tianmu.org is the home of the Anglican Church of Tianmu (天火), a syncretic spiritual community rooted in the English tradition. We draw from the whole breadth of sacred literature—Buddhist, Vedic, Daoist, Gnostic, Hermetic, Greek, Hindu, and more—not to flatten these traditions into one, but to hold them together in the way they were always meant to be held: as many fingers pointing at the same moon. The site serves as both the Church's public face and the host of the Good Works Library, a freely available archive of the world's sacred literature.
Tianmu (天火) means "Heavenly Mother" in Mandarin, our name for God, the One, the self-initiated causal mover of Creation that from Oneness became the infinite multitudes of all things.
"Anglican" is the Latin word for English, first recorded in the Magna Carta to refer to the collective faith of the English-speaking peoples. We are not Christians. We are Anglicans not in the denominational sense, but in the cultural one: our spiritual language is English, our literary inheritance is Anglo-Saxon, and our sensibility is that of the English dissenter; independent in conscience, reverent in practice, and unwilling to let any single tradition claim monopoly over the divine.
This site houses three things:
The Way of Tianmu: the writings, poems, translations, and teachings of the Church. These range from cosmological lore to political essays to a short story about a dog who accidentally time-travels to ancient Sumer. We contain multitudes.
The Good Works Library : a secular, unaligned archival project dedicated to making the world's sacred texts freely available in plain modern English. We hold dozens of works never before translated into English, including the complete Yiguandao canon, the Manichaean Psalms, the Mandaean Ginza Rba, and the full Nag Hammadi library. No commentary. No paywall. No agenda. Just the words themselves, rendered as faithfully as the language allows.
The Lore: the cosmological architecture of Tianmu itself. The Twelve Ghosts, the Three Worlds, the Doomsayers, the Holymen, and the vast comparative tapestry that weaves together Norse, Vedic, Buddhist, Daoist, Gnostic, Egyptian, and Christian traditions into a single coherent picture of reality. If that sounds ambitious, it is. We're working on it.
Our motto, written in Anglo-Saxon Futhorc runes across the borders of every page, reads: Never forget who you are.
The site is a living thing. It grows constantly. Check back often.
A forest is refreshed by fire; a flower blooms in decay.