The evidence standard
What is known, what is claimed, and where the two part company.
This is the actual product of the house — the reason the brand is credible rather than decorative. Every archive already grades its own material. Thaumatica is the promise that they all do, in a vocabulary you only have to learn once.
Show the evidence
Every entry carries what it rests on — the excavation report, the archive it came from, the released document. If we cannot show you why something is in the catalog, it does not go in the catalog.
Grade the claim, not the reader
Confidence is recorded on the entry, in a vocabulary that is the same across every archive. You are told how far the evidence carries, and then left to draw the line yourself.
Keep the contested in
Disputed and rejected material stays in the catalog, labelled. An archive that removes what it disagrees with has stopped being an archive and started being an argument.
Clause two, in practice
The confidence ladder.
Six grades, in descending order of how far the published evidence carries. Mysteria applies them to places, where the vocabulary was first written; the other archives express the same ladder in whatever terms their material allows — a book’s inclusion evidence, a case’s official disposition.
The bottom rung is the one that does the work. It exists so that rejected claims can stay in the catalog, labelled as rejected, rather than vanishing from it. A reader who came looking for a famous piece of nonsense should find out what is actually known about it — not find an empty search result and conclude we are hiding something.
Verified
Peer-reviewed consensus: inscribed, extensively excavated, dating corroborated.
Widely accepted
Broad scholarly acceptance, with minor debate on the details.
Contested
Active scholarly dispute over authenticity, date, or interpretation.
Hypothetical
Plausible, but insufficient published evidence — often known only from remote sensing or legend.
Unverified
Claimed, but lacking peer-reviewed field verification.
Pseudoarchaeology
Claims the scholarly community has rejected. Included and labelled, never hidden.
Clause one, per archive
Same promise, three different kinds of proof.
An excavation report, a library’s catalog record and a released government file are not the same object, and pretending otherwise would be its own kind of dishonesty. What they have in common is that each archive can show you the one it rests on.
Mysteria
The verification seal
Six grades — from peer-reviewed consensus down to pseudoarchaeology — carried on every place, every card and every map pin, each with a note on where the scholarly position actually stands.
Libra Esoterica
Inclusion evidence
Each of 27,125 book-to-tradition assignments carries a machine-readable record of why that book qualified. Membership of a category means relevance, and never endorsement.
UAP Nexus
The documentary record
Every case is anchored to the documents that exist, with the official disposition recorded as recorded — not endorsed, not debunked, and never quietly upgraded to fact.
Clause three, honestly
What the standard does not promise.
A standard that claimed to settle these subjects would be the least trustworthy thing on the site. Here is the edge of what it covers.
- A grade is a reading of the literature, not a verdict
- When an archive marks a claim contested, it is reporting that specialists disagree — not adjudicating between them. Where we have read the field wrong, the correction belongs on the entry, and we would like to hear about it.
- Inclusion is not endorsement
- A book placed in a tradition, a place placed in a category, a case placed in the record: each says the entry is relevant to that heading. None of them says it is true, sound, or recommended.
- The standard covers our catalogs, not our sources
- We can show you where a record came from and what its source said. We cannot vouch for the internal rigor of forty-two libraries, every excavation report, or any government's filing practices.
- Coverage is uneven, and says so
- Some subjects are documented to death and some barely at all. An archive that hid that unevenness behind a uniform surface would be lying about the state of the evidence.