Order Before Doctrine: A Structural and Chronological Analysis of Religious Transmission as a Persistence Layer

This paper presents a structural and chronological analysis of major religious traditions, examined not as belief systems or theological doctrines, but as order-preserving transmission substrates.Across cultures and historical periods, religions are shown to converge on a common set of mechanisms—oral precision, repetition, memorisation, rhythm, and gated interpretation—that enable meaning to persist under social change, political disruption, and environmental constraint.Rather than occupying the same layer as political or social institutions, religious systems are positioned as a stabilising substrate beneath them, mediating between biological cognition and the non-negotiable boundary conditions imposed by…