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The Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA) is a Santa Cruz, California-based website dedicated to the preservation of electronic public domain religious texts.
The website was first opened to the public on March 9, 1999, by John Bruno Hare (1955–2010), in Santa Cruz, California.[1][2] Hare started building the website from his home in the late 1990s, as "an intellectual challenge". At the time, he was working as a software engineer with a dot-com company, and started by scanning over 1,000 public domain books on religion, folklore and mythology.[3][4] The reason for its founding was the promotion of religious tolerance through knowledge.[5][6] Its texts are organized into 77 different categories. The maintenance costs for the website — which as of 2006[update] received anywhere from five hundred thousand to two million visits a day — are funded by sales of the website on DVD, CD-ROM, or USB flash drive for monetary donations.[1]
The Internet Sacred Text Archive lists three general links, World Religions, Traditions, and Mysteries. The first leads to the texts of the Near Eastern religions (Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity and Islam); to Eastern religions Hinduism, Buddhism, Jainism, Sikhism, Confucianism, Taoism and Shinto; and to some modern developments Baháʼí and Mormonism, as well as secondary sources describing them.
The second leads to Indigenous religions, including those of Africa, North, Central and South America and Polynesia, as well as Shamanism and transcriptions of oral myths.
The third leads to miscellaneous works — Nostradamus's writings, descriptions of Atlantis, and pagan texts.
The main page has a site map that is organized alphabetically.[7]
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