Remarkable parallels link Irish mythology to that of ancient India. Both represent Indo-European mythic beliefs at a roughly similar level of evolution, and it has been suggested that the forebears of the Celts of Ireland might therefore have left the presumed ‘common Indo-European homeland’ and moved westwards at around the same time as the ancestors of the Indo-Aryans broke away to the east. Be that as it may, the parallels are widely accepted, and it is in this setting that contributors to Monograph 57 offer the following papers.

Séamus Mac Mathúna: Sacred Landscape and Water Mythology in Early Ireland and Ancient India; Victoria Vertogradova: Man-Made Sacer Locus throughout the Religious Paradigm Shift: On the Track of the Snake Cult in Ancient Mathurā; Nataliya Alexandrova: Legends of Chthonic Deities and Buddhist Historical Narrative of Ancient India; Grigory Bondarenko: Significance of Pentads in Early Irish and Indian Sources - Case of Five Directions; Yevgenyi Vyrschikov: Social Classifications and Sacred Space in the Pāli Canon; Dar Zhutayev: Sacred Topology of the Buddhist Universe - The Buddhakṣetra Concept in the Mahāsāṅghika-Lokottaravādin Tradition; Maxim Fomin: And His Cloak Covered the Whole Island - Stories of Religious Conversion in Pāli and Medieval Irish Narrative Traditions.