Internet Sacred Text Archive
The Internet Sacred Text Archive (ISTA), founded by John Bruno Hare in 1999 in Santa Cruz, California, is a website dedicated to preserving electronic public domain religious texts. Hare, a software engineer, initiated this project from his home as an intellectual challenge, digitizing over 1,000 public domain books on religion, folklore, and mythology to promote religious tolerance through knowledge. The archive’s texts are divided into 77 categories, and its maintenance costs are supported by sales of the website’s content on DVDs, CDs, or USB flash drives.
ISTA’s content is organized under three main links: World Religions, Traditions, and Mysteries. The first link includes texts and secondary sources on Abrahamic religions. The second focuses on indigenous religions and transcriptions of oral myths. The third link offers writings of Nostradamus, descriptions of Atlantis, and various pagan texts. The website’s main page features an alphabetically organized site map for easy navigation.