
- faithGod, Jesus, belief, holy, divine
- African folkloreAnansi, folktales, ancestors, spirits, griots
- Indigenous Loreorigin myths, tribal legends, tribal lore, tribal histories, elder wisdom
- mythmakingfounding myths, founding myth, origin story, mythos, mythic heroes
- Native Folklorecreation myth, creation story, thunderbird, windigo, spirit animal
sacred storiesfolktales
Traditional oral narratives
fairy tales · folk tales · campfire stories · urban legends · old wives' tales