During the early days of the development of this encyclopedia, the board of editors and the senior members of the staff met often, both formally and informally, to exchange ideas, to decide editorial policies, and to discuss plans for the contents of the work we had undertaken to produce. At first, given the enormous scope of our topic, and the great variety of religious traditions and fields of study that it includes, it seemed impossible that any coherent system of articles could be devised that would limn the entire circle of current learning on religion and that would, further, serve the purposes both of the general reader and of specialists in various areas of religious studies. Soon, however, it became apparent that the conceptual scheme mapped out by Mircea Eliade, our editor in chief, and the editorial formats and systems...