Two practitioners who gave up the instrument after it failed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zwei Praktiker, die das Instrument nach dem Versagen aufgaben @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. VIII, Of the Religion of the Laplanders, p. 33
definition: Two cases are reported together. A man of a Lapp village whose reindeer were dying prayed to his idol, strewed fir boughs about it, offered the skins, horns and skulls of reindeer, and prostrated himself with his whole family beseeching it to testify by some sign that it was the true god; after a whole day of prayers and devotions, finding no sign given, he set fire to the wood he had brought and burned the idol down, and asked the neighbours who sought to kill him why they would not let the god avenge himself. And a man whose mother was grievously sick sought remedy from the drum; his mother died notwithstanding, whereupon he cut his drum in pieces, alleging that he saw no use of it.
note: Both cases have the shape a protocol has: a question, a stated period, an outcome that could have fallen either way, and an act that follows from the outcome. In the first the period is a whole day and the demanded sign is named in advance. Neither man explains the failure away, and that is the whole point of entering them: it is the counter-case to a transmission that meets every disappointment with a named excuse.
note: The provenance is the reason no more is made of them. Both stand in the chapter on the reception of Christianity, both are credited to a named priest of the mission, and both end with the man becoming a Christian or being praised as one. A missionary reporting that heathens destroyed their own idols after they failed is reporting the thing he most wanted to find. The cases are entered as claims standing in the work, and what they are evidence of is a separate question from what they say.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

How high the threshold of absorption stands
type: Disputing
label: Wie hoch die Schwelle der Vertiefung liegt @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
definition: A disagreement about what is required for absorption. The discourses describe it as reached in the ordinary course of the training; the handbook sets a far higher bar, remarking that only one in a hundred or a thousand accomplishes it.
note: The disagreement bears directly on every prerequisite in this file that runs through the fourth absorption. If the handbook's threshold is the right one, the capacities it makes conditional on that absorption are conditional on something very few reach; if the discourses' is, they are not.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The four absorptions

Each absorption presupposes the one before it
type: Presupposing
label: Jede Vertiefung setzt die vorhergehende voraus @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
note: The series is strictly graded in both canon and handbook, each stage defined by what it has let go of. No passage was found that forbids skipping in so many words, which is why this is recorded as an order and not as a necessity.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The fourth absorption
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The four absorptions
within tradition: Theravāda

The ascending order of the ācāras
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die aufsteigende Ordnung der ācāras @de
source: Kulārṇava Tantra, in the section on the superiority of the Kula-dharma, at the verses giving the order of superiority of the ācāras (text with English translation by Ram Kumar Rai, Varanasi 1999)
definition: A graded order of ways of practice in which each is declared superior to the one before: the Veda above all others, the Vaiṣṇava above the Veda, the Śaiva above the Vaiṣṇava, the Dakṣiṇa above the Śaiva, the Vāma above the Dakṣiṇa, the Siddhānta above the Vāma, the Kaula above the Siddhānta, and nothing above the Kaula.
note: The chapter and verse are not recoverable from the copy read, which is an OCR of a printed translation whose running structure the scan does not carry reliably. Work, section and edition are named instead, which meets the standard of findability; a later reader working from another edition should expect a different numbering. See prima-materia#45 and prima-materia#56.
note: This is the passage Wilson translates in 1832 without naming a place in the work, and on which pmc:RightAndLeftHandNomenclature rests. It is now located in an edition, so the order is a claim of the tantra and no longer only a claim of its reporter.
note: Two things follow that the Western pair of names cannot carry. The order has seven steps and not two, so a scheme with two is not a simplification of it but a replacement. And within the order the left stands above the right, so the English rendering keeps the pair and reverses its valuation. Whoever explains the modern left-hand path out of this passage explains it out of a text that ranks the left higher than the right and both below two further steps.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

The acquitted may fine his accuser
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Freigesprochene darf den Ankläger büßen @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 263 and p. 264
definition: A man who has passed the ordeal is led back to the town with songs of praise and dressed in fine cloth, and the corpus states that he may then mulct his accuser in a very heavy fine; in the milder form used for theft and adultery, the accused who retains the dose may demand compensation from his accusers.
note: A cost on the accuser is the one feature of the procedure that works against its abuse, and it is worth recording that the transmission has it. The second witness records the cost running the other way at the same point, since in some districts the ordeal-giver loses his fee when the accused vomits, so the two incentives are opposed within one procedure.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

An acquittal denied by ascribing evasion
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Freispruch, den man durch behauptete Umgehung entwertet @de
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), pp. 147-148
definition: A named case from Loango. A man was divined to be the owner of the leopard that had killed another man's wife; he denied it, was told by the ruler that nobody would believe him and that the decision lay with God, went to another town, demanded the ordeal, took it and vomited, and was thereby innocent. His accusers held instead that he had used his knowledge of the black art to escape the proper effect of the bark, and left their own town rather than live beside him.
note: The counterpart within the ordeal to the failure attributions on the charged things: an outcome that clears a man is not accepted as clearing him, and the exit is a capacity ascribed to him which the procedure cannot test. Recorded with the case because the case is named and dated by the recorder and can be argued with.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The principal huaca is addressed without being seen
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Haupt-Huaca wird angesprochen, ohne gesehen zu werden @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. II and cap. V
definition: Not all who address the huaca see it. Although everyone knows in which direction it stands, few see it, because they hang back and only the priest goes forward, speaks and offers. Places where a huaca is said to have rested, called zamana, and places from which it is invoked, called cayan, are reverenced too.
note: In one village a woman who kept the huaca told the people to cover their eyes when they adored it, because the divine essence cannot be seen with bodily eyes. That is the transmission stating a reason for the arrangement, and it is entered because a reason given from inside is worth more than the recorder's explanation, which is that the devil had put fear into them.
note: The arrangement has a consequence the recorder reports with satisfaction and which is a finding whoever reports it: when the villagers were finally made to look at what they had feared, that was itself the strongest argument against it. A cult whose object is addressed without being seen is a cult that can be undone by showing the object.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Whether the shift occurs, and whether the claim says anything about it
type: Testing
label: Ob die Verschiebung eintritt, und ob die Behauptung etwas über sie sagt @de
definition: An examination of whether a strong affect shifts attention, readiness and the threshold for risk, and of what remains of the claim once it does.
note: A convergence worth following separately. Several transmissions warn against exactly this coupling on the ground that it deceives the practitioner about his own position, and traditions/patanjala-yoga.ttl already carries pmc:SiddhisAsObstacle in that shape. If the direction of the shift is unknowable in advance, the warning and the finding say something close to the same thing from opposite ends, and that is a candidate for a convergence node rather than a remark here.
note: Counter-search, carried and not favourable to either side. A registered replication of the key studies in a large online sample supports the framework only in part: the association between the emboldening affect and both risk-seeking and optimistic estimates holds, while the association between the cautioning affect and risk-seeking does not reliably appear. The opposition of directions survives; its symmetry does not.
note: On the state. This protocol is the case that made pm:claimDoesNotDiscriminate necessary, and it is deliberately not recorded as cases without deviation. There the claim says something and the cases bear it out; here they bear it out because the claim does not say enough to be borne out against anything. Filing it as an ordinary confirmation would have added a success to a record that had in fact found the claim empty.
note: That the shift occurs is not in doubt and the claim is borne out in that narrow sense. Strong affect measurably moves risk judgement and the choices that follow from it, in induced and in naturally occurring form alike.
note: The consequence for anyone acting on the claim, which is the reason to enter this node at all. Whoever couples an intended state to a strong affect in order to shift his own threshold does not know from the claim whether he has raised or lowered it. Confirmation at this level of generality is not usable guidance, and the node says so rather than recording a success.
note: What the evidence takes away in the same motion. The direction of the shift is set by the particular affect and not by its strength. Fear and anger are both strong and both unpleasant, and they move the threshold for risk in opposite directions: the fearful judge risk pessimistically and choose cautiously, the angry judge it optimistically and choose boldly, with the angry closer to the cheerful than to the fearful. A claim that names only the strength of the affect therefore cannot say which way anything moves, and is compatible with every outcome.
counter-search: Counter-search found opposition
counter-search note: Carried. A registered replication of the key studies in a large online sample supports the framework only in part: the association between the emboldening affect and both risk-seeking and optimistic estimates holds, the one between the cautioning affect and risk-seeking does not reliably appear. The finding is in the notes above. Not searched: later meta-analytic work on the framework as a whole.
evidence from: J. S. Lerner and D. Keltner, Beyond valence: toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice, Cognition and Emotion 14 (2000), no. 4, pp. 473-493
evidence from: J. S. Lerner and D. Keltner, Fear, anger, and risk, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 81 (2001), no. 1, pp. 146-159, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.1.146
examination state: Claim does not discriminate
examined by: Not devised here. The protocol reads the finding off experimental work on specific emotions and their appraisal tendencies, and off a registered replication of it
falsified by: Strong affect, induced or occurring, leaves risk judgement and the choices following from it unmoved against a neutral condition.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: Coupling an intended state to a strong affect shifts the one who couples
undivided outcomes: A threshold for risk that has been raised, and one that has been lowered. The claim covers both alike, so acting on it cannot tell the practitioner which of the two he has brought about.

The states are not attained by effort
type: Situating
label: Die Zustände werden nicht durch Anstrengung erlangt @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Not by effort
situated node: States
situation ground: The handbooks describe these as descending on the wayfarer as a gift and distinguish them from the stations precisely by their not being attainable through effort. That is the criterion this coordinate names, stated by the source itself.

The states pass
type: Situating
label: Die Zustände vergehen @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Transient
situated node: States
situation ground: The same passage has them pass as well as descend, and the two are separate claims: a gift may be kept. The Sufi material answers both questions the same way, which is why one axis sufficed until a tradition answered them differently.

A failed amulet is never at a loss for an excuse
type: Conceptualizing
label: Für ein versagendes Amulett findet sich immer eine Ausrede @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 92
definition: The witness states the failure case in its sharpest form and reports the response as a rule: if the amulet fails to defend the wearer from the one danger it was made to avert, so that an amulet consecrated to the fire god fails to protect its wearer from a disaster by fire, they are never at a loss for some excuse to account for its inefficacy.
note: It is also the recorder's summary rather than a quoted informant, and it is entered as such. What would settle it is a named excuse in a named case, and none was found in the works opened.
note: The passage names the response and not its content, so the graph can hold the shape of the move and not the move itself. That is worth having, because it is the third transmission in this holding of which the same shape is recorded: the Kongo corpus assigns a failed object to neglect or exhaustion, the Lakota corpus assigns a stone that will not obey to the owner's divided faith, and here the excuse is reported without being specified.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

Mindfulness of breathing yields rapture
type: Yielding
label: Atemachtsamkeit bringt Verzückung hervor @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV.94ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga VIII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
note: Rapture appears in the handbook as a factor of absorption reached through the meditation subject, not as something aimed at directly. The pairing is recorded at that strength.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Ānāpānasati
within tradition: Theravāda
yields capacity: Pīti

The deception that appears as light
type: Cautioning
label: Die Täuschung, die als Licht erscheint @de
source: Diadochus of Photice, Gnostic Chapters 40
source: Evagrius Ponticus, On Thoughts 39
definition: The warning that an experience of luminosity or consolation may be counterfeit, and that the counterfeit is recognised by its circumstances rather than by its brightness.
note: Diadochus distinguishes the true consolation, which comes with the body awake and in warm love, from the false, which comes in a light half-sleep.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Discernment of origins
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

Answers fixed to an outcome the operator does not control
type: Generalizing
label: Antworten am Ausgang, den der Betreiber nicht beherrscht @de
note: A third case was considered and not used. The Sámi drum answers by the travel of a ring that the operator does not steer, and the reading rule is attested twice ninety years apart (pmc:SunCourseRule). It is not entered here because that node states a rule of reading and not a claim that the reading comes true, and pm:generalizedFrom must point at claims and not at descriptions. Seen and left out, with the reason.
note: The Zande transmission has a feature that makes this generalization examinable rather than merely stateable: it prescribes a control, the second consultation that must reverse the first. It also names eight causes to which a failure of that control is attributed, so the condition never falls against the oracle itself. Both stand in traditions/azande.ttl, and both belong in any protocol devised against this node.
note: The comparison class is the whole of the claim and is the part to attack. An oracle that answers yes or no is measured against one half; a system of two hundred and fifty-six figures against one two-hundred-and-fifty-sixth. A protocol that does not fix the admissible set before the consultation measures nothing, because the set can always be narrowed afterwards to whatever came true.
note: Two attested claims from two transmissions with no route between them that this holding has established: the Zande poison oracle and the casting of the Ifá figures. The mechanism is the same in both and is the reason they are taken together — the answer is not read off the operator's judgement but off an outcome he does not steer.
attested by: Compiler inference
generalized from: The poison oracle yields the naming of the witch
generalized from: The casting yields foreknowledge
generalized statement: Procedures that fix an answer to the outcome of a physical process the operator cannot control name the state of affairs later established more often than an answer drawn at random from the same set of admissible answers.

The downward wind driven upward by force
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der abwärts gerichtete Wind wird mit Gewalt aufwärts getrieben @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.62 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The wind whose course is downward is said to be made to go upward by force; the manual states the natural course and the reversal in the same verse.
note: This is the direct reversal of any scheme that assigns downward carriage to an operation in the lower abdomen. The manual has the abdominal operation carry upward, and has the operation at the throat press the other wind down. Both assignments are the opposite of the one the modern draft makes. See prima-materia#28.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Apatheia presupposes ascetic labour
type: Presupposing
label: Apatheia setzt asketische Arbeit voraus @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 81
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Apatheia is called the flower of ascetic labour and ascetic labour is defined as the keeping of the commandments, so that where the labour is absent the freedom from the passions does not appear at all rather than appearing in a lesser degree.
dependent step: Apatheia
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Ascetic practice
within tradition: Desert monasticism

The appearances are self-arising
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Erscheinungen sind Selbst-Erscheinung @de
source: Bar do thos grol (Karma Lingpa recension, 14th century; trans. Gyurme Dorje 2006), the intermediate state of reality
definition: The teaching that the figures met in the intermediate state are appearances of the one who meets them and not independently existing beings, and that recognising them as such is what frees.
note: Tibetan rang snang, self-appearance. A dating warning belongs on this node: the work is traditionally ascribed to Padmasambhava in the eighth century but is a treasure text of the fourteenth, revealed by Karma Lingpa; the older ascription is not held in the scholarship. Note also the scope. The doctrine holds of all appearance in this tradition, waking included, and is therefore not a statement about the threshold state in particular.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Araqiel discloses the signs of the earth
type: Attributing
label: Araqiel offenbart die Zeichen der Erde @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Signs of the earth
ascribed to: Araqiel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The soul-journey ascribed to Aristeas
type: Attributing
label: Die Seelenreise, Aristeas zugeschrieben @de
source: Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16
source: Pliny, Naturalis Historia VII.174
definition: A capacity ascribed to a figure who is not available to report it, in a historian's account of what was told of him.
ascribed capacity: Journey of the soul apart from the body
attested by: Third-party ascription
within tradition: Graeco-Roman testimony

Armaros discloses the loosing of spells
type: Attributing
label: Armaros offenbart das Lösen von Beschwörungen @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Loosing of spells
ascribed to: Armaros
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

No one impeded by crime may presume to say it
type: Cautioning
label: Wer durch ein Verbrechen behindert ist, darf sie nicht sprechen @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), pp. 46-47, ed. Peterson
definition: The warning that no man impeded or corrupted with any crime ought to presume to say the oration; on a day on which he is so impeded he may only call it to mind in his heart.
note: The caution is the closest thing in this witness to a condition of failure, and it is worth naming what it does not do: it names who may not say the words, not what happens to one who says them anyway. The distinction decides whether the condition is examinable or absorbing, and the text leaves it on the safer side of that line.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The saying of the orations
within tradition: Ars Notoria

Not after drink or luxury, and not fasting without discretion
type: Cautioning
label: Nicht nach Trunk oder Ausschweifung, und nicht nüchtern ohne Bedacht @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), p. 44, ed. Peterson
definition: The warning that no man presume to say any of the oration after too much drinking or luxury, nor fasting, without great reverence and discretion, and that it be treated only at certain determinate and appointed times.
note: Fasting appears on both sides of the corpus: it is prescribed for the first day of a rehearsal and warned against here without reverence and discretion. The two passages are held apart rather than reconciled; whether the witness contradicts itself or distinguishes two situations is not decided from what was read.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The saying of the orations
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The hours of the day and the count of repetitions
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Tagesstunden und die Zahl der Wiederholungen @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), pp. 13-14, ed. Peterson
definition: The division of the day the orations follow: once in the morning, once about the third hour, once about the ninth hour and once at evening; where a great work presses, twice in the morning and twice about the ninth hour.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The effect presupposes the appointed day
type: Presupposing
label: Die Wirkung setzt den bestimmten Tag voraus @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 14, p. 12, ed. Peterson
note: Prescribed order and not stated necessity. The text says the orations are to be pronounced at certain determinate times of the moon and are not to be undertaken without consideration of the end; it does not say what follows if the day is missed. The strength is set to what the passage carries and no higher.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Profiting in all the sciences
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The days of the moon on which the orations are said
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The effect presupposes solitude and the lowered voice
type: Presupposing
label: Die Wirkung setzt Alleinsein und die gesenkte Stimme voraus @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), p. 14, ed. Peterson
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Profiting in all the sciences
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Alone, and scarcely audible to himself
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The repeated oration yields eloquence by measure
type: Yielding
label: Die wiederholte Oration bringt Beredsamkeit nach Maß hervor @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), pp. 46-47, ed. Peterson
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The oration repeated once, twice or three times
within tradition: Ars Notoria
yields capacity: Eloquence measured out by the count of repetitions

The inexcusable prohibition on passing it on
type: Cautioning
label: Das unentschuldbare Verbot der Weitergabe @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 17, p. 16, ed. Peterson
definition: The warning, ascribed in the text to the angel who declared the oration, that the holder presume neither to give it to another nor to expound anything out of it, neither himself, nor any one by him, nor any one after him.
note: This is the gate the project's criterion is directed at, stated by the transmission in its own words and attributed to an angel so that no holder can lift it. It stands here as a claim of the tradition and not as an instruction; the text it guards has been in print since sixteen fifty-seven.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The saying of the orations
within tradition: Ars Notoria

Whether the death is set for the morrow or only soon
type: Disputing
label: Ob der Tod auf den folgenden Tag oder nur auf bald gesetzt ist @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 30a, p. 25, ed. Peterson
source: Ars notoria, the Latin of the Beringos printing appended to the Agrippa Opera, § 30a, printed beside the translation in the edition of Peterson
note: Held as a dispute and not resolved. Resolving it would need the medieval recensions, which were not opened; that the two readings stand side by side in one edition is a reason to record the divergence, not to prefer either.
note: The Latin of the printing Turner worked from says of the sick man who answers badly that he is proculdubio in proximo moriturum, that is that he will die shortly, with no day named. Turner's English says: then doubtless conclude, He will dye on the morrow. Both stand in the edition read, on facing sides of the same passage.
note: The difference falls on the only part of the claim that could be missed. A death that must come tomorrow can be watched for and can fail to arrive; a death that will come shortly has no last day, and no outcome ever refutes it. The English is therefore the examinable version and the Latin is not, and a protocol has to say which of the two it tests.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The rule of decision on the sick man's answer
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The miracle proceeds not from your own nature
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wunder geht nicht aus deiner eigenen Natur hervor @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 30b, p. 25, ed. Peterson
definition: The statement the text makes about its own procedure: that this miracle proceeds not from the operator's nature but from the nature and virtues of the holy angels, it being a part of their office wonderfully to reveal these things to him.
note: A transmission that says outright where it locates the acting is uncommon, and this one says it in the middle of an instruction rather than in a prologue. It is why the placement on the agency axis beside this file rests on the wording and not on a reading of it.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The vision of beauty itself presupposes the ascent by rungs
type: Presupposing
label: Die Schau der Schönheit selbst setzt den Aufstieg über die Stufen voraus @de
source: Plato, Symposium 211c
note: The word rendered as rungs stands in the base text at 211c, which is why this counts as a stated ordering and not as a modern reading of a sequence of paragraphs.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The ascent is described as rightly conducted only when it proceeds as by rungs of a ladder, from one body to two, from bodies to pursuits, from pursuits to studies, and thence to beauty itself; the one who does not go this way does not arrive at the final vision.
dependent step: Beauty itself
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The beauty of one body
within tradition: Platonic tradition

Azazel discloses adornment and cosmetics
type: Attributing
label: Azazel offenbart Schmuck und Kosmetik @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:1 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Adornment and cosmetics
ascribed to: Azazel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Azazel discloses metalworking
type: Attributing
label: Azazel offenbart Metallverarbeitung @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:1 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Metalworking and weapon-making
ascribed to: Azazel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The bad Midē who turns the powers to harm
type: Cautioning
label: Der böse Midē, der die Vermögen zum Schaden wendet @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 168-169
definition: The society names a figure of its own kind who employs the powers for evil purposes, who can assume the form of any animal and in that shape destroy the life of his victim. The warning is not against an outsider but against a member who has passed the same degrees.
note: A tradition that catalogues capacities and warns against their use is the shape this collection meets in Pātañjala Yoga as well, and the two warnings are not the same warning. There the capacities are called obstacles to the goal of the practice; here they are called dangerous in the hands of a man who wants harm. One is a caution about the practitioner's direction, the other about his intention.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Touching at a distance for good or ill
cautions about: Calling forth the shadow and holding it
within tradition: Midewiwin

Baraqel discloses astrology
type: Attributing
label: Baraqel offenbart die Astrologie @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Astrology
ascribed to: Baraqel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Baraqel discloses the signs of the lightning flashes
type: Attributing
label: Baraqel offenbart die Zeichen der Blitze @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
note: Stands in the position the Ethiopic fills with astrology.
ascribed capacity: Signs of the lightning flashes
ascribed to: Baraqel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The purification that makes it worse
type: Testing
label: Die Reinigung, die es schlimmer macht @de
source: Vendidad, fargard 9.47-49, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 4, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895)
definition: A protocol taken from the transmission's own reasoning. The claim is not that an unqualified purification is ineffective but that it increases sickness and death in the world beyond what they were. That is a directional claim about an outcome outside the practitioner, and it separates two states of affairs that a later observer could tell apart.
note: Entered at procedure without cases. No series has been collected, and none is available from within the transmission: the man who would provide the case is executed before the outcome could be recorded, which is itself a feature of the protocol worth stating rather than passing over.
note: The transmission supplies the falsifying condition without meaning to. It could have said that the wrong rite simply does not cleanse, which nothing would contradict; instead it named an effect in the opposite direction from the one intended, and thereby excluded an outcome. Where a claim of failure predicts nothing, this one predicts an increase.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A recorded series of purifications carried out by persons known to be unqualified, after which sickness and death in the affected place did not rise above the rate where the rite was performed correctly or not at all. The transmission asserts an increase, so a flat or falling rate falls due against it.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: Against undertaking the purification without knowing the rites

The poison ordeal at the first sustained contact
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Giftprobe beim ersten dauerhaften Kontakt @de
source: Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, trans. Ellen E. Frewer (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1873), vol. II, chapter XIII, the account of the Niam-niam praying-machine and auguries
definition: The earliest European account, from travels of eighteen sixty-eight to eighteen seventy-one, already describes the whole apparatus: an oily preparation from a red wood, given to a hen, whose death or survival decides the question; the rubbing-board consulted before any undertaking of consequence; and the use of both to establish the guilt or innocence of the accused, with suspected witches tried by the same ordeal. It records a case in which a hostile chief called off an attack because his fowl had died.
note: The corroborative second test is not in this account. That is an argument about the account and not about the transmission: the writer was a botanist passing through with an ivory company, not an observer of consultations, and he reports the outcome of single fowls because that is what he saw. What the silence does establish is that the double test is not attested before the monograph in anything read here, and the question of when it can first be shown is left open as an issue.
note: The passage is the reason the contact route on this tradition is not simply documented. The oracles stand in the record at the first sustained contact with the Islamic north and cannot have come in with it.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The rate at which the corroborative test fails
type: Testing
label: Die Rate, mit der der Bestätigungstest scheitert @de
definition: A count of the corroborated consultations printed in the source: how often the second test fell opposite to the first, as the transmission's rule of validity requires, and how often it fell alike and voided the verdict.
note: Of the two seances printed, the first carries two corroborated pairs and both are recorded as contradictory: a question about taking on the taboos of vengeance against a question about the questioner's own survival under them, and a question about a man's safety in a named settlement against its explicit corroboration. The second seance carries one explicitly corroborative question, and it agreed; the recorder calls that seance a wholly successful consultation. Three pairs, two of them void by the transmission's own rule.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, set when the counter-search requirement was introduced, because this node does not record whether a search for opposing work was made. Its notes are older than the requirement and are kept unchanged; whoever documents the search restores the case-bearing state. See prima-materia#386.
note: The count is the recorder's material and the counting is this graph's. He states outright that the seances are given so that the reader may judge for himself the proportion of fowls that die and the order of deaths and survivals, so the arithmetic is invited by the source and is not imposed on it.
note: The state is cases with deviation and not cases without, and the deviation is from the transmission's own stated requirement rather than from a base rate of chance. A base rate is deliberately not entered: the poison is administered in a number of doses that varies with the size of the fowl and with the operator's reading of its earlier answers, so the probability that a given fowl dies is not fixed and no honest chance rate can be stated from what was read.
note: Three pairs decide nothing about a rate and the number is entered so that a later reader can see how small it is. What it does establish is that the falsifying condition is not hypothetical: it occurred in two of the three cases this graph has actually read, and the source says elsewhere that the oracle frequently kills or spares both fowls.
note: What the deviation is not. It is not evidence against the oracle in the transmission's own terms, because the transmission assigns every occurrence of the condition to one of eight causes that leave the instrument untouched. That is why the finding of this protocol is about the standing of the falsifying condition inside the transmission and not about the oracle's accuracy, which nothing read here measures.
case count: 3
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not documented. Predates the requirement; see the note at pmc:TummoHeatExamination for why the undocumented case is treated as uncarried.
evidence from: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), the two seances printed at pp. 141-143
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: The Azande, by the corroborative second test their own rule prescribes; the two consultations counted here were recorded and printed at length by E. E. Evans-Pritchard, who was present at both
falsified by: The two tests of one consultation fall alike, both fowls dying or both surviving, so that by the transmission's own rule the verdict is contradictory and void.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The poison oracle yields the naming of the witch

The eight causes to which a failure of the oracle is attributed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die acht Ursachen, denen ein Versagen des Orakels zugeschrieben wird @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 155 and pp. 155-157
definition: Where the oracle contradicts itself the failure is attributed to one of eight causes: the wrong variety of the creeper having been gathered, the breach of a taboo, witchcraft, the anger of the owners of the forest in which the creeper grows, the age of the poison, the anger of the ghosts, sorcery, and use. Two varieties of the creeper are distinguished by name, and poison that kills without discrimination is set aside for some months to cool and is thrown away if it does not.
note: The list is the reason the falsifying condition on the neighbouring node does not function as one inside the transmission. Every occurrence of the condition is assigned to a cause that leaves the oracle itself untouched, and the recorder reports that the errors as well as the sound judgements are taken as proof of its accuracy. That sentence is the recorder's summary of an attitude and not a quoted Zande statement, and it is entered as such.
note: This is also the passage on which the whole later argument about whether Zande thought is closed against refutation rests. None of that argument was read at the wording in this run; it stands as an issue with the works named.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The bellows breath presupposes neck and trunk held level
type: Presupposing
label: Der Blasebalgatem setzt einen gerade gehaltenen Hals und Rumpf voraus @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.60 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The verse binds the lotus seat, a level neck and trunk, and a carefully closed mouth into the one instruction that opens the bellows breath. It is the only place in the breath chapter where the alignment of the spine is stated as a condition of a breath practice, and it is stated for one practice, not for the chapter. See prima-materia#29.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The straight trunk as the mark of a seat
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The three dispositions: paśu, vīra, divya
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die drei Dispositionen: paśu, vīra, divya @de
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra I.50-57 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra IV.19-20 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
definition: A division of practitioners into three kinds, the bound, the heroic and the divine, which governs the rites a person is competent for. The source describes the divine as all but a god, pure of heart, alike towards opposites and unattached, and the bound as one who must gather his own offerings and who may neither look at a Śūdra nor think of a woman.
note: This is the tradition's own answer to the question why one person takes one way and another another: not by choosing, but by what he is held competent for. The text presses the point polemically — it argues that if the bound disposition cannot exist in this age, the divine cannot either, and that only the heroic rites bear visible fruit. A record that reports the two paths as a choice between camps reports the later Western reading and not this one. See prima-materia#54.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

The birchbark chart
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Birkenrindenkarte @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 164-165
definition: The record the priests keep on birchbark, incised in fine lines, giving pictorially the ground plan of the degrees to which the owner is entitled.
note: Two things follow from this and both bear on how the rest of the file is to be read. The society keeps a written record by its own means, which is unusual among the transmissions this graph registers as lacking a corpus. And the capacities of the degrees are stated as readings of marks on such a chart, so what the report carries is an informant's exegesis of a pictograph and not a free verbal account; that is a different kind of witness, and arguably a firmer one, because the marks were there before the question was asked.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Whether the place of contact makes a difference
type: Testing
label: Ob der Ort der Berührung einen Unterschied macht @de
definition: An examination of whether contact at the brow differs from contact elsewhere on the head in what the recipient reports.
note: Procedure without cases. The design is the same as for the palms and inherits the same controls, with one addition that matters more here: the brow is the place the recipient has most often been told about, so an effect found without blinding him to the site would be an effect of the telling.
note: What a negative result would and would not settle. It would touch the draft's addition and leave pmc:Saktipata untouched: a descent of power that names no place cannot be refuted by showing that a named place does nothing. Keeping the two apart is why this node tests the posit and not the transmission.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The falsifying condition follows from the claim naming a site
falsified by: Recipients blinded to the site of contact report no difference between contact at the brow and contact at another site on the head beyond chance.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The brow of another is opened by contact between the brows

Budge's ordering of the Ethiopian amulets under the power of names
type: Systematizing
label: Budges Ordnung der äthiopischen Amulette unter der Macht der Namen @de
date: 1900
source: Budge (ed.), The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Life of Hanna (Saint Anne), and the Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), introduction, pp. L-LIII
definition: The account given in the introduction to the volume, in which the amulets are explained by a single principle: that wherever the name of a good or evil spirit, or of a man, existed, there also was the presence of that spirit or man, so that the presence of a name is equivalent to the presence of the being; and that the Ethiopians, having become Christians outwardly, retained their fear of demons and could resist one only by obtaining the protection of another of greater power.
note: Entered as an ordering act and not as a claim of the transmission because none of the rolls printed in the volume says any of it. The formula about the presence of the name is the editor's, it is the sentence most often repeated about this material, and it is regularly given as an Ethiopian doctrine.
note: The same introduction summarises the sixth section of the roll written for Za-Walda Hawaryat as declaring that the man who wears this amulet on his breast shall be delivered from the spear of any who would attack him. The translation printed sixty pages later gives two forms, the spoken one first, and attaches the reservation by the will of God to the worn one only. A reader of the summary gets the guarantee without the reservation and without the alternative, which is the part of the sentence a protocol turns on.
compiled by: E. A. Wallis Budge
orders claim: The names that hold off

Camac, the maker that is invoked
type: Conceptualizing
label: Camac, der angerufene Macher @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V, the invocation of the huaca; cap. VII, the pacarina of each lineage; cap. XIV, the third question of the visitor's interrogatory
definition: The name under which the power is addressed at the moment of asking. When they invoke the huaca they call it Runapcamac, maker of men, and ask it for life, health and food, and they ask it nothing for any other life. Each lineage names its own pacarina, the place it says it came out of, and calls that Camac, maker; and each says it has its own maker, one a hill, one a spring.
note: The term is entered at the strength the three passages give it and no higher. All three are the same recorder, and all three show him using the word as evidence that the Indians give to a stone what is due to God alone. What can be taken from them is that camac was the word used in address and that it was understood as making rather than as owning or protecting. What cannot be taken from them is a doctrine of camac as a substance or a force, which is a reading of the Quechua of Huarochirí and stands on a document this run could not open.
note: The third of the three places is a question of the interrogatory the visitor was to put in every village. That the word had to be asked for by name shows that it was the recorder's own diagnostic and not an incidental report, which strengthens the evidence that it was in use and weakens the evidence about what it meant.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The huaca that foretold a death and was burned for it
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Huaca, die einen Tod voraussagte und dafür verbrannt wurde @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. II, on the idol Catequilla
definition: A famous idol of one province was consulted through its priests by an Inca passing with an army, about whether he would return victorious from a battle or die in it; the answer was that he would die, and so it fell out. From this the huaca came to have so great a name that people came from very remote provinces to consult it and to make offerings, and it grew rich and had a sumptuous temple. His son, passing later and seeing that greatness, and learning that it was the huaca which had announced his father's death, ordered the temple and all in it to be burned; the priests stole the idol out of the fire and carried it elsewhere and built it another temple.
note: A stated hit, with its consequence stated too: the reputation of the huaca is derived from a single prediction that came true, by the recorder and presumably by the tradition he heard it from. It is the only place in this file where a claim about accuracy is made about a particular occasion rather than about a method.
note: Entered as a claim standing in the work and not as a report of an event. Its chain is long — an extirpator writing in sixteen twenty-one about what another visitor was told about a consultation before the conquest — and no part of it was checked against another witness in this run.
note: The second half is the more useful. The correct answer cost the huaca its temple, because the person it was correct about was the father of the man who burned it. A transmission in which an accurate oracle can be destroyed for its accuracy is not one in which reputation tracks accuracy, and the story says both things at once.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Do not undertake the last transport in doubt
type: Cautioning
label: Die letzte Überführung nicht im Zweifel übernehmen @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 141, p. 382
definition: When a shaman dies among the Northern Tungus his soul must be taken to the lower world by another shaman who is stronger than the deceased. The spirits left behind often want to keep the dead man in their company, so the one who performs the operation must first fight them. If he is not certain of being able to master the spirits of the deceased, he must not undertake it.
note: A prohibition addressed to the practitioner and conditioned on his own estimate of his strength, which is unusual: most cautions in this graph are addressed to the layman or to the beginner. If no sufficiently strong shaman exists, the soul is said not to reach the world of the dead and to disturb the clansmen without rest.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Shamanizing
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The office cannot be laid down
type: Cautioning
label: Das Amt lässt sich nicht ablegen @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 140, pp. 380-381
definition: Once a man or woman has become a shaman, he or she must go on to death or to psychic invalidity. Three reasons are given: by giving up control the shaman would leave the dis-mastered spirits to harm the clansmen, since in the presence of the old master the spirits will not easily submit to a new one; the person may again be affected by the condition that compelled him to become a shaman in the first place; and the clan holds that a shaman must not give up, so that breaking with it puts him in still greater trouble.
note: He closes the section with a judgement of his own — that a shaman's life is a continuous self-sacrifice. That is his and is recorded as his.
note: The warning is against the release and not against the practice, which inverts the usual shape. The recorder states in the same section that if the shaman performs too often he may become the prey of his own spirits, so the office is hedged on both sides: too much practice and its abandonment carry the same named outcome.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Shamanizing
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The caution against forming opinions about hidden things
type: Cautioning
label: Die Warnung davor, sich über die verborgenen Dinge eine Meinung zu bilden @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 19-20
definition: The reported attitude that these are great and difficult questions best left alone, that men know so little beyond food and sleep and rest that it might easily seem presumptuous to form any opinion about hidden things, and that people who are content should not trouble themselves with thinking.
note: A tradition warning against the very enquiry the rest of it makes possible. It is entered because a record that carries only the capacities and not the cautions misreports what it holds, and because this caution is directed at the enquirer and not at the practitioner: it does not say the hidden things are unreal, it says that opinion about them is presumption.
note: The passage also gives a second and worldlier ground for the same reticence, which the ethnographer reports of himself and not of the tradition: that his hosts feared their séances and their taboo observances would be laughed at. Both grounds are in the same pages, and separating them is the reader's work.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Hidden things
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

The fire-readers were least esteemed because they always lied
type: Cautioning
label: Die Feuerleser galten am wenigsten, weil sie immer logen @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fol. 6v, on the virapiricoc
definition: The report adds, of this class and of no other in its list of specialists, that these were the least esteemed, because they always lied.
note: It bears directly on the claim, open elsewhere in this project, that the old traditions test origin and fruits and never a rate of hits. Here a transmission is reported as having formed a standing comparative judgement about a whole class of practitioners on the ground that they were always wrong, which is an aggregation over cases however loosely it was arrived at. Whether the judgement was reached by counting or was itself a piece of received esteem is not decidable from the one sentence, and no examination node is written on it.
note: The most valuable sentence found in this run. It is a ranking of divinatory techniques by reliability, made inside the transmission, with the reason given as repeated failure rather than as impurity, wrong descent or broken taboo. Every other failure in this file is attributed to something about the person; this one is attributed to the method.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Reading the burning of fat and coca
within tradition: Andean transmission

The rubbing-board can be worked by the operator
type: Cautioning
label: Das Reibbrett lässt sich vom Betreiber führen @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 173 and p. 153
definition: The transmission holds the rubbing-board inferior to the other oracles because the man who works it can cheat with it, and only he may work it. The charge is raised in practice when the oracle has spoken against the questioner or when he dislikes the operator. Of the poison oracle, by contrast, the source records that a manipulation is never even suggested.
note: The warning names the failure mode of an oracle whose outcome one party controls, and names it from inside the transmission rather than from the recorder's side. It is the counterpart of the passage on the second test that is not made.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Consulting the rubbing-board oracle
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The sight comes unbidden and cannot be laid down
type: Cautioning
label: Das Sehen kommt ungerufen und lässt sich nicht ablegen @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 46-47
definition: Those who have reached the third degree are said to see distant things even against their will. A first-person report is given: a man who surrendered his drum to the recorder on complaint confessed with tears that though he parted with it and made no other, he would have the same visions as before; he instanced the recorder himself, giving a true and particular account of what had happened to him on his journey to Lapland; and he complained that he did not know how to make use of his eyes, since things altogether distant were presented to them.
note: The same passage carries a claim of a verified hit — the man is said to have told the recorder correctly what had happened on his own journey — and the recorder reports it without endorsing it. It is a claim standing in the work and no more; nothing about the account can be checked, and the man is not named.
note: The warning is not against misuse and not against the anger of a spirit. It is that the capacity, once complete, is not under the will and cannot be given up with the instrument. That is a caution of a kind this graph holds very few of, and it is the transmission warning against the thing it exists to produce.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Seeing what is at a distance
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The wrong presence destroys the power of the thing
type: Cautioning
label: Die falsche Anwesenheit zerstört die Kraft der Sache @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 252
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 143 and p. 145 and p. 92
definition: Both recorders report that a ceremony or a medicine is undone by who is present. The first states that no ceremony will be efficacious if a woman is present during her menstrual flow or if the influences that surround her at that time are present, that such influences remain about a tipi she has occupied until it is taken down and set up again, and that the conductor of the Buffalo ceremony walked the lodge scanning the women to find such a one and the men to find an unworthy one, and would have ordered either to withdraw. The second states that the presence of the wrong kind of person in the lodge was believed to affect the efficacy of a medicine, and that if it were exposed to such influence for any considerable time its power would be entirely destroyed.
note: The caution is entered against the imparted potency rather than against any single rite, because that is the thing both sources say is destroyed: the first speaks of a ceremony that will not be efficacious, the second of a medicine whose power is entirely destroyed, and what the two have in common is the potency the rite is supposed to put to work.
note: The measure the first source prescribes is worth recording exactly, because it is physical and datable: the tipi in which the young woman had lived alone was taken down by her mother and immediately set up again on the same spot, and that act is what made it fit for the ceremony.
note: This is the failure condition that does the most work in the file, because it is prior to every other: it can be invoked after the fact against any rite that did not take, and it needs no evidence beyond the assertion that somebody was there. Entered as a caution and not as a mere doctrine because both sources give it in the imperative, with an action to be taken.
attested by: Field attestation
cautions about: Sicun, imparted potency
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Do not touch what is left at the grave
type: Cautioning
label: Was am Grab bleibt, nicht anrühren @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 141, p. 382
definition: Among the Tungus of Transbaikalia the shaman's paraphernalia are laid with the body or hung on a tree standing nearby. It is not recommended to touch them: those who do may get mental diseases, they may lose their minds.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The paraphernalia are indispensable and variable
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The eight rules that govern a candidate
type: Cautioning
label: Die acht Regeln, die einen Kandidaten binden @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 71 and p. 93
definition: The invariable rules taught to a candidate for the second, third or fourth form: he must subordinate himself to his mentor, meditate continually on his undertaking, speak little with others than his mentor, and use only his consecrated implements and utensils; he must not become angry, must not hear ribald speech, must not go into the water, and must not have sexual intercourse. A candidate who disregards any of them must do such penance as his mentor prescribes before he can proceed.
note: A warning with a remedy rather than a forfeit: the breach does not void the undertaking, it interrupts it until a penance set by another man has been done. That is a different shape from the taboos which are said to destroy an instrument outright, and the two stand in the same corpus.
note: Two further restrictions belong to the same regime and are entered here rather than as separate nodes: the consecrated clothing, implements and utensils may be used by no one else until the dance is danced, and from the beginning of his last day in the sacred lodge the candidate must fast and take no drink until he has danced. Only a shaman can release him from any requirement of his conduct in the sacred lodge.
attested by: Field attestation
cautions about: Wiwanyang wacipi, the sun-gazing dance
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Cedar keeps the Winged God away
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zedernholz hält den Geflügelten Gott fern @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 70 and p. 110 and p. 133
definition: The rack set at the foot of the candidate's bed of sage is of cedar because the cedar is favoured by the Winged God, who will not visit one protected by it nor cause such a one to act foolishly. Cedar leaves and twigs are also sprinkled over the altar in the dance lodge, where they are said to ward against the contrary conduct of the Winged God and of the heyoka.
note: The claim is worth holding because it is the counter-move to the obligation on the neighbouring node: the same transmission that says a communication can bind a man for life also names a material that prevents it. A third means is named in the Hunka ceremony, where the waved wands are said to shield a man from seeing the person of the Winged God and so from being made heyoka. Three protections against one outcome, from three different rites, all in the same paper.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Chilan
type: Conceptualizing
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XXVII, pp. 46-47
alternative label: chilam
alternative label: chilanes @es
definition: The office of the speaker who gave out the oracles to those of the locality. The witness reports that the respect shown them was so great that they did not ordinarily leave their houses except carried on litters.
note: The same section gives the office of the priest beside it: to teach the sciences, to indicate calamities and the means of remedying them, to preach at the festivals and to celebrate the sacrifices. Indicating a calamity and naming its remedy are one office in this transmission, which is why the remedy for a foretold year below is not a separate institution.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

The chin pressed to the chest in the two seats the manual prefers
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das an die Brust gedrückte Kinn in den beiden bevorzugten Sitzhaltungen @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I.37 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I.46 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I.48 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: In the two seats the manual singles out as chief, the chin is set firmly against the chest and the gaze is fixed between the brows or at the tip of the nose.
note: This is the counterweight to any claim that the manual requires an erect spine throughout. The seats it recommends most warmly close the neck rather than extend it, and the same posture chapter has the tongue set against the roots of the upper teeth while the wind is drawn upward. Uprightness of the trunk is attested; uprightness carried through the neck and head is contradicted in the same work. See prima-materia#29.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The Chinvat bridge
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Činwad-Brücke @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), 4.7 and 5.1
alternative label: Chinvat
alternative label: Cinvat
alternative label: Cinwad puhl
definition: The bridge at which the accounting falls due. In the account of the journey under mang it is called very wide and strong, and its width for the traveller who has passed becomes nine javelin-lengths.
note: The measure is stated in a unit and is therefore comparable, which most of what the transmissions in this graph say about such passages is not. What the chapters read do not give is the counter-measure, the width for the one who fails; that stands in another book and was not opened here.
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

The clear light is placed at the sleep threshold
type: Situating
label: Das klare Licht liegt an der Schlafschwelle @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005), the yoga of the clear light of sleep
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Sleep threshold
situated node: The clear light of sleep
situation ground: The treatise places the luminosity at the moment of falling asleep and trains the practitioner to hold it rather than pass through it unconscious. The file's own note already separates this from a body whose motor system has shut down while the mind stays awake; both fall on this coordinate, and the difference between them belongs in the nodes, not in the axis.

Whether cold is a source or a resistance
type: Testing
label: Ob Kälte Quelle oder Widerstand ist @de
definition: An examination of whether exposure to cold supplies the practitioner with something, in the physical sense the word energy carries, or draws on him.
note: A second reading, that the claim reports an experience of being charged, is not established here and the correction matters. This node first cited an intervention study as showing that cold exposure raises circulating catecholamines. Read at the wording, that study attributes the rise to the breathing technique — cyclic hyperventilation with breath retention, producing intermittent respiratory alkalosis and hypoxia — and its participants practised breathing, not cold immersion, during the measurement. Cold was one component of a ten-day training and is not the variable the epinephrine measurements isolate. The claim's experiential reading therefore has no evidence in this file, and the study is retained only for what it does show.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, and everything below is written in the voice of a finding. It is not one. The notes record what the evidence appeared to show before any search for opposing work was made, and they are kept in that voice because rewriting them would destroy the reasoning that has to be checked. Read them as the expected result of an examination nobody has finished, not as its outcome. See prima-materia#386.
note: The claim has two readings and they come out in opposite directions, so the protocol keeps them apart as prima-materia#341 requires. Read physically, it is turned around: cold exposure raises energy expenditure rather than supplying it. The heat produced in the brown adipose tissue that the cold recruits comes from oxidising the body's own substrate, and the deposit is depleted by the work, not filled by it. Cold costs; it does not deliver.
note: The source transmission stands on the other side, and the issue that opened this said so before any evidence was consulted. The tibetan inner-heat literature sets cold as the resistance against which the heat is raised, never as what the heat is raised from. Where the draft and its transmission disagree, the measurements agree with the transmission. That is the reverse of the expected result and is the reason this node is worth having.
base rate: Energy expenditure and substrate use at thermoneutrality in the same participants.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not carried. No search was made for work disputing the thermogenesis account or failing to replicate it. The reversal recorded in the notes is therefore one side of a question nobody has asked here.
evidence from: A. M. Cypess and others, Identification and importance of brown adipose tissue in adult humans, New England Journal of Medicine 360 (2009), no. 15, pp. 1509-1517, doi:10.1056/NEJMoa0810780
evidence from: M. Kox and others, Voluntary activation of the sympathetic nervous system and attenuation of the innate immune response in humans, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111 (2014), no. 20, pp. 7379-7384, doi:10.1073/pnas.1322174111
evidence from: V. Ouellet and others, Brown adipose tissue oxidative metabolism contributes to energy expenditure during acute cold exposure in humans, Journal of Clinical Investigation 122 (2012), no. 2, pp. 545-552
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The deviation is read off the thermogenesis literature; the second reading off the intervention study cited below
falsified by: Practitioners exposed to cold are found to expend less energy, or to end the exposure with greater substrate reserves, than matched participants at thermoneutrality.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: Energy can be taken in from cold

The communication presupposes an interpreter
type: Presupposing
label: Die Mitteilung setzt einen Deuter voraus @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 68-69
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity: the source says that the seeker ought to consult a shaman even where the communication is apparently intelligible and easily understood, and that a candidate for the Sun dance must consult his mentor and be guided by him, but it names no consequence for the man who interprets his own. What it does name is one possible content of the interpretation, and that is entered in the definition because it is a stop rule.
note: The stop rule: the communication may prohibit the candidate from dancing the Sun dance, and if it does he is to proceed no further in the matter. A ceremony that can be called off by the very thing it is undertaken to obtain is unusual enough in this graph to be recorded where it stands.
attested by: Field attestation
dependent step: Wowihanble, a communication received
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Having a communication interpreted by a shaman
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The completion stage presupposes the generation stage
type: Presupposing
label: Die Vollendungsstufe setzt die Erzeugungsstufe voraus @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
note: The order is set by the arrangement of the treatise, which takes the generation-stage meditations before the completion-stage yogas. That the six yogas belong to the completion stage places tummo after the generation stage as well.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Completion stage
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Generation stage
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The practice is concealed from the questioner
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Praxis wird dem Fragenden verborgen @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulos I and VI, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The recorder states that the people of this land, like those of Peru, hide the matter with the greatest diligence; that they deny it stubbornly even when accused and convicted, until they die impenitent; and that neither the fear of God nor an oath nor anything else avails to make them confess.
note: The comparison with Peru is the recorder's and is not evidence of any connection between the two. It is entered because it shows he was generalising across two colonial situations, which is one of the ways a report acquires content its informants never supplied.
note: This is the most valuable sentence in what was read, and it cuts two ways. It records a gate: the transmission was held closed against an outsider who had the power to punish, which is a fact about the tradition. And it records the limit of the whole manual as a witness, in the words of the man who wrote it: what he has is what could not be hidden from him. Every other node in this file is to be read against it.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

Concentration presupposes virtue
type: Presupposing
label: Sammlung setzt Sittlichkeit voraus @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.1 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.7-I.8 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
note: The handbook is built as a commentary on a canonical verse in which the one established in virtue develops mind and understanding, and it glosses the order accordingly.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Concentration
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Virtue
within tradition: Theravāda

The confession turns aside the anger
type: Yielding
label: Die Beichte wendet den Zorn ab @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The confession made during the fast
within tradition: Andean transmission
yields capacity: Turning aside the anger of the huacas and the ancestors

Whether a level of consciousness can be read off a muscle test
type: Testing
label: Ob sich eine Bewusstseinsstufe am Muskeltest ablesen lässt @de
definition: An examination of the claim that the position of a mental or emotional state on a numbered scale can be established by testing the strength of a subject's muscle, as the scale's author reports having done over some quarter of a million times.
note: A second reason for caution about the direction of the finding. The source itself names conditions under which its procedure is said to fail: synthetic clothing on the subject, metal jewellery, the voice of the tester. A procedure whose stated interferences are all channels through which an expectation could travel is one whose null result would be expected on ordinary grounds, and whose positive result would need to exclude them. That observation belongs in the protocol and not in a verdict.
note: The counter-search is owed and has not been carried out. Work claiming reliability for manual muscle testing exists, some of it from within the field, and a rejection that has read only one side is by SPEC §13 a one-sided dispute and not a refutation. Until it is read, the state of this protocol stays where it is.
note: What the available evidence covers. Three controlled studies bear on the muscle test as a diagnostic instrument, all with blinding, and none of them supports it. A test-retest study on wasp-venom allergy with four examiners, seven patients and twenty bottles each reports an overall kappa of 0.03 with sensitivity around forty per cent and specificity around sixty; a dental double-blind study on materials testing reports the test unreliable; a double-blind randomised study on therapy localisation reports the same. The first states plainly that as a diagnostic tool the method is no more useful than guessing.
note: What the available evidence does not cover, and this is the point. Every one of those studies asks whether the muscle test can identify a substance or a bodily site. None asks whether it can place a mental state on a numbered scale. The evidence therefore strikes the presupposition, that the test yields answers better than chance, and not the claim itself. No blinded replication of the calibrations is known, and the claim is unexamined in the strict sense even though its foundation is not.
note: Why this claim and not another. Almost every claim in this graph is about an inner state for which no procedure exists, and pm:noProcedureDevised is accordingly the commonest state in the holding. This one names its own procedure, the procedure requires no instrument, and blinding it is cheap. Among the claims the graph carries it is the most nearly testable, and that is the reason it was opened.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not carried, and the debt is stated in the notes above. Work claiming reliability for manual muscle testing exists and has not been read; until it is, the negative reading rests on one side.
evidence from: H.-J. Staehle, M. J. Koch and T. Pioch, Double-blind Study on Materials Testing with Applied Kinesiology, Journal of Dental Research 84 (2005), no. 11, doi:10.1177/154405910508401119
evidence from: R. Lüdtke, B. Kunz, N. Seeber and J. Ring, Test-retest-reliability and validity of the Kinesiology muscle test, Complementary Therapies in Medicine 9 (2001), pp. 141-145
evidence from: S. A. Schwartz and others, A Double-Blind, Randomized Study to Assess the Validity of Applied Kinesiology as a Diagnostic Tool and as a Nonlocal Proximity Effect, Explore 10 (2014), no. 2
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The procedure is the one the source prescribes; the falsifying condition is the ordinary requirement of inter-rater and test-retest agreement, and nobody has yet applied it to the calibrations themselves
falsified by: Blinded testers, given the same states without knowing which, do not agree on their placement above chance; or the same tester, blinded to his earlier results, does not reproduce his own placements.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The ranking of emotions by measured level

Consulting the drum presupposes wood that turns with the sun
type: Presupposing
label: Die Befragung setzt sonnenläufiges Holz voraus @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, Of the magicall Ceremonies of the Laplanders, pp. 47-48
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity: the source says the drum must be of such wood, and does not say what follows from using a drum that is not. The strength is the strength the text gives, not the strength the requirement sounds like.
note: This is the condition the graph nearly lost. It was read at the wording in the same run as the rest of this file but reached only a local working copy, not the branch, and was recovered only because an uncommitted file was noticed. Recorded as a process finding in prima-materia#351.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Consulting the drum
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Wood that turns with the sun's course
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The consultation presupposes the taboos
type: Presupposing
label: Die Befragung setzt die Tabus voraus @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 132
note: Entered at stated necessity: the source does not merely prescribe the abstinence but says what its want does to the instrument. An unclean man may still address the oracle from a distance, which is a graded rather than an absolute exclusion and is recorded here rather than smoothed away.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Contact of an unclean person with the oracle is certain to destroy its potency, and even the close proximity of an unclean person may have that result.
dependent step: Consulting the poison oracle
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The taboos kept before touching the oracle poison
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The contest of two practitioners
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Wettstreit zweier Praktiker @de
source: Knud Leem, An Account of the Laplanders of Finmark, in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), chap. XXI, p. 477
definition: When two noaidi wished to know which of them excelled the other in the art, they painted on a drum two reindeer striking each other with their horns, and he whose reindeer had the victory was the better.
note: A procedure with a stated criterion, applied by practitioners to practitioners, with an outcome that could fall either way and that neither controls. Nothing else in this file, and very little in this graph, has that shape.
note: What the source does not say is how the victory of a painted reindeer is determined — whether by the ring, by the movement of the drum, or otherwise. Without that the procedure cannot be reconstructed, only recorded, and no protocol node is written on it.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The office refused is paid for in the body
type: Presupposing
label: Das verweigerte Amt wird am Leib bezahlt @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 128, p. 349
note: Entered at stated necessity, and the consequence is quoted rather than paraphrased because it is the sharpest one in the file. The case is a single one, among the Khingan Tungus: a girl of fifteen entered by a clan spirit, taught by an old shaman to distinguish the questions asked by the assistants, a shaman at the time of the report for some twenty-five years.
note: One case is a case and not a rate. What makes it worth a node is that the transmission states a specific bodily outcome for the refusal, which is the shape a condition of failure has, and not a general misfortune.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: If she had not become a shaman, her arms or legs or neck, or back would have been crooked for life.
dependent step: The condition of the candidate
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Mastering of spirits
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Daena
type: Conceptualizing
label: Daēnā @de
source: Hadhoxt Nask, fragment 2.7-11, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883)
alternative label: daena
alternative label: den
definition: What meets the soul at the end of the third night after death, in the shape of a woman. The oldest witness read here fixes three things a later reader can hold the transmission to: the moment, the end of the third night, after a wind that comes sweet-scented from the south; the appearance, of the size of a maid in her fifteenth year, fair, bright, white-armed, strong, tall-formed, high-standing, thick-breasted, beautiful of body, noble, of a glorious seed; and the answer she gives when asked who she is, that she is the soul's own conscience.
note: The account of the journey under mang describes the same encounter and gives the figure no age at all. The fifteenth year stands in the older Avestan fragment and not in the Pahlavi book, and the two are kept apart here rather than merged, because a reader who takes the age from one and the setting from the other is reading a text no witness gives.
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

The counterpart met by the soul of the wicked
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Gegenstück, das die Seele des Bösen trifft @de
source: Hadhoxt Nask, fragments 2.15 and 3.25-33, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 23 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1883)
definition: The same structure with every term reversed: at the end of the third night a foul-scented wind from the north, and four steps that lead to the hell of evil thought, of evil word, of evil deed, and to endless darkness, against the four that lead to the paradise of good thought, good word, good deed, and endless lights.
note: Entered because the symmetry is the point. A transmission that gives both outcomes in the same form, with the same number of steps and the same sequence, is making a claim with two branches rather than a promise; the passages read state the second as fully as the first.
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

The dance presupposes an offering and a wound that bleeds
type: Presupposing
label: Der Tanz setzt eine Gabe und eine blutende Wunde voraus @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 61 and p. 93
note: Entered at stated necessity: the corpus does not merely order the two before the dance but says what their absence costs. The wound may be as small as the skin of a louse in the first form and as large as the dancer wills.
attested by: Field attestation
consequence of skipping: Before beginning to dance the candidate must make an acceptable offering to the Sun and have a wound that will cause his blood to flow while he dances; when the blood flows as a token it is the surest guarantee of sincerity, and without such a guarantee the people or the Sun may doubt the professed purposes of the dancer.
dependent step: Wiwanyang wacipi, the sun-gazing dance
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The offering to the Sun and the wound that bleeds
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The descent presupposes the depth that gathers the breath
type: Presupposing
label: Der Abstieg setzt die Tiefe voraus, die den Atem sammelt @de
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
note: Recorded at stated necessity because a consequence is quotable, which is unusual: most sequences in this collection state an order and leave the consequence unsaid. The strength rests on the closing line, not on the chain of conditionals, which on its own would carry only a prescribed order.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The inscription closes by setting the two outcomes against each other: to go with the sequence is to live, to go against it is to die. The consequence is stated for the order as a whole, and every stage is joined to the one before it by the same conditional form.
dependent step: Descent as a stage of the sequence
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Depth as the first stage
within tradition: Daoist tradition

The direct knowledges presuppose concentration
type: Presupposing
label: Die höheren Kenntnisse setzen die Sammlung voraus @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.11 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The handbook states that the six kinds of direct knowledge are arrived at with the support of perfected concentration and by nothing besides that.
dependent step: Knowledge encompassing another mind
dependent step: Divine eye
dependent step: Divine ear
dependent step: The kinds of supernormal power
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Concentration
within tradition: Theravāda

Direction is carried by a graded course, not by the phase of breathing
type: Converging
label: Die Richtung trägt eine gestufte Bahn, nicht die Atemphase @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.47 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
definition: Two traditions assign direction inside the body to something other than inhaling and exhaling. One assigns it to two winds driven against each other in a single operation; the other to a place in a graded sequence, with descent in the middle of it and ascent at its end. Neither pairs a direction with a phase of the breath.
note: A second correspondence sits alongside this one and is deliberately not asserted as a separate node yet: both traditions sanction the wrong handling of the breath with death, the one saying that the breath kills the practitioner who forces it, the other that going against the sequence is to die. Two death sanctions are a thinner finding than they look, since a warning of death is the commonest form a strong prohibition takes anywhere, and the two do not agree on what the fault is: one names haste and force, the other names reversal of order. Recorded here so that the next reader can weigh it rather than rediscover it.
note: The independence is asymmetric and the node says so rather than claiming more than it has. The jade inscription is dated to the fourth or third century before the common era on the reading this collection follows, which is earlier than any documented transmission of Indian breath technique into China; for that witness there is no route of contact to be had. The manual is fifteenth-century and stands downstream of centuries of Buddhist traffic in both directions, so its side of the correspondence cannot be declared contact-free with the same confidence. What the two share is therefore better read as one early independent witness and one late witness of uncertain independence, which is weaker than a convergence of two early ones and stronger than a citation chain.
converging concept: The two winds are driven in opposite directions at once
converging concept: Descent as a stage of the sequence
ground of independence: One side carries the claim and the other has been withdrawn from it. The jade inscription is dated to the fourth or third century before the common era, earlier than any documented transmission of Indian breath technique into China, and for that witness there is no route of contact to be had. The manual is fifteenth-century and stands downstream of centuries of Buddhist traffic in both directions; it cannot be declared contact-free, and it was listed here as an independent attestation until this ground was required, which is what the requirement is for. Neither witness is an ethnographic gathering, so no recorder's feedback is at issue.
independent attestation: Daoist tradition

Display of powers refused
type: Cautioning
label: Zurschaustellung der Kräfte verweigert @de
source: Dīgha Nikāya 11 (Kevaṭṭa Sutta)
source: Vinaya, Cūḷavagga V.8
definition: The discourse distinguishes three marvels, of psychic power, of mind-reading and of instruction, and holds only instruction to be reliable; the display of power for the sake of persuasion is refused as something to be ashamed of.
note: The Vinaya rule against displaying superhuman states to laypeople stands alongside it.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Knowledge encompassing another mind
cautions about: Divine eye
cautions about: Divine ear
cautions about: Mind-made body
within tradition: Theravāda

Perception of what is out of range, from a state entered at will
type: Generalizing
label: Wahrnehmung des Unerreichbaren aus einem willentlich betretenen Zustand @de
note: No pm:Testing points at this node, and that is its function rather than a defect. SPEC §16 makes the untested generalizations the queue for the examining layer; this one heads it, because it rests on more attested claims and more widely separated transmissions than anything else the holding can currently form.
note: Seven attested claims from five transmissions: the Sámi journey made while the body lies still, two applications of saṃyama in the Yogasūtra, two of the graded degrees of the Midewiwin, the Iglulik spirit calling, and the Lakota sending of the sacred stones. Each names its own work and passage; this node names none, because none of them says what it says.
note: The derivation is contestable at two points and both are left visible. First, whether the four transmissions describe one kind of practice at all: the Sámi journey, saṃyama, the Midewiwin degrees and the Iglulik calling agree in that the state is entered deliberately and differ in almost everything else. Second, whether reporting on a distant place and reading another mind are one effect or two — the sources treat them as neighbouring and this node treats them as one, which is a decision and not a finding.
note: The seventh claim was added after the sixth and its addition is the only one that changed the shape of the derivation, so it is recorded rather than absorbed. The Lakota case is the first in this set that comes with narrated cases attached: a stone sent to find a rifle dropped into a river at a named place, and a stone sent to bring a buffalo in front of a fur trader who had staked ten articles against it. Cases do not make evidence — nobody devised the procedure and nobody recorded an outcome that could have been checked by a third party — but they are what a protocol would have to address, and no other claim under this node has any. Against that stands the same objection as for the Midewiwin material, since the recording is of nineteen eleven to nineteen fourteen; and beside it the fact that the same transmission names the cause to which a failure of the instrument is attributed, so that its own successes cannot be counted as a run.
note: Why the wording is as heavy as it is. The traditions say that the capacity is reached; a statement that repeated that could not fail at anything. What can fail is a comparison, so the statement is written as one, with the comparison group named — people working from the same prior information without the state. Whoever thinks the sentence overreaches should attack that clause, because it is the clause that carries the whole claim.
attested by: Compiler inference
generalized from: The fourth degree yields the reading of thoughts
generalized from: The journey yields the knowledge of the distant place
generalized from: Saṃyama yields the divine ear
generalized from: Saṃyama on the presented idea yields knowledge of another mind
generalized from: The second degree yields hearing at a distance
generalized from: Spirit calling is said to recover what has been lost
generalized from: Sending the stones yields knowledge of what is out of range
generalized statement: Where a practitioner enters a stated inner state at will and then reports on a person, place or object outside the range of ordinary perception, the reports agree with independently established facts more often than reports produced, from the same prior information, by people who have not entered such a state.

Telling a good spirit from a bad one
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Unterscheidung guter und schlechter Geister @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXIV, sections 263-264
alternative label: distinction des bons et des mauvais Esprits @fr
definition: The capacity the whole system rests on, since every claim in it arrives through a communication that may be false. The criterion given is not evidential but linguistic and moral: spirits are judged as men are judged, by their language, and goodness and benevolence are held to be the essential attributes of purified spirits.
within tradition: Spiritism

Distinctiveness as the striving of the creature against dissolution
type: Originating
label: Die Unterschiedenheit als Streben des Geschöpfs gegen die Auflösung @de
date: 1916
source: C. G. Jung, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos, Sermo I (English translation of the 1916 private printing, Gnostic Society Library electronic edition)
definition: The claim that a creature which ceases to distinguish falls into the undifferentiated fullness, ceases to be a creature and is given over to dissolution in nothingness, so that its natural striving runs towards distinctiveness against a primeval and perilous sameness; and that the striving is nevertheless not after difference but after the creature's own being.
note: Placed on the telic axis as pm:individuatingTelos. The placement is a reading and rests on the two refusals the passage makes in the same breath: dissolution is called the death of the creature, and the striving is said not to be after difference. Stated here rather than left implicit so that it can be contradicted.
note: Recorded because it is the only position located so far that names both ends of the axis as a loss and then states a third movement. Dissolution into the fullness is called the death of the creature outright, which rules out the unitive end; and the striving is expressly not after difference as it is thought, which rules out the separative one. What remains is a striving after one's own being, and the source gives it the name principium individuationis.
note: The attribution is why this is an origination and not a witness of gnostic transmission. The author printed the text under the name of a second-century teacher of Alexandria who did not write it, and it continues to be read and cited as gnostic teaching. pm:circulatesAs records that, and the node makes no judgement about the author's own reading of the ancient material.
note: The god named above the god of the pairs of opposites belongs to the same argument and not to a separate doctrine: the qualities of the fullness are given as pairs, and what is set above them unites the full and the empty. A reading that takes this for a third party in a pantheon takes the figure for the argument.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: A gnostic text of the second century, printed under the name of Basilides of Alexandria and read as ancient teaching rather than as a work written in 1916.
originated by: C. G. Jung
telic orientation: Individuating telos

The divine dream is not ordinary sleep
type: Cautioning
label: Der göttliche Traum ist nicht der gewöhnliche Schlaf @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
definition: The warning that the mass of dreams occurring in full sleep carries no divination, and that only the state at the edge of sleep is treated as a sign of divine presence.
note: Load-bearing against any claim that sleep as such is an access. The source that comes closest in the whole collection to naming the threshold state is also the one that refuses the wider claim.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The god-sent dream
within tradition: Neoplatonic theurgy

Divining presupposes the pupilage
type: Presupposing
label: Das Befragen setzt die Lehrzeit voraus @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the training of a candidate for the office of Babalawo
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity, and the reason is a property of the passage rather than of the tradition. The source sets the pupilage, its minimum length and the division of its course, and says nothing about what befalls a man who divines without it. A stated consequence would raise this to a necessity; none stands in what was read.
attested by: Mediated attestation
dependent step: Casting the sixteen palm nuts
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The pupilage of a candidate for the office of babalawo
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

The divine eye is exercised in withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Das göttliche Auge wird in abgezogener Vertiefung geübt @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.26
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Divine eye
situation ground: The sūtra reads bhuvanajñānaṃ sūrye saṃyamāt: knowledge of the worlds from saṃyama on the sun. The operator is named in the sūtra itself, and its state is fixed at III.1-4.

The divine ear is exercised in withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Das göttliche Ohr wird in abgezogener Vertiefung geübt @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.41
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Divine ear
situation ground: The sūtra has the divine ear follow from saṃyama on the relation between the organ of hearing and the ether. The operator is named in the sūtra itself, and its state is fixed at III.1-4.

Is the knowledge of the companion found in the transmission?
type: Testing
label: Steht die Kenntnis des Begleiters in der Überlieferung? @de
definition: A protocol addressing the claim that Dogon transmission carries knowledge of an invisible companion of Sirius. It asks whether the star names and the doctrine can be found among Dogon outside the circle of the original informants, and whether any account of them leads anywhere but back to the recording work.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, set when the counter-search requirement was introduced, because this node does not record whether a search for opposing work was made. Its notes are older than the requirement and are kept unchanged; whoever documents the search restores the case-bearing state. See prima-materia#386.
note: The counter-testimony has not been read at the wording in this run. A reply appeared in the same journal in the following volume, and a further exchange in the two years after; the deviation recorded here therefore rests on one side of a controversy that has two. See prima-materia#252. Under SPEC §13 this state is a one-sided dispute waiting for its second side, not a refutation, and the state below is set on the cases and not on the conclusion.
note: The one trace that remains is itself the finding. Informants in that village say that in former times people knew of a star appearing in the year of the ceremony, and further enquiry leads back to the recorder. What looks like independent survival is feedback from the published account into the field it describes, and any later confirmation must be tested against that path before it counts.
note: The re-study reports the ethnographic facts as straightforward. Dogon know Sirius as a star and call it the hunter's star; knowledge of the stars matters neither in daily life nor in ritual, the sun and the phases of the moon being what reckoning runs on. No Dogon outside the circle of the original informants had heard the star names the account turns on, and no one, not even inside that circle, had heard or understood that Sirius was double. The scheduling of the ceremony is done in several ways in the village the account draws on, none of them astronomical.
note: The re-study's explanation of how the account arose is not adopted here as a finding, only recorded: that an informant spoke of stars of different generations, meaning two adjacent visible stars held as father and son to Sirius as grandfather, and that the recorder, who had read astronomy in Paris, made a double and triple system of it. That is a reconstruction of an intention and cannot be examined; the absence of the doctrine in the field can.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not documented. Predates the requirement; see the note at pmc:TummoHeatExamination.
evidence from: Walter E. A. van Beek, Dogon Restudied: A Field Evaluation of the Work of Marcel Griaule, Current Anthropology 32/2 (1991), pp. 149-150 with its footnote 10, and pp. 156-157
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Walter E. A. van Beek, field re-study among the Dogon of Sanga and Yugo Doguru, reported 1991
falsified by: A report of the star names or of the doctrine of an invisible companion from Dogon speakers outside the original circle of informants, where the chain of the report can be shown not to run back through the published account; or a fixation of the doctrine in any text or record datable before nineteen thirty-one. Either would return the claim to contested and undo the deviation recorded here.
protocol updated: 2026-09-01
tests: The Dogon knew the companion of Sirius

Nothing is done until there is someone to do it
type: Originating
label: Es wird nichts getan, solange niemand da ist, der tut @de
date: 1949
source: P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London 1950), in the first talks on the human machine and in the chapter on the absence of unity
definition: The claim that a person is a machine governed by outward influences, that everything happens and nobody does anything, and that in order to do it is first necessary to be; together with the account of a person as lacking unity and consisting of a multiplicity of I's rather than one.
note: It bears directly on the disagreement recorded in convergences/left-hand-path-divergence.ttl. Both sides there dispute what becomes of the self at the end; this source holds that at the beginning there is no single self to be kept or surrendered, and that one has to be made first. That is not a third answer to their question but a claim that the question has a precondition neither states.
note: The interest for this graph is the order of precedence. The claim is not that people do the wrong thing but that the doer is not yet assembled, which puts every question of method downstream of a question about who is applying it. A path chosen by a multiplicity is chosen by whichever part happens to be present.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: A finding of an older school, transmitted rather than argued.
originated by: G. I. Gurdjieff, in the record of P. D. Ouspensky

Dream divination presupposes purity of the vehicle
type: Presupposing
label: Traumdivination setzt die Reinheit des Fahrzeugs voraus @de
source: Synesius of Cyrene, De insomniis
note: The condition is on the state of the seer, not on a technique of sleeping. Recorded as order rather than necessity because the treatise makes the clarity of the dream depend on the vehicle without stating at that place what befalls one who proceeds with an unpurified one. Chapter divisions vary between editions; the work and its subject are given so that the passage can be found in whichever edition is at hand.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Dream divination
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The pneumatic vehicle of the soul
within tradition: Neoplatonic theurgy

Dream yoga is performed within the dream
type: Situating
label: Traumyoga wird im Traum ausgeführt @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005), the yoga of the dream state
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Dreaming within
situated node: Dream yoga
situation ground: The exercises are set out as apprehending, multiplying and transforming what appears within the dream, which places the performance inside the state and not at its edge. That the practitioner knows he dreams is what the training is for and is not a separate coordinate.

Dream yoga presupposes holding the clear light of sleep
type: Presupposing
label: Traumyoga setzt das Halten des klaren Lichts voraus @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
note: The treatise takes the recognition of the clear light before the training in the dream. It does not state at that place what befalls one who begins elsewhere, which is why the strength is order and not necessity.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Dream yoga
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The clear light of sleep
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The drum must be inherited
type: Presupposing
label: Die Trommel muss ererbt sein @de
source: Knud Leem, An Account of the Laplanders of Finmark, in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), chap. XXI, p. 474
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity: the source says the drums were not thought sufficiently fit for their uses unless got by inheritance, and does not say what follows from using one that was not. The rule sits oddly beside the same recorder's report of a practitioner explaining how his own drum was made, and the oddity is left standing rather than resolved.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Consulting the drum
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The rule of the sun's course
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The time he lies still follows the distance, and stops at a day
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Dauer des Liegens folgt der Entfernung und endet bei einem Tag @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, p. 57
definition: How long he lies is stated to depend on how near or far the place is of which he makes enquiry — an hour or two for a near one — and to have an upper bound: the time never exceeds twenty-four hours, let the place be at never so great a distance.
note: A quantity that varies with a measurable quantity, and a ceiling that does not. Both halves are unusual: the first makes the claim comparable across cases, and the second makes it refutable by a single case that runs longer. Nothing else in this file states a number.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The end of the twelve
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Ende der Zwölf @de
source: Vijñānabhairava 28 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
source: Vijñānabhairava 50 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
source: Vijñānabhairava 51 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
definition: A limit named as the end of twelve, at which the mind or the risen power comes to rest. The verses give the number and leave the unit unstated.
note: The count itself fluctuates. What is verse 50 in the numbering used here appears as 51 in other editions, and the following verse shifts with it. A reader working from a different edition should expect the two verses cited here to sit one number further on.
note: Two things this node deliberately does not say. It does not fix the unit: the base text says end-of-twelve, and the reading that makes this twelve finger-breadths from the tip of the nose belongs to the commentarial layer, not to the verse. And it does not fix the place: the exegesis of Lakṣmaṇjoo counts several such limits in the body, at the crown, the brows, the throat, the base of the heart and the navel, and the verse that follows says outright that it may be reached in any manner and in any place. Nothing here yields a fixed radius. See prima-materia#38.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

The eighth chief taught men the characteristics of the star
type: Attributing
label: Der achte Häuptling lehrte die Menschen die Merkmale des Sterns @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 282-284
definition: The account that the eighth supreme chief, having discovered the star, escaped the sacrifice his seven predecessors had undergone by feigning death, returned claiming to have been inside the star and to know its secrets, and then taught men its characteristics and reordered the reckoning of time.
note: An ascription inside a myth of origin, and the article gives it as such: it is offered expressly as an indication of the changes and combinations of reckoning that appear in the course of what the recorders put in quotation marks as the history of the Blacks.
ascribed capacity: Knowledge of the characteristics of the seed-star
ascribed to: the eighth supreme chief, in the Dogon account of the origin of the sixty-year reckoning
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Eji Ogbe as the first of the signs
type: Conceptualizing
label: Eji Ogbe als erstes der Zeichen @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the Odu and their number
definition: The sign held to be the principal one, called the leader, the commander and the king. Its appearance on the divining bowl is taken to mean that the message delivered is of very great weight.
note: A stated order of rank among the signs, and therefore a place where a later reader can check whether a modern list has kept the tradition's own order or imposed another.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

The fasting of the heart is placed at withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Das Fasten des Herzens liegt bei abgezogener Vertiefung @de
source: Zhuangzi 4, in James Legge (trans.), The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Tâoism, Part I, Sacred Books of the East vol. XXXIX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), Book IV, par. 2, pp. 208-210
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Fasting of the heart
situation ground: The three steps are a graded withdrawal from the sensory channel and are stated as such: not to wait for the hearing of the ears, then not even for the hearing of the mind. The practitioner is awake throughout; what is withdrawn is the reliance on what the ears report. That is the criterion this coordinate names.

Against putting the spirits to the test
type: Cautioning
label: Gegen die Prüfung der Geister @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXVI, section 288, item 3
definition: The instruction that follows from it. Questions asked from a motive of curiosity or of test are not to be put; the spirits addressed do not answer them and go away, and the transmission adds that such questions please the imperfect spirits, who are amused by them.
note: The rule is self-sealing in a way the graph should record plainly rather than argue about. A superior spirit that withdraws when tested and an absent spirit produce the same observation; and a spirit that does answer a test question is by that answer classed as imperfect. Both outcomes are accounted for in advance, so the test yields no information either way.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Evocation
within tradition: Spiritism

The names guard against men
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Namen schützen vor Menschen @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 4, p. LVII
definition: The claim of the fourth section of the same roll: that the names shall enable a man to guard himself against evil men, liars, calumniators, men of wrath, the hand of him that would attack him, and the feet of those who would rush upon him by means of magical powers; and, in the petition that follows, that those who would oppose him in the time of judgment shall not do so.
note: Set beside the outcome of the sixth section because the two are of different kinds. Guarding oneself against liars has no moment at which it can be seen not to have happened; a spear turned back has one.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

Barya
type: Naming
label: Barja @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayers I, II, III, VI, VII, VIII, pp. 216-220
alternative label: Borya
definition: The being named more often than any other in the Meux roll, against whose evil eye the first, second, third, sixth, seventh and eighth prayers ask deliverance, and against whom the diseases enumerated in them are directed.
note: The edition read prints Barya and Borya for what is plainly one name and does not say which spelling stands in the parchment. Held as one naming with the second form as an alternate label rather than split into two, because nothing in the volume supports two bearers.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Barya
name role: the bringer of the evil eye against which the prayers are said
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The oath that grounds the written protection
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Eid, auf dem der geschriebene Schutz ruht @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 219
definition: The undertaking sworn by the pierced child-killer, by the seven ranks of the archangels, that she will not contend against the Name, will never journey along the path where it is to be met with, or enter any church wherein it is commemorated, or any house or place whatsoever, and that this prayer shall be placed upon children, young men or the full grown, unto the end of the world.
note: The reason for a node of its own is that the roll states its own mechanism, which is uncommon. The protection is not a power the wearer acquires and not a favour asked each time; it is the enforcement of a promise extracted once from the adversary, and the written object is what puts the wearer inside the scope of that promise. A protocol that wanted to unsettle the claim would have to unsettle the oath, and there is no proceeding for that.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The roll names the person it was written for
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Rolle nennt die Person, für die sie geschrieben wurde @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayers I-IX, pp. 216-220; the supplementary rolls, pp. LV-LXIV
definition: The condition, visible in every prayer of the roll and never stated as a rule in it, that the protection is asked for a named person: each of the nine prayers of the Meux roll closes by naming the woman Aheta Mikael, and the three supplementary rolls each name their own owner in the same place.
note: Read off the wording and not from a statement about it. The volume nowhere says that a roll must carry its owner's name; it prints four rolls, and all four do it in every section. What follows for any protocol is that a failure is always available for explanation as a wrong or missing name, and that this escape is built into the object rather than argued for.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The preserving presupposes the wearing through the term
type: Presupposing
label: Die Bewahrung setzt das Tragen über die Frist voraus @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 218
note: Prescribed order and not stated necessity. The prayer says the writing down and the wearing must be done and gives the term, and it names no consequence of breaking off, so nothing here carries a citable consequence of skipping.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The preserving of the child at the breast
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Worn until the years of childbearing are ended
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

Susenyos
type: Naming
label: Susenjos @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 219
alternative label: Socinius
definition: The being named in the seventh prayer as the man whose child was killed, who mounted his horse Cherubim, took a spear in his right hand, was granted power from a voice out of heaven, and slew the killer.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Susenyus
name role: the saint on horseback whose prayer is written down and worn
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

Werzelya
type: Naming
label: Werzelja @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 219
alternative label: Ursula
definition: The being named in the seventh prayer of the Meux roll as the one who came in the matter of the first child and killed him, and who after being pierced swears never again to approach where the Name is met with.
note: The edition read renders the name as Ursula in the introduction and prints Werzewelya in the translation. The identifier keeps the transliterated form of the roll and not the editor's substitution, which is a Latin name for a being the roll does not call by one.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Werzewelya
name role: the killer of the child at the breast, bound by her own oath
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The worn prayer preserves the suckling child
type: Yielding
label: Das getragene Gebet bewahrt den Säugling @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 218
note: The list of harms is long and the wording is a petition rather than a guarantee: it says preserve and protect, and it names the woman it is for. What makes the claim examinable at all is not the list but the term beside it, and what makes it hard is that infant death from any of the named causes can be assigned to a lapse in the wearing.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The prayer of Susenyos written down and worn
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission
yields capacity: The preserving of the child at the breast

The knotting presupposes the window of weekday and moon
type: Presupposing
label: Das Knüpfen setzt das Fenster aus Wochentag und Mond voraus @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 29
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 18
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The ceasing of the fits
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The window of weekday and moon
within tradition: European folk magic

The knotting presupposes that it is done unbeschrauen
type: Presupposing
label: Das Knüpfen setzt voraus, dass es unbeschrauen geschieht @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 29
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 18
note: Prescribed order and not stated necessity, because the passage gives the condition as part of the instruction and says nothing about what follows if it is broken. The book has consequences elsewhere and none here, and the difference is kept rather than filled in.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The ceasing of the fits
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Unbeschrauen
within tradition: European folk magic

The knotting drives out the fits
type: Yielding
label: Das Knüpfen vertreibt die Gichter @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 29
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 18
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The knotting of three twigs against the fits
within tradition: European folk magic
yields capacity: The ceasing of the fits

Do not drive the wheel too hard
type: Cautioning
label: Treib das Rad nicht gar zu stark um @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 84
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 53
definition: The warning against turning the wheel too hard, printed inside the spoken charm and addressed to the operator rather than to the thief the surrounding words address.
note: The place of the sentence is the finding. A caution set inside the words to be spoken cannot be read aloud without being obeyed or noticed, and an operator working from the page meets it at the moment it applies. What it does not say is what turning too hard would do.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The three chips in the wheel hub
within tradition: European folk magic

Which Friday of the moon the letter is hung on
type: Disputing
label: An welchem Freitag des Mondes der Brief angehängt wird @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 53
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 32
note: Kept as a dispute and not resolved. Resolving it would require the intervening American printings, which were not opened; that the translation is called literal on its own title page is a reason to record the divergence, not to prefer either side.
note: The eighteen twenty printing sets the hanging on at the last Friday in the old light, that is at the end of the waning moon. The eighteen fifty translation sets it at the first Friday in the decreasing moon, which is the other end of the same quarter. The two cannot both be followed, and the difference falls on the only part of the prescription that could be missed.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The sewn letter against rheumatism
within tradition: European folk magic

On whom the sixty applications were made
type: Disputing
label: An wem die sechzig Anwendungen geschahen @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 46
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 28
note: The eighteen twenty printing says the author drove away his own severest toothaches more than sixty times. The eighteen fifty translation says he has cured the severest toothache more than sixty times and names no patient, which reads as a series over other people. The number is the same and the population it runs over is not, and a count whose population is unsettled cannot be compared with anything.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The vitriol drives out the toothache
within tradition: European folk magic

Loose the bush again once the goods are back
type: Cautioning
label: Den Busch wieder losmachen, sobald das Gut zurück ist @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 90
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 57
source: Romanus-Büchlein (Glatz: Franz Pompejus, 1788), Nr. 65, in the edition of Joseph H. Peterson, 2006
definition: The warning to watch for the return of the stolen goods and, when they are back, to carry the stone to the place it lay and to loose the bush again.
note: A caution about what the operator owes after the effect has occurred, not about the risk of performing it. Both printings and the older booklet carry it in the same order and with the same clause; no consequence of leaving the bush bent is named in any of them.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The bent juniper bush
within tradition: European folk magic

The operation places the agency with the spirit
type: Situating
label: Die Operation verortet die Handlungsträgerschaft beim Geist @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: Evocation
situation ground: The medium supplies the hand or the voice and the content is the spirit's. The transmission makes the point itself at the place where it matters: the spirits decide whether to answer, they withdraw from a question they dislike, and they give proof only when it suits them. What the sitter controls is the form of the question, not the reply.

Discretion against excess
type: Cautioning
label: Unterscheidung gegen das Übermaß @de
source: John Cassian, Collationes II (De discretione)
definition: The teaching that discretion is the mother of the virtues, directed against the practitioner who is undone not by laxity but by an excess undertaken in good faith.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Discernment of origins
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

The state presupposes the drum
type: Presupposing
label: Der Zustand setzt die Trommel voraus @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 D, p. 272
note: Entered at stated necessity: the source names the drum's function and the consequence of its absence in one clause. It is the rare case in which an instrument is given a mechanism rather than a meaning, and the mechanism is what a later examination would have to address.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The drum is needed for the shamans' self-excitation, without which they cannot bring themselves into the state of extasy.
dependent step: The state has two limits, and both can be missed
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The drum as the instrument of self-excitation
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The exteriorisation correspondence
type: Converging
label: Die Entsprechung der Exteriorisation @de
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta, DN i.77 (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
source: Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
definition: The observation that a body or seat of awareness distinct from the physical one is claimed in the Pāli handbooks, in the Yogasūtra, and in Greek reports of men whose souls left them.
note: The Indian pair share a sphere and a technical vocabulary and are not independent of each other. The Greek reports are of a different kind entirely: they are second-hand ascriptions to figures long dead, made by historians rather than by practitioners, and a route of contact with the Indian material has been proposed but not shown.
attested by: Compiler inference
converging concept: Mind-made body
converging concept: Entering another body
converging concept: Journey of the soul apart from the body
ground of independence: The Greek witness is fixed in the fifth century before the common era, before any documented route by which Indian technique could have reached the Greek world; a Scythian route has been proposed in the scholarship and not shown. The ground carries the independence and not the strength: the Greek report is a third-party ascription to figures long dead, made by a historian and not by a practitioner, which is a weakness of the testimony and not of its separateness from the Indian material.
independent attestation: Graeco-Roman testimony
transmission path: Theravāda and Pātañjala Yoga share the Indian sphere and a common technical vocabulary. A Scythian or shamanic route to the Greek reports has been proposed in the scholarship but is not documented.

Ezeqeel discloses the knowledge of the clouds
type: Attributing
label: Ezeqeel offenbart die Wolkenkunde @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Knowledge of the clouds
ascribed to: Ezeqeel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The oracle is said to have come from the Yoruba
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Orakel soll von den Yoruba stammen @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 97
source: Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (2nd ed., London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864), vol. II, p. 143
definition: Two statements from two witnesses who did not work from one another. The first says that among the eastern Ewe tribes divination is always practised after the manner of Ife, the Yoruba god of divination, and elsewhere that those tribes have their notion of the passage of souls from their Yoruba-speaking neighbours. The second identifies the Fon practitioner of the oracle with the babalawo of the Egba, and reports that the figure names are the same.
note: This is the node that carries the contact route of the file. It has a consequence for counting and not only for history: the graph already holds the Ifá casting in traditions/ifa.ttl, and an agreement between the two is the same statement twice, not two witnesses. Whether the chain runs further back, to the sand divination of the Arabic-speaking world, is asserted by one of the witnesses in a passage that lies in a volume this run could not reach, and is held as an issue.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

Protocol: the announced outcome against the event
type: Testing
label: Protokoll: der angesagte Ausgang gegen das Ereignis @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), pp. 379-380
definition: A protocol against the claim that the casting of the nuts makes known the outcome of the business asked about.
note: One case, and it is entered as one case and not as a rate. The king's complaint of 1871 names a prediction of an easy victory and a defeat, which is a deviation; what it does not supply is how many consultations he had, how many were borne out, or what the base rate of victory was for the campaigns of that reign. A single failure reported by an aggrieved client is evidence that the claim can fail and no evidence at all about how often.
note: The counter-search was carried inside the works opened and is recorded below. It found no case of a consultation whose outcome was reported as borne out; what it found instead is the remedy at pmp:VoSisa, which absorbs a bad prediction, and the observation that the oracle is the most lucrative branch of the priesthood. Both belong to the protocol rather than against it: the first says why cases are hard to count, the second says who has an interest in there being no count.
case count: 1
counter-search: Counter-search found nothing
counter-search note: Searched in the three works opened in this run for a reported consultation whose prediction was borne out, and for any reply to the king's complaint of 1871: Skertchly 1874 records the complaint and no vindicating case; Burton 1864, vol. II, records the remedy for an evil prediction and the saying that the oracle pays best, but no case; Ellis 1890 does not describe the procedure at all and refers the reader to his Yoruba volume. Nothing was found that reports a Fa prediction as confirmed by the event.
examination state: Cases with deviation
examined by: prima-materia compiler, from the wording of Skertchly 1874, pp. 379-380 and 474-476, with the search stated in the counter-search note
falsified by: A consultation whose stated outcome is contradicted by the event, reported by the person who consulted.
protocol updated: 2026-09-08
tests: Casting the nuts yields the answer

A throw that leaves more than two nuts is void
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Wurf, bei dem mehr als zwei Nüsse bleiben, ist ungültig @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), p. 475
definition: The casting rule carries its own condition of nullity: if more than two nuts remain in the hand, the throw does not count and yields no mark.
note: It also has an opposite side that belongs beside it. One or two nuts are dropped on purpose during the throw, so the number remaining is not left wholly to the cast; how much that leaves to the caster is not stated in the source and is not asserted here.
note: The only stated void condition found in this run in the travellers' literature on the oracle, and the reason this transmission was worth opening before others in the registry. A procedure that can produce a non-answer is not the same as one whose every outcome is an answer, and the difference is exactly what makes a count possible: the admissible answers can be fixed before the consultation.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The lie is a fabricated consultation, never a misreported one
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Lüge ist eine erfundene Befragung, nie eine falsch berichtete @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 37 and p. 154
definition: The source states that no Zande would report the declaration of an oracle otherwise than it was given, and that a man who wishes to lie fabricates a declaration without consulting the oracle at all. Against the fabrication the transmission sets three things: the elder who makes an official test takes two or three witnesses with him, the counterparty consults his own oracles to check the first man's, and a man who believes he was not fairly tested may appeal to the king.
note: The cross-check by the counterparty is the part worth noticing. It is a control against the questioner rather than against the instrument, and it is the only one in this file that does not depend on the instrument being honest.
note: The sanction is stated and is not merely moral: the king sends for the elder, tells him he is a cheat and a liar, and bars him from ever again conducting official consultations.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

A cure that does not take is charged to a broken prohibition
type: Conceptualizing
label: Eine ausbleibende Heilung wird einem gebrochenen Verbot angelastet @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 231 and pp. 250-251
definition: Where a treatment does not take, the corpus states that the failure is put at the door of a broken prohibition or a slighted custom, and that the distinction between a trouble coming from a broken prohibition and a trouble coming from witchcraft, difficult as it is to trace, is decided by the practitioner himself. A recorded case of nineteen hundred and nine has a practitioner locked in a house with his charged thing, voices of young and old heard in conversation, and the verdict that the sickness came because the patient's brother had given no palm wine to his wife's family at his marriage.
note: Held beside pmc:FailureIsSulkinessOrLostPower and not merged with it. The first assigns a failure to the instrument, the second to the patient's conduct, and the second is the more expensive of the two, because the patient cannot show that he kept a prohibition he was never told he had.
note: The recorder states his own explanation beside the material, and it is his and not the transmission's: he holds that the practitioners are themselves responsible for the prohibitions, because a prohibition leaves a reasonable excuse for a failure to cure, and the patient is satisfied with the reason and willing to pay the fee to have the matter set right. Entered here as the recorder's reading, not as a claim of the transmission.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

A charged thing that fails is either sulky or weak
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Ding, das versagt, schmollt oder ist erschöpft @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 235 and pp. 230-231 and p. 250
definition: The corpus states the diagnosis as a pair of alternatives with a remedy for each. A charged thing that fails to perform its office must either have a sacrifice offered to it or have its power renewed by the practitioner who first made it, or by a member of the same cult: it is either sulky because it has been neglected, or weak from loss of power. The sacrifice removes the sulkiness and the practitioner restores the power.
note: The same corpus records the second, wider form of the move: when a man is not helped, he as a rule does not blame the practitioner but concludes that the diagnosis was wrong and that his trouble is not under the control of that particular charged thing, and simply changes practitioners, his confidence in the order untouched. The transmission thus has two exits from a failure before any question about the practice arises.
note: This is the node the file is built around. It is a complete account of non-occurrence that never reaches the claim: whatever happens, the outcome is assigned to the state of the instrument and not to the question whether the instrument works. It costs a fee in either branch.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

A stone that will not obey is the owner's fault
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Stein, der nicht gehorcht, liegt am Besitzer @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 207
definition: A man who had owned a sacred stone for many years but had not been able to command it as the medicine men do attributed the failure to himself, saying that he does not place his faith wholly upon it but believes in the help of many other agencies.
note: It is also the reason the two printed cases at pmc:TunkanDistantKnowledge cannot be counted as a run of successes: the corpus records the failures under a heading that removes them from the count.
note: The counterpart of the eight causes at pmc:BengeFailureCauses in the Azande file: an instrument that fails is not thereby discredited, because the transmission has a place to put the failure. Here the place is the owner's divided faith, which cannot be inspected from outside and which no outcome can clear. It is entered beside the capacity it protects and not away from it, because the two only mean anything together.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Whether the fast was kept is checked afterwards
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ob das Fasten gehalten wurde, wird nachträglich geprüft @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
definition: When the feast is over, guinea pigs are sacrificed in some places and it is seen by which part the blood runs in the entrails whether they have fasted well and kept all the ceremonies of the feast. The last act is named, and the name is given in the source.
note: A second procedure of the same shape as the confession test and applied to a different object: not to a statement but to a period of conduct. Together with the confession test it makes the checking of the participant, rather than of the answer, a recurring feature of this transmission and not a single case.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The narrator's father is said to have understood hidden things
type: Attributing
label: Dem Vater der Erzählerin wird zugeschrieben, die verborgenen Dinge verstanden zu haben @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 23-24
definition: The narrator relates that her father, called a great shaman, understood hidden things and perceived that the children she wanted to run out and play with were the souls of her dead brothers and sisters, whereupon his helping spirits set a barrier between her and them.
note: The case is worth the node because of its shape rather than its content. The perception is not reported as a vision or a journey but as a correction of an ordinary judgement: the child saw children, the shaman saw who they were. A claim in that form is answerable in a way that a claim about an inner state is not.
ascribed capacity: Hidden things
ascribed to: The narrator Takornâq's father, named in the narrative as a great shaman
attested by: Third-party ascription
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Fifty years against sixty: the period of the orbit and the interval of the ceremony
type: Disputing
label: Fünfzig gegen sechzig: Bahnperiode und Zeremonienabstand @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 282 with its first footnote
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 283 with its fifth footnote
definition: The account gives the period of the seed-star's orbit as some fifty years and the interval between two Sigui as sixty, and states in a footnote that there is here a contradiction which has not yet been resolved. It then offers, as a question and not as a finding, that the last ceremony may have been brought forward and that the profane may be kept in the belief that the official period is sixty years.
note: Entered as a dispute although both sides stand in the same work, because the work states the disagreement itself rather than smoothing it. The dispute is decisive for everything the outside reception built on the passage: fifty years is the figure that matches the companion of Sirius, sixty is the figure the ceremony actually runs on, and only the second is attested by anything a later worker could count.
note: The same footnote that reports the fifty-year period cites a French astronomical periodical of 1931 for the closeness of that period to the companion of Sirius. Whether the fifty came from the informants or from the reading is the question this graph cannot decide from the article alone; see prima-materia#250.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The course of pô tolo around Sirius

The finer bodies are not innate but cultivated
type: Originating
label: Die feineren Körper sind nicht angeboren, sondern gezüchtet @de
date: 1949
source: P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London 1950), in the chapter on the four bodies of man
definition: The claim that a person is not born with the bodies beyond the physical, that these can only be cultivated artificially and only where favourable conditions, inner and outer, are present, and that immortality therefore is not a property one is born with but something acquired.
note: It also fixes what the paths in pmc:FourWaysAtConstantGoal are for. If the goal were innate, a way would be a matter of recognising it; here it is a matter of building something, which is why the classification falls entirely on how much of a person is worked on. See prima-materia#65.
note: The claim is stated against the traditions it borrows its terms from: most teachings that repeat the divisions are said to have forgotten or omitted precisely this feature. That makes it a correction offered to a corpus rather than a report of it, and it is the load-bearing move of the whole system — everything about ways, effort and time follows from a possession that must be made and can fail to be made.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: The most important feature of an ancient teaching, lost by the systems that preserved its divisions, rather than a claim first published in this form in 1949.
originated by: G. I. Gurdjieff, in the record of P. D. Ouspensky

The five primary devotional relations, ranked
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die fünf primären Hingabeverhältnisse, nach Rang @de
source: Rūpa Gosvāmin, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu 2.5.115 (trans. Haberman 2003)
definition: The claim that the five primary forms of devotional love stand in a single ascending order: peacefulness, respectful service, companionship, parental affection, amorous love, with the first counted lowest and the last highest.
note: The ranking is asserted in the verse itself and not by a commentator. The operative words are yathā-pūrvam anuttamāḥ, rendered in the bilingual edition of two thousand and three as a hierarchical manner in which the first is considered the lowest, and in the independent translation published by a different lineage as an order of excellence running from first to last. Two translations from different hands and different schools agree on the direction, which is worth recording because the compound admits a second parsing that would reverse it.
note: What the verse does not do is give the criterion. It states the order and moves on. Any statement of the form that the ranking follows increasing intensity, density or nearness of affection is drawn from elsewhere in the corpus and must be cited from there, not from this verse. The nearest thing the text supplies is the graded series inside a single relation, held separately below.
within tradition: Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava transmission

Breath forced rather than tamed by degrees kills the practitioner
type: Cautioning
label: Ein erzwungener statt allmählich gezähmter Atem tötet den Übenden @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.15 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.16-17 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A warning that the breath is to be mastered by degrees as a lion, an elephant or a tiger is mastered, and that it destroys the one who proceeds otherwise; performed wrongly, the practice is said to generate the very ailments it removes when performed rightly.
note: The named consequences are hiccough, laboured breathing, cough, and pain in head, ears and eyes. This is the strongest thing the manual says about the manner of breathing, and it concerns pace and force, not the opening the breath passes through. See prima-materia#26.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

One fourfold division under four sets of names
type: Originating
label: Eine Vierteilung unter vier Namensreihen @de
date: 1949
source: P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London 1950), at the table of the four bodies and its four terminologies
definition: The claim that four terminologies name the same four bodies: carnal, natural, spiritual and divine; carriage, horse, driver and master, glossed as body, feelings and desires, mind, and the I with consciousness and will; physical, astral, mental and causal; with the assertion that comparisons of this kind are found in most systems that grant a person more than a physical body.
note: Held here because of the shape of the claim, not its content. An identity is asserted between a Pauline triad extended to four, an unnamed eastern set of images, and a nineteenth-century theosophical scheme. No route of contact is given for any of the three, and none is asserted by this node. The correspondence is recorded as claimed and not as established: this is exactly the case pm:Converging exists to keep separate from, and it does not meet that bar, because a shared table of names is not a shared claim.
note: The theosophical column is the one that dates the table. Physical, astral, mental and causal in that sequence is a set fixed in the late nineteenth century; a table containing it cannot be older than that, whatever the antiquity of the images beside it. Anyone reading the four columns as four independent witnesses to one ancient doctrine has taken a nineteenth-century arrangement for a convergence.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: A correspondence found in most teachings, presented as recovered rather than as drawn up.
originated by: G. I. Gurdjieff, in the record of P. D. Ouspensky

Four ways to one goal, distinguished by how much of a person they work on
type: Originating
label: Vier Wege zu einem Ziel, unterschieden danach, wie viel am Menschen sie bearbeiten @de
date: 1949
source: P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London 1950), in the chapter on the ways to immortality and the fourth way
definition: The claim that all known ways to immortality fall into three — that of the fakir working on the body, that of the monk on the emotions, that of the yogi on the mind — each long, hard and one-sided; and that a fourth works on all three at once, requires no withdrawal from life, and reaches the same goal sooner for that reason.
note: Recorded chiefly as a negative finding. The fourth way is regularly listed among the third options beside a right-hand and a left-hand path, and the source will not carry that. All four ways are said to lead in one direction, and the direction is named: immortality. What separates them is how much of a person is worked on and whether life must be left. That is an axis of completeness, not of the direction of the will, and it is compatible with either end of the other one. See prima-materia#65.
note: The case is more useful than a mere correction, because it is a whole system in which the goal is held fixed and the entire classification falls on the means. Whoever doubts that method and goal can be varied independently has here a taxonomy that varies only one of them. See prima-materia#52 and prima-materia#67.
note: The goal as named — an immortality that the person acquires and is not born with — sits on the separative side of the telic axis rather than the unitive one. That placement is not asserted on this node: it would need the passages on the four bodies read as well, and those have not been read here.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: Fragments of an unknown and older teaching, as the book's own subtitle has it, rather than a doctrine set out in talks of the early twentieth century and published in 1949.
originated by: G. I. Gurdjieff, in the record of P. D. Ouspensky

The fourfold negation of the end state
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die vierfache Verneinung des Endzustands @de
source: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā XXV, at the four theories concerning the state after release and the four concerning the limits of the world (trans. Th. Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa, Leningrad 1927)
definition: The treatment of the state after release under four theories that are all refused: that the released one exists after death, that he does not exist, that he both exists and does not, and that he neither exists nor does not; with the parallel refusal of the corresponding four theories about the limits of the world.
note: For the telic axis in prima-materia#52 this is the plain form of pm:selfBoundaryDeclined, and it is worth keeping distinct from the case in traditions/advaita-vedanta.ttl, where the question is not refused but assigned to a level that is itself superseded. The two look alike from a distance and are not the same move. No orientation is asserted on this node yet; the placement needs the verses on the self read as well. See prima-materia#63.
note: The point of holding this is that it is not a third answer. The four alternatives are laid out in order to be declined together, and declining the fourth is what keeps the move from collapsing into the third: a position that said only neither would be the fourth alternative rather than the refusal of it.
note: The same source guards against the reading that is nearest to hand. Reality is said to be neither existent nor non-existent, and the dialectic is described as negating not only every affirmation about it but every negation as well; it is expressly not the claim that the absolute is a non-entity, only that it is inaccessible to thought. A record that files this as nihilism reports the objection and not the position.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Madhyamaka

The self in four quarters
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Selbst in vier Vierteln @de
source: Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 2-6, in Robert Ernest Hume (trans.), The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921), pp. 391-392
definition: The claim that this self has four fourths, enumerated in order: the waking state, outwardly cognitive; the dreaming state, inwardly cognitive; the deep-sleep state, in which the sleeper desires no desire and sees no dream; and the fourth.
note: The three named states are given by what the sleeper or waker cognizes, which is the same criterion the sensory-anchoring axis uses and the reason three of its values can be recognised in them. The fourth is given differently, by negation, and that difference is the whole point of the passage.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Upaniṣadic tradition

The fourth degree yields the seizing of the shadow
type: Yielding
label: Der vierte Grad bringt das Ergreifen des Schattens hervor @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 170
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Initiation into the fourth degree
within tradition: Midewiwin
yields capacity: Calling forth the shadow and holding it

The fraud is known and the belief is held
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Betrug ist bekannt und der Glaube bleibt @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 105-107
definition: The transmission holds both at once: that the objects the witch-doctors draw from the bodies of their patients are produced by sleight of hand, with the manner of the deception described in detail by laymen, and that some of them nevertheless work real cures. Scepticism is directed at particular practitioners and turned into an explanation of their failures, so that it supports the standing of the rest.
note: A layman's account taken down by the recorder explains not only how the trick is done but how a cured man comes to believe he was cured by it. The doubt is stated in the terms of the transmission itself: a witch-doctor is a cheat because his medicines are poor and a liar because he has no witchcraft in him.
note: This is the passage this graph most needs from the tradition, and it cuts against the usual report of it. What is described is not credulity but a transmission that has a settled place for its own failures, states its scepticism openly, and is not thereby weakened. Whether that makes it closed against refutation is the whole later argument, and none of that argument was read here.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The tests that follow an acquittal nobody wanted
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Proben nach einem unerwünschten Freispruch @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 263-264
definition: Where the acquitted person is obnoxious to the people and they are set on killing him, the corpus states that he is put to several further tests although he vomited properly: twigs of six different trees are thrown at him in quick succession and he must name each tree at once, then he must name the ants running on the ground before him, then the butterflies and the birds as they pass, and should he fail in any single trial he is pronounced a witch and pays with his life. The recorder adds the reason the tests work as they do, that the effect of the ordeal is to daze the person who has taken it and to deaden his wits.
note: Entered because it is the mechanism by which a procedure said to be beyond the operator's control is brought back under it, and because the corpus states the mechanism itself: the tests are set after the verdict is known and are chosen so that a dazed man will fail them.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Four informants fused into one account
type: Systematizing
label: Vier Gewährsleute zu einer Darstellung verschmolzen @de
date: 1950
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 273-274
definition: The recorders state that the material was put in order in the sense that the sayings of the four principal informants were fused into one and the same exposition. What the printed system presents as a single doctrine is therefore a composite, and no sentence in it can be assigned to a named speaker.
note: Held as an ordering act because the recorders describe it as one in the same breath in which they claim to give the raw documents. The two claims are in tension on the same page: material that has been fused across four speakers is no longer raw, and the fusion is the step at which a disagreement between informants would have become invisible.
note: One informant is described as having supplied the system in its entirety and the others only its essential parts, and one of them obtained a supplement between the visits of the enquirers, from people elsewhere. The account is thus composite in a second sense: part of it was gathered by an informant on the enquirers' behalf between their stays.
compiled by: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen
orders claim: Emme ya tolo, the Female Sorghum star
orders claim: Pô tolo, the Digitaria star
orders claim: The seed-star as the axis of the world
orders claim: The course of pô tolo around Sirius

Gadreel discloses the weapons of death
type: Attributing
label: Gadreel offenbart die Waffen des Todes @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:6 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
source: J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford, 1976)
note: Book of Parables; no Aramaic fragment of chapters 37-71 is attested at Qumran.
ascribed capacity: The weapons of death
ascribed to: Gadreel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

A graded attainment is said to yield hearing at a distance and knowledge of other minds
type: Converging
label: Eine gestufte Erlangung soll Fernhören und Kenntnis fremden Bewusstseins hervorbringen @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.19
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.41
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 168 and 170
definition: Two transmissions state the same claim in the same form. A named procedure, entered by stages, is said to produce two named capacities: perception of what is beyond the range of the senses, and knowledge of what is in another mind. In the one the procedure is the sustained application of attention to a single object, and the capacities follow verse by verse. In the other the procedure is an initiation into a graded society, and the capacities are read off the marks of the degree.
note: The contact question, carefully. No route is proposed by anyone between the Anishinaabe of the upper Great Lakes and the Sanskrit commentarial literature, and the dispute recorded at pmc:MidewiwinAgeDispute does not touch this: whether the society formed before European contact or in reaction to it, a seventeenth-century Great Lakes formation has no access to the third pāda either way. What the dispute does affect is the age of the Midewiwin claim, not its independence.
note: The one real objection to independence lies in the recording and not in the traditions, and it is stated here rather than left for a reader to find. The Midewiwin account was written down between eighteen eighty-seven and eighteen eighty-nine, by which time the capacities of the third pāda had been in English-language circulation for a decade through theosophical publishing. Two things weigh against the objection. The recorder was a bureau ethnographer and not a member of that milieu, and the capacities are given as readings of lines incised on birchbark charts — marks that were on the bark before anyone asked what they meant. The objection is not thereby closed; it is entered so that it can be closed or sustained by someone who reads the charts.
note: Two differences that a correspondence must not smooth. The Indian text ranks its capacities as obstacles with respect to the goal of the practice; the American report names no such rank and warns instead against the member who turns them to harm. And the Indian claim is a claim about attention, repeatable in principle by anyone who applies it, where the American one is a claim about an institution, obtainable only from priests and only for a fee that the report says impoverishes the candidate. The capacity is the same; what it costs and what it is for are not.
note: What makes this worth holding is not the capacities, which are common, but the form of the claim. Both traditions bind the capacity to a procedure and to a place in a sequence, rather than ascribing it to a figure or a birth. That form is what a protocol can address; an ascription to a hero is not.
converging concept: Divine ear
converging concept: Hearing what happens at a great distance
converging concept: Reading the thoughts and intentions of others
converging concept: Knowledge of another mind
ground of independence: This is the case in the collection where the gathering situation decides, and it is entered in full because the date alone would clear a claim the date cannot clear. The American material was gathered between eighteen eighty-seven and eighteen eighty-nine and printed in eighteen ninety-one; the capacities of the third pāda had been in English-language circulation for roughly a decade by then through theosophical publishing, so the fixation does not precede the material it agrees with. What carries the independence instead is twofold: the recorder was a bureau ethnographer and not a member of that milieu, and the capacities are given as readings of lines incised on birchbark charts, marks that were on the bark before anyone asked what they meant. The second point is what a date cannot supply, because it puts the agreement in an object rather than in an answer. The ground is not thereby closed; it can be sustained or overturned by someone who reads the charts.
independent attestation: Midewiwin

The graded specialists
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die gestuften Spezialisten @de
source: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 2232 4°, p. 278 [280], the chapter on the sorcerers of this kingdom
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
definition: The offices are named separately because they are separate. The one who speaks with the huaca, keeps it, carries the offerings, sets the fasts and answers the people in its name; the ones who do the same for the ancestor bodies, for the lightning and for the sun; the lesser minister who assists each of them; the one who cures; the one who hears confession; the one who makes the chicha; and a series of diviners named by their instruments — by heaps of maize counted odd or even, by the twitching of the upper arms, by the legs of a large spider broken one by one, by dreams, and by opening a guinea pig with the thumbnail and reading where the blood runs.
note: Every office in it is held by women as well as men, the confessing included, on the recorder's express statement; he adds that the principal offices were more often men's and the lesser ones, divining and making the chicha, more often women's.
note: The indigenous chronicler of sixteen fifteen names four classes with Quechua terms and the extirpation account of sixteen twenty-one names two of the same as its general terms. Two recorders of opposite standing therefore agree on the vocabulary while disagreeing about almost everything else, which is the strongest thing that can be said for this list.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The greater mysteries presuppose the lesser
type: Presupposing
label: Die großen Mysterien setzen die kleinen voraus @de
source: Athenian decree concerning Eleusis, IG I³ 6, face C
note: The requirement is institutional and concerns admission, not efficacy. The inscription regulates participation in both rites; nothing in it says that the greater rite would fail for one who had skipped the lesser, only that such a one is not admitted.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The greater mysteries
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The lesser mysteries
within tradition: Eleusinian mysteries

The quest yields the communication
type: Yielding
label: Das Suchen bringt die Mitteilung hervor @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 68
note: Not circular in the sense SPEC §11 forbids: the practice is a stated bodily regime in a stated place, and the capacity is a communication with a content that the seeker is afterwards to be governed by. The transmission also states that the two do not always go together, which is on the neighbouring node.
attested by: Field attestation
by practice: Hanblapi, seeking a communication
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission
yields capacity: Wowihanble, a communication received

Whether the side of the hand makes a difference
type: Testing
label: Ob die Seite der Hand einen Unterschied macht @de
definition: An examination of the narrow half of the claim: whether contact through the left hand differs in its reported or measured effect from contact through the right.
note: A caution about what a positive result would mean. Handedness, the side a practitioner was taught on, and the expectation carried into the contact would all have to be controlled before a difference between the sides could be read as a property of the sides. A protocol that found one without controlling them would have measured the teaching.
note: Only the lateral half is examined here. Whether anything passes at all is the section's broad claim and is not addressed by this protocol; a result on the sides would say nothing about it either way, and the two must not be allowed to borrow from one another.
note: The state is procedure without cases, which is rare in this holding and is the point. The falsifying condition below needs no instrument the field lacks and no access to a tradition: blinded practitioners, both hands, and a comparison. Nobody has run it. That is a gap in the record and not a verdict, and the distinction is the one SPEC §13 exists to keep.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The falsifying condition is the ordinary two-sided comparison, stated because the claim names a side and thereby invites it
falsified by: Practitioners blinded to which hand is in contact report or show no difference between left-hand and right-hand contact beyond chance.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: Energy can be taken from a person through the left hand

What comes to the man who does not act accordingly
type: Cautioning
label: Was den trifft, der sich nicht daran hält @de
source: The Sword of Moses, ed. and trans. Moses Gaster (London: David Nutt, 1896), the opening instructions
definition: The penalty the handbook states for a user who does not keep the preparation. If he will not act accordingly, the angels of wrath, ire, fury and rage will come near him to minister to him, and they will lord over him, and strangle him, and plague him all over. Four leaders are named for the four.
note: The harm named is bodily and immediate and falls on the practitioner himself, which distinguishes this caution from the Hawaiian case in traditions/hawaiian.ttl, where the ill-luck of a fault falls on the party the chant honours. Where the sufferer is the one who could report the fault, the tradition can in principle be contradicted from inside.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The Sword of Moses
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

Using the Sword presupposes the three days' preparation
type: Presupposing
label: Der Gebrauch des Schwertes setzt die dreitägige Vorbereitung voraus @de
source: The Sword of Moses, ed. and trans. Moses Gaster (London: David Nutt, 1896), the opening instructions
note: The prior step named here is the secrecy and purity condition rather than one of the counts, because the handbook binds them together in a single sentence and attaches the penalty to the whole. Which of the counts, taken alone, the penalty would follow is not stated and is not inferred.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: If he will not act accordingly the angels of wrath, ire, fury and rage come near him to minister to him, and they lord over him, and strangle him, and plague him all over. The consequence is stated for the whole of the preparation and not for a single part of it.
dependent step: The Sword of Moses
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The secrecy the Sword requires
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The manual orders posture, breath, seal and absorption
type: Presupposing
label: Das Handbuch ordnet Haltung, Atem, Siegel und Versenkung @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I-IV (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: Recorded at the weakest strength on purpose. The four chapters run posture, breath, seal, absorption, and that arrangement is often cited as though it were itself a rule. The rule is in II.1; the chapter order is only an arrangement.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Purification of the channels
prerequisite strength: Presentation order
prior step: Posture
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The text and the verse numbering of the manual are edition-dependent
type: Disputing
label: Textbestand und Verszählung des Handbuchs hängen von der Ausgabe ab @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhapradīpikā, critical edition, Kaivalyadhama S.M.Y.M. Samiti, Lonavla
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhapradīpikā, critical edition, ed. J. Mallinson, J. Birch, J. Hanneder, M. Demoto and N.-J. Liersch (2024)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā, ed. and tr. P. Sinh (1915)
definition: A disagreement among editors about what belongs to the manual and how its verses are numbered. The widely circulated editions descend from single manuscripts and differ in the count and extent of their chapters; a critical edition drawn from more than two hundred manuscripts, with the oldest dated 1496, settles neither question in favour of the numbering that most citations use.
note: Held as a node because every citation in this file carries a verse number, and a number is only as stable as the recension it comes from. The numbering used throughout this file follows the widely circulated vulgate text; a reader working from the critical edition may find the same passage under a different number. Naming the manual without naming the edition conceals that anything is at issue.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: Haṭhayoga

The gift carries a spirit that compels its return
type: Originating
label: Die Gabe trägt einen Geist, der ihre Erwiderung erzwingt @de
date: 1925
source: Marcel Mauss, The Gift, translated by Ian Cunnison (London: Cohen and West, 1966), pp. 8-10
definition: The claim that a thing given holds a spiritual power belonging to its giver, that this power seeks to return to its place of origin, and that the obligation to make a return gift follows from it. The claim is put forward in a work of nineteen twenty-five, on the strength of the single Māori passage above.
note: Entered as an origination and not as a Māori claim because the generalisation is the author's. The letter speaks of one kind of valuable and of a forest rite; the obligation of the return gift as a universal law of archaic exchange begins here. That the reading of the passage was itself contested from nineteen twenty-nine onward is recorded in prima-materia#107, because those sides were not read at the wording in this run.
circulates as: the Māori doctrine of the spirit of the gift, and beyond it a universal principle of archaic exchange
originated by: Marcel Mauss

Whose hau: the wording of the Ranapiri letter
type: Disputing
label: Wessen Hau: der Wortlaut des Ranapiri-Briefes @de
source: Elsdon Best, Maori Forest Lore, part III, Transactions and Proceedings of the New Zealand Institute 42 (1909), p. 439
source: Tamati Ranapiri, letter to Elsdon Best, 23 November 1907, Polynesian Society Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1187, folder 271, as collated in Hēnare, Journal of the Polynesian Society 127/4 (2018), pp. 455-457
definition: A disagreement about what the source text says, not about how to interpret it. The manuscript reads the possessive of the second person, which makes the hau that of the giver and keeps the giver attached to the thing after it has changed hands. The printed version of 1909 has the definite article in both key sentences, which makes the hau that of the object. Every later reading of the passage rests on one of the two.
note: Entered as a dispute over the text rather than over its meaning, because that is the part a later reader can check and because the substitution was made silently. Both sides were read in the same study that reports the substitution, so the collation itself has not been verified against the manuscript or against the 1909 printing in this run.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The hau of the gift

Sugar cane is forbidden to the hula company
type: Cautioning
label: Zuckerrohr ist der Hula-Schar verboten @de
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter IV, p. 30
definition: A prohibition the teacher justifies in a sentence that turns on the word itself: if one indulged in sugar cane his work as a practitioner would amount to nothing, aohe e ko ana kana mau hana, his work will not be accomplished. The recorder adds a practical ground beside it, that chewing the stalk roughens the voice.
note: Two grounds for one rule, and they are of different kinds: one is a pun and the other is a physical effect on a singer's instrument. The transmission gives both without ranking them. Where a rule carries a homophonic justification, the graph should not read the justification as the reason the rule exists.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Ailolo
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The good fortune of the honoured family presupposes a chant without fault
type: Presupposing
label: Das Wohlergehen der besungenen Familie setzt den fehlerlosen Gesang voraus @de
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, p. 35
note: The transfer of the harm is what distinguishes this witness from the others the graph holds on the same rule. Where the Maori address is simply said to lose its efficacy and the Navajo ceremony is broken off, here the reciter is not the one who suffers. That makes the rule harder to test from inside the tradition, because the person who could report the fault and the person who bears the consequence are different people.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: A breath taken before the close of a phrase, a mistake, or even hesitation in pronouncing a word was a sign of ill-luck to the person or family thus honoured. The harm is named, it is transferred, and it falls on the party who did not commit the fault.
dependent step: The good fortune of the person or family the chant honours
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The chant rendered without breath, mistake or hesitation
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

Whether the gentler form produces the same heat
type: Testing
label: Ob die sanftere Form dieselbe Hitze erzeugt @de
definition: An examination of whether the effect measured in the practice survives the removal of its forceful-breath component.
note: No new evidence was gathered for this protocol and none was needed. The measurements already held at pmc:TummoHeatExamination separate the two components and report the temperature rise as depending on the forceful breath together with the visualisation, with the visualisation alone yielding the lesser effect. The claim that the breath may be dropped is therefore addressed by evidence that has stood in this file since the twenty-eighth of August.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, and everything below is written in the voice of a finding. It is not one. The notes record what the evidence appeared to show before any search for opposing work was made, and they are kept in that voice because rewriting them would destroy the reasoning that has to be checked. Read them as the expected result of an examination nobody has finished, not as its outcome. See prima-materia#386.
note: The finding matters more than its size. Where a draft and its source transmission differ on a component, and the difference is exactly the component the measurements isolate, the draft is testable at that seam and almost nowhere else. Removing a prescribed element and claiming the effect survives is the one kind of modification that instruments can settle.
note: What is not settled. That the gentler form yields less heat is not that it yields none, and the studies were not designed to find the floor. The deviation recorded here is from the claim of sameness and not from the claim that the gentler form does anything at all.
base rate: Temperature change under the visualisation alone, against the change under visualisation together with the forceful breath, in the same participants.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not carried. The component separation was read off a single study and no search was made for work that failed to reproduce it.
evidence from: M. Kozhevnikov et al., Neurocognitive and somatic components of temperature increases during g-tummo meditation, PLoS ONE 8(3) (2013), e58244, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058244
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The separation of the two components is the design of the second study already cited in this file
falsified by: Practitioners of the gentler form show the same rise in measured body temperature as practitioners of the form with the forceful breath.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The heat arises without the forceful breath

Passing the sixth palace presupposes fitness to descend
type: Presupposing
label: Das Bestehen am sechsten Palast setzt die Eignung zum Abstieg voraus @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 26, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is quotable and because the passage sets no lesser outcome beside it: no second attempt, no purification that would restore the failed descender, no return.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The transmission states the consequence in a sequence and states it as violence, not as exclusion. The doorkeepers run after him and stone him; they name him of the seed of them that kissed the calf and unfit to see the King and his throne in his beauty; a voice from the seventh heaven confirms that they have said well; and he does not move from the spot before they place on him a thousand thousands of pieces of iron.
dependent step: The descent to the Merkavah
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Fitness to descend to the Merkavah
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The polarity of mental states
type: Originating
label: Die Polarität der Gemütszustände @de
date: 1912
source: Three Initiates, The Kybalion (Chicago: Yogi Publication Society, 1912), chapter X, Polarity
definition: The claim that every mental state is a rate of vibration, that states fall into innumerable classes each of which has two opposite poles, that the positive pole of a class stands at a higher degree than its negative, and that a state may be moved along its own scale but never across into another class.
note: Opened for prima-materia#12, to date the step between the theosophical colour key of nineteen hundred and two and the numbered scale of nineteen ninety-five. Read at the wording, chapter ten.
note: The finding is a denial, and it is sharper than a confirmation would have been. The vibration vocabulary is fully present and every mental state carries a rate. But the text states outright that the states belong to innumerable classes, each with its own two poles, and that movement is possible only within a class: love and hate are transmutable into one another, so are fear and courage, and fear cannot be turned into love. That is many two-ended scales and expressly not one scale carrying all feelings. A ranking of unlike feelings against each other is therefore not merely absent here, it is ruled out.
note: What the later scales do inherit is the direction. The positive pole is said to stand at a higher degree than the negative and to dominate it, and a practitioner is described as raising his own vibration and inducing the change in another. Sixty years separate that from a numbered ladder, and the step is still undated.
circulates as: A study of the Hermetic philosophy of ancient Egypt and Greece, so described on its own title page and taken by its readers for a transmission from Hermes Trismegistus rather than for a work of its own decade.
originated by: Three Initiates, the pseudonymous authorship under which the work appeared

The communication that obliges the receiver to act contrarily
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Mitteilung, die den Empfänger zum widernatürlichen Handeln verpflichtet @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 68 and pp. 83-84
definition: A communication that appears in the form of one of the messengers of the Winged God is held to have been granted by him, and the one to whom it speaks must thereafter become heyoka and speak and act contrarily, or as a buffoon, for the rest of his life. A candidate to dance the Sun dance who receives such a communication must act as a clown in the dance lodge, appear to enjoy the tortures and make sport of his fellow dancers. Seeing the substance of the Winged God himself has the same effect; seeing the god Heyoka, who may appear in the form of a bent man, does not.
note: An obligation imposed by the outcome of a procedure and binding for life, entered because it is the sharpest cost this transmission attaches to a communication. The heyoka must also set the door of his tipi so that it does not face the centre of the camp circle.
note: The list of the messengers is given twice in the same paper and the two lists do not agree. The first names the dog, the shore lark, the swallow, the night hawk, the frog, the lizard and the dragon fly; the second names the dog, the swallow, the snowbird, the night hawk, the lizard, the frog and the dragon fly. Whether the shore lark and the snowbird are one bird under two English names, or whether one of the two places is a slip, is not decidable from the paper and is held as an issue rather than smoothed away here.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The emotional guidance scale
type: Originating
label: Die Skala der emotionalen Führung @de
date: 2004
source: E. Hicks and J. Hicks, Ask and It Is Given (2004), ch. 22
definition: The claim that emotions form a graded ladder that indicates how near a person stands to a desired state, with joy, knowledge, empowerment, freedom, love and appreciation at its top rung.
note: The diagnostic marker is the top rung and its sequence: joy, knowledge, empowerment, freedom, love, appreciation. Six terms, and the fourth of them is the one that gives the sequence away, because a list built from an older stock has no reason to place freedom between empowerment and love. A later list carrying this block, in this order, carries it from here.
note: The upper block of this scale reappears almost word for word in later lists that present themselves as older. Recorded so that the wording has a dated first appearance to be checked against.
circulates as: A law of the emotions, presented as a description of how feeling works rather than as one author's arrangement.
originated by: Esther Hicks and Jerry Hicks

The horripilation correspondence
type: Converging
label: Die Entsprechung der Haaraufrichtung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV.94ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Nāṭyaśāstra VII
definition: The observation that the raising of the body hair is codified as a sign of an inner state in two Indian genres that have no common subject matter: a meditation handbook and a treatise on dramatic performance.
note: The strongest item in this file, and still not what it first appears. The independence is generic and not cultural: both texts belong to the Indian sphere, so a common background cannot be excluded. What can be excluded is that one borrowed the observation from the other, since neither is about the other's subject. A universal physiology codified twice is a finding about the physiology.
attested by: Compiler inference
converging concept: Minor rapture
converging concept: Horripilation
ground of independence: Here the ground is not a date and the node says so rather than borrowing an argument it does not have. The commentary is of the fifth century of the common era and the treatise on performance is older, so priority runs the wrong way for an argument from age. What carries the independence is that neither text treats the other's subject: a handbook of meditation had no occasion to take an observation about gooseflesh from a manual for actors, or the reverse. Both are received texts, so no gathering situation is at issue. A common Indian background remains available and is not excluded by this ground.
independent attestation: Sanskrit dramaturgy
independent attestation: Theravāda
transmission path: Both codifications arise within the Indian cultural sphere; independence holds at the level of genre and subject matter, not at the level of culture.

How many the Great Mysterious are, and whether the Sun is the Great Spirit
type: Disputing
label: Wie viele die Große Geheimnisvolle sind, und ob die Sonne der Große Geist ist @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 153
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 154-155
definition: Two informants in the same volume give the count differently. The one whose written Lakota underlies the doctrinal texts gives sixteen names in four groups of four and says that the term of the shamans differs from the common term only in considering all the benevolent gods, four of each of four classes, as one whole. The other, questioned directly, names eight, then says there is but one, then reduces the eight to four by pairing them, saying that the Sun and the Moon are the same, the Sky and the Wind the same, the Rock and the Winged the same, and the Earth and the Beautiful Woman the same. On a second point the same informant contradicts the people rather than the other informant: many of the people hold that the Sun and the Moving are one and the same, and he says that the shamans know it is not so, because the Sun is in the sky only half the time and the Moving is there all the time.
note: The argument the second informant gives for his denial is worth keeping separate from the denial: it is an argument from the observed availability of the two, not from authority or from lineage. That form is rare in this corpus.
note: The dispute is entered because the graph would otherwise hold the scheme of the first informant as the doctrine of the transmission, which the second informant does not confirm and the compiler himself declines to claim. It is a disagreement between two witnesses of the same transmission and not between two traditions, which is the commoner and less visible kind.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The four-times-four scheme of the gods as an ordering act

The huaca as a power that is addressed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Huaca als angesprochene Macht @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. II
definition: What is addressed falls into two kinds. The fixed, which cannot be taken away because they do not move: the sun, the moon, the Pleiades, the lightning, the sea, the earth, springs, rivers, snow peaks, high hills and certain very large stones, and the pacarina, the place each lineage says it came out of. And the movable, which are the ordinary huacas of a place: mostly stone, mostly without a figure, each with its own name, each belonging to a lineage, each with its own priests. Beside them stand the malquis, the bones or whole bodies of the ancestors, held to be children of the huacas and given the same offerings; and the conopas, held in each house and inherited by the eldest son, which are the same worship made private.
note: The division is the recorder's and it is his working distinction as an extirpator: the movable ones could be seized and burned and the fixed ones had to be taken out of the heart instead. It is entered because it is also a real division in the practice — a lineage huaca is public and a conopa is secret — and not because his purpose was neutral.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Keeping the songs presupposes keeping the vows
type: Presupposing
label: Das Behalten der Gesänge setzt das Halten der Gelübde voraus @de
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter V, p. 34
note: A memory sanction is a rare shape and it is nearly self-confirming, which is worth marking here rather than discovering later. A pupil who forgets is by that fact convicted of having been heedless, and a pupil who remembers proves the rule; no outcome is excluded. The claim is therefore weaker than it sounds even though the consequence is quotable.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The pupils who are heedless of their vows are told that the songs they have learned will fly away. The sanction is a loss of memory and not a punishment laid on by anyone; it is stated as what follows.
dependent step: The songs and the training stay with the pupil
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The conduct required of the hula company
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The supernormal powers are exercised in withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Die übernatürlichen Kräfte werden in abgezogener Vertiefung ausgeübt @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.1 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.49 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: The kinds of supernormal power
situation ground: The handbook assigns the powers to a meditator who has reached the fourth absorption and calls that absorption their natural plane. The absorption is one of the four described as awake and turned from the senses to a single object, which is the criterion this coordinate names. The placement is of the exercise, not of the training that leads to it.

Supernormal power presupposes the fourteenfold mastery
type: Presupposing
label: Übernatürliche Kraft setzt die vierzehnfache Beherrschung voraus @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.8 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The handbook states that it is not possible for a meditator even to begin to accomplish transformation by supernormal power without having first completed the development of control of the mind in those fourteen ways.
dependent step: The kinds of supernormal power
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Control of the mind in fourteen ways
within tradition: Theravāda

Supernormal power presupposes the fourth absorption
type: Presupposing
label: Übernatürliche Kraft setzt die vierte Vertiefung voraus @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.1 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.12-13 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
note: The handbook assigns the task to a meditator who has reached the fourth absorption and calls that absorption the natural plane for obtaining the power. It does not, at these places, say what happens to one who attempts it from elsewhere.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The kinds of supernormal power
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The fourth absorption
within tradition: Theravāda

The state to be undone is mistaken for the state to be sought
type: Originating
label: Der aufzulösende Zustand wird für den erstrebten gehalten @de
date: 1949
source: P. D. Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous: Fragments of an Unknown Teaching (London 1950), in the passage on identifying and the names given to it
definition: The claim that in identifying a person is absorbed into what occupies them and becomes a thing, and that those who observe this state in themselves regularly take it for a merit, calling it enthusiasm, zeal, passion, spontaneity or inspiration, and believing that good work is possible only in it.
note: It stands beside the self-caution recorded at pmc:Panchatattva, where a text prescribes a rite and warns in the same breath that men of the age will take it up for pleasure. Two traditions with no route between them both place the danger inside the practitioner's own approval. Not asserted as a convergence here; noted as a second instance of the same shape.
note: Recorded as a caution that names its own misrecognition, which is the form worth collecting. The warning is not that the state is unpleasant — it is that the state is valued, under names that make it sound like the goal. A caution of this shape cannot be tested by asking practitioners how they feel, since the claim predicts they will report it favourably.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: An observation of the school, reported as long known.
originated by: G. I. Gurdjieff, in the record of P. D. Ouspensky

Whether the sixteen figures are the apparatus of geomancy
type: Disputing
label: Ob die sechzehn Figuren der Apparat der Geomantie sind @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
source: J. A. Abayomi Cole, Astrological Geomancy in Africa, the account of the sixteen palm nuts, read in R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix
definition: A disagreement about what the sixteen figures of the oracle are. One account has them as the base figures of the system itself, called mothers, from whose columns every further figure is compounded, and gives the practice no derivation from outside Yorubaland. The other, written by a Sierra Leonean author and reprinted in the same appendix as the bishop's extract, counts the sixteen as twelve houses of the heavens, two witnesses, one judge and a further judge got by combining the judge with the figure of the first house, and calls the operations of the diviners geomantic throughout.
note: Neither side of this was read in a modern study at the wording in this run. What the twentieth-century literature makes of the question — whether the figures were taken over and grafted on an older practice, whether the sand science itself has North African roots, and how either is dated — is untouched here and is the first thing the next run on this tradition should open.
note: The second account is the reason pm:contactRoute on this tradition stands at disputed. Twelve houses, two witnesses and a judge are the working parts of the Arabic sand science and of the European geomancy descended from it, and a system that has them is not without a route to the Mediterranean and Islamic material this graph already holds. The first account describes the same casting and the same sixteen without any of those parts.
note: The second account was read at second hand, in the appendix that reprints it, and carries no imprint there. It is entered as a side of a dispute and not as a finding about the history of the system.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The sixteen figures called mothers

The memorisation standard reported as unattained
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der als unerreicht berichtete Gedächtnismaßstab @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the stories attached to the Odu
definition: The same extract that states the standard states that it is not reached: scarcely anyone has been found who has learnt the whole of the narratives and can recite them.
note: The node exists because the shortfall stands in the same breath as the demand. A record that carried the demand alone would report a feat of memory that the tradition does not claim is performed, and this is one of the few places where a transmission states the distance between its own rule and its practitioners.
note: This is the point at which the tradition touches the exactness material already in the graph, and it touches it from the other side: there the rule is enforced, here the rule is conceded to be unfulfilled. No convergence node is written for it. The contact route of this tradition stands at disputed, so an agreement counts as neither reception nor independent attestation.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

The enumeration of the signs
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Zählung der Zeichen @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the Odu and their number
definition: The count of the signs as the bishop's extract gives it: behind each of the sixteen representative palm nuts stand sixteen subordinate powers, and each of the whole number is itself called an Odu, which is to say a head; this gives two hundred and fifty-six. A further sixteen are counted behind each of those, which gives four thousand and ninety-six.
note: The two accounts read in this run do not generate the count the same way. The account of eighteen ninety-four compounds the further figures from the columns of two of the sixteen; the extract used here subordinates sixteen to each of the sixteen. Both arrive at a system built on sixteen, and neither states the other's derivation. The difference is recorded rather than smoothed, because which derivation a source gives is one of the things that would distinguish a locally grown scheme from a borrowed one.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

The rule of interpretation is fixed and closed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Deutungsregel ist fest und verschlossen @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
definition: The reading of a figure is reported to follow an established rule, and the rule is reported to be known only to those initiated into it. The fee paid to a priest for being taught the art is reported as very heavy.
note: Two gates named in one sentence, and they are of different kinds. That the rule is fixed is a claim about the system and is checkable against any later account of it; that it is known only to the initiated is a claim about access, and the fee gives its price. The account is an outsider's and reports what he was not told, which is a weaker witness for the content of the rule than for the fact of its closure.
within tradition: Ifá

The narratives attached to the signs
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die den Zeichen anhängenden Erzählungen @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the stories attached to the Odu
definition: The body of narratives through which a sign delivers its answer, given in parables. One thousand six hundred and eighty are counted to each Odu, and everyone aspiring to the office of babalawo is expected to commit them, together with those of the other signs, to memory.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

Whether the return differs from the outward journey
type: Testing
label: Ob die Rückkehr sich von der Hinreise unterscheidet @de
definition: An examination of the asymmetry the claim asserts between the journey out and the journey back.
note: Against the claim stands the same passage as at the neighbouring node, in a weaker way. If the time lying still follows the distance and ends at a day, the account being given is of an absence with a duration, not of an absence with a slow half and an instant half. The transmission says nothing about the return specifically; it is the shape of the whole report that sits awkwardly with a claim of asymmetry.
note: Procedure without cases rather than no procedure, and this is the one of the three where that holds. A comparison of reported durations for the outward and the return passage, gathered from practitioners not told which half the question is about, needs nothing that does not exist. It has not been done.
note: The asymmetry is where this claim is reachable, and it is reachable in principle without settling anything about the journey itself. Whatever the outward passage is, the claim says the return is not like it, and a report that describes both would show whether the practitioner experiences them as different.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The falsifying condition follows from the claim asserting a difference between two things the practitioner can be asked about separately
falsified by: Practitioners asked about both passages, without being told that the asymmetry is at issue, report durations for the return that match those for the outward journey.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The return is immediate, by thinking of the body

The imperfections of insight
type: Cautioning
label: Die Unvollkommenheiten der Einsicht @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XX.105ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Ten states arising in practice, among them luminosity, rapture, tranquillity, pleasure and resolve, which are not defilements in themselves but become obstacles when taken as proof of attainment.
note: The handbook illustrates the error with the monk who held himself awakened for sixty years. This is the tradition's own answer to the question of how a practitioner mistakes a state for a result.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Pīti
within tradition: Theravāda

The breath inaudible to its own bearer and shorter out than in
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der für den Übenden selbst unhörbare Atem, kürzer aus als ein @de
source: Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian 8
definition: Two marks set on the practice: one is not to hear the sound of one's own breathing, and a feather held before nose and mouth is not to stir; and one is always to give out less than one has taken in.
note: The intake is at the nose and the release at the mouth. The distribution is the reverse of the one a modern draft assigns, which treats mouth breathing as a fault on the intake and says nothing of the release. The passage also fixes the pace by an external test rather than by a count of seconds, which is what makes it examinable at all. See prima-materia#26.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Indo-Tibetan reception, not convergence
type: Converging
label: Indo-tibetische Rezeption, keine Konvergenz @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The correspondence between the Indian channel-and-heat material and its Tibetan form, held as a node in order to be counted out: the route is documented, so the agreement is reception and carries no weight as evidence of an independently arrived-at structure.
note: Recorded because a graph that only holds findings cannot show its own exclusions. Any later count of independent attestations must skip this pair.
attested by: Compiler inference
converging concept: Inner heat
converging concept: Kuṇḍalinī
converging concept: Channels
transmission path: The six yogas reach Tibet from the Indian mahāsiddha Nāropa through Marpa the translator; the transmission is named in the Tibetan sources themselves.

The lodge must be built after the custom or the ceremony is of no avail
type: Presupposing
label: Die Hütte muss nach dem Brauch gebaut sein, sonst wirkt die Zeremonie nicht @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 156
note: Entered at stated necessity because the source does not prescribe the build and stop there: it names what follows if the build is wrong, and what follows is total. The sentence is from the text written in Lakota by Sword and translated, not from the compiler's exposition.
attested by: Field attestation
consequence of skipping: The ceremony must be performed in an ini ti; the ini ti must be made according to Lakota custom, otherwise the ceremony would be of no avail.
dependent step: Inipi, the vitalizing lodge
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Building the ini ti
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Initiation presupposes the descent of power
type: Presupposing
label: Die Initiation setzt die Herabkunft der Kraft voraus @de
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra XI
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka XIII
note: The exegesis asks who is qualified for initiation and answers by taking up the descent of power, which places the descent before the rite and before the path. Later and other traditions have read the descent as the fruit of practice instead; the direction recorded here is the one Abhinavagupta sets.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Initiation
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Descent of power
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Heat from a held breath and attention directed into the trunk
type: Generalizing
label: Wärme aus gehaltenem Atem und gerichteter Aufmerksamkeit @de
note: It is nonetheless the most examinable generalization the holding can currently form, and for a reason that has nothing to do with the number of witnesses: it names a quantity an instrument reads. The two clauses of the statement are separately refutable — a rise that a matched untrained person shows from the breathing alone refutes the second without touching the first.
note: The weakness is a route and it is stated rather than smoothed over. The Tibetan material received the Indic; these are not two independent witnesses but one transmission at two stations, and the count here is therefore one and not two. The class does not require independence, but a reader ordering the queue by the spread of the traditions under a generalization must see that this one has none.
note: Two attested claims: the Tibetan tummo instruction and the root seal of the Haṭhayogapradīpikā. Two is the floor the class sets and not a recommendation, and this node stands on the floor.
note: Two protocols in examinations/tummo-heat.ttl already address the tradition-level claim and the question whether the gentler form works without the forceful breath. Neither points here, and neither is extended by this node: a protocol on a generalization has to be devised against this wording, and the difference between the two levels is exactly what the wording adds.
attested by: Compiler inference
generalized from: The root seal yields the kindled inner fire
generalized from: Tummo yields inner heat
generalized statement: Practices that combine a retained or forcefully driven breath with attention directed to a named region of the trunk raise the practitioner's measured peripheral temperature above what the same person shows at rest under the same ambient conditions, and by more than the breathing alone produces in a person not trained in the practice.

The sign read from the fork
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das an der Gabel gelesene Zeichen @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 24
definition: The stated reading of the divination: if the fork falls the sick person will die, if it stays upright she will live. In the case related the fork settled upright and the sick child lived.
note: Entered because the sign is stated in advance and in both directions, which is rare in the material this graph holds. A divination that names its own failure condition before the outcome is known is examinable; one that is interpreted afterwards is not. The single case related is of course selected by the narrator's survival.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Helping spirits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Hilfsgeister @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 24, 28
definition: Spirits belonging to a particular shaman, called up by him and reported to act in the world on his behalf: to guard a child, to raise a barrier against the dead, to find what has been lost.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Second sight abides
type: Situating
label: Das zweite Gesicht bleibt @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 29
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Abiding
situated node: Second sight
situation ground: A standing property of a person is not an episode. This is the placement that broke the older single axis: not attained and not passing either, which the two ends of that axis could not hold at once. See prima-materia#439.

Second sight is not attained by effort
type: Situating
label: Das zweite Gesicht wird nicht durch Anstrengung erlangt @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 29
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Not by effort
situated node: Second sight
situation ground: The narrative reports the capacity as a standing property of a person and expressly not as the outcome of an exercise. No training is named for it anywhere in the portion read.

The spirit calling states no sensory anchoring
type: Situating
label: Das Geisterrufen gibt keine Sinnesbindung an @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 24, 28
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Anchoring not stated
situated node: Spirit calling
situation ground: The portion read gives the occasions on which the session is held and the outcomes claimed for it, and not the procedure; the node's own note already records that nothing was found there about posture, words or darkness. A session held in the household on the occasion that requires it is not thereby placed on this axis, and the silence is worth recording because the later chapters of the same volume are known to describe what this portion does not.

Absorption presupposes the abandoning of the hindrances
type: Presupposing
label: Die Vertiefung setzt das Aufgeben der Hemmnisse voraus @de
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
note: The discourse places the abandoning of the five immediately before entry into the first absorption in a fixed formula, without stating at that place what befalls one who enters otherwise.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The four absorptions
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The five hindrances
within tradition: Theravāda

Kandu, the token that announces a curse
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kandu, das Zeichen, das den Fluch ankündigt @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 239
definition: A hoe handle with cassava cores tied to it, a stick daubed with colours, an old basket hung in a fruit tree: things set where property is to be protected. The corpus states that these are not themselves charms but tokens or warnings, put up to inform a thief that a curse lies on the thing and what complaint he will get if he risks it, and it gives the reason in the form of a rule of fairness, that it is not considered fair to curse the stealing of an article without indicating it in some way.
note: A stated rule of fairness inside an operative system is rare in this graph and is the reason for the node. It also has a consequence for what the transmission can claim: a curse that must be announced in advance is one whose effects the announcement itself could produce, and the corpus records elsewhere the case of a man who could not eat what his inherited prohibition forbade only so long as he feared it.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Kasdeja discloses the striking of spirits
type: Attributing
label: Kasdeja offenbart das Schlagen der Geister @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:12 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
source: J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford, 1976)
note: Book of Parables; no Aramaic fragment of chapters 37-71 is attested at Qumran.
ascribed capacity: Striking of spirits and of the womb
ascribed to: Kasdeja
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Kaula worship as the way that succeeds in this age
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die kaulische Verehrung als der in diesem Zeitalter tragende Weg @de
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra IV.20 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra XIV.203 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
definition: The claim that in the present age success is attained by Kaula worship alone, and that the mantra received from a Kaula brings knowledge of Brahman, where the mantra received from one of the lower dispositions reproduces that disposition in the receiver.
note: Kaula is set above the other ways here, not beside them. That is the same order Wilson translates from a passage he ascribes to the Kulārṇava, in which the left hand stands above the right and Kaula above all — an order the Western pair of names keeps while reversing its valuation. Two witnesses, one of them located by chapter and verse in a named translation and one not; the second is still to be found. See prima-materia#56.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Retention alone holds its own agency
type: Situating
label: Das alleinige Anhalten behält die eigene Trägerschaft @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.74 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Own agency
situated node: Retention alone
situation ground: The verse has the practitioner able to hold the breath at his own pleasure, and what follows is credited to that holding. Nobody else acts in these verses: there is no descent, no possession and no conferral, only a capacity said to be at the practitioner's disposal once the practice has taken.

Retention alone is attained by effort
type: Situating
label: Das alleinige Anhalten wird durch Anstrengung erlangt @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.72-73 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: By effort
situated node: Retention alone
situation ground: The verse directs that the accompanied retention be practised for as long as it takes until the unaccompanied one succeeds, and the next verse names the condition by the success: it is called retention alone once it can be done without the emptying and the filling. The manual gives no other way to it, and the counted regimen of the same chapter sets a number of retentions to be performed at four times of the day.

Retention alone is placed at withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Das alleinige Anhalten liegt bei abgezogener Vertiefung @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.71-74 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Retention alone
situation ground: Retention held at will without the filling and the emptying that ordinarily frame it. A suspension of the breath held as the accomplished form of the practice is the case this coordinate names by its own definition; the practitioner is awake and the ordinary sensory traffic has stopped being the point.

Retention alone states no locus
type: Situating
label: Das alleinige Anhalten gibt keinen Ort an @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.71-74 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Locus not stated
situated node: Retention alone
situation ground: The verses were read for this question and are silent on it. They describe the breath and what the practitioner can do with it, and say nothing about where the awareness is held to be; the seated posture the chapter requires places the body and not the awareness.

Retention alone presupposes retention with filling and emptying
type: Presupposing
label: Das alleinige Anhalten setzt das Anhalten mit Füllen und Leeren voraus @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.72 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The instruction is to keep practising the accompanied form until the unaccompanied one succeeds. Recorded at prescribed order because the verse sets a sequence without saying what befalls one who skips it. The direction of the breath drops out at the top of this sequence, which is what makes the claim that inhalation draws and exhalation expels a claim about the lower rungs only. See prima-materia#27.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Retention alone
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The tongue set above the palate yields the retention of the nectar
type: Yielding
label: Die über den Gaumen gelegte Zunge bringt das Zurückhalten des Nektars hervor @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.42 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.51-52 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The contact at the palate is attested, and what it is said to do is stop a descent. It is not bound to a phase of breathing anywhere in the chapter, and it is not said to carry anything upward. The same holds for the seal at the throat, which is described as closing off a downward flow. A scheme that pairs the palate with inhalation and with upward carriage takes a stopping and reports it as a conveyance. See prima-materia#28.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Khecarī
within tradition: Haṭhayoga
yields capacity: The retention of the descending nectar

Kinyambi, the water that was to prevent an ordinary death
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kinyambi, das Wasser gegen den gewöhnlichen Tod @de
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, p. 292
definition: In eighteen eighty-five men came from Luanda with the story of a fish that begged not to be killed and promised that whoever drank the water from its mouth, or water it had lain in, would never die by fair means or from natural causes, but only by witchcraft. The water was hawked through the country and widely bought, even at San Salvador.
note: The corpus notes that the promise conceded almost nothing, since every death is in any case attributed to witchcraft, and that it was nonetheless a great success. That is a claim that discriminates almost nothing by construction, and the transmission that made it is the one that noticed.
note: The outcome is the reason the node stands beside pmc:Kiyoka: when it was seen that the purchasers died like ordinary mortals, the traffic ceased. The same corpus, thirteen years earlier and in the same districts, had recorded a failure that was explained away instead. The two responses to a failed promise stand two pages apart, and neither is the rule of the transmission.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Protocol: the promise of the general burning
type: Testing
label: Protokoll: das Versprechen des allgemeinen Verbrennens @de
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, pp. 290-292
definition: A protocol against the claim carried by the movement of about eighteen hundred and seventy-two, that the destruction of every charged thing would end sickness and death.
note: The case is the movement itself and is entered as one case and not as a count. What the source records is that the deaths went on as before and that the people themselves drew that conclusion; it gives no number, no period and no comparison, so the deviation is qualitative and rests on the summary of one resident observer.
note: The response to the failure is the part worth keeping. The claim was not withdrawn: the failure was assigned to hidden charms, an unobservable condition that can absorb any outcome, and the theory was left standing. That is the same move the transmission makes at the level of a single charged thing in pmc:FailureIsSulkinessOrLostPower, carried out at the scale of a country.
case count: 1
counter-search: Counter-search found nothing
counter-search note: Searched for a second and independent record of the outcome of the kiyoka movement in the other works opened in this run: the term does not occur in Weeks 1914 or in Dennett 1906; it occurs once in Weeks, Folk-Lore vol. XX, pp. 57-58, but there as a quotation from the same compiler's dictionary appendix of 1895, pp. 848-849, and therefore not as a second witness. Nothing was found that reports the movement as having succeeded, and nothing that gives a count of deaths on either side.
examination state: Cases with deviation
examined by: prima-materia compiler, from the wording of Bentley 1900, vol. I, pp. 290-292, with the search stated in the counter-search note
falsified by: A district in which the general destruction of charged things was carried out and sickness and death did not cease.
protocol updated: 2026-09-08
tests: Kiyoka, the burning of all the charged things

Knowledge of God presupposes contemplation of nature
type: Presupposing
label: Gotteserkenntnis setzt Naturschau voraus @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Knowledge of God
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Contemplation of nature
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Kokabel discloses the constellations
type: Attributing
label: Kokabel offenbart die Sternbilder @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: The constellations
ascribed to: Kokabel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Kokabel discloses the signs of the stars
type: Attributing
label: Kokabel offenbart die Zeichen der Sterne @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
note: Stands in the position the Ethiopic fills with the constellations.
ascribed capacity: Signs of the stars
ascribed to: Kokabel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Kumulipo
type: Conceptualizing
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 1, the prose note
definition: The chant the transmission names as an ancient prayer for the dedication of a high chief: a birth chant that establishes rank by reciting a descent that runs from the beginning of the world to the living. What it is held to accomplish is therefore a standing, not a cure or a protection.
note: The prose note prefixed to the chant makes two datable claims beside the genealogical ones: that the chant was recited to Alapai-wahine at Koko on Oahu while Keeaumoku lay dying, and that it is the chant Puou recited to Cook at the heiau of Hikiau at Kealakekua. Those are historical assertions and not claims of efficacy, and they are the only part of the text that an outside record could meet or miss.
note: The text this edition rests on is disputed, and the dispute is not entered as a node because neither side was read at the wording in this run. It stands at prima-materia#472.
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The left-hand path defined by its goal, with two branches differing in method
type: Originating
label: Der linke Pfad, über sein Ziel bestimmt, mit zwei nach der Methode unterschiedenen Zweigen @de
date: 1997
source: S. E. Flowers, Lords of the Left-Hand Path: A History of Spiritual Dissent (Smithville 1997), in the chapter setting out the criteria and the two branches
definition: The claim that the left-hand path is constituted by the goal of self-deification rather than by any particular practice, and that it falls into two branches: an immanent one, materialistic in outlook and pronounced in its transgression, and a transcendental one, centred on intellect and eternal forms.
note: That is the case this graph was given a separate method axis for. In the same work the goal is held constant across both branches while the degree of transgression varies between them — an author varying one axis and holding the other fixed, without drawing the axes. See prima-materia#52 and prima-materia#67.
note: The passage that matters most for this record is the one that denies a methodological definition outright. The source states that there are no categorical methodological proscriptions on the path in any of its traditions, eastern or western, and that methods are chosen pragmatically; the antinomian element is described as often strong, not as constitutive. The author who is usually cited as fixing the path by transgression therefore says the opposite of what he is cited for.
note: The transcendental branch is the standing candidate for the quadrant that a one-axis scheme cannot name: a goal of self-deification without transgression as its means. Whether it actually sits there is not settled by this node and is the question of prima-materia#72.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: The old distinction of the Indian tantric traditions, reported as though the two-criteria definition were carried by them rather than formulated in 1997.
originated by: Stephen E. Flowers

Legal action presupposes the poison oracle
type: Presupposing
label: Die Rechtsverfolgung setzt das Giftorakel voraus @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 164
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is stated flatly and is not a matter of degree: the action cannot be brought. The passage dates from the period of the monograph, in which the declarations of the oracle had already ceased to be recognized as evidence in the courts the administration had set up, so the necessity is the transmission's own and not the colonial law's.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Legal action cannot be taken without a decision of the poison oracle.
dependent step: One fowl must die and the other live
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Consulting the poison oracle
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The published system is a stage of revelation, not the system
type: Cautioning
label: Das veröffentlichte System ist eine Enthüllungsstufe, nicht das System @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 274
definition: The recorders state once and for all that what they print represents one stage of the revelations granted to initiates of high standing who were not themselves responsible for the calculations concerning this part of the sky, and that the stage is deliberately distorted in both directions.
note: A caution that cuts against the account carrying it, which is why it is held as a node. It makes the text unfalsifiable in the direction its later readers wanted: any discrepancy can be assigned to the withheld stage. It also means the article cannot be cited as the Dogon system without citing this sentence, and the reception has cited it without.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Light knowledge
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The lightning-struck is taken as elected
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der vom Blitz Getroffene gilt als erwählt @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fols. 6v-7r, on the camascas
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
definition: When a man struck by lightning is left alive, injured but living, he is held to be as if divinely chosen for the service of the huacas. The earlier report gives the claim in the first person of the transmission: those called camascas said that the grace and virtue they had was received from the Thunder — that when lightning fell and left a man in terror, he said on coming to himself that the Thunder had shown him that art, whether curing with herbs or giving answers to what was asked; and the same was said of a man who escaped a river or a great danger.
note: The two do not say the same thing about what is received. The later gives a status — he is as if elected. The earlier gives a content — the Thunder showed him an art, and names two arts. The difference is recorded rather than merged, because a status can be conferred by the community after the fact and a taught art cannot.
note: Two recorders, forty-six years apart, in different regions, on different sides of the colonial administration, one writing in Cuzco and one in the archdiocese of Lima, give the same claim. Neither cites the other. This is the best-attested single claim in the file, and the only one for which the internal date spread is wide enough to be worth stating.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Whether the limbs must be traversed in order
type: Disputing
label: Ob die Glieder der Reihe nach zu durchlaufen sind @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.29
source: Vyāsa, Yogabhāṣya on Yogasūtra II.29
definition: A disagreement about whether the eight limbs form a sequence that must be climbed. The sūtra that names them enumerates and says nothing about order; the commentarial layer introduces the categories of outer and inner limb, and later teaching hardens these into a rule of practice.
note: The disagreement is not between two traditions but between a base text and its readers, which is the commonest shape a dispute takes in this collection and the easiest to lose, because the readers usually win by default.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The eight limbs

Practice of the limbs yields the light of knowledge
type: Yielding
label: Die Übung der Glieder bringt das Leuchten der Erkenntnis hervor @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.28
note: The sūtra makes the arising conditional on the wearing away of impurity, which is itself said to come from the practice. The condition is part of the claim and is not to be dropped when the claim is quoted.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Practice of the limbs
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga
yields capacity: The light of knowledge

Love presupposes apatheia, and knowledge presupposes love
type: Presupposing
label: Liebe setzt Apatheia voraus, Erkenntnis die Liebe @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 81
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 84
note: The chain is stated as generation and not as sequence: each term is the child or the flower of the one before it. That is why the strength here is necessity, and why a consequence can be quoted at all.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Love is called the offspring of apatheia and is said to keep the door to the contemplation of created things, so that without it the door is not passed.
dependent step: Love
dependent step: Contemplation of nature
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Love
prior step: Apatheia
within tradition: Desert monasticism

A contested declaration is decided by a snake
type: Conceptualizing
label: Eine bestrittene Erklärung entscheidet eine Schlange @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 99
definition: The maidens who wish to attend the dancers are called by name and each declares that she has never had carnal intercourse with a man. Anyone may challenge the declaration. If the challenged maiden is silent she is held not to be a maiden; if she repeats the declaration and bites a snakeskin or the effigy of a snake and the challenger then keeps silence, her declaration is held true. If the challenge is repeated the challenger must bite the snake too; if he does not, his challenge is held a slander. If he does, the decision is held in abeyance until a snake decides it by biting the one who gave false testimony, as the corpus says a snake will surely do.
note: It is also the only ordeal in this file in which both parties are put at risk, and the only one in which the transmission provides that the accuser may lose by refusing the same test.
note: The most nearly falsifiable procedure in this file. It has a named outcome, a named agent, and a defined pair of contestants, and it does not resolve until the outcome occurs. What it does not have is a term, and that is the whole difference between it and the Sun dance promise on the node above: the verdict of the snake can be waited for indefinitely, so no length of silence tells against it.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Not to spit in the presence of one skilled in the art
type: Cautioning
label: Nicht spucken in Gegenwart eines Kundigen @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 31
definition: The witness reports that a person would not dare to spit in the presence of anyone he feared might be disposed to injure him, if that person had a reputation for skill in this art.
note: A caution that names its own detection problem: the material the art needs is produced involuntarily, so the guard is against being present rather than against acting.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Makutu
within tradition: Māori transmission

Mana
type: Conceptualizing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 54 and 62
definition: An efficacy that belongs to someone. In the passages read it is always somebody's: a father's, which may inspire the son so that he becomes the living representative of that mana and of the karakia with it; or an opponent's, which is asked for by name in an invocation before a stroke is made.
note: What the witness does not show is the thing the term is famous for elsewhere. In these passages mana is never a quantity of impersonal force at large in the world; it is held, inherited, represented, and asked for from a named holder. The reading that made it an impersonal power belongs to a later literature and to a different archipelago, and it is not entered here because that literature has not yet been opened at the wording. See prima-materia#103 for the origination and prima-materia#105 for the philological dispute over the word itself.
within tradition: Māori transmission

The journey places the awareness away from the body
type: Situating
label: Die Reise verortet das Bewusstsein außerhalb des Körpers @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Displaced
situated node: The drinking of wine and the mang of Wishtasp
situation ground: The body stays on the carpet and is watched for seven days by named persons, while what travels sees, is addressed and is guided elsewhere, and returns to that body on the seventh day. The transmission does not treat the two as one place at any point of the account.

The substance may remain cool
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Substanz kann kühl bleiben @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 4
definition: The doctrine holds that a man may carry the substance and never use it: it may remain inoperative, cool, throughout his life, and a man whose witchcraft never functions is hardly counted a witch. In practice the question asked of the oracles is never whether a man is a witch but whether at this moment he is bewitching the questioner.
note: The clause is what keeps the post-mortem from telling against the inheritance rule, and it belongs in the record beside that rule for exactly that reason. A finding of the substance where no injury was ever ascribed costs the doctrine nothing, and the absence of the substance is the only outcome that decides anything.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Witchcraft passes to the children of the same sex
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Hexerei geht auf die Kinder desselben Geschlechts über @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 2-3
definition: The substance is held to be transmitted by unilinear descent from parent to child of the same sex: all the sons of a male witch are witches and none of his daughters, all the daughters of a female witch are witches and none of her sons.
note: The claim is checkable in a way few in this graph are, because the transmission itself draws consequences from it in practice and then declines the widest of them: in theory every clansman of a proven witch would be one, and in practice only close paternal kinsmen are so regarded.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Witchcraft as a substance in the body
type: Conceptualizing
label: Hexerei als Substanz im Leib @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 1-2
definition: Mangu, described as an oval blackish swelling attached to the edge of the liver and lying beneath the xiphoid cartilage, in which small objects are sometimes said to be found. A witch performs no rite, utters no spell and possesses no medicines: the act is held to proceed from the substance itself. The location is known because the substance was formerly extracted by autopsy.
note: The recorder adds that he believes the organ in question to be the small intestine in certain digestive periods. That is his identification and not the transmission's, and it is recorded here as his.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The mind-made body is a displaced locus
type: Situating
label: Der geistgemachte Körper ist ein verlagerter Ort @de
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta, DN i.77 (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Displaced
situated node: Mind-made body
situation ground: The source has a second body, complete in its faculties, produced from this one and going where this one does not. That is the criterion for the displaced value; whether anything of the sort occurs is a separate question and not this one.

The efficacy of a karakia presupposes its repetition without error
type: Presupposing
label: Die Wirksamkeit einer Karakia setzt die fehlerfreie Wiederholung voraus @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 11
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is quotable. The same sentence is the tradition's own falsifying condition and is what makes the claim examinable at all; the protocol stands at pmc:RecitationExactnessExamination in convergences/recitation-exactness.ttl.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The witness says that to make an error, or even to hesitate, in repeating a karakia was held fatal to its efficacy. The consequence is stated for the whole address and not for a part of it, and hesitation is named alongside error.
dependent step: The efficacy of the karakia
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Repetition without error or hesitation
within tradition: Māori transmission

The stations abide
type: Situating
label: Die Stationen bleiben @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on the stations
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Abiding
situated node: Stations
situation ground: The handbooks have the station held by the one who reaches it, which is what makes the enumeration an ascent rather than a list of episodes.

The stations are attained by effort
type: Situating
label: Die Stationen werden durch Anstrengung erlangt @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on the stations
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: By effort
situated node: Stations
situation ground: The handbooks describe these as attained by effort and enumerated in a set order. The order is why prerequisite claims are found here and not at the other end of the axis.

The planted cane as a report of a death elsewhere
type: Testing
label: Das gepflanzte Rohr als Meldung eines Todes andernorts @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part II, chapter 7
definition: A protocol the transmission states for itself and states completely: a plant in one place is held to report the death or survival of a person in another, and both readings are fixed before the event. The claim is about a correspondence between two separated states of affairs, so it is decidable in a way that a claim about an inner state is not.
note: Entered as a protocol rather than as a remark because the tradition supplies every part a protocol needs and supplies it in advance: the observable, the two readings, the reader, and the moment of reading. What it does not supply is a case in which the reading was checked against the death.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A case in which the cane dried while the person who planted it lived, or sprouted again while he was dead, with the state of the plant recorded before the news arrived.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: The cane planted in the middle of the house

The carvers excused themselves from the commission
type: Cautioning
label: Die Schnitzer entzogen sich dem Auftrag @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XL, pp. 76-77
definition: A warning that comes from the practitioners and not from the priesthood. The witness reports that the craftsmen always excused themselves from the work, because they believed that either they or someone of their household would die, or would suffer heart attacks or strokes.
note: This is the rarer kind of caution: not a rule laid on the practice from above but a refusal by the people who would have to carry it out, with the harm they expected named. The named harms are sudden, bodily and unrelated to the work, which is what makes the belief hard to disappoint.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The carving of idols in the month Mol
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

The conjuring frees from the ills foretold
type: Yielding
label: Die Abwehr befreit von den geweissagten Übeln @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XXXVII, pp. 65-66
note: Entered with its own weakness stated, because the weakness is the finding. The witness names no sign by which the freeing would be recognised, no interval within which the ills would otherwise have come, and no consequence of omitting the procedure. The ills themselves are drawn wide enough to include drought and political discord together. Nothing in the passage marks out an outcome the claim would exclude, and the harvest rule keeps signs of success apart from conditions of failure exactly because a transmission can be rich in the first and empty of the second. This one is.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The conjuring of the evils foretold for an Ix year
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission
yields capacity: Being freed from the ills indicated as to come

The averting of the foretold ills is credited to the god, not to the celebrants
type: Situating
label: Die Abwehr der Übel wird dem Gott zugeschrieben, nicht den Feiernden @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: The conjuring of the evils foretold for an Ix year
situation ground: The witness does not say that the offerings work, but that they were held to be very acceptable to the idols and remedial through that acceptance. The efficacy is placed with the receiving party; the celebrants supply the occasion.

The mat and the throne presuppose understanding the language of Zuyua
type: Presupposing
label: Matte und Thron setzen das Verstehen der Sprache von Zuyua voraus @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 91-93
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is quotable and because the text sets no lesser outcome beside it. There is no passage naming a second attempt, a number of chiefs to be examined, or a remedy for failure.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The source states the consequence for the whole procedure and states it as death, not as exclusion: those who die are those who do not understand, those who live will understand it. The punishments are named in a sequence. The hands of those who fail are bound before them to a wooden collar and they are pulled along with the cord; they are taken to the house of the ruler; they shall be hung by the neck, the tips of their tongues shall be cut off, their eyes shall be torn out. The chapter adds an omen for the case that the chiefs of the towns do not understand: ill-omened is the star adorning the night.
dependent step: The mat and the throne
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Understanding the language of Zuyua
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Remaining unharmed presupposes not breaking a fast once begun
type: Presupposing
label: Die Unversehrtheit setzt voraus, ein begonnenes Fasten nicht zu brechen @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XL, p. 70
note: The evil is not specified, which is why this prerequisite is examinable only as far as its own wording reaches: a rule whose penalty has no described shape cannot be found to have failed. That is a property of the passage and is worth having on the record beside the passages that do name a shape.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The witness states it as the reason the fasts were not broken: those who began these fasts did not dare to break them, for they believed it would bring evil upon them or upon their houses. The consequence attaches to the breaking of a fast begun and not to the omission of the fast.
dependent step: Remaining unharmed in person and household
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The fast before the new year
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Coming out alive presupposes returning the torch unconsumed
type: Presupposing
label: Das lebende Verlassen setzt die unverbrauchte Rückgabe der Fackel voraus @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part II, chapter 9
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is reported for a named case with the condition quotable beside it, not because a rule is pronounced. Where a transmission gives the precedent instead of the rule, the precedent is what a later reader can check.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The transmission names the case and its outcome. Hun-Hunahpú and Vucub-Hunahpú burned the torch and the cigars through, and were sacrificed at once and buried at Pucbal-Chah. The consequence is not stated as a rule but exhibited as a precedent, and the later pair act on it.
dependent step: Coming out of the houses of Xibalba alive
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The ordeal of the Dark House
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Eating the medicines yields the seeing
type: Yielding
label: Das Essen der Medizinen bringt das Sehen hervor @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 88-89
note: The claim is not circular in the sense SPEC §11 forbids: the medicines are vegetable preparations named by their plants and the capacity is a perception ascribed to the eater, so the practice is not the capacity under another name.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Eating the medicines of the witch-doctors
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission
yields capacity: Seeing witchcraft and prophesying

Each degree presupposes the one below it
type: Presupposing
label: Jeder Grad setzt den darunter liegenden voraus @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 164-170
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity, and the reason is a property of the passages read rather than of the society. The report sets the sequence, names the payment and the feasts due before each step, and says nothing about what happens to a man who takes a degree out of turn or without the preparation. A consequence would raise this to a necessity; none was found in the pages read. See prima-materia#119.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Initiation into the second degree
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Initiation into the first degree
within tradition: Midewiwin

Whether the society precedes European contact
type: Disputing
label: Ob die Gesellschaft dem europäischen Kontakt vorausgeht @de
source: Harold Hickerson, The Chippewa and Their Neighbors: A Study in Ethnohistory (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970), p. 63, as quoted in Kidd 1981, p. 42
source: Kenneth E. Kidd, A Radiocarbon Date on a Midewiwin Scroll from Burntside Lake, Ontario, Ontario Archaeology 35 (1981), pp. 41-43
definition: A disagreement about the age of the society. One side reads it as a nativistic formation of the contact period, assembled from older elements in response to epidemic, trade and mission. The other points to a birchbark scroll fragment from an archaeological context, radiocarbon dated to about the middle of the sixteenth century, which is earlier than any documented European contact with the central Algonkians.
note: Held as a node because everything else in this file depends on it. If the society is a formation of the contact period, its agreement with anything the graph already holds has to be weighed differently, and the value at pm:contactRoute changes with the outcome.
note: Only one side was read at the wording in this run. The dating, the laboratory reference and the argument against the nativistic reading were read in the note of nineteen eighty-one; the nativistic reading itself was read only as that note quotes it, and the paper of nineteen sixty-two that states it in full was not obtained. See prima-materia#118.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: Midewiwin

The origin of the society and the chain of its transmission
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Ursprung der Gesellschaft und die Kette ihrer Übertragung @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 166-167
definition: The account by which the society traces itself: the culture hero instructed the otter in its mysteries, gave him the sacred rattle and the drum, shot the shell into his body, and conferred the secrets on him.
note: The chain runs through an animal and not through a lineage of men, which is why the society's own account of its age cannot be read as a genealogy and does not bear on the dispute recorded above.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Mī'gis
type: Conceptualizing
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 167
definition: The sacred shell of the society, said in the origin account to have been shot into the body of the first recipient so that he might have immortality and be able to confer the secrets on his kinsmen.
note: The shell is not a token of membership but the vehicle of the transfer: the account makes the entry of the shell into the body the act by which the capacity passes, and the same act is repeated at every degree.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Mpangu, the inherited prohibition
type: Conceptualizing
label: Mpangu, das ererbte Verbot @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 245-246
definition: A prohibition inherited in a family, with a penalty stated in advance and matched in kind to the thing forbidden: hippopotamus flesh and elephantiasis, a fish with opal eyes and diseased eyes, the great bull frog and bulging eyes, spotted animals and a spotted skin disease. A parent who keeps the prohibition is said to bless his children with immunity from that disease and one who breaks it to curse them with liability to it.
note: The corpus records its own counter-witness at the same place, and the node exists as much for that as for the rule. Some people told the recorder there are no such prohibitions in their families; and a well-informed man told him that anyone could eat what his inherited prohibition forbade without evil consequence, provided he ate it fearlessly and did not boast of it afterwards. That is a stated condition of failure for the prohibition itself, and it is stated by a member of the transmission.
note: The same corpus notes that the animals under prohibition are not treated as omens and are not respected: they are killed like any others and only not eaten.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Nahualli
type: Conceptualizing
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo I, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The word as the recorder of sixteen twenty-nine glosses it: one veiled or disguised under the appearance of an animal. He connects the name with calendars he had found among such people, which distribute the names of animals across the days.
note: The gloss is the recorder's and is given in Spanish; the Nahuatl word is his lemma. That he offers an etymology at all is worth noting, because it shows he had the word from the people and not from a predecessor's book.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

The animal is assigned when the child is born
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Tier wird bei der Geburt zugeteilt @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo I, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The assignment is made at birth and not chosen later: the child is dedicated or subjected to the animal at the time it is born, on the strength of an agreement the recorder attributes to the parents.
note: The recorder frames the agreement as a pact with the devil, which is his own theology and not the tradition's account of itself. What is left when that frame is subtracted is the timing — at birth — and the fact that someone else contracts it for the child. Both are entered; the frame is not.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

The efficacy of the ceremony presupposes exactness in the songs
type: Presupposing
label: Die Wirksamkeit der Zeremonie setzt die Genauigkeit der Gesänge voraus @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 41, p. 24
note: The consequence is graded rather than absolute: an error may be fatal, and only in some cases does a single syllable do irreparable harm. That grading is worth keeping, because the parallel claims elsewhere are usually reported without it.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The witness says an error made in singing a song may be fatal to the efficacy of a ceremony, and that in some cases the error of a single syllable works an irreparable injury.
dependent step: The efficacy of the ceremony
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Exactness of the sung words
within tradition: Navajo ceremonial transmission

The audience as the detector of the error
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Zuhörerschaft als Fehlerinstanz @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 42, pp. 24-25
definition: The practice, at the public night ceremony, that many of those present know the songs well enough to catch a deviation, whereupon the ceremony is broken off as fruitless and the gathering disperses.
note: The part of the claim that makes it examinable rather than merely asserted. The tradition does not only say that an error destroys the effect; it names who notices, when, and what visibly follows. Neither of the two parallel witnesses in this bundle carries that.
within tradition: Navajo ceremonial transmission

One leaf annuls every charged thing in the house
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Blatt hebt jedes geladene Ding im Haus auf @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 241
definition: A leaf of the ngindu-ngindu tree is held to counteract the influence of all charms and charged things, so that a practitioner who finds one in his house must reinvigorate everything he owns, the presence of the leaf having rendered them useless.
note: Recorded because it is a physical and checkable condition of failure rather than a moral one, and because it is general: it does not annul one charged thing but the whole stock of them. What it shares with the other failure conditions is that it is discovered after the fact.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The successor within nine years
type: Presupposing
label: Der Nachfolger binnen neun Jahren @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 141, pp. 382-383
note: Entered at stated necessity: a period is named and the outcome of letting it pass is named with it. A dated deadline with a stated consequence is the material a condition of failure is made of, and this graph holds few of them.
note: The observed cost of an unfilled interval is reported separately in the same section: the free clan spirits try one person after another and make them abnormal, sometimes for years. The recorder watched such a case daily for nearly two months among the Khingan Tungus.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The new shaman who gathers the spirits left free must appear not later than nine years after the shaman's death; otherwise there will be many people suffering from the spirits.
dependent step: The formal recognition
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Mastering of spirits
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The verdict rule of the ordeal
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Urteilsregel des Ordals @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 263
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, pp. 276-277
definition: Vomiting acquits and retention condemns, with a confirming step: should the accused vomit three times he is given a fourth dose, and if he vomits that he is held to have proved beyond doubt that he is not a witch. He does not clear himself if he fails to vomit, or if there are signs of blood or of green matter in what he brings up, or if he has bad diarrhoea; in that case he is brought out of the hut and killed and the body left on the hill.
note: A fourth dose after three successful vomits is a repetition of the trial by the transmission itself, and the graph holds only one other case of a prescribed repetition, the second consultation of the Zande poison oracle. The difference is that the Zande control must reverse the first answer and this one must repeat it.
note: The second witness records that the rule is not the same everywhere, and the variants are the finding. In some districts the vomit is examined and guilt inferred from something in it; in others the man who has vomited must run down into the valley and up the next hill, which he is usually in no condition to do, so that the vomiting has proved nothing. The same witness states that in some districts the ordeal-giver loses his fee if the accused vomits and may be punished, and that he is sometimes bribed to prepare a mild dose that will ensure one.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The ordeal yields the detection of the witch
type: Yielding
label: Das Ordal bringt das Aufdecken des ndoki hervor @de
source: John H. Weeks, Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People, in Folk-Lore, vol. XX (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1909), p. 51
note: Entered because this is the form of claim the graph already holds from another African transmission, at pmc:BengeYieldsIdentificationOfTheWitch in traditions/azande.ttl, and because the two differ in a way that matters: there the poison is given to fowls and the question is put twice in opposite form, here the accused drinks it himself and no reversal is prescribed. Whether the two may be counted as separate witnesses is not decided here and is held as an issue; the contact route of this transmission is entered as documented on other grounds, and that value governs.
attested by: Field attestation
by practice: Bau kia nkasa, the ordeal by the bark
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks in the districts of San Salvador and Ngombe Lutete and published in 1909; given in Kikongo, printed in English with the Kikongo terms.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission
yields capacity: The detection of the witch

Nkisi a kiniambe, the cult that promised no death
type: Conceptualizing
label: Nkisi a kiniambe, der Kult, der den Tod aufhob @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 234
source: John H. Weeks, Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People, in Folk-Lore, vol. XX (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1909), p. 57
definition: A practitioner who appeared with a new charged thing at the towns round San Salvador and held a rite in the form of a communion, with slices of cassava and peanuts in palm wine. The recipient paid first, one string of beads for a child and five for an adult, then confessed every evil desire he had had for the sickness or death of another, then received the cassava, the peanut and a drop of the wine, and with them the promise that he should never die.
note: The name is analysed by the recorder himself: the word for God on the Lower Congo is Nzambi and the form kiniambe is an upper river name for God, so a new charged thing was made under a borrowed divine name.
note: The same recorder gives two different outcomes in two works, and the discrepancy is the finding. In nineteen hundred and nine he writes that when the people died the practitioner said it was because they had not made a full confession, and that he and his accomplices made a large sum out of the fear of death. In nineteen fourteen he writes that when the clients died like others the bubble burst and that cult and its charged thing fell into disfavour and neglect. Immunisation and collapse are the two possible responses to a failed promise, and here one witness reports both about one cult; the file records the discrepancy rather than choosing between them.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The charged thing performs the office it was made for
type: Yielding
label: Das geladene Ding verrichtet sein Amt @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 235
note: Not circular in the sense SPEC §11 forbids: the practice named is the composing and charging of an object by a named practitioner, and the capacity is an effect in the world outside it, on a thief, a gun, a disease or a birth. The transmission also states what is to be concluded when the effect fails to appear, and that stands on the neighbouring node.
attested by: Field attestation
by practice: Kimenga, the sacrifice that renews the charged thing
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo at San Salvador and in the Ngombe Lutete district, mostly unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms in the text while the accounts themselves are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission
yields capacity: Nkisi, the charged object

Nlongo, the imposed personal prohibition
type: Conceptualizing
label: Nlongo, das auferlegte persönliche Verbot @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 246-247
definition: A prohibition laid on one person by the practitioner who treats him, sometimes for life and sometimes for a stated term. The corpus states that the thing forbidden bears no relation to the complaint and is chosen at the practitioner's discretion, and it gives instances: a woman with fits forbidden to look in a mirror or at her reflection in a stream, men forbidden cassava in any form for the rest of their lives. Eating the forbidden thing is said to break the protective spell and to bring the complaint back. Where the prohibition is for a term, say six months, the practitioner removes it at the end and takes his fee.
note: Held apart from pmc:Mpangu because the two differ in exactly the way that matters here: the inherited prohibition names its penalty in advance and in kind, and the imposed one names no relation at all between the forbidden thing and the disease. The second cannot fail, since any return of the complaint is evidence that something was eaten.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

No count against chance in the old sources
type: Cautioning
label: Keine Zählung gegen den Zufall in den alten Quellen @de
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 313-336
source: John Cassian, Collationes I.20-22
definition: A negative finding, held as a node so that it is not lost: the old traditions test a claimed movement by its origin and its fruits, and none of those examined here tests a claimed capacity by counting hits against the rate obtainable by guessing.
note: Any protocol that counts outcomes against a base rate is a modern addition and is to be recorded as one, not as the recovery of an ancient method.
attested by: Compiler inference
cautions about: The examination of thoughts

Noa
type: Conceptualizing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 26
definition: The state of being free or common, that is, not under the restriction of tapu. The witness states that persons and things under tapu can be brought into this state by ceremonies, so that the two are not fixed conditions but ends of an operation.
within tradition: Māori transmission

The journey states no sensory anchoring
type: Situating
label: Die Reise gibt keine Sinnesbindung an @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 55-56
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Anchoring not stated
situated node: The journey made while the body lies still
situation ground: The passage was read for this question. It describes the practitioner from outside — he casts himself down, grows black in the face, lies as if dead, sweats — and says nothing about what he perceives while he lies there. An outside description of immobility is not a statement about the sensory channel, and reading one into the other would put a coordinate in the record that the source does not carry.

The journey is a displaced locus
type: Situating
label: Die Reise ist ein verlagerter Ort @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 55-56
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Displaced
situated node: The journey made while the body lies still
situation ground: The practice is named for it: the journey is made while the body lies still, and a token is brought back from where the body was not. The placement records the account the tradition gives and not a verdict on it — the same compilation carries three positions on what actually lies there, and its author rejects the departure of the soul on doctrinal grounds rather than from anything he was told. See pmc:WhatLiesStillWhileHeTravels.

Nothing tied in a bundle may enter the town
type: Cautioning
label: Nichts Gebündeltes darf in den Ort @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 220-221
definition: One prohibition is attached to the town charm and the corpus says it must be scrupulously observed: nothing tied in a bundle may enter the town, or the charm becomes ineffective. Women returning with firewood untie their bundles before they reach the post, men carrying thatching grass unfasten them, carriers loosen their cords or make a wide detour, and people take off their girdles.
note: Recorded because it is the clearest case in the file of a condition that is public, physical, continuously in force, and observable by anyone. It is also the condition most easily satisfied after the fact: any misfortune in the town can be traced to a bundle somebody carried in.
attested by: Field attestation
cautions about: Nkind' a evata, the setting up of a town charm
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo at San Salvador and in the Ngombe Lutete district, mostly unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms in the text while the accounts themselves are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The office presupposes the fast
type: Presupposing
label: Das Amt setzt das Fasten voraus @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity, and the reason is a property of the passage. The source sets the fast, its lengths and its abstinences, and says nothing about what befalls a man who takes the office without it. A stated consequence would raise this; none stands in what was read. The variation between one month, six and a year is itself against reading a necessity into it.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Three ways into the office
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The fast before entering a major office
within tradition: Andean transmission

The drinking yields the answer
type: Yielding
label: Das Trinken bringt die Antwort hervor @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo VI, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Drinking the ololiuhqui in order to question it
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission
yields capacity: What the oracle is asked for

The five tattvas of the heroic rite
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die fünf Tattvas des heroischen Ritus @de
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra I.58-59 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
source: Mahānirvāṇa Tantra I.61 (trans. A. Avalon, Tantra of the Great Liberation, London 1913)
definition: The five elements of the rite belonging to heroic practice, named in the source as wine, meat, fish, parched grain, and the union of man and woman.
note: The fourth element is parched grain and not a ritual gesture. Wilson renders the same list in 1832 with mudrā glossed as gesticulations of the fingers and maithuna as women; the divergence is his and not the text's, and it matters because grain makes that element a food where a gesture would make it an act. Recorded so that the current gloss can be checked against a verse instead of against another summary. See prima-materia#53.
note: The same passage carries its own caution, and the caution is not a Western addition: the source says that the men of this age, being greedy and lustful, will neglect the discipline, drink for the pleasure of it, and lose the distinction of right and wrong. The warning against the rite stands inside the text that prescribes it.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Knowledge of another mind is exercised in withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Die Kenntnis fremden Bewusstseins wird in abgezogener Vertiefung geübt @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.19
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.20
note: The sūtra immediately following adds a limit that belongs to the claim: what supports the notion is not thereby known, being out of the practitioner's reach. The capacity is bounded in the base text and not only by its readers.
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Knowledge of another mind
situation ground: The sūtra reads pratyayasya paracittajñānam: knowledge of another mind from the presented notion, with saṃyama carried over from the sūtras before it. The state is the operator's, fixed at III.1-4, and the placement is inherited from the binding the source itself makes.

Entering another body is a displaced locus
type: Situating
label: Der Eintritt in einen anderen Körper ist ein verlagerter Ort @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Displaced
situated node: Entering another body
situation ground: The sūtra has the seat of awareness transferred into a body other than the practitioner's own. The awareness is thereby located away from the body it started in, which is the criterion this value names.

Entering another body is performed in withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Der Eintritt in einen anderen Körper geschieht in abgezogener Vertiefung @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Entering another body
situation ground: The sūtra makes the entry follow from saṃyama, and the state saṃyama names is fixed by III.1-4. The placement is inherited from the operator the source itself binds the capacity to, and not read off the capacity.

Whether the paralysis is universal and its noticing rare
type: Testing
label: Ob die Lähmung allgemein ist und ihr Bemerken selten @de
definition: An examination of the posited claim in two parts: whether the motor paralysis of the sleep threshold is a feature of every sleeper, and whether the rate at which it is noticed is low enough that a universal mechanism could go unreported.
note: A word on why the claim is posited and not sourced. It comes from an unpublished method draft, which SPEC §10 excludes as a witness, and the exclusion is not a formality: a draft that entered as a source could be confirmed by the very research it was written from. Holding it as a posit keeps the direction right, and the direction is that the draft is examined and never grounded.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, and everything below is written in the voice of a finding. It is not one. The notes record what the evidence appeared to show before any search for opposing work was made, and they are kept in that voice because rewriting them would destroy the reasoning that has to be checked. Read them as the expected result of an examination nobody has finished, not as its outcome. See prima-materia#386.
note: The claim has two halves and they are carried by two different bodies of evidence, which is the reason this protocol is worth entering at all. The universality is a matter of mechanism: the atonia of the relevant sleep stage is produced by an identified transmitter and receptor pathway and is a regular feature of that stage rather than a fault in it. The rarity of noticing is a matter of prevalence: a systematic review over thirty-five studies and more than thirty-six thousand participants finds that some seven and a half per cent of the general population report at least one episode in a lifetime, with markedly higher figures among students and psychiatric samples.
note: The two halves fit, and that is the finding. A mechanism present in every sleeper and an experience reported by roughly one in thirteen are not in contradiction: they are exactly what the claim asserts, namely that what is rare is not the paralysis but the waking awareness that coincides with it. The state is therefore cases without deviation.
note: What this does not settle, and the limits are sharper than the fit. The prevalence figure counts self-reported episodes and not measured ones, so it is a floor for noticing and not a ceiling for occurrence. The mechanism evidence establishes the atonia of the sleep stage and not that every reported episode coincides with it; the two are joined here by the ordinary explanation and not by a study that measured both in the same subjects. And a claim confirmed in this shape says nothing about what any transmission builds on the state, which is the part this graph actually cares about.
base rate: 7.6 per cent of the general population report at least one lifetime episode, aggregated over 35 studies and 36,533 participants; 28.3 per cent among students and 31.9 per cent among psychiatric patients
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not carried. Neither the prevalence review nor the mechanism study was checked against later work, and a systematic review of 2011 is old enough that the question is not idle.
evidence from: B. A. Sharpless and J. P. Barber, Lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis: a systematic review, Sleep Medicine Reviews 15 (2011), no. 5, pp. 311-315, doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2011.01.007
evidence from: P. L. Brooks and J. H. Peever, Identification of the transmitter and receptor mechanisms responsible for REM sleep paralysis, Journal of Neuroscience 32 (2012), pp. 9785-9795, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0482-12.2012
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The protocol assembles two existing bodies of evidence, one on the mechanism and one on the prevalence, and states the joint they leave open
falsified by: A population of ordinary sleepers is found in whom the atonia of the sleep stage is absent; or reported episodes are measured and found not to coincide with it.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The paralysis is present in everyone and only its noticing is rare

Divination by odd and even
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wahrsagung durch gerade und ungerade @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fol. 6v, on the achicoc
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III, on the diviner by maize
definition: The diviner by maize makes small heaps of grains without counting them, then takes one away from one side and one from another, and according as they are left even or odd the lot is good or bad. The earlier report gives the same mechanism under another name and with another material: they cast lots with maize and llama dung, and if they came out even or odd they gave their answers accordingly.
note: In one village a practitioner of this office produced instead a bag of small stones which he said were called by a particular name and that he had inherited them from his grandfather for this purpose. The variant is recorded because it shows the office surviving a change of instrument.
note: Two recorders, forty-six years and several hundred leagues apart, name different practitioners and the same mechanism. The count is deliberately not made before the drawing in the later account, which means the outcome is not determined by anything the diviner knows; that is the same feature the poison-oracle material in this graph rests on, and it is stated here of a maize heap.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The capacities are given no duration
type: Situating
label: Für die Vermögen wird keine Dauer angegeben @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.19
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.26
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.37
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.41
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Duration not stated
situated node: Entering another body
situation ground: The sūtras that carry the capacities of this chapter were read for the question and are silent on it: each names an object of saṃyama and the knowledge or entry that follows, and none says whether what follows passes or remains. The sūtra that weighs the capacities weighs them for what they are worth and not for how long they last.

Penemue discloses bitter and sweet
type: Attributing
label: Penemue offenbart bitter und süß @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:8 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
source: J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford, 1976)
note: Book of Parables; no Aramaic fragment of chapters 37-71 is attested at Qumran.
ascribed capacity: Discernment of bitter and sweet
ascribed to: Penemue
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Penemue discloses writing with ink
type: Attributing
label: Penemue offenbart das Schreiben mit Tinte @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:9 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
source: J.T. Milik, The Books of Enoch: Aramaic Fragments of Qumrân Cave 4 (Oxford, 1976)
note: Book of Parables; no Aramaic fragment of chapters 37-71 is attested at Qumran.
ascribed capacity: Writing with ink
ascribed to: Penemue
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The performance fails if the audience cannot follow
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Vorstellung misslingt, wenn das Publikum nicht folgen kann @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVII, sect. 122, pp. 332-333
definition: Where too many of those present are not susceptible, the audience reacts too slowly and the performance may fail. It may still be carried out formally, as a sequence of well known actions, without attaining its aim. The presence of a single person who remains outside may suffice to disturb the rest.
note: He notes in the same section that a performance staged outside its milieu is psychologically impossible to bring off, because there is no audience cooperating and no purpose in shamanizing, and describes such a staging before an ethnographical society as a farce. That is a warning by the recorder against the conditions under which his own discipline usually saw the thing it described.
note: The condition of failure is located outside the performer, which is rare. The recorder adds that public opinion is nonetheless inclined to see the cause in the shaman, and that this is one of the reasons shamans resort to tricks in order to gain an indifferent audience. Both of those are his reading; the failure and its stated cause are reported.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The performance presupposes the mirror
type: Presupposing
label: Die Vorstellung setzt den Spiegel voraus @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXIII, sect. 99, p. 278
note: Entered at stated necessity because the source states the outcome of the want in plain terms and in the same sentence as the requirement. The substitute is admitted and is said not to be considered as good as the original; that qualification stands here rather than in the strength, because it weakens the object and not the necessity.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Where there is no mirror or its substitute, no performance is possible.
dependent step: Shamanizing
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Toli, the brass mirror
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The two thresholds of polarity and the collapse of the negative one
type: Originating
label: Die zwei Schwellen der Polarität und der Zusammenbruch der negativen @de
date: 1981/1984
source: The Law of One (The Ra Material), session 36.12 (L/L Research, Louisville 1984)
source: The Law of One (The Ra Material), session 78.25 (L/L Research, Louisville 1984)
source: The Law of One (The Ra Material), session 85.11 (L/L Research, Louisville 1984)
source: The Law of One (The Ra Material), sessions 17.32 and 17.33 (L/L Research, Louisville 1984)
definition: The claim that a being becomes harvestable on one of two opposed paths at unequal thresholds — a slight majority of service to others on the one, an approach to totality of service to self on the other, with a region of indifference between them — and that the negative path is nevertheless abandoned at the density of unity, because it rests on an omission and what is not cannot endure.
note: Held as an origination rather than as the teaching of a tradition. The material was produced between 1981 and 1984 by three named people in a stated procedure, and it presents itself as received rather than composed. That presentation is what pm:circulatesAs records; the node makes no claim about the source of the material, only about where the text begins.
note: One caution for anyone opening the passages. The published wording of the omission argument names the wrong polarity at its first occurrence, and the correction is made in the exchange itself; a reader who quotes the sentence as printed quotes a slip. And the passage about abandoning the negative polarity in the early sixth density stands at 36.12, not at 78.25 as an earlier note in prima-materia#62 had it. 78.25 carries the different statement that the two paths must take in each other.
note: The two halves of the claim do not sit easily together, and the record keeps them apart rather than choosing. Read from the thresholds alone the system is a dualism with two valid outcomes; read from the argument about the omission it is a monism in which one outcome is provisional. Whoever cites only the thresholds reports a symmetry the same text withdraws. See prima-materia#69.
circulates as: A cosmology of great antiquity, received from a source outside the authors, rather than a text composed between 1981 and 1984.
originated by: Carla Rueckert as instrument, with Don Elkins as questioner and Jim McCarty as scribe (L/L Research)

Commanding a potency presupposes its songs
type: Presupposing
label: Das Gebieten über eine Potenz setzt ihre Lieder voraus @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 211
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 158 and pp. 158-159
note: Entered at stated necessity: two informants in the same volume make obedience conditional on the songs and not merely customary, and the second witness reports the same rule attached to a particular stone, whose song was transferred with it and was to be sung whenever a request was made of it. The consequence is stated as a condition on the obedience rather than as a punishment, which is the strongest form this corpus uses.
attested by: Field attestation
consequence of skipping: The chosen potency must do as it is directed by the one who chose it, but the chooser must know the songs that belong to it; a man should know the songs, and if he sings them his potency will do as he wishes.
dependent step: Sicun, imparted potency
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Singing the songs that belong to a potency
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The practice presupposes initiation
type: Presupposing
label: Die Praxis setzt die Initiation voraus @de
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka XV
source: Mālinīvijayottaratantra VIII
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Conferring the descent of power
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Initiation
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Breath regulation presupposes firmness in posture
type: Presupposing
label: Atemregulierung setzt Festigkeit in der Haltung voraus @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.1 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The verse opens the breath chapter by requiring that the practitioner first be established in posture and in a measured diet, and that the breath practice then follow the instruction of a teacher. The condition is in the base text, not in a commentary.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Posture
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The prayer of the heart is bound to no state
type: Situating
label: Das Herzensgebet ist an keinen Zustand gebunden @de
source: Philokalia IV, Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness and the Two Ways of Prayer
source: Philokalia IV, Nikephoros the Monk, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Not bound to an anchoring
situated node: The prayer of the heart
situation ground: The prayer is prescribed as continuous, which is the point of it: not a set-apart exercise but something carried through whatever the practitioner is doing. The tradition is not declining the distinction between waking and sleeping; it requires the prayer across it.

The prayer of the heart presupposes watchfulness and guidance
type: Presupposing
label: Das Herzensgebet setzt Wachsamkeit und Führung voraus @de
source: Philokalia I, Hesychios of Sinai, On Watchfulness and Holiness
source: Philokalia IV, Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness and the Two Ways of Prayer
source: Philokalia IV, Nikephoros the Monk, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart
note: The writers of this corpus set watchfulness and the direction of a spiritual father before the prayer, and describe the way as passing from purification through illumination to perfection. The chapter divisions vary between the editions of the individual texts; the works and their titles are given so that the passages can be found in whichever edition is at hand.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The prayer of the heart
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Watchfulness
within tradition: Hesychasm

Prophesying presupposes the eating of medicines
type: Presupposing
label: Das Weissagen setzt das Essen der Medizinen voraus @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 96
note: Entered at stated necessity: the source states a disqualification and not only an order. A novice who has eaten only a few times dances at the seance but does not divine, and the quantity eaten is what the source names as the reason.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: A man who has eaten the medicines only a few times is not qualified to take a prominent part in a seance or to prophesy at it.
dependent step: Seeing witchcraft and prophesying
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Eating the medicines of the witch-doctors
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

What is done when no communication is granted
type: Conceptualizing
label: Was geschieht, wenn keine Mitteilung gewährt wird @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 68
definition: The seeker is to wait until he receives the communication or until he is so exhausted that he cannot wait longer without danger of losing his life. One who receives it returns to his tipi singing a song of victory; one to whom it is not granted is to come away from the quest meekly and as privately as possible.
note: It also fixes the abort condition on the practitioner and not on the clock: the quest ends at exhaustion, not after a set number of days. The corpus read here gives no number of days for this quest, which is the point at which the popular reports of it differ most sharply from it.
note: The passage is the reason this transmission was opened before others in the registry. A procedure that names an exit for its own non-occurrence, and prescribes a different bearing for it, is stating that the non-occurrence happens and is expected. Nothing else read in this run says as plainly that the promised thing may fail to come.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Attending with the qi presupposes the emptying of the heart
type: Presupposing
label: Das Hören mit dem Qi setzt das Leeren des Herzens voraus @de
source: Zhuangzi 4, in James Legge (trans.), The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Tâoism, Part I, Sacred Books of the East vol. XXXIX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), Book IV, par. 2, pp. 208-210
note: Reopened in this run and confirmed at the wording, with one correction. The consequence stood here as a paraphrase of the dialogue and is now quotable from the edition named. What the earlier wording added and the passage does not say is that the hearing which stops at the ears and the mind does not reach the qi at all; the text says the pupil is to wait for the third hearing and that the first two are to rest where they are, which is an instruction and not a statement about what fails to arrive.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The pupil sets out three ways of proceeding and is refused each time; the master answers that he has too many plans, that adhering to them may keep him free from transgression but that this will be all the result, that he cannot in this way produce the transformation he desires, and that all it shows is the mind of a teacher. Only when the pupil says he can go no further and asks for the method is he told that the method is the fasting.
dependent step: Qi
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Fasting of the heart
within tradition: Daoist tradition

The test question
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Prüfungsfrage @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXVI, sections 286 and 288, item 3
alternative label: question d'épreuve @fr
definition: A question put in order to try the perspicacity of the spirits. The transmission classes it with the useless questions and with those put out of curiosity, and states the outcome: to those the spirits do not reply, and they withdraw. The founder warns against them expressly when he sets out how a question is to be framed.
note: The French word épreuve carries both senses in this literature and the transmission uses both: the trial a soul undergoes in an incarnation, which it affirms, and the test question, which it forbids. A translation that renders them alike loses the distinction at the point where it matters most.
within tradition: Spiritism

Protocol on the exactness rule
type: Testing
label: Prüfprotokoll zur Genauigkeitsregel @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 42, pp. 24-25
definition: An attempt to fail the claim that a misrecited ritual utterance does not obtain its effect. The claim is unusually well placed for this, because two of the three traditions name an outward event that follows a lapse, and one of them names who notices it and when.
note: The Navajo witness supplies the sharpest form of the test and it needs no laboratory: at the public ceremony many present know the songs, an error is caught, and the ceremony is broken off as fruitless. The condition can therefore be failed by the tradition's own reporting rather than by an outside measurement, which is what the falsifier below states.
note: The examination is entered at procedure without cases and not at no procedure devised, and the difference is the whole point of the scale. A condition has been stated here; nobody has yet collected the cases against it.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol drawn from the wording of the three witnesses; no cases collected
falsified by: A recorded case, from within one of these transmissions, of a ritual utterance known to have been misrecited and nonetheless reported by that transmission as having obtained its effect; or, on the Navajo side, a recorded public ceremony in which a detected error did not break off the proceeding.
protocol updated: 2026-08-30
tests: The exactness of the recitation is set as the condition of its efficacy

Recognition presupposes a minimum of mastered spirits
type: Presupposing
label: Die Anerkennung setzt eine Mindestzahl gemeisterter Geister voraus @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 B, pp. 271-272
note: Entered at stated necessity: the source states both that a candidate must have a certain minimum before being recognised and what follows where he has not, and it adds that the loss of recognition on this ground is met with among all Tungus groups. That the condition is reported as sometimes failing after the fact, and not only before it, is what makes it a condition and not a form of words.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: He would not be recognized as a real shaman by his clansmen and outsiders, and it is very likely that he would give up his practice of shamanism.
dependent step: The formal recognition
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The shaman must have a list of spirits
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The red collar worn by those who took the bark
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der rote Kragen derer, die die Rinde genommen haben @de
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 73 and pp. 74-75 and p. 77
definition: A collar of red list bound with white tape, worn in Loango by a person who has taken the bark and survived it, to show the people that he did so successfully. The figures worked on it are read out by the wearer: signs for the common descent of the parties, for the strife that divided them, for the witnesses called and saluted, for the accusers set aside, and for the place given to the wearer in the town where he took it.
note: A sign of success that is public, durable and worn, and the file holds it apart from the conditions of failure for the reason SPEC §15 gives: signs of success are announced in advance and are reported by the person to whom they were announced. Two cases are recorded by name and date, an elderly woman who visited the recorder wearing one, and Matueka on the fifth of January nineteen hundred, who explained each figure on his.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The return after death presupposes that the prohibition was kept
type: Presupposing
label: Das Wiederaufleben setzt die Einhaltung des Nähverbots voraus @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 28-29
definition: The claim that the attempt to bring back a dead man failed because a prohibition had been broken, and not because the shamans were unable.
note: The structure of this passage matters more than its content, and it is the reason the node is here. A failure of the practice is reported, and the account assigns the failure to a third party's breach of a prohibition rather than to the practitioners or to the claim. That move makes the underlying claim unfailable from inside the tradition: any outcome confirms it, since success shows the power and failure shows the breach. Recording the immunisation is not an objection to the passage; it is the part a later protocol has to work against.
attested by: Third-party ascription
consequence of skipping: The narrator relates that the moon would not let the man come to life again, because his mother had sewn garments of new caribou skin on the island of Oqshoriaq, which is not allowed there; the two shamans who tried to catch the returning corpse did not succeed.
dependent step: Coming to life again after death
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The prohibition on sewing new caribou skin on Oqshoriaq
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

The return presupposes that the singing does not stop
type: Presupposing
label: Die Rückkehr setzt voraus, dass der Gesang nicht abbricht @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 56-57
note: Entered at stated necessity because the source states the outcome of the want in plain terms and twice over: the singing must not cease and no one may stir him, and no fly or living creature is suffered to touch him. The recorder adds that the watching is for this reason and not, as another writer held, out of fear that the devil would take the body away; he names that writer and rejects him. The correction is his and is recorded as his.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: He would never recover out of the trance if they either ceased singing, or any one stirred him with hand or foot.
dependent step: Seeing what is at a distance
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The journey made while the body lies still
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

For theft and adultery the rule is reversed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Bei Diebstahl und Ehebruch gilt die umgekehrte Regel @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 264
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, p. 279
definition: The same bark is used in serious accusations of theft and in bad cases of denied adultery, given in small doses in the town by a practitioner of divination, and there the rule runs the other way: if the accused retains the ordeal he is guiltless of the charge and may demand compensation from his accusers, and if he vomits he pays the fines for his crime and the matter ends.
note: The exact inversion of the witchcraft rule with the same substance, in the same transmission, recorded on the following page. It is the strongest single argument in the file against reading the ordeal as a belief about a poison, and the strongest for reading it as a procedure whose reading rule is chosen with the charge. A second witness has the milder dose for theft too and gives the reason in physiological terms, that the retained poison then only causes illness.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The second test at the rubbing-board is seldom made
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der zweite Test am Reibbrett wird selten gemacht @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 171
definition: Strictly the rubbing-board requires the same corroborative second test as the poison and termites oracles, with the opposite outcome for the verdict to be valid. In fact the second test is very seldom made, and important questions are taken to the poison oracle instead.
note: The passage is a self-warning of the transmission against a rule it lays down, and it is the sharpest one this file carries: the control procedure exists for the instrument that is used most often and is precisely the one it is not applied to. The recorder adds the inference that the Azande must be aware that the second test always confirms the first. That is his conclusion and not a reported Zande statement, and it is not entered as a claim of the transmission.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The five rising stages of love as friendship
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die fünf aufsteigenden Stufen der Freundesliebe @de
source: Rūpa Gosvāmin, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu 3.3.106 (trans. Haberman 2003)
definition: The claim that love in the mode of friendship passes through five increasingly higher stages: friendship itself, attachment, supreme love, tenderness, and passion.
note: Given in the text as increasingly higher, so the ordering is asserted and the direction is stated. The series is named for one relation only; the edition read notes that a longer series of the expansions of love stands in the Ujjvalanīlamaṇi, which was not opened here.
within tradition: Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava transmission

Concentration is placed at withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Die Sammlung liegt bei abgezogener Vertiefung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.7-I.11 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Concentration
situation ground: The handbook names concentration as the condition of the direct knowledges and develops it as the four absorptions, which it describes as awake and turned from the senses to a single object. The coordinate is read off that development and not off the word itself; concentration in a weaker sense would not carry it.

The word itself comes from outside
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wort selbst kommt von außen @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXIII, sect. 98, pp. 276-277, sect. 99, pp. 277-278, and sect. 100, p. 284
definition: The term saman is mentioned by the Chinese at the beginning of the twelfth century as a Nuichen word for sorcerer which they did not recognise as their own san-men, both being traced to the same source, sramana. The recorder proposes that wandering sramana, changed into samana, were transformed into the Nuichen and Manchu saman.
note: Beside it stands a second borrowing that needs no reconstruction: burkan, the term applied to a great number of spirits across the Tungus groups, is a Mongol word and a modification of Buddha, and where Buddha himself is mastered the ordinary word for a shaman's spirit is used of him.
note: The etymology and the second sentence are of different weights and are kept apart here. That the Chinese record the word in that century, and that both forms are referred to sramana, is what the passage reports; that wandering monks were themselves the first bearers is the recorder's proposal and is his.
note: This is the node for which the file exists. A category the whole comparative literature uses is named after a word its own bearers took from a Buddhist term for a wandering ascetic, in a transmission whose bearers say the art came from their neighbours. Whoever cites the Siberian case as the archaic form is citing the station of a transmission, not its source.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Saṃyama holds its own agency
type: Situating
label: Saṃyama behält die eigene Trägerschaft @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Own agency
situated node: Saṃyama
situation ground: The base text has the practitioner bind his own mind and hold it, and the capacities of the third chapter are said to follow from his doing so. Nothing in these sūtras has another speak or act through him; what is claimed is credited to the practice.

Saṃyama is attained by effort
type: Situating
label: Saṃyama wird durch Anstrengung erlangt @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.28
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: By effort
situated node: Saṃyama
situation ground: The practice is the deliberate application of three named means to one object, and the text elsewhere makes the arising of knowledge conditional on the wearing away of impurity through the practice of the limbs. Nothing here arrives unworked for.

The three inner limbs are inner to the preceding five
type: Presupposing
label: Die drei inneren Glieder sind innerlicher als die vorhergehenden fünf @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.7
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.8
note: The base text ranks the last three limbs as inner with respect to the preceding five, and then ranks even those three as outer with respect to the seedless absorption. It sets a relation of inner and outer, not a rule that one cannot be attempted before the other, and it says nothing about what follows from disregarding the ranking.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Saṃyama
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The eight limbs
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

Saṃyama is withdrawn absorption
type: Situating
label: Saṃyama ist abgezogene Vertiefung @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
note: Numbering. The three members stand at III.1-3 and their combination at III.4 in the received division; the practice node in this file cites III.1-3 alone. See prima-materia#456.
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Withdrawn absorption
situated node: Saṃyama
situation ground: The three members are defined in sequence as the binding of the mind to one place, an unbroken flow of attention to that same place, and the same again with the object alone shining forth; the fourth sūtra names the three taken together on one object as saṃyama. That is the criterion this value states — awake, the senses off their objects, attention held on a single one — given in the base text rather than inferred from the capacities. The withdrawal of the senses is a separate limb preceding the three.

Saṃyama does not state a locus
type: Situating
label: Saṃyama gibt keinen Ort an @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-4
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Locus not stated
situated node: Saṃyama
situation ground: The four sūtras were read for this question and are silent on it: they place the attention on an object and say nothing about where the awareness itself is held to be. That the collection has one capacity of displaced locus at III.38 does not settle the operator, which is applied to near and distant objects alike.

Saṃyama on the sun yields knowledge of the world
type: Yielding
label: Saṃyama auf die Sonne bringt Weltkenntnis hervor @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.26
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Saṃyama
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga
yields capacity: Divine eye

Saṃyama yields entry into another body
type: Yielding
label: Saṃyama bringt den Eintritt in einen anderen Körper hervor @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Saṃyama
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga
yields capacity: Entering another body

Calm as the source of the other aesthetic states
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Ruhe als Quelle der übrigen ästhetischen Zustände @de
source: Abhinavagupta, Abhinavabhāratī, on Nāṭyaśāstra VI
definition: The commentator's claim that the calm state is not one aesthetic state beside the others but their source: the various feelings arise out of calm through their particular causes, and melt back into calm when those causes fall away.
note: Attestation is mediated and the reason is the language and not the reachability. The critical edition of the commentary is digitised and openly available, and so is the edition of the rival position named in prima-materia#363; the passage below was read in the English rendering of a study that prints and translates it. The mediated mode is therefore an open posting to be raised as soon as someone reads the Sanskrit, not a statement that the work cannot be had.
note: The base treatise arranges its states by derivation, deity and colour and ranks none of them. This claim is the commentator's and belongs to him, which is why it stands as its own node and not as a property of the treatise.
note: The reason it matters for this graph. It is a claim about the top of an order and not about an order running through: it makes one state the ground of the rest on metaphysical grounds, and it does not place unlike states on a common measure. Anyone citing it as evidence that the transmission ranks aesthetic states on a scale is reading it for something it does not say.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: J. L. Masson and M. V. Patwardhan, Śāntarasa and Abhinavagupta's Philosophy of Aesthetics (Bhandarkar Oriental Series 9, Poona: Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1969), where the passage is printed and translated
within tradition: Sanskrit dramaturgy

Sar ha-Torah, the Prince of the Torah
type: Conceptualizing
label: Sar ha-Tora, der Fürst der Tora @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 31, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
alternative label: Sar Torah
definition: The angelic power under whose name the Law is said to be obtained. The transmission gives its own reason for needing him: Israel's understanding was obscured by the exile and the words of the Law became hard as brass and iron, and what the world lacks is this secret and this mystery which is not in it. The remedy is offered as a means of loftiness by which the people are to raise themselves.
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The Law obtained without study
type: Testing
label: Das ohne Studium erlangte Gesetz @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapters 30 and 31, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
definition: A protocol against the claim that the seal replaces study. The claim is unusually well placed for examination and the transmission itself supplies the reason: what it promises is not an inner state but a public performance before witnesses who can judge it. A man who sits in an academy and expounds what is forbidden and permitted either holds up under that or does not, and the people around him are competent to say which.
note: Entered at procedure without cases, and the reason is that the passages carrying the numbers were not opened. The regime is said elsewhere in this literature to run forty days with immersions counted by the day, and to be annulled from the first day by a single lapse of purity; none of that was read at the wording here and none of it stands in this file. See prima-materia#496.
note: This is the rarest thing in the collection: a claim about an acquired capacity whose success condition the tradition itself locates outside the practitioner, in a room full of people qualified to contradict him. Most capacities in this graph are reported by the one who has them.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A recorded case of a man who completed the rite as the transmission prescribes it and could not afterwards expound what is forbidden and permitted better than before, judged by the academy the transmission itself makes the judge. The claim is that toil is replaced, so an outcome indistinguishable from the untrained falls due against it.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: Learning the Law without toil

Sariel discloses the course of the moon
type: Attributing
label: Sariel offenbart den Lauf des Mondes @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: The course of the moon
ascribed to: Sariel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Sariel discloses the signs of the moon
type: Attributing
label: Sariel offenbart die Zeichen des Mondes @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
note: Given under the name Sahriel; stands in the position the Ethiopic fills with the course of the moon.
ascribed capacity: Signs of the moon
ascribed to: Sariel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Involuntary bodily states
type: Conceptualizing
label: Unwillkürliche Körperzustände @de
source: Nāṭyaśāstra VII
definition: Eight bodily signs held to arise from the inner constitution rather than from will: paralysis, perspiration, horripilation, change of voice, trembling, change of colour, tears, and fainting.
within tradition: Sanskrit dramaturgy

The second degree yields touching at a distance
type: Yielding
label: Der zweite Grad bringt das Fernberühren hervor @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Initiation into the second degree
within tradition: Midewiwin
yields capacity: Touching at a distance for good or ill

The second degree yields the look into futurity
type: Yielding
label: Der zweite Grad bringt den Blick in das Künftige hervor @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Initiation into the second degree
within tradition: Midewiwin
yields capacity: Looking into futurity

The second week presupposes the first
type: Presupposing
label: Die zweite Woche setzt die erste voraus @de
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 4
note: The same annotation that sets the order removes any fixed duration from it: the weeks need not have seven or eight days, and one who needs longer in the first is to be given longer. The order is set, the schedule is not.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The second week
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The first week
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

A sudden seizure is taken as a call to the office
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein plötzlicher Anfall gilt als Ruf ins Amt @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
definition: When a man or woman is struck by a sudden illness, loses judgement and is left as if mad, the senior ministers say that this has come because the huacas want him for their villac and priest; and on his coming to himself they make him fast and learn the office. The ground given is that they themselves lose judgement when they speak with the huacas. From this all who fall in fits are counted as chosen for these ministries.
note: The transmission gives its own explanation of the sign, and the explanation is an inference from the practitioner's state back to the novice's: the office is recognised by the symptom that the office produces. The recorder adds his own competing explanation, that the loss of judgement comes from the devil or from the strength of the chicha they drink before speaking with the huaca. Both are recorded; neither is the graph's.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Whether the part in contact makes a difference
type: Testing
label: Ob der berührende Körperteil einen Unterschied macht @de
definition: An examination of whether contact through the palms differs in its reported or measured effect from contact through another part.
note: Procedure without cases, and for the same reason as at pmc:HandSideTransferProtocol: the comparison needs no instrument the field lacks, and nobody has made it. What is absent is the case, not the means.
note: The controls that would have to hold before a difference could be read as a property of the part: which part the practitioner was taught to use, which part the recipient expects, and the difference in ordinary touch between a palm and a forearm. A protocol without them would have measured the training and the expectation.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The falsifying condition is the ordinary comparison the claim invites by naming one part and excluding the rest
falsified by: Recipients blinded to the part in contact report or show no difference between contact through the palm and contact through another part beyond chance.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The palms are the organ of sending

The serial reading of the eight limbs
type: Systematizing
label: Die serielle Lesart der acht Glieder @de
date: 20th century
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.29
definition: The reading of the eight limbs as a ladder that must be climbed in order, each limb a precondition of the next.
note: The inner and outer categories come from the commentarial layer, and the hardening of the ranking into a rule of practice belongs to twentieth-century yoga pedagogy. Recorded here so that the reading is available as what it is. The base text at II.29 enumerates and does not order.
attested by: Compiler inference
compiled by: The commentarial tradition, sharpened in twentieth-century yoga pedagogy
orders claim: The eight limbs

The seven-centre quality mapping
type: Systematizing
label: Die Zuordnung von sieben Zentren zu Eigenschaften @de
date: 1927
source: A. Avalon, The Serpent Power (1919)
source: C. W. Leadbeater, The Chakras (1927)
source: Christopher Hills, Nuclear Evolution (1977)
source: Ken Dychtwald, Bodymind (1977)
definition: The assignment of a fixed set of seven centres to spectral colours and to psychological qualities such as will, expression and security. An ordering imposed in the twentieth century on material that did not carry it.
note: Colour scheme in Leadbeater 1927, rainbow spectrum in Hills 1977, on the textual basis made available by Avalon's 1919 translation of the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa. Recorded here so that the mapping is available in the graph as what it is, and cannot be mistaken for the tantric material it was built on.
attested by: Compiler inference
compiled by: C. W. Leadbeater, extended by Christopher Hills and Ken Dychtwald
orders claim: Cakra

Shamanizing brings the knowledge of what is hidden
type: Yielding
label: Das Schamanisieren bringt das Wissen um das Verborgene hervor @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVII, sect. 121, pp. 331-332
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Shamanizing
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission
yields capacity: Knowing what those present are thinking or doing

Shamanizing brings relief to those afflicted
type: Yielding
label: Das Schamanisieren bringt Befreiung der Befallenen hervor @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 140, p. 381
note: The claim the whole institution rests on, and the one on which the source is least specific: it names no duration, no rate and no case in which the relief failed to come. That silence is the reason no protocol is written on it here.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Shamanizing
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission
yields capacity: Relief of those afflicted by spirits

Shamsiel discloses the signs of the sun
type: Attributing
label: Schamsiel offenbart die Zeichen der Sonne @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Signs of the sun
ascribed to: Shamsiel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Shemihazah discloses root-cutting
type: Attributing
label: Schemichasa offenbart das Wurzelschneiden @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Root-cutting
ascribed to: Shemihazah
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Shemihazah discloses spell-casting
type: Attributing
label: Schemichasa offenbart die Beschwörung @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
ascribed capacity: Spell-casting
ascribed to: Shemihazah
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The powers are obstacles to samādhi
type: Cautioning
label: Die Kräfte sind Hindernisse für samādhi @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.37
definition: The capacities of the third chapter are named obstacles with respect to samādhi and attainments only with respect to the outward-turned state. The tradition that catalogues them is the same one that warns against them.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Divine eye
cautions about: Divine ear
cautions about: Knowledge of another mind
cautions about: Entering another body
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

No material sign proves who is speaking
type: Cautioning
label: Kein materielles Zeichen beweist, wer spricht @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXIV, section 268, questions 3-6 and 23
definition: The transmission's own warning against the evidential test. Superior spirits, it says, have no signs by which to be recognised other than the superiority of their ideas and their language, and every spirit can imitate a material sign. It adds that spirits take the names of saints and of famous persons, and that this is not fraud where the intention is good, so that the name is no proof either.
note: Two of the three things an outside investigator would reach for - a signature or handwriting, and a name - are ruled out by the transmission itself before anyone else can propose them. What is left is the third, the quality of the language, which is the one an outsider cannot measure.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: Evocation
within tradition: Spiritism

The article's own prediction of the next ceremony
type: Testing
label: Die Vorhersage der nächsten Zeremonie im Artikel selbst @de
definition: A protocol on a dated prediction the account makes about itself. A footnote states that the next ceremony would probably fall in nineteen sixty-one or nineteen sixty-three if the reckoning holds, and adds that it was publicly known at the end of nineteen fifty that it would not be celebrated for another ten years or so.
note: A rare thing in this collection: a claim that fixes its own due date, published before the date fell. Whether the ceremony fell in those years is a matter of record, and the record was not read at the wording in this run. The date is therefore not entered and the state stands at procedure without cases. See prima-materia#254.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the account's own footnote; the date of the ceremony has not been established from a work
falsified by: A dated report of the ceremony beginning in a year other than nineteen sixty-one or nineteen sixty-three refutes the reckoning as the account states it, and with it the claim that the interval is governed by a fifty-year period doubled.
protocol updated: 2026-09-01
tests: Sigui

The mask and ferment-holder series as a datable record of the ceremony
type: Testing
label: Masken- und Fermentträgerserien als datierbarer Nachweis der Zeremonie @de
definition: A protocol on the one part of the account that leaves objects a later worker can count and date without asking anybody: the great masks carved for each sixtieth-year ceremony and kept in rock shelters beside their predecessors, and the baobab-fibre ferment-holders woven for each and hung in the hogon's house. The account infers from series of nine, of eight and of fourteen that ceremonies were held back to the fifteenth and, on one reading, the twelfth century.
note: Entered because it is the falsifiable half of the account and the half nobody examined. The astronomical claims cannot be tested against anything but memory; wood and fibre can be dated. The protocol asks whether the intervals between the objects of a single shelter are compatible with sixty years, and whether the oldest are as old as the inference requires.
note: No case series has been collected here and none is known to this graph. The state is therefore procedure without cases and not cases without deviation: nobody has carried the examination, which is a different report from having carried it and found nothing. See prima-materia#253 for the radiocarbon and dendrochronological work on Bandiagara material that would have to be searched before this protocol can be advanced.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the account; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A dated series from one shelter whose intervals depart from sixty years beyond what the dating method's error admits, or whose oldest object is materially younger than the count of objects requires. A single shelter dated cleanly against the count would equally carry the claim.
protocol updated: 2026-09-01
tests: Sigui

Inhalation over the tongue yields cooling
type: Yielding
label: Die Einatmung über die Zunge bringt Kühlung hervor @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.57-58 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: Recorded because the opening through which the breath is taken is not incidental here but is what the practice consists in. Two of the eight retentions the manual lists take the breath in through the mouth and give it out through the nose; two others require the mouth held shut. The manual therefore assigns the opening per practice and does not set nasal breathing as a general rule, still less mark mouth inhalation as an error. See prima-materia#26.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Śītalī
within tradition: Haṭhayoga
yields capacity: Cooling and the quenching of hunger and thirst

The prognosis is placed at ceded agency
type: Situating
label: Die Prognose wird bei abgetretener Handlung verortet @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: The oration of the physical art yields the knowledge of death or life
situation ground: The text states the coordinate itself rather than describing a condition from which it has to be inferred: know that this miracle proceeds not from your own nature, but from the nature and virtues of the holy angels, it being a part of their office to reveal these things to you. The operator says the words and asks the question; what is said to act is named as someone else.

The protection of the names is placed at ceded agency
type: Situating
label: Der Schutz der Namen wird bei abgetretener Handlung verortet @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: The names said at the door hold the devils off
situation ground: The roll assigns the acting to others throughout: the angels protect and keep in safety, the names are the names of their God, the deliverance of the worn form comes by the will of God, and the seventh prayer rests the whole effect on an oath sworn to Christ by the adversary. What the person does is say or wear; what acts is named as someone else.

The saying of the names is placed in outward waking
type: Situating
label: Das Sprechen der Namen wird im nach außen gewandten Wachen verortet @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Outward waking
situated node: The names said at the front and at the doors
situation ground: The roll sets the saying at the front and at the doors of a house that is about to be entered, and the sixth section of the supplementary roll sets it at the moment a man raises a spear. Both are acts done with open eyes in the ordinary channel; nothing in either passage asks for withdrawal, sleep, vision or absorption, and no state is named as a condition.

The sixteen steps of mindfulness of breathing
type: Presupposing
label: Die sechzehn Schritte der Atemachtsamkeit @de
source: Majjhima Nikāya 118
note: Recorded at the weakest strength on purpose. The discourse sets out four tetrads of four steps and assigns them to the four foundations of mindfulness. It presents a progression; it does not say that a step is unreachable without the one before it, and the question whether the order is binding or expository is contested among practitioners to this day.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Ānāpānasati
prerequisite strength: Presentation order
prior step: Ānāpānasati
within tradition: Theravāda

The sixteen supports
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die sechzehn Stützen @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.73 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A set of sixteen named stations of the body, called supports, which the seal at the throat is said to bind; the manual names the number in a compound and treats the binding of all sixteen as one operation.
note: Recorded because the number is the whole of the finding. A modern draft gives thirteen segments as the path along which the force is led; sixteen is what the base text names here, and other works of the wider corpus give eighteen. The count therefore varies across the transmission, which means there is no single path to be had, and a scheme that presents one number as the path has chosen a branch without saying so. The other witnesses to the sixteen and the eighteen have not been read at their wording and are not entered here. See prima-materia#35.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The water that is not there, at the gate of the sixth palace
type: Testing
label: Das Wasser, das keines ist, am Tor des sechsten Palastes @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 26, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
definition: A protocol the transmission states for itself, complete in every part. The doorkeepers of the sixth palace place upon the descender a thousand thousands of waves of water, and there is not in that place even a single drop. The test is what he does next: the fault is not a wrong answer but the question. If he says what is the nature of this water, they run after him and stone him, saying that he is of the seed of them that kissed the calf and is unfit to see the King and his throne in his beauty; a voice goes out from the seventh heaven confirming the sentence; and he does not move from the spot before they place on him a thousand thousands of pieces of iron.
note: Silence is the pass and the question is the failure, which inverts the shape every other examination in this graph has. It also makes the test unusually cheap to administer and impossible to prepare for by learning an answer, since there is none.
note: What the protocol cannot survive is the same thing that undid the Maya examination in traditions/maya.ttl: the text that transmits the test also transmits the correct behaviour. From the moment this chapter is written down, the trial separates those who have read it from those who have not.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A recorded case in which a descender held to be fit asked about the water, or in which one held unfit kept silent and passed. The transmission claims the gate decides fitness, so a single clean case on either side falls due against it.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: Fitness to descend to the Merkavah

The sixty-year reckoning presupposes the discovery of the seed-star
type: Presupposing
label: Der Sechzigjahres-Comput setzt die Entdeckung des Same-Sterns voraus @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 282-283
note: Entered at stated necessity because the consequence is quotable, and not because the sequence is historical. What the passage establishes is that the tradition itself makes the calendar depend on the star, which is the claim the outside reception took over and the claim the examination addresses.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The account states what held before the discovery: the year was not yet fixed as a unit, the only reckoning known was by seven harvests, and at the end of the seventh the supreme chief was sacrificed. The consequence of the prior step being absent is therefore named twice over, as a defect of the calendar and as a death.
dependent step: Sigui
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: Knowledge of the characteristics of the seed-star
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The journey of the soul is a displaced locus
type: Situating
label: Die Seelenreise ist ein verlagerter Ort @de
source: Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16
source: Pliny, Naturalis Historia VII.174
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Displaced
situated node: Journey of the soul apart from the body
situation ground: The reports have the soul leave the body and return to it. That is the criterion for this value, and it is what the accounts of Aristeas and Hermotimus turn on; whether anything of the sort occurred is a separate question and not this one.

Refining spirit presupposes refining breath
type: Presupposing
label: Die Verfeinerung des Geistes setzt die des Atems voraus @de
source: Chen Zhixu, Jindan dayao, juan 4
note: Recorded from the Yuan-period witness, not from the Han or Song works to which the sequence is commonly credited.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The three stages of the inner elixir
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Qi
within tradition: Daoist tradition

The control that cannot be applied
type: Testing
label: Die Kontrolle, die sich nicht anwenden lässt @de
source: Allan Kardec, L'Évangile selon le spiritisme, introduction, section II, sub-heading Contrôle universel de l'enseignement des Esprits
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXVI, section 288, item 3
definition: A protocol on the transmission's own rule of verification. Two passages by the same author, in two works, stand against each other in the way that matters here. One states a control and states it well: concordance of spontaneous teaching, from many mediums unknown to one another, in different places, restricted to fundamental principles, with the express refusal to count a single medium or a single centre. The other forbids the question put in order to test, and settles both outcomes in advance - the spirits addressed do not answer and withdraw, and a spirit that does answer such a question is thereby classed as imperfect.
note: The state stood at procedure without cases until prima-materia#499 was decided, and understated the protocol: pm:CasesRequireCounterSearchShape grouped the verdict on a claim's wording with the two states that report cases and demanded a counter-search that would have had nothing to search. The shape was corrected rather than the state faked, and the state is now the one the reading reached.
note: The two rules do not contradict each other on their face and the finding is not that they do. The finding is what they leave: a criterion that can be satisfied by agreement and cannot be strained by a question. Agreement among mediums who share a doctrine, a vocabulary and an expectation is the outcome to be explained, not the evidence that explains it, and the one operation that would tell a real concordance from a shared expectation is the one the transmission rules out.
examination state: Claim does not discriminate
examined by: prima-materia, protocol formed from two passages of the same author read at the wording; no case series has been collected and no external examination has been read
falsified by: A passage in this transmission in which a concordance of independent mediums is reported and then set aside as insufficient on some ground other than the moral quality of the communication; or a recorded case in which a test question was put, answered, and the answer accepted as evidence rather than as a mark of an imperfect spirit. Either would show that the control can be strained and that the exclusion of the test question is not doing the work described here.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: The universal control of the teaching of the spirits
undivided outcomes: A spirit that withdraws when tested and a spirit that was never present produce the same observation; a spirit that answers a test question is by that answer classed as imperfect. Agreement among mediums and agreement produced by a shared doctrine are likewise not separated, since concordance is admitted as the control and no operation is allowed that would strain it.

A principle enters the doctrine only after the control of generality
type: Presupposing
label: Ein Grundsatz gehört zur Lehre erst nach der allgemeinen Kontrolle @de
source: Allan Kardec, La Genèse, les miracles et les prédictions selon le spiritisme, chapitre I, article 55
note: This is the passage on which the registration's judgement rested, and it holds: a transmission that writes down the condition under which it would change is doing something almost nothing else in this collection does. What the next section of this file records is what the same author did with that opening elsewhere.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: The consequence is stated as a disqualification and is quotable: any principle that has not received the consecration of the control of generality cannot be considered an integral part of the doctrine. The same article adds the other half, that if new discoveries showed spiritism to be in error on a point, it would modify itself on that point.
dependent step: A principle's standing as part of the doctrine
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The universal control of the teaching of the spirits
within tradition: Spiritism

The states are not attained in order
type: Cautioning
label: Die Zustände werden nicht der Reihe nach erlangt @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya
source: al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ
definition: A warning against treating the given states as a further ladder: they descend and pass, and no course of effort produces them.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: States
within tradition: Sufism

A station presupposes the station below it
type: Presupposing
label: Eine Station setzt die darunterliegende voraus @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on the stations
source: al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ
note: The handbooks set turning back as the first station and hold that the one below must be kept before the one above is reached. The enumeration and the count of the stations differ between the handbooks; the precedence of turning back does not.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Stations
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Turning back
within tradition: Sufism

Whether the expectation is what does the work
type: Testing
label: Ob die Erwartung das Wirkende ist @de
definition: An examination of whether the state depends on the practitioner holding the expectation of physical stillness, or arises without it.
note: No procedure devised, and the obstacle is worth naming exactly because the condition itself is easy to write. It would read: practitioners who do not hold the expectation reach the state as often as those who do. Every term in that sentence can be arranged except the last. There is no way to establish that the state has been reached other than the practitioner's report, and his report is made by the same person whose expectation is the variable. The design collapses at its measuring end, not at its manipulating end.
note: What would open it is an outward mark of the state that does not depend on the report — the kind of mark that made the inner-heat claim reachable, where a thermometer settled what testimony could not. Whether such a mark exists for this state is itself unexamined.
examination state: No procedure devised
examined by: Nobody. The state records that no falsifying condition has been devised that could be run, which is a fact about the means and not about the claim
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The expectation that nothing moves physically is the operator

Stillness and love presuppose repentance and the labour against the passions
type: Presupposing
label: Stille und Liebe setzen Buße und den Kampf gegen die Leidenschaften voraus @de
source: John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, steps 1-30
note: The work is emphatic that neither stillness nor the love of God is reached without the prior repentance and the fight with the passions. It does not, however, state for every rung that the next is unreachable without it, and the image of the ladder is didactic before it is ontological, which is why the strength here is order and not necessity.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The ladder of thirty steps
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Ascetic practice
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Success in the practice presupposes purification of the channels
type: Presupposing
label: Erfolg der Praxis setzt die Reinigung der Kanäle voraus @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.19-20 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.6 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The text directs the breath practice at clearing the impurity of the central channel and gives the outward signs by which accomplished purification is known. It makes success depend on the purification without stating in these verses what befalls one who proceeds without it, which is why the strength here is order and not necessity.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Purification of the channels
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Whether the weather ever failed at a Sun dance
type: Disputing
label: Ob das Wetter bei einem Sonnentanz je versagte @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 99
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 100 and p. 105
definition: The two recorders of this transmission report opposite things about the same ceremony. The first prints a rule for the days on which the Sun does not show his face, assigns such a day to an offence in the camp, and provides that the day be struck from the count of four, which presupposes that such days occurred. The second reports that the medicine men prayed for fair weather for a month beforehand, that their efforts were always successful, and that the oldest men could not remember the falling of rain during a Sun dance.
note: Neither report is a study and neither can be preferred on its face. What separates them is not doctrine but memory of events: the first states a contingency and the second denies that the contingency ever arose. The dispute is entered because the second statement is checkable in principle against the recorded weather of the years and places at which the ceremony was held, and because the first would be untestable without it.
note: The two are not equally situated. The first was written down at Pine Ridge from shamans who conducted the ceremony, the second at Standing Rock from men who danced in it, and the last tribal Sun dance the second witness names was held in eighteen eighty-one. A reader who wants to resolve this has to decide whether never having rained is a claim about the weather or a claim about what the rule on the other side was for.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The Sun hides his face while an unworthy person is in the camp

Dancing to completion yields a communication from the Sun
type: Yielding
label: Das Zuendetanzen bringt eine Mitteilung von der Sonne hervor @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 61 and p. 115 and p. 120
note: The dancers of the buffalo dance are told the same thing in the praise the herald proclaims over them: that they now belong to the people of the Sun, that they will not have to pay the price when they take a wife, that they will have many children who will honour them, and that they may now receive a communication from the Sun. The four are given together, which is worth noting because only the last of them has a term.
note: The strongest form in which this transmission makes a claim that could fail, and the reason the tradition was taken from the registry. The practice is public and its completion is witnessed by the camp; the promised effect is a communication; the term within which it is to arrive is named. What the corpus does not say is what follows if the term passes empty, and that silence is a property of the corpus and is recorded rather than filled.
attested by: Field attestation
by practice: Wiwanyang wacipi, the sun-gazing dance
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission
yields capacity: A communication from the Sun

Superimposition underlies every path, including the texts on release
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Überlagerung trägt jeden Weg, auch die Texte über die Befreiung @de
source: Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, introduction, at the definition of superimposition as nescience and the statement that all practical distinctions including the texts on final release presuppose it (trans. G. Thibaut, Sacred Books of the East 34, Oxford 1890)
definition: The claim that self and non-self are mutually superimposed, that this superimposition is what learned men call nescience, and that it is the presupposition of every practical distinction — those of ordinary life and those laid down in scripture alike — between means of knowledge, objects of knowledge and knowing persons, in texts of injunction and prohibition and in texts concerned with final release.
note: For the axes in prima-materia#52 this is neither a value nor a third position but a denial of the question's standing. It does not say that the bounded self is dissolved or kept; it says that the level at which either could be said is the level of nescience. Recorded so that a scheme which files it as a unitive telos can be checked against the argument. See prima-materia#66.
note: The clause that decides the matter is the last one. Not only the ordinary distinctions but the texts on release itself are said to rest on the superimposition. A path, a choice between paths and the scripture that recommends one are therefore all inside what the argument calls nescience — not false, but valid only where the superimposition holds.
note: The same section removes the one who would choose. Without the superimposition the self does not become a knowing agent at all, and where there is no knowing agent the means of knowledge do not operate. The agent that a choice between paths presupposes is thus itself among the things superimposed.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Advaita Vedānta

The cut scalp as the sign that the fast was broken
type: Testing
label: Die verletzte Kopfhaut als Anzeichen des gebrochenen Fastens @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 42
definition: A protocol the tradition states for itself. During the hair-cutting of a child under tapu nobody attending may eat; the witness says that a breach is discovered at once, because the skin of the child's head is cut while the hair is being cut, and calls this a sure sign.
note: Entered because the tradition names an outward, observable event as the detector of a hidden breach and calls it certain. That is a falsifying condition offered by the material itself, which is rare enough in this collection to be worth holding as a protocol rather than as a remark.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A recorded case in which the fast was kept and the scalp was cut all the same, or in which the fast was broken and the scalp was not cut. The tradition claims the sign is sure, so a single clean counter-case on either side falls due against it.
protocol updated: 2026-08-30
tests: Tapu

Protocol: the ten-day term of the named man
type: Testing
label: Protokoll: die Zehntagesfrist des Gerufenen @de
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 93
definition: A protocol against the claim that a man publicly named at the felling of a muamba tree dies within ten days, and that this never fails.
note: No case is entered and none is claimed. The work read supplies no list of namings and no follow-up, and the practice was already being suppressed by the colonial administrations at the time the work was written. What a later run would need is a source that names an occasion and a person rather than the rule, and the candidates are the Laman notebooks and the Mayombe literature, neither of which was opened here.
note: Taken up because the claim states its own falsifying condition, which is rare enough in this holding to be worth a protocol even where no case can yet be entered. The condition is not the death but the term and the completeness: a single named man alive after ten days refutes the claim as the corpus states it, and the corpus states it as exceptionless.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia compiler, from the wording of Dennett 1906, p. 93
falsified by: A man publicly named at the felling of a muamba tree who is alive on the eleventh day, in a source that names the occasion and the person rather than the rule.
protocol updated: 2026-09-08
tests: The man whose name is called dies within ten days

Protocol: the animals named by their marks
type: Testing
label: Prüfprotokoll: die an ihren Zeichen benannten Tiere @de
definition: The claim states that animals bearing marks named in advance by the candidate will be sent and found. A condition of refutation exists and can be stated; no case has been recorded under it, because the source that carries the claim reports no case and no count.
note: The claim as the source words it is close to failing to discriminate, and the reason is inside it: where the named animals are not found, the spirit may be asked to send another. The falsifying condition below therefore has to be stated against the first designation and against the substitution separately, or the claim covers the finding of a marked animal and the finding of any animal alike. Whether the substitution is used often or rarely is exactly what the source does not say.
note: The state is procedure without cases and not cases without deviation, although the source says the animals are always found. What it reports is a summary judgement without a number, and a protocol that entered it as a case series would be counting the recorder's confidence.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol devised from the wording of Shirokogoroff 1935, sect. 130 I
falsified by: A recorded search in which the marks named by the candidate before the hunt are not found on any animal taken within the stated period, and the designation is neither withdrawn nor replaced by a second one. Where the substitution is admitted, the claim is refuted only if the marks of the second designation also fail.
protocol updated: 2026-09-03
tests: The animals named by their marks

The eaters of men
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Menschenesser @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III, on the cauchus or runapmicuc
definition: A class named apart from all the other specialists and said to be the only ones who properly deserve the name of witch. They are said to gather at night under a master, who goes to a chosen house scattering a powder made of the bones of the dead, by which everyone in the house is put so deeply asleep that neither person nor animal stirs; he comes to the one he means to kill, draws a little blood with his nail from any part of the body and sucks what he can, for which they are also called suckers; what is so taken is carried to the assembly, where it is said to be multiplied into flesh, and is cooked and eaten, and the person dies within two or three days. The common phrase for the assembly is that tonight we are to eat the soul of such a one.
note: The recorder states how the class came to be known and the account is unusually traceable for this file: it was not established until one man volunteered it after his examination was over, naming others, who were then arrested and examined singly and against one another. Sixty-three were found culpable in four villages of the coast, none at all in the highland villages at that time, and more later in two other provinces. He also reports the confessions in the words of the accused, including one who said he had been made to eat by force and threatened with death if he did not come again.
note: The whole of it was obtained under an examination conducted by a tribunal with the power to punish, and the recorder says the punishment given during the visitation was deliberately light in order to keep them quiet until a heavier one could be arranged. What such an examination produces is a well-known thing and the count of sixty-three is not evidence of sixty-three witches. It is entered because it is what the record says the transmission says about itself, and because the shape of the claim — the night assembly, the taking of a little blood, the eating of the soul, the death within two or three days — is the material a comparison is made from, not because the events are credited.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The bundle of the first flow and what disturbing it is said to cause
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Bündel des ersten Flusses und was seine Störung bewirken soll @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 143 and p. 162
definition: The young woman wraps her first menstrual discharge and places the bundle in a plum tree, high enough that coyotes cannot reach it. The reasons given are three: the plum is the emblem of fruitfulness preferred by the Buffalo God; anyone or anything obtaining part of a first discharge thereby gains an influence over the woman that may be used to make her do foolish or shameful things; and the bundle has a potency of its own, so that if it is disturbed it may cause eruptive diseases of the skin and the falling of the hair.
note: The corpus adds elsewhere that the menstrual flow is very wakan and will cause diseases of the skin and the genitals, that some medicine men make a love medicine of it if they invoke the right spirits, and that its influence gives paralysis. The three passages are consistent with each other and are cited together.
note: The last clause is the reason this node is in the file. The corpus does not leave the claim as a doctrine: it names the evidence it rests on, in the form see young men with pimply faces and many coyotes without hair. That is an appeal to a distribution in the world, made by the transmission itself, and it is the only one of its kind found in this run. It is also plainly checkable and plainly weak, and both belong in the record.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The king says publicly that the diviners lied to him
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der König sagt öffentlich, die Wahrsager hätten ihn belogen @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), pp. 379-380
definition: At a named ceremony in 1871, before the assembled army and the priesthood, the king of Dahomey complained that his Muslims with their Arabic inscriptions and charms had deceived him, that his cult people made all sorts of mistakes, and that the diviners who cast lots to learn the will of the gods told him many lies. He set the complaint against what he had paid: he gave them everything in his power and everything they asked for, cowries, cattle, goats, slaves and wives, and still they did not tell him the truth. The instance he named is a war: the diviners told him he would go out and meet an easy victory, and he was beaten back and disgraced.
note: The exit the king takes is the one this graph has now seen in three transmissions: the fault is put on the practitioners and not on the procedure. He says they lied, not that the casting does not answer. The Kongo corpus states the same division as a rule, that doubt of the practitioners costs nothing and doubt of the ordeal costs a life.
note: The most valuable single passage found in this run. It is a failure of the oracle reported by the client, in public, with the prediction, the outcome and the fee all named, and it was taken down by a European who was present and had no stake in the complaint.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The mission entered the category of the charged thing
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Mission trat in die Kategorie des geladenen Dings ein @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 240
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, pp. 236-237 and p. 281
definition: Four statements from inside the corpus, all of them by missionaries reporting their own trade. The word chosen by the old Catholic missionaries for holy was nkisi, and the word they chose for church was nzo ankisi, which is the ordinary word for a grave and means the house of the charged things, so that they spoke of the church of Rome as the Roman grave. The Kongo name for the devil is stated to have stood for four hundred years. The image of the Virgin in the Catholic church at San Salvador is one of the places a couple goes for a child, the church itself being called the house of the charged things. And the crosses, metal discs and small pictures given by the priests to be worn are called by the same word as an ordinary protective amulet.
note: It also fixes the date. A term in liturgical use since the end of the fifteenth century cannot be treated as untouched in a corpus written down between eighteen eighty-seven and nineteen fourteen, and any agreement between this transmission and the Christian material this graph holds is reception until somebody shows otherwise.
note: This is the node that carries the contact route of the whole file, and it is entered as a node rather than as a note on the tradition because a note would not survive a query. It shows the route in the direction that matters here: not that the mission borrowed a word, which would be a fact about the mission, but that the objects of the mission were classified by the transmission under its own category, which is a fact about the transmission.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The cock is killed so that the omen falls on itself
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Hahn wird getötet, damit das Vorzeichen an ihm selbst eintritt @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 96 and p. 98
definition: It is a bad omen for a cock to crow in the middle of the night, and the bird is immediately killed in order that the omen may be fulfilled at its own expense.
note: A procedure for discharging a prediction on a substitute, and thereby the cleanest case in this file of a claim that cannot come out wrong: the bad thing foretold has happened, to the bird. The graph holds nothing else of this shape.
note: The witness draws his own conclusion two pages later, that to these people there is no such thing as an accident. That is his sentence and not the transmission's, and it is recorded here rather than entered as a claim.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The practitioner must stand the other ordeals himself
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Betreiber muss die übrigen Proben selbst bestehen @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 264-265
definition: Beside the bark the corpus lists seven lesser ordeals with their Kikongo names, by hot knife, by boiling palm oil, by a bracelet in the oil, by knotted grass, by a bean on a twisted string, by a glass bead under the eyelid and by hot water. Of these the corpus states a condition on the practitioner: unless he is prepared to undergo each of them, the bark excepted, before the accused does, he is little respected and would soon lose his practice.
note: A qualification requirement that the practitioner meets in public, and the only one in the file. The corpus states in the same place how it is met: the practitioner rubs baobab juice on the arm of any accused person who pays for it, and on one who will not pay he rubs another decoction which is not protective, and the recorder adds that the practitioners undoubtedly know of juices that help them bear the tests and are willing to sell the knowledge.
note: The bark is excepted, and the exception is the whole of the difference: the ordeal that kills is the one the practitioner does not have to take.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The ranked ways a disease is driven out
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Rangordnung der Wege, auf denen eine Krankheit ausgetrieben wird @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), pp. 251-252
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 163
definition: All diseases are things that have got into the body and do violence to it, and the thing to do is to get them out. The medicines drive the disease out in the sweat, in the breath, in the defecation, in the urine or in the vomit, and the corpus ranks these: in the sweat is the best and easiest, in the breath the next best, then the defecation, then the urine, and the vomit is very hard although some diseases will come out no other way. Where the cause is an influence a shaman cures best; where it is something else, a medicine man does; and if the sickness is of long duration someone should seek a communication and learn what to do.
note: A ranked therapeutics with a stated criterion, given by a named informant whose father was a medicine man. It is entered because a ranking of routes is a claim that can be wrong in a way that a list cannot.
note: The second witness has the same rule from a different man on a different reservation, put as a regime rather than a ranking: the first thing a sick person should do is take a sweat bath so that the body will respond to remedies, then a lighter diet and rest, and no unnecessary exertion. He adds a limit that the first witness does not — that if the disease is not too far advanced the person usually recovers — and a caution that the sick person did not jump into cold water afterwards, as is sometimes stated, but was covered with furs and allowed to cool gradually.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Killing a python, even by accident
type: Cautioning
label: Das Töten einer Python, auch aus Versehen @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), pp. 57-59
definition: Among the tribes of this worship a native who kills a python of the sacred kind, even by accident, is by custom liable to be burned alive, and a European to be beheaded. A child who touches or is touched by one of the pythons must be kept a whole year in the seminaries of the god at the expense of its parents and taught the songs and dances of the worship; adults, and particularly women, were formerly liable in the same way, and the witness states that the scandals this produced and the decline of priestly power have let the practice fall into disuse.
note: A named case is printed with it, from a French cleric on the coast: a young enslaved woman crushed a python under a door, the priests demanded her, her owner declined to pay the composition, and she and five men were shut in the hut. Four of the men had bribed the escort and were brought through the crowd unharmed with her; the fifth, who had not paid or could not, was beaten until he escaped into a cask in the lagoon. What the transmission prescribes and what it enforces are two different things, and the difference is measured here in bribes.
note: The penalty is the finding, because the source records it in the act of becoming a form. Fifty years before the writing a native was invariably burned to death; at the time of writing the appearance of the sentence is preserved and the culprit escapes with his life. A hut of dried grass is built, the man is thrust inside unbound and the hut is fired, so that he breaks out long before the flames reach him, and the worshippers waiting outside beat him with clubs until he has purified himself by reaching running water.
attested by: Field attestation
cautions about: Danh-gbi, the python held sacred
field record: Spoken by Ewe and Fon informants at Whydah, unnamed, with one case taken from the published account of the Abbé Bouche and one from Des Marchais of 1731, both named by the recorder as he uses them; recorded by A. B. Ellis, colonial officer on the West African coast, published 1890; given in Ewe and Fon, of which the work prints the terms, the accounts in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The specialist is paid, and paid well
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Fachmann wird bezahlt, und gut bezahlt @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo VI, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The recorder states that the practitioner is paid very well for the consultation and is additionally courted with food and drink after their own fashion.
note: Entered because payment is one of the gates this project counts, and because it stands beside the other one: the same chapter says the practice is hidden from outsiders. A transmission can be closed by price and by secrecy at once, and the two are not the same gate.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

The god-sent dream cedes agency
type: Situating
label: Der gottgesandte Traum tritt die Trägerschaft ab @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: The god-sent dream
situation ground: The dream is held to come from a god rather than from the sleeper, and the sleeper is described as receiving it. The axis records the account the source gives of who acts, not a verdict on that account.

The god-sent dream is placed at the sleep threshold
type: Situating
label: Der gottgesandte Traum liegt an der Schlafschwelle @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Sleep threshold
situated node: The god-sent dream
situation ground: The account describes the condition and not the hour: sleep departing and waking beginning, or a condition between the two, with a voice, a light and an inability to move the eyes. Partial detachment of the sensory channel with the body already immobile is the criterion this coordinate names.

The god-sent dream states no locus
type: Situating
label: Der gottgesandte Traum gibt keinen Ort an @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Locus not stated
situated node: The god-sent dream
situation ground: The passage was read for this question. It says where the communication comes from and says nothing about where the sleeper's awareness is while it arrives; nothing in it has the sleeper go anywhere. Recorded so that a later query can tell a source that was asked from a node nobody has reached yet.

The reading of feeling from colour and vibration
type: Originating
label: Die Lesung des Gefühls aus Farbe und Schwingung @de
date: 1902
source: C. W. Leadbeater, Man Visible and Invisible (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1902), the frontispiece plate and the chapter Colours and their Meaning, pp. 81-82
definition: The claim that every feeling has a colour, that the colour can be read off a body of subtle matter surrounding the person, and that the brightness of the colour measures the strength of the feeling.
note: Opened for prima-materia#361, on the suspicion that the modern one-dimensional ranking of emotions begins here. Read at the wording. The suspicion is only half borne out, and the half that fails is the more interesting one.
note: What is here: a fixed key from feeling to colour, given as a list of the commonest hues; brightness and depth of colour stated outright as a measure of the strength and activity of the feeling; the vocabulary of vibration throughout; and an axis of self-reference applied to every colour alike, on which a thought with something of self in it turns downwards and one without turns upwards. The axis is the part that later scales inherit.
note: What is not here, and the point of the node: a ranking of the feelings against one another. The plate is a grid of twenty-five fields, not a series, and the chapter introduces its colours as a list of the commonest ones. Where the text does rank, it ranks within a single colour by purity and luminosity, so that the same feeling has a lower and a higher form. That is a second dimension and not a scale. A later list that puts unlike feelings in one numbered order therefore does not have it from here, and prima-materia#12 cannot be answered by pointing at this node.
circulates as: An ancient science of the aura, reported as eastern in origin and as the common property of the older traditions.
originated by: C. W. Leadbeater; Annie Besant

Contemplation of nature presupposes ascetic practice
type: Presupposing
label: Naturschau setzt asketische Praxis voraus @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Contemplation of nature
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Ascetic practice
within tradition: Desert monasticism

The threefold seizure
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die dreifache Heimsuchung @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 46-47
definition: The office is not sought but suffered. The one marked for it is seized in infancy by an illness in which he is haunted by apparitions, and from these he learns, according to his years, what belongs to the art. Those seized a second time see more visions and gain greater knowledge. Those seized a third time — which is seldom without great torment or the utmost danger of life — arrive at the perfection of the art and become so knowing that without the drum they can see things at the greatest distances.
note: A graded scale with a stated cost at each step and a stated end state, which is the material an examination is made of. The recorder's own explanation of the seizure is that the devil takes a liking to the person in infancy; that explanation is his and is not entered as the transmission's.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Whether the threshold state carries the faculties
type: Disputing
label: Ob der Schwellenzustand die Vermögen trägt @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.11 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Diadochus of Photice, Gnostic Chapters 40
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
definition: A disagreement about where the higher perceptual capacities are exercised. The handbooks of absorption place them in a waking, fully concentrated state and say so with a stated necessity; the ascetic literature marks the light half-sleep as the place of counterfeit consolation; the theurgic account, by contrast, treats the edge of sleep as the mark of a genuine divine communication.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. Two of the three sides name the edition or translation they were read in. For Diadochus the edition is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed; the passage is to be reopened, and until then the chapter number stands on whichever numbering the earlier session used.
note: Recorded as a dispute between sources and not as a verdict on the modern draft. A draft is not a side: it carries no attestation, so a claim it makes has no standing here. What the sources actually disagree about is narrower and more interesting than the draft's question, namely whether the threshold is evidential at all, and both sides of that are attested.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: The god-sent dream

The threshold as a place of reception
type: Converging
label: Die Schwelle als Ort des Empfangs @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005), the yoga of the clear light of sleep
definition: The observation that several traditions mark the passage between sleeping and waking as the place where a communication is received, while none of them makes it the place where a faculty is exercised.
note: Two axes have to be held apart, and the modern draft that prompted this examination runs them together. On the reception axis the threshold is well attested: a voice, a light and an immobility of the eyes in the Neoplatonic account, the nightly ascent of the soul in the Kabbalistic one, the true dream in the Islamic one. On the execution axis, where sight, hearing and the mind-made body are actively exercised, the sources bind the capacities to waking absorption instead. No source found so far puts an actively exercised faculty in the threshold state.
attested by: Compiler inference
converging concept: The clear light of sleep
converging concept: The god-sent dream
transmission path: The correspondence must not be counted as independent attestation. The Tibetan material reaches Tibet from the Indian mahāsiddha Nāropa through Marpa and is reception, as the file that holds it records. The Mediterranean witnesses are worse still for this purpose: the later Jewish and Islamic dream theory rests on a Neoplatonic substrate, so an agreement between the Greek, the Jewish and the Islamic account is a shared inheritance and not three independent observations. What would count as a finding is a tradition outside both blocks, and none has been located.

Whether the paralysis is a shutdown and whether it happens at the threshold
type: Testing
label: Ob die Lähmung eine Abschaltung ist und ob sie am Übergang geschieht @de
definition: An examination of the posited claim in its two parts: whether the event is located at the transition into or out of sleep, and whether the mechanism is the switching off of motor control there.
note: How far the mechanism evidence reaches. The transmitter and receptor pathway was identified in rats, by pharmacological inactivation of trigeminal motoneurons; the atonia of the stage is a defining feature of it across the species studied, but the receptor-level account is not a human finding. The direction of the correction does not depend on that account, only on the atonia belonging to the stage rather than to the transition, which the human review also reports.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, and everything below is written in the voice of a finding. It is not one. The notes record what the evidence appeared to show before any search for opposing work was made, and they are kept in that voice because rewriting them would destroy the reasoning that has to be checked. Read them as the expected result of an examination nobody has finished, not as its outcome. See prima-materia#386.
note: The location holds. Reported episodes occur on falling asleep or on waking and not in the middle of consolidated sleep, and the systematic review classes them accordingly.
note: The mechanism does not hold as stated, and the correction is not a quibble. Motor control is not switched off at the transition: it is already off throughout the sleep stage in question, and the experience arises when that shutdown persists past the transition instead of ending with it. The claim has the direction backwards. What happens at the threshold is the failure to switch motor control back on, not the switching of it off.
note: The word regular carries a second and separate deviation. The mechanism is regular, but the recurring form of the experience is classified as a parasomnia in the standard nosology, which is to say as a disorder. Both can be true at once and the claim does not distinguish them: a normal mechanism appearing at an abnormal moment. Whoever repairs the claim must say which of the two the word regular is doing.
note: This is why the two posits in this file were kept apart. The universality claim survives its protocol; this one does not, on the same evidence, and a single node carrying both would have had to be entered as confirmed or as deviating and would have been wrong either way.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not carried. The receptor account and the nosological classification were taken as settled without any search for dissent, and the receptor work is an animal study whose translation is itself contested in the field.
evidence from: American Academy of Sleep Medicine, International Classification of Sleep Disorders, 3rd edition (Darien, Illinois, 2014), recurrent isolated sleep paralysis among the parasomnias of the relevant sleep stage
evidence from: B. A. Sharpless and J. P. Barber, Lifetime prevalence rates of sleep paralysis: a systematic review, Sleep Medicine Reviews 15 (2011), no. 5, pp. 311-315, doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2011.01.007
evidence from: P. L. Brooks and J. H. Peever, Identification of the transmitter and receptor mechanisms responsible for REM sleep paralysis, Journal of Neuroscience 32 (2012), pp. 9785-9795, doi:10.1523/JNEUROSCI.0482-12.2012
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The deviation is read off the same two bodies of evidence that carry the neighbouring protocol, plus the standard nosological classification
falsified by: The atonia is shown to begin at the transition rather than to persist across it; or reported episodes are found in consolidated sleep away from either threshold.
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: The paralysis is the regular shutdown of movement at the threshold of sleep

A token is brought back from the place
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Zeichen wird von dem Ort mitgebracht @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 55-57
definition: He returns with a knife, a ring or some other token of his knowledge of what is done in those parts, and on rising shows what he has brought from thence, so that the account may seem certain. The recorder notes that the other report he uses mentions no such thing.
note: That the two reports the compiler used disagree about whether the token exists is recorded with the claim and not smoothed away. He names the report that lacks it. Which of the two is right is not decidable here, and the disagreement is itself the reason no examination node is written.
note: This is the most examinable claim in the file. It is not a report of a perception but the production of a physical object said to have come from a named distant place, in front of witnesses, at a stated moment. What would refute it is obvious and requires nothing but the object and the place, and it is entered chiefly for that reason.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

The training presupposes the preliminaries
type: Presupposing
label: Das Training setzt die Vorbereitungen voraus @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: Generation stage
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The preliminaries
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The traversal presupposes that its stations are taken in order
type: Presupposing
label: Die Durchquerung setzt voraus, dass ihre Stationen der Reihe nach genommen werden @de
source: Vijñānabhairava 29 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
source: Vijñānabhairava 56 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
note: Recorded at prescribed order and not at stated necessity, on purpose and against the reading a modern draft makes. The sources say kramaśaḥ and kramāt kramam, in sequence and step by step, and they say it more than once. What no source consulted says is what happens to one who skips a station. A prohibition needs a consequence somebody can quote, and this one has none; without it the claim is an instruction that a later reader hardened into a rule. See prima-materia#36.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The traversal of the path of worlds
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The ascent that passes through every centre in one movement
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Examination of the tummo heat claim
type: Testing
label: Prüfung der Tummo-Hitze-Behauptung @de
definition: An examination of the claim that the tummo practice produces inner heat, taken up because this is the one pairing in the collection whose capacity has an outward side that instruments reach.
note: Status of what follows. The state above is procedure without cases, set when the counter-search requirement was introduced, because this node does not record whether a search for opposing work was made. Its notes are older than the requirement and are kept unchanged; whoever documents the search restores the case-bearing state. See prima-materia#386.
note: What the measurements bear on is the somatic claim and nothing beyond it. Reported temperature rises are consistent with the practice producing heat; they say nothing about the cosmology the practice is embedded in, and the node must not be read as though they did. The reported effect also depends on the forceful-breath component together with the visualisation, which means the claim that is actually supported is narrower than the one the tradition makes.
attested by: Protocolled practice
base rate: Temperature change under comparable breathing effort without the practice, in matched participants.
counter-search: Counter-search not carried
counter-search note: Not documented. This node predates the requirement; whether a counter-search was carried is not recoverable from it, and an undocumented search is treated as uncarried for the same reason pm:independenceGround reverses its burden.
evidence from: H. Benson et al., Body temperature changes during the practice of g-tummo yoga, Nature 295 (1982), 234-236
evidence from: M. Kozhevnikov et al., Neurocognitive and somatic components of temperature increases during g-tummo meditation, PLoS ONE 8(3) (2013), e58244, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0058244
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: H. Benson and colleagues; M. Kozhevnikov and colleagues
falsified by: Practitioners of the forceful-breath tummo method show no rise in measured body temperature beyond that produced by the breathing alone in matched non-practitioners.
protocol updated: 2026-08-28
tests: Tummo yields inner heat

When a female shaman does not perform
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wann eine Schamanin nicht auftritt @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 128, pp. 349-350, and chap. XXX, sect. 140, p. 380
definition: Female shamans do not perform at all during pregnancy and in the first weeks after the delivery, nor during the few days of menstruation each month. The consequence stated is practical and not ritual: she cannot help her clansmen at any moment when she might be needed, and this is given as one reason for a preference for male candidates.
note: The same passage carries a second, separate reason, given as the assertion of the Tungus themselves: that females are physically less resistant and therefore cannot carry out very long and difficult performances. The two are reported side by side and are not the same kind of claim.
note: The suspension reappears as the one excuse the office admits. A shaman who is not very old and physically weak may be excused from attending only if she is a female and pregnant or otherwise under the prohibition; without such an excuse he may lose his position.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The five characters of shamanism in full function
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die fünf Merkmale des vollen Schamanentums @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95, p. 274
definition: The recorder's enumeration of what must all be present: the shaman is a master of spirits; he has a group of mastered spirits; there is a complex of methods and paraphernalia recognised and transmitted; there is a theoretical justification of the practice; the shamans assume a special social position.
note: He states in the same passage that all of these but the first two are met in complexes that are not shamanism at all — in the Manchu clan priesthood and in the Lamaist priest — and that he therefore restricts the term to complexes covering all five. The enumeration is his and is entered as his; what is not his is each of the five conditions, which the preceding sections carry as reports.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The transmission says the art was not originally its own
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Überlieferung sagt, die Kunst sei nicht ihre eigene gewesen @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXIII, sect. 98, pp. 276-277, and sect. 100, pp. 282-283
definition: What the groups themselves state about the beginning of their shamanism. The Manchus refer it to a definite person and a definite year, 1033, and name him: a soldiers' commander who left his spirits to spread over three provinces, and who is himself now one of those spirits. The Reindeer Tungus of Manchuria state that they received shamanism, before their move to Manchuria in the first half of the nineteenth century, from subjects of the Emperor of China. The Birarcen name a Dahur or a Goldi as their first shaman, or say they had no shamans at all until the seven mastered spirits came from the Mongols. On the decisive point the recorder reports the groups as unanimous: the art of mastering spirits did not originally exist among them but was practised by their neighbours, and especially by lamas.
note: He also states why such testimony is usually missing from the record, and the remark is a finding about the discipline rather than about the Tungus: answers of this kind look to an investigator accustomed to the primeval character of shamanism like an error of the informer, and would most probably not even be recorded. That is his and is entered as his.
note: This is testimony about itself and not a scholar's reconstruction, and it is the reason the node stands here rather than at an examination. The recorder separates it explicitly from folklore, which he holds unreliable for the question, and states that the groups themselves consider these statements historical facts.
note: What he holds the older complex to have contained is reported with the same care: only the spirit of heaven, buga, which he says shows no direct sign of alien influence and is recognised by all Tungus as their own, and the managing of the souls of the dead. The Birarcen are quoted saying that before, the Tungus had only buga and buni. He then argues against his own inference, that other complexes may have been lost and forgotten, and calls the scepticism perhaps too great.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The sign that a sacrifice was refused
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Zeichen des zurückgewiesenen Opfers @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 128, Case 2, p. 347
definition: In the Manchu clan history recorded by the author, the kite spirit is said to be able to eat the whole liver of an ox. After eating, the shaman must leave his assistant; if he falls down without being able to keep on his legs, the sacrifice is considered as rejected by the spirit.
note: A condition of failure with a physical criterion, stated in advance, decidable on the spot by everyone present, and not in the performer's gift. Very little in this graph has that shape, and it is the reason the passage is entered although it stands inside a narrative.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The office and the hunt exclude each other
type: Conceptualizing
label: Amt und Jagd schließen einander aus @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 127, p. 345, and chap. XXX, sect. 140, pp. 378-381
definition: The shaman cannot do two things, the hunting and a regular carrying out of the performances, and therefore needs the support of the junior members of his clan. It is given as one reason why father and son are not both shamans and why the office commonly skips a generation.
note: An economic condition stated as such, and one of the few places where a transmission in this graph says what its own office costs the household that carries it.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The state of the performance holds its own agency
type: Situating
label: Der Zustand der Darbietung behält die eigene Trägerschaft @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXIX, sect. 134, pp. 362-363
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Own agency
situated node: The state has two limits, and both can be missed
situation ground: Producing the state is said to require a power of controlling the thinking mechanism and knowledge of the methods for entering it, maintaining it and ending it. A person in whom it turns into an uncontrolled fit is held to be possessed and for that reason cannot hold the office. The transmission thus places the office on the acting end of this axis and excludes the other end by name.

The trial in the frost
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Probe im Frost @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 128, Case 2, p. 347
definition: In the same clan history, an election carried out when nobody knew whom to select: a man from every generation put on a shaman's headdress, they went out and stayed in the frost while the act was carried on for a long time. Many of them could not stand it and ran away. The spirit descended into one of those who remained and declared that new shamans should not be initiated in winter but in spring.
note: A selection by endurance with an outcome the participants do not control, followed by a rule derived from the cost of the procedure. The transmission here corrects its own practice on the strength of what happened, which is the shape of an operative reworking rather than of a copied instruction.
note: It stands inside a clan narrative told to the recorder and not in an account of a procedure he watched. The narrative also carries a live burial, a decapitation and a series of deaths, and no part of it is separable from the rest by anything in the text.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Tunkan, the sacred stones
type: Conceptualizing
label: Tunkan, die heiligen Steine @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), pp. 204-206 and pp. 208-211
definition: Small stones of native brown sandstone, usually spherical, regular in outline and untouched by any tool, found on the tops of high buttes and not buried. To dream of one was held to be a sign of great import, meaning that the dreamer who fulfilled the requirements of the dream would become possessed of a power exercised through the stones. The word is said to be an abbreviation of the word for grandfather and belongs to the sacred speech.
note: The stones are kept wrapped, one of them in eagle down, of which it was said that there is something between the down and the stone, because when surrounded by down it cannot get away. A stone sold to another remains subject to recall by the man who dreamed it.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The fourth
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Vierte @de
source: Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad 7, in Robert Ernest Hume (trans.), The Thirteen Principal Upanishads (London: Humphrey Milford, Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 392
definition: The fourth quarter of the self, given by negation throughout: not inwardly cognitive, not outwardly cognitive, not both, not a cognition-mass, neither cognitive nor non-cognitive; unseen, ungraspable, without distinguishing mark, unthinkable, not to be designated. Its positive terms are the cessation of development, tranquil, benign, without a second. The passage closes by identifying it with the self and saying it should be discerned.
note: Nothing in the verse gives a criterion by which a reader could decide of a described condition that it is this one. Every mark is a denial, and the one positive phrase, without a second, is a claim about reality rather than about what the practitioner meets. A coordinate has to be decidable from a text; this is not, and that is the second reason it is a claim here and not a value there.
note: The separation of verse from commentary is drawn more sharply above than the transmission can bear, and the correction belongs in the node rather than only in a review. The Upaniṣad is transmitted inside the Kārikā and the question of an independent transmission is open; whether that changes what the verse alone supports is what prima-materia#443 has to settle at the wording. Until it does, the sentence above states what the printed verse says and not that verse and commentary reached us apart.
note: What the verse does not say is as important as what it says, and it is why this node exists rather than a coordinate on an axis. The text enumerates the fourth alongside the other three as a fourth quarter, and does not say there that it underlies them or that the other three are its appearances. The substrate reading is carried by Gauḍapāda's Kārikā and by Śaṅkara after him and is not asserted here on the strength of this passage.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Upaniṣadic tradition

The branching of humanity into a right-hand and a left-hand path of knowledge
type: Originating
label: Die Verzweigung der Menschheit in einen rechten und einen linken Pfad des Wissens @de
date: 1888
source: H. P. Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine I: Cosmogenesis (London 1888), in the discussion of the fourth race, at the sentence on the branching of humanity into the right- and left-hand paths of knowledge or Vidya
definition: The claim that humanity divided at a datable point of its history into two opposed paths of knowledge, a right-hand and a left-hand one, and that the two magics called white and black were sown as seeds at that moment.
note: Checked against the earlier work rather than assumed from it. The full text of Isis Unveiled (1877), both volumes, carries no occurrence of a right-hand or a left-hand path, and none of the tantric vocabulary the names come from. The usual account, which dates the introduction of the terms to 1877, is wrong by eleven years: the passage stands in the work of 1888. See prima-materia#58.
note: The claim is presented as a quotation from a commentary of unstated antiquity, and it is the commentary rather than the author that later reporting cites. That is what pm:circulatesAs records here, and it is why this node is an origination and not an ordering: an ordering names what it arranges, and this one arranges nothing.
note: What is new here is not the pair of names, which stands in the orientalist literature from 1832 and is held as pmc:RightAndLeftHandNomenclature. What is new is that the pair becomes a history: two parties, a moment of origin, and a lineage of adepts on either side. Everything the later occult milieu inherits — that there are two camps and that a person may join one of them — rests on this move and not on the naming.
circulates as: The ancient meaning of the two paths, credited to a commentary of unstated age rather than to the work of 1888 in which it first stands.
originated by: Helena P. Blavatsky

The lot that was wrong
type: Testing
label: Das Los, das falsch lag @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part I, chapters 2 and 3
definition: A protocol taken from the tradition's own report. The lot predicted that the men of wood would come out well and would speak on earth; the chapters that follow have them without memory of their maker, walking on all fours, and destroyed. The transmission preserves the failure of its own divination instead of removing it, which is what makes the passage worth holding.
note: The state is not raised above procedure without cases, and deliberately. One narrated instance inside a creation account is not a case in the sense this scale uses: nobody counted consultations, and the outcome is fixed by the story rather than observed. What the passage supplies is a procedure with a stated, missable outcome, which most divination material does not.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A series of castings recorded before their outcomes, in which the rate of answers met is no higher than the rate expected from the distribution of the seeds alone.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: The answer the lot gave about the men of wood

Uplifting rapture
type: Conceptualizing
label: Erhebungsverzückung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV.94ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The fourth of the five degrees of rapture, described as strong enough to lift the body.
within tradition: Theravāda

Whether the unchosen state transmits
type: Testing
label: Ob der ungewählte Zustand übergeht @de
definition: An examination of whether a sender's own affective state passes to a recipient in the absence of a deliberately chosen one.
note: Affect transfer between co-present people remains widely reported, but the mechanism the contagion literature proposes for it is not secure. The canonical test of the facial feedback step returned a rating difference of 0.03 units, confidence interval -0.11 to 0.16, across seventeen laboratories and 1,894 participants, where the original had reported 0.82. A claim that the state passes without either party choosing it therefore stands without its stated mechanism.
note: The consequence for the draft, and it is not a refutation. What the claim describes occurs; it occurs through a channel that requires nothing the section posits. A practitioner who finds his own state arriving in the other person has not thereby found evidence for the transfer the section is about — he has found the effect that would be there anyway. The claim is confirmed and its confirmation supports nothing beyond itself.
note: The earlier sentence here, that the states a person is not presenting are the ones that leak most reliably, is retracted. It reversed the meta-analytic finding.
note: The leakage evidence is withdrawn. Ekman and Friesen 1969 is a theoretical paper with three illustrative analyses of films of forty female psychiatric inpatients, of whom deception could be certified for three interviews; the authors state that the studies do not directly test their formulation, and that the leakage they describe should be relatively easy to eliminate once a person is aware of it. Its channel prediction is not borne out either: over independent estimates numbering twenty-nine, twenty-eight, eighteen and thirty-two, hand movements stand at d = 0.00, foot and leg movements at d = -0.09, self-fidgeting at d = -0.01 and eye contact at d = 0.01. The body areas named as the reliable leakage sites sit at zero; what discriminates is verbal and vocal, and it is faint.
note: The narrower claim that would carry the section is not examined here and is not touched by this node: that the unchosen state passes where the ordinary channels are closed, out of sight and out of earshot. That is a different protocol, it has no cases, and it must not borrow the confirmation recorded above.
note: Two claims were run together here and are now separated. Detectability is the claim that an observer can read a state the sender is not presenting. Transmission is the claim that the recipient comes to be in that state. The evidence entered for the first was cited for the second, which is the same error as at the Kox case in prima-materia#383: the work was named correctly and stood for something it does not say.
counter-search: Counter-search found opposition
counter-search note: Carried 2026-09-03. Searched: the meta-analytic record on behavioural cues to deception, the accuracy of lie-truth judgments, and the replication status of the mimicry-and-feedback mechanism, in each case for work opposing the claim rather than supporting it. Found: the cue meta-analysis reports that many behaviours have no discernible or only weak links to deceit, with the hand, foot, fidgeting and gaze channels at or near zero; and the multi-laboratory replication of the facial feedback step recovered no effect. Both were read at the passage. Not yet opened: Hatfield, Cacioppo and Rapson 1994, which is carried in prima-materia as an unread citation, and the judgment-accuracy meta-analysis of Bond and DePaulo 2006, seen only in abstract.
evidence from: B. M. DePaulo, J. J. Lindsay, B. E. Malone, L. Muhlenbruck, K. Charlton and H. Cooper, Cues to deception, Psychological Bulletin 129 (2003), no. 1, pp. 74-118
evidence from: E.-J. Wagenmakers et al., Registered Replication Report: Strack, Martin, & Stepper (1988), Perspectives on Psychological Science 11 (2016), no. 6, pp. 917-928
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: Not devised here. The protocol reads the finding off the contagion literature and the work on involuntary nonverbal disclosure
falsified by: Recipients in the presence of a sender in an unchosen state show no shift toward that state against a neutral condition.
protocol updated: 2026-09-03
tests: Sending without a chosen signature carries the sender's actual state

The uncreated light cedes agency
type: Situating
label: Das ungeschaffene Licht tritt die Trägerschaft ab @de
source: Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (trans. Gendle 1983)
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Ceded agency
situated node: Uncreated light
situation ground: The file's own note states the criterion: this is a claim about what shines through the practitioner, not about an emanation the practitioner produces or directs. The defence turns on the light being uncreated, which is what puts the acting side outside the practitioner.

The consummation as a marriage rather than a merging
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Vollendung als Hochzeit, nicht als Verschmelzung @de
source: Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I, in the account of the Valentinian consummation, at the passage on the mother's return, the brides of the angels and the removal of the creator (trans. J. Keble, Oxford 1872)
definition: The account of a final state in which the mother returns within the fullness and receives the saviour as her spouse; those who call themselves spiritual are stripped of their souls, made purely intellectual spirits, and become brides of spiritual angels; the creator, being merely animal, moves into the mother's place; and the souls of the righteous rest in an intermediate place.
note: Placed on the telic axis as pm:conjugalTelos. The placement is a reading and carries the same burden as the claim it sits on: it rests on the bridal state reported in the passage, which has two parties and therefore neither one term nor an absolute. It is stated here rather than left implicit so that it can be contradicted.
note: Recorded because it does not fit either end of the axis it is regularly assigned to. The spiritual ones are not dissolved: they are stripped and transformed, but a bridal state presupposes two, so what is transformed persists as a party to it. Nor are they made into absolutes of their own: they are married, not set apart. The end is a union that keeps what it unites, and that is a third case, distinct from the one in pmc:DistinctivenessAgainstDissolution, where the creature stays with itself against dissolution rather than entering a twoness. See prima-materia#70 and prima-materia#52.
note: The passage is a report by an opponent and is attested as such. What can be said on this source is that the doctrine was ascribed in this form in the second century, not that its holders stated it so. See the caution on pmt:ValentinianGnosis.
note: Two further things in the same passage that a summary loses. The demiurge is not destroyed but relocated, which makes the account less anticosmic than its modern reception; and the souls of the righteous, who are not of the spiritual class, are neither saved into the fullness nor lost, but given a place between. A scheme with two outcomes cannot hold either detail.
attested by: Third-party ascription
telic orientation: Conjugal telos
within tradition: Valentinian gnosis

A confession that holds presupposes that nothing was withheld
type: Presupposing
label: Eine gültige Beichte setzt voraus, dass nichts verschwiegen wurde @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
note: Entered at stated necessity because the source names the outcome of the want and not merely the rule: the confession was not good and is to be made again. That the finding of the want is itself made by a randomising device is the point of the neighbouring node and does not weaken the necessity, which is stated independently of how it is detected.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Where the bead breaks in two rather than three, or the straws come out odd, the confession was not good and the penitent is told to confess his faults again.
dependent step: The confession made during the fast
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The test that decides whether a confession held
within tradition: Andean transmission

A valid verdict presupposes the second test
type: Presupposing
label: Ein gültiger Spruch setzt den zweiten Test voraus @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 138-139
note: Entered at stated necessity because the source names what fails to happen without the second test and not merely the order of the two. The qualification that a single test is often accepted stands on the practice node and does not weaken this: where the transmission requires the corroboration, it also says what the want of it costs.
attested by: Textual attestation
consequence of skipping: Without the second test no judgement is accepted as valid; where both tests fall alike the verdict is contradictory and void and the matter must be put again on another occasion.
dependent step: One fowl must die and the other live
prerequisite strength: Stated necessity
prior step: The corroborative second test at the poison oracle
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The vengeance system holds only while the victims are unnamed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Racheverfahren trägt nur, solange die Opfer ungenannt bleiben @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 6
definition: Every death is held to be caused by witchcraft and to be avenged by lethal magic, and the death of the witch so struck is in turn avenged by his own kin. The transmission keeps the names of those killed by avenging magic secret between the kin and the prince, and the source states that were the names known the whole procedure would stand exposed as futile. Some Azande are reported as doubting the honesty of the princes who hold the oracles, and a few as having seen that the system is fallacious.
note: The defence offered when the recorder put the objection is recorded with it: a prince whose oracle has declared that one man died of another's vengeance-magic will refuse to put the second death to his oracle at all, so that the chain is cut by the authority that holds the instrument.
note: The strongest self-warning in this file, and one reported as spoken rather than inferred. It names the exact condition under which the transmission's own central procedure collapses, and names the arrangement by which that condition is kept from arising.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Healing by touch ascribed to Vespasian
type: Attributing
label: Heilung durch Berührung, Vespasian zugeschrieben @de
source: Suetonius, Divus Vespasianus 7
source: Tacitus, Historiae IV.81
definition: A capacity ascribed to a named ruler, in an account whose author remarks that those who were present still tell it although there is now no reward for the lie.
note: The remark about eyewitnesses is part of the ascription, not an endorsement of it. It records how the historian wanted the claim received.
ascribed capacity: Healing by touch
ascribed to: Vespasian
attested by: Third-party ascription
within tradition: Graeco-Roman testimony

The vital-energy correspondence
type: Converging
label: Die Entsprechung der Lebensenergie @de
source: Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7.15.1 (Sanskrit; received prapāṭhaka-khaṇḍa numbering)
source: Xingqi yupei ming (jade inscription on circulating the qi)
definition: The observation that several traditions name something conducted or borne in the body and susceptible of deliberate direction.
note: The correspondence is weaker than it looks. Pneuma is a principle of cosmic cohesion and not a faculty; the breath of the Sefer Yetzirah is a medium of formation and not a conduction through the limbs. Only the Chinese and the Indian material carries the operative sense the modern draft assumes.
attested by: Compiler inference
converging concept: Inner heat
converging concept: Kuṇḍalinī
converging concept: Pīti
converging concept: Pneuma
converging concept: Prāṇa
converging concept: Qi
converging concept: Ruaḥ
ground of independence: The two witnesses that carry the claim of independence are fixed long before any route between them. The jade inscription is dated to the fourth or third century before the common era on the reading this collection follows; the Chāndogya passage belongs to the early Upaniṣads and is older still. The earliest documented traffic that could have carried Indian breath technique into China is the Buddhist transmission of the first centuries of the common era, and both fixations precede it. Neither is an ethnographic gathering, so no question of a recorder's feedback arises; what each carries is the wording of a received text.
independent attestation: Daoist tradition
independent attestation: Upaniṣadic tradition
transmission path: The Tibetan material reaches Tibet from the Indian mahāsiddha Nāropa through Marpa the translator and is therefore reception, not independent attestation. Buddhist and Daoist exchange along the trade routes is documented and forbids treating the Chinese and Buddhist testimony as wholly separate. The Greek and Hebrew items are neither route-linked nor operatively parallel.

Vo-sesa, the bound amulet
type: Conceptualizing
label: Vo-sesa, das gebundene Amulett @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), pp. 92-93
definition: An amulet belonging to a god, of which every god has his own kind. Its power is said not to rest on an indwelling spirit but on its consecration: it lets the god recognise and protect his own. Neither prayer nor sacrifice is offered to it. Only the priests of a god know how to make the amulets of that god, and they sell them at a high price. The word is derived from the verb to bind, which is used only of amulets, because the priest binds them on the person or the property of the buyer.
note: The transmission attaches a public and checkable claim to these: crops standing in the bush and goods left for sale beside a frequented path are put under an amulet on a stick, with a few cowries on each article to show the price, and are said to be quite safe from pillage. Whether that held is a question about a distribution in the world, and it is the kind of claim this graph is short of.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

Watchfulness is bound to no state
type: Situating
label: Die Wachsamkeit ist an keinen Zustand gebunden @de
source: Philokalia I, Hesychios of Sinai, On Watchfulness and Holiness
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Not bound to an anchoring
situated node: Watchfulness
situation ground: The guarding of the heart is set as an unbroken attention to what arises in it, and its whole point is that it does not stop when the occasion changes. A watchfulness held only in a session would not be the thing the literature asks for.

Do not ask about the water
type: Cautioning
label: Frage nicht nach dem Wasser @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 26, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
definition: A caution whose object is a speech act and not a deed. What the descender must not do at the sixth palace is not touch, not turn back and not doubt, but ask; the transmission attaches the whole penalty to the question about the nature of the water.
note: A rule against asking is the form a tradition takes when the thing to be hidden is that there is nothing there. This is not offered as a reading of the passage's intent, which the graph cannot establish, but as the shape the rule has: the prohibition falls exactly on the act that would reveal the absence.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The descent to the Merkavah
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The gods that ceremony cannot influence
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Götter, die keine Zeremonie beeinflussen kann @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 82 and p. 83 and p. 88 and p. 158
definition: The corpus names three limits on its own means. The Moon fixes the time for the more important undertakings of mankind but is indifferent to ceremonies and cannot be influenced by them, and her potency can be imparted to nothing. The Wind cannot be influenced by sacrifice or ceremony and his potency can be imparted to nothing. And the Sun's potency abides in fire and can be imparted to no other thing, so that since fire cannot be clothed in wrappings, a fetish having the potency of the Sun cannot be prepared at all; a second informant puts the same thing as a refusal rather than an impossibility, saying that no one ever had the potency of the Sun for his own, for the Sun will not be that for anyone.
note: A fourth is recorded beside them without being one of them: a fetish carrying the potency of the Great Spirit is said to be able to prevail in all things and to be not permissible to mankind. That is a prohibition and not a limit of the means, and it is not entered as one.
note: Statements of what does not work are scarcer in this graph than statements of what does, and they are worth more per line, because a transmission that names the boundary of its own instrument is making a claim that its own practice could refute. Here there are three of them in a corpus that elsewhere ascribes very wide powers to a shaman.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

What it is that lies still
type: Conceptualizing
label: Was da stillliegt @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, p. 56
definition: Three positions are reported side by side. Some hold that those who cast themselves down are not really but only in appearance dead. Others hold that the soul departs from the body and, after its travel abroad, returns again. The compiler holds both to be false, on the ground that it is impossible for either man or devil to restore a soul to the body it has once left, and concludes that the devil only stifles the faculties of the soul for a time and hinders their operations.
note: No dispute node is written, and the reason is a rule of this repository rather than a judgement about the material. A dispute cites each side from its own work; here all three positions stand in one compilation, reported by one man, and two of them without an owner. What the passage establishes is that the question was open among those the compiler drew on, not who held what.
note: The compiler's own position is reached from a doctrine and not from the material: he rejects the departure of the soul because it would be theologically impossible, not because anything he was told tells against it. That is worth recording, because the same move settles the question for him everywhere else in the chapter.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

What may be doubted and what may not
type: Conceptualizing
label: Was bezweifelt werden darf und was nicht @de
source: John H. Weeks, Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People, in Folk-Lore, vol. XX (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1909), pp. 51-54
definition: The corpus sets out a ranking of what the people hold, in the order of its binding force: witchcraft and evil spirits first, the ordeal second, prohibition third, divination fourth, omens fifth, the practitioners sixth, and the charged things last. On the first two it states that doubt is not permitted, since to scout the idea of the power to bewitch or to sneer at the ordeal is held to prove the doubter a witch himself; on the last two it states that doubt costs nothing, that a man may snub a practitioner and talk slightingly of his charms and suffer no inconvenience, and that no one believes in all the charged things but each keeps his own few and regards the rest with contempt.
note: The corpus states one consequence of this ranking as an observation of the recorder: the practitioner of a village is seldom if ever engaged by the people of that village, who know too much about him and see that his charms cannot keep himself, his wife, his children or his animals in health, and who send instead for the practitioner of another village of whom they know little.
note: The most valuable node in the file for what the project is for, because the transmission itself distinguishes the propositions that carry the system from the ones that do not. It also states the reason the ordinary man cannot check the charged things against each other: if a thief is not found out his charm was strong, and if he is caught the other man's was stronger.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Whether the huaca speaks or the priest speaks for it
type: Disputing
label: Ob die Huaca spricht oder der Priester für sie @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fol. 6v
source: Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno (1615), Copenhagen, Det Kongelige Bibliotek, GKS 2232 4°, p. 280 [282], the chapter on the sorcerers of this kingdom
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III, on the huacapvillac
definition: A disagreement between the recorders about what happens at the moment the whole transmission turns on. The indigenous chronicler of sixteen fifteen says outright that these priests deceived men, saying that the huacas eat and drink and speak, which they did not do. The extirpation account of sixteen twenty-one says that the one who speaks with the huaca answers the people what he pretends it tells him, and then adds that sometimes the devil does speak to them through the stone. The earlier report of about fifteen seventy-five says without qualification that they had many huacas and temples where the devil gave his answers.
note: The chronicler's denial has a provenance he states himself: he knows what he reports about the priesthood because he served the visitor general who destroyed the huacas of the kingdom. Whether that makes his denial better evidence, as an insider's, or worse, as a man writing for the side that was burning them, is exactly what a later reader has to weigh, and it is why the sentence is in this note.
note: The disagreement is not the ordinary one between a believer and a sceptic. All three recorders are Christians who hold the huacas to be nothing or to be demons, and the one who denies the speaking outright is the one who is himself Andean. What separates them is whether the office rests on an event or on a performance, and that is a question about the transmission and not about their theology.
note: What the three do agree on is that few laymen ever saw the principal huaca and that only the specialist went forward and spoke. That much is common ground between the denial and the two affirmations, and it is entered separately as its own node.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: Mochar: the act of address

Whether keeping the self is the goal of the path or its failure
type: Disputing
label: Ob das Bewahren des Selbst das Ziel des Weges ist oder sein Scheitern @de
source: A. Crowley, Magick Without Tears, chapter XII, on the left-hand path and the black brothers (electronic text of the collected letters)
source: M. A. Aquino, The Temple of Set (Temple of Set, San Francisco), in the account of the Word Xeper and its Egyptian derivation
definition: A disagreement about what becomes of the bounded self at the end of the path, carried on inside the modern occult literature with the same term on both sides. One party holds that a self which is not surrendered ossifies and is consumed by time, and calls that the second death; the other holds that a self brought forth and made to endure is the attainment, and names it with a word of self-generation.
note: One asymmetry the record should not smooth. The earlier side values the matter from a unitive end and treats the surviving self as a remainder that time consumes; the later values it from a separative end and treats the same survival as the work itself. Neither is a misreading of the other. A continuity story running from the one to the other as a single tradition with a changing mood reports a break as a development.
note: That is why the disagreement is worth a node. Read as a quarrel about practices it dissolves into nothing, because neither side defines the path by practices. Read as a quarrel about the end state it is sharp and not decidable from inside either work, because each describes the same movement and calls it by the opposite name. See prima-materia#61 and prima-materia#68.
note: The sides do not differ over means, and both say so. The one states that the signpost of a right-hand and a left-hand path is barely legible, that the two look alike for a long way, and that the question is at which point they diverge; he puts the divergence at the crossing of the Abyss and separates the sorcerer from the brother of the left-hand path as sharply as a thief from a tyrant. The other derives his word from an Egyptian term for coming into being and applies it to the transformation of the will, not to any particular practice. Whatever is at issue between them, it is not method.
attested by: Textual attestation
disputed claim: Xeper as the word of self-generation

Whether the drum belongs to the sun or to God
type: Disputing
label: Ob die Trommel der Sonne gehört oder Gott @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 47-48
source: Knud Leem, An Account of the Laplanders of Finmark, in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), chap. XXI, pp. 476-477
definition: The two recorders describe the same instrument and disagree about what is invoked over it. The compilation of sixteen seventy-four has the drum made from a tree whose grain turns with the course of the sun, because the tree is held acceptable to the sun, which they worship under the image of Thor; the whole art is treated as heathen and the answers as the devil's. The account of seventeen sixty-seven reports a named practitioner who, going to use his drum, marked himself and it with the sign of the cross as an earnest of good success, said the Lord's Prayer, invoked God the Father, the Son and an angel to assist him, and in the middle of the work broke out into a prayer to the God who created the heaven and the earth, calling himself a man liable to error, old and unworthy, and saying it were better that he should die than that God should deny help to the one on whose behalf they entreated.
note: Ninety years lie between them and the second recorder had read the first, so this is not two independent descriptions of one moment. What it is, is a transmission caught in the middle of taking something over: the instrument, the hammer, the ring and the rule of the sun's course are unchanged, and what is said over them has been replaced. The reading rule survived the theology that was given for it, which says something about which of the two the practice actually rested on.
note: That the later station added something to what it received is exactly the shape pm:Reworking is for, and no reworking node is written: the addition here is Christian and the transmission it came from is not the one that performed the act. The class as it stands wants one tradition taking over from another, and this is a tradition taking over from the mission that was suppressing it. The gap is recorded rather than forced.
note: The second recorder notices one detail against himself and reports it: that in calling the Holy Ghost an angel the man used a word he had never heard the Lapps use for it anywhere he knew, where they say Passe Vuoign. He records the anomaly instead of correcting it, which is why the passage can be used at all.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: Consulting the drum

Whether the displacement is instantaneous in the way the claim requires
type: Testing
label: Ob der Ortswechsel so unmittelbar ist, wie die Behauptung verlangt @de
definition: An examination of the claim against what the transmissions that report the journey say about its duration.
note: A transmission in this holding says the opposite, and it says it in the one form that can be compared. pmc:DurationTracksDistance records that the time the practitioner lies still is stated to depend on how near or far the place is, an hour or two for a near one, with an upper bound of a day however great the distance. A journey whose duration follows the distance is not a displacement by willing; it is a movement with a speed.
note: How much weight this bears, stated plainly. It is a seventeenth-century report of what practitioners said, not a measurement, and it is one transmission among several. It does not refute the posit. What it does is show that the draft's account is not the one its sources give, at a point where the sources happen to be specific — and specificity of that kind is rare enough in this field that it should not pass unremarked.
note: No procedure devised, for the same reason as at the neighbouring node: the duration of the journey is only reachable through the traveller's report, and the claim is about what that report describes. The falsifying condition would require an independent fix on when the traveller arrived, which is the whole question.
examination state: No procedure devised
examined by: Nobody. The comparison with the transmission is recorded in the notes and is not an examination; no protocol has been devised that could be run
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: Intention replaces the musculature and the change of place happens by willing it

Whether wind is a source
type: Testing
label: Ob Wind eine Quelle ist @de
definition: An examination of the claim that moving air supplies the practitioner with something over and above respiration.
note: Entered on no procedure devised, and the reason is worth stating rather than passing over. The neighbouring claim about cold names a boundary condition that instruments already measure, so it could be turned around within an afternoon. This one names no quantity that distinguishes it from breathing in still air, and until it does, there is nothing to fail.
note: What would make it examinable is a difference the claim itself must state: the same breathing, in moving and in still air, with the two conditions expected to come apart in some named respect. That is a small addition to the claim and it is the whole difference between this node and its neighbour.
examination state: No procedure devised
examined by: Nobody. The state records that no falsifying condition has been stated, which is a fact about the means of examination and not about the claim
protocol updated: 2026-09-02
tests: Energy can be taken in from wind

A bad dream is an experience of witchcraft, not a sign of it
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein böser Traum ist eine Erfahrung der Hexerei, kein Zeichen für sie @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), appendix II, pp. 230-231
definition: The transmission divides dreams into witchcraft-dreams and oracular dreams, a nightmare being of the first kind and a pleasant dream of the second. A bad dream is held to be not a symbol of witchcraft but an actual undergoing of it: in waking life a man learns that he was bewitched only from a subsequent misfortune or from an oracle, but in a dream he sees the witches themselves and may speak with them. The soul is held to leave the body in sleep, and the witch to send the soul of his witchcraft to eat the soul of his victim while both sleep.
note: Entered because it stands squarely against a claim this graph holds open elsewhere, that the figures met at the threshold of sleep are the signature of the sleeper's own state and not visitors. Here the transmission asserts the opposite in as many words. It is one side and not a refutation; the other side is not in this file, so no dispute node is written.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The man is found with the wounds the animal took
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Mensch trägt die Wunden, die das Tier davontrug @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo I, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The claim that the man and his animal are one body for the purpose of injury: after a threatened person had a fight in the river with a caiman or in the open with some other animal, the man who had uttered the threat was afterwards found bearing the same wounds the animal had taken from the fight, although he had been elsewhere while it happened.
note: This is the most examinable claim in what was read, and it is examinable in the ordinary way: it asserts a coincidence of injuries between two bodies at a distance, with a stated time relation. Nothing about it requires an opinion on whether the transformation occurs. No protocol stands on it yet; see prima-materia#231.
attested by: Third-party ascription
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

The dating and reading of the jade inscription
type: Disputing
label: Datierung und Lesung der Jadeinschrift @de
source: D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
source: H.D. Roth, Original Tao (1999)
source: J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China II (1956), p. 143
definition: A disagreement among editors about the age of the inscription on circulating the qi and about how its opening is to be construed. One dating places it in the late fourth or early third century before the common era, another in the middle of the sixth; one reading takes the opening characters as a title and begins the text at the second line, another counts and construes differently.
note: Held as a node rather than as a remark, because the dating decides whether this is the earliest datable witness to deliberate circulation of the qi or one witness among several, and because a citation that names only the inscription conceals that anything is at issue.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: Circulating the qi

Yourougou in pursuit of Yasigui
type: Conceptualizing
label: Yourougou in Verfolgung Yasiguis @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 292
definition: The account in which one twin tore away a piece of the placenta that became the earth, was turned into the pale fox for it, and communicated his own impurity to the earth so that it became dry and barren; his fate is to pursue his twin, who is also his female soul, until the end of time. On the mythical plane the seed-star is this fox, held in space and turning tirelessly around Sirius, that is around the pursued twin, without ever reaching her.
note: The pursuit that never arrives is the same figure as the orbit that never closes on its centre. Whether the star is the image of the myth or the myth the reading of the star is exactly the question the article declines to raise.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Which oracles the transmission counts as its own
type: Disputing
label: Welche Orakel die Überlieferung als die ihren zählt @de
source: A. de Calonne-Beaufaict, Azande: introduction à une ethnographie générale des bassins de l'Ubangi-Uele et de l'Aruwimi (Bruxelles: Maurice Lamertin, 1921), chapter V, Procédés divinatoires (mantique), pp. 183-184
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), appendix I, p. 228, and p. 164
definition: A disagreement between the two recorders about the extent and the naming of the Zande set of oracles. The monograph gives the generic term as soroka and names four principal oracles: the poison, the rubbing-board, the termites and a three-stick oracle called mapingo. The earlier Belgian ethnography gives the generic term as lora, lists eight procedures, and assigns the pile-of-sticks oracle to the Abarambo, Mangbetu and Bakango and to Azande of those origins rather than to the transmission at large. It also describes the termites procedure differently, as a plaited grass braid laid in a small pit and read from whether the termites cut it through or gnaw only its underside.
note: The disagreement matters beyond terminology. Which procedures belong to the transmission and which were taken over from neighbours is exactly the question a contact route turns on, and the two recorders answer it differently for the same set. Neither was read against the other in a modern study in this run.
note: The two accounts also differ on who receives the poison. The Belgian ethnography, written sixteen years earlier and on the other side of the border, gives the ordeal as administered to a suspected person or to a fowl, in the present tense and without qualification. The monograph gives administration to human beings as a thing of the past and very rare even then. Whether that is a change over sixteen years, a difference between the two administrations, or a difference of observation is not decidable from the two passages.
attested by: Compiler inference
disputed claim: The graded order of the oracles

Ziqel discloses the signs of the shooting stars
type: Attributing
label: Ziqel offenbart die Zeichen der Sternschnuppen @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
note: Stands in the position the Ethiopic fills with Ezeqeel and the knowledge of the clouds.
ascribed capacity: Signs of the shooting stars
ascribed to: Ziqel
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The return presupposes the unbroken watch over the body
type: Presupposing
label: Die Rückkehr setzt die ununterbrochene Wache über dem Körper voraus @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), 2.18-33 and 3.2
note: Entered at prescribed order and not at stated necessity, and the difference is the finding rather than a formality. The transmission prescribes the watch in full detail and never says what would follow if it lapsed. There is no sentence anywhere in the chapters read about what happens if the traveller does not return, none about a condition under which the journey fails, and none about a body left unwatched. The risk is conceded in practice, by the testament made before drinking and by the undertaking given to the sisters, and it is not conceded in doctrine. A procedure this exact about what to do, and this silent about what goes wrong, is the shape a claim takes when nobody has been in a position to report a failure.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The return of the traveller on the seventh day
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: The seven days' watch over the body
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

The public prayer presupposes letter-perfect delivery
type: Presupposing
label: Das öffentlich gesprochene Gebet setzt buchstabengetreue Wiedergabe voraus @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 616
note: Entered one step below the Māori and Navajo parallels and for a reason that is a property of the passage and not of the tradition: the requirement is stated, the consequence of failing it is not. Raising this to stated necessity would need a place in the corpus that says what a misrecited prayer does, and the body of the collection was not read. See the convergence node and prima-materia#112.
attested by: Textual attestation
dependent step: The efficacy of the Zuni prayer
prerequisite strength: Prescribed order
prior step: Letter-perfect delivery
within tradition: Zuni ritual transmission

The prayer as a possession
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Gebet als Besitz @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 615
definition: Prayers held to carry power in themselves, so that having them is a source of power and losing or impairing them is a great danger.
note: The nearest thing the passages read give to a stated consequence of getting a prayer wrong, and deliberately not entered as one: the sentence speaks of loss and impairment of the prayer as a possession, not of the effect of a misrecited performance.
within tradition: Zuni ritual transmission

The Zuyua interrogation as a test of descent
type: Testing
label: Das Zuyua-Verhör als Abstammungsprobe @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 89-98
definition: A protocol the tradition states for itself. The claim is that the questions separate men of the ruling lineage from men who are not, and the tradition acts on the claim to the point of execution. The outcome is binary and is applied on the day.
note: A route by which a European examination genre could have reached this material exists and is documented: a Yucatec translation of the Spanish question-and-answer book of the emperor Adrian and the boy Epitus stands in a colonial Yucatec manuscript. Nobody has set the Zuyua catalogue against that literature. See prima-materia#460.
note: What the protocol cannot survive is the document that preserves it. The manuscript that reports the examination also prints the answers, so from the moment of that writing the procedure separates those who have read this book from those who have not, and no longer those of the lineage from the rest. A test whose key is published measures access to the key. This is a property of the record and not a modern objection to the tradition, and it is the reason the state stands at procedure without cases rather than higher.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, protocol stated from the witness; no case series has been collected
falsified by: A recorded case in which a man of the ruling lineage failed the questions, or in which a man not of that lineage answered them. The tradition claims the questions decide descent, so a single clean case on either side falls due against it.
protocol updated: 2026-09-04
tests: Understanding the language of Zuyua

The Zuyua interrogation is carried out in ordinary waking
type: Situating
label: Das Zuyua-Verhör findet im gewöhnlichen Wachen statt @de
attested by: Compiler inference
axis value: Outward waking
situated node: The interrogation in the language of Zuyua
situation ground: The candidate walks in, is spoken to by the first head-chief, fetches the objects demanded and hands them over, and the outcome is executed on the spot. Nothing in the chapter withdraws the senses, alters the state of either party, or places the exchange anywhere but in the public day.

prima-materia core ontology
type: Ontology
license: https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/
comment: Consciousness-first meta-ontology. Processes, not substances.

Manifesting
type: Class
label: Manifestieren @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The emergence of a form out of a prior undifferentiated ground.

Perceiving
type: Class
label: Wahrnehmen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of apprehending form within an awareness context.

Relating
type: Class
label: Beziehen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of placing one concept in relation to another.

Acquisition distinction declined
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Acquisition
label: Erwerbsunterscheidung abgelehnt @de
definition: The tradition holds that the distinction between what is worked for and what is given does not apply to what it teaches.

Acquisition not stated
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Acquisition
label: Erwerb nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it.

added element
type: ObjectProperty
label: hinzugefügtes Element @de
domain: Reworking
definition: The node carrying what this station added and the exemplar does not have. Required: an addition that cannot be pointed at is an assertion about a chain and not a link in it.

Agency distinction declined
type: Agency Holding
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Trägerschaftsunterscheidung abgelehnt @de
definition: The tradition holds that the distinction between acting and being acted through does not apply to what it teaches.

Agency not stated
type: Agency Holding
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Trägerschaft nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it.

analogue concept
type: ObjectProperty
domain: Conceptualizing
range: Conceptualizing
definition: A cross-tradition structural analogue, weaker than owl:sameAs and distinct from skos:closeMatch in that it asserts role-in-process similarity rather than lexical overlap.

Anchoring distinction declined
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Sinnesbindung als Unterscheidung abgelehnt @de
definition: The tradition holds that the distinction this axis draws does not apply to what it teaches: nothing is to be withdrawn from and no state is to be entered, because whatever arises is taken as the way.
note: A positive claim about a tradition and not a gap in the record. It needs a passage like any other claim; the same shape as pm:normDistinctionDeclined and pm:selfBoundaryDeclined on the two orientation axes.

ascribed capacity
type: ObjectProperty
label: zugeschriebenes Vermögen @de
domain: Attributing
range: Conceptualizing
definition: The capacity that an attribution ascribes.

ascribed to
type: ObjectProperty
label: zugeschrieben an @de
domain: Attributing
definition: The bearer to whom the capacity is ascribed: a named figure, a class of beings, humanity before a stated event.

attested by
type: ObjectProperty
label: bezeugt durch @de
range: Attesting
definition: Declares by which route a claim entered the record. Mandatory on every attribution, so that non-evidence cannot be forgotten.

axis value
type: ObjectProperty
label: Achsenwert @de
domain: Situating
range: Awareness Axis Value
definition: The coordinate the node is placed at. One value per node; a claim placed on two axes is two placements, and a claim placed at two values on one axis is either two claims or a dispute.

base rate
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Basisrate @de
domain: Testing
definition: The rate against which observed outcomes are compared, with the population it was taken from.

by practice
type: ObjectProperty
label: durch Praxis @de
domain: Yielding
range: Practicing
definition: The practice a yielding claim proceeds from.

case count
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Fallzahl @de
domain: Testing
range: integer
definition: The number of cases recorded under this protocol so far.

Cases without deviation
type: Examination State
label: Fälle ohne Abweichung @de
definition: Cases have been recorded and show no deviation from the stated base rate.

cautions about
type: ObjectProperty
label: warnt vor @de
domain: Cautioning
definition: The capacity, practice or pursuit a warning is directed at.

circulates as
type: DatatypeProperty
label: zirkuliert als @de
domain: Originating
definition: The ascription under which the claim is commonly reported: the tradition, the age or the authority it is credited to and does not have.

claimed speaker
type: DatatypeProperty
label: behaupteter Sprecher @de
domain: Receiving
definition: The speaker the work claims for the wording, given as the work gives it. A literal and not a link to a named being: what is recorded is the claim, and typing it as a bearer would grant the claim the thing it is asserting.

compiled by
type: DatatypeProperty
label: geordnet von @de
domain: Systematizing
definition: The named compiler who performed the ordering act. Without it, an order made in the present is indistinguishable from an order found in the source.

Conforming method
type: Method Orientation
label: Ordnungstreue Methode @de
definition: The operative means keep the norm of the order the path is transmitted in: what is prohibited there stays prohibited here.

consequence of skipping
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Folge des Überspringens @de
domain: Presupposing
definition: What the source says happens if the prior step is passed over.
note: Required wherever the strength is pm:statedNecessity. Claiming that a text sets a necessity obliges the claimant to say what the text says goes wrong without it; a necessity nobody can quote a consequence for is an order read as a necessity.

contact route
type: ObjectProperty
domain: Tradition
range: Contact route
definition: The state of the contact question between this tradition and those the graph already holds.

converging concept
type: ObjectProperty
label: konvergierender Begriff @de
domain: Converging
range: Conceptualizing
definition: A concept that participates in the observed correspondence.

Corpus harvested
type: Coverage state
label: Korpus geerntet @de
definition: The harvest has been carried out for the works actually opened, and what was left unread is recorded. The state claims completeness for what was opened, never for the corpus.

counter-search
type: ObjectProperty
label: Gegensuche @de
domain: Testing
range: Counter-Search State
definition: How far the search for work opposing the cited evidence has been carried.
note: Required wherever pm:evidenceFrom is set, enforced by pm:CounterSearchRequiredShape. A protocol that records no state here is not neutral about the question; it has not asked it.

counter-search note
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Notiz zur Gegensuche @de
domain: Testing
definition: What was searched for and what came back, stated so that the search itself can be judged.
note: Required wherever pm:counterSearch is set, enforced by pm:CounterSearchNoteRequiredShape. Without it, pm:counterSearchFoundNothing is indistinguishable from a search nobody ran, and it is the state a hasty protocol would reach for.

coverage state
type: ObjectProperty
domain: Tradition
range: Coverage state
definition: How far the corpus of this tradition has been carried into the graph.

dependent step
type: ObjectProperty
label: abhängiger Schritt @de
domain: Presupposing
definition: The later step: the practice, state or capacity said not to be reached without the prior one.

disputed claim
type: ObjectProperty
label: strittiger Gegenstand @de
domain: Disputing
definition: What the disagreement is about.

Duration distinction declined
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Duration
label: Dauerunterscheidung abgelehnt @de
definition: The tradition holds that the distinction between a passing and an abiding condition does not apply to what it teaches.

Embodied
type: Awareness Locus
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Im Körper @de
definition: Awareness is located where the body is, whatever it perceives at a distance.
note: Distant sight reported from a motionless practitioner is embodied. The axis asks where the seer is, not how far he sees.

evidence from
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Evidenz aus @de
domain: Testing
definition: A modern work bearing on the claim under examination, given as a bibliographic reference or a work identifier.
note: Deliberately not dcterms:source. A modern study is never a witness to a tradition and must never appear as the source of one of its claims; it bears on a claim only as evidence inside an examination. Keeping the two predicates apart is what allows research to enter the record at all without loosening the rule that sources are received works.

examination state
type: ObjectProperty
label: Prüfstand @de
domain: Testing
range: Examination State
definition: How far the attempt to fail the claim has been carried.

examined by
type: DatatypeProperty
label: geprüft von @de
domain: Testing
definition: Who devised or carried the protocol. A protocol without a named author is unaccountable, and an unaccountable protocol is not evidence of anything.

falsified by
type: DatatypeProperty
label: widerlegt durch @de
domain: Testing
definition: The stated condition under which the claim counts as refuted.

field record
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Aufnahmelage @de
definition: How the cited passage was taken down: who spoke, or that the speaker is expressly withheld; who recorded; when and where; in which language; and whether the wording in the language of the telling is carried in the work or only a translation.
note: It names the gathering of this passage, not the standing of the corpus. The situation of a whole ethnographic tradition — span of the fieldwork against the year of publication, how many informants, whether the same people were revisited, whether material was delivered between visits, whether the recorder stood in a milieu already expecting what he found — belongs as a skos:note on the pm:Tradition instance. See prima-materia#260. The two are needed together: one says how far this sentence stands from its speaker, the other how far the corpus stands from the transmission.
note: Required wherever pm:attestedBy is pm:fieldAttestation, enforced by pm:FieldAttestationShape. Prose and not a scale, for the reason pm:independenceGround is prose: there is no threshold at which a gathering becomes sound, and a scale would counterfeit a check. What the sentence is worth is decided by whoever reads it.

generalized from
type: ObjectProperty
label: verallgemeinert aus @de
domain: Generalizing
definition: An attested claim the generalization was formed from. At least two are required, and each must itself name a work.
note: Two is a floor and not a target. How many attested claims a generalization rests on, and how far apart their traditions stand, are the numbers that make one worth examining before another — the same distinction pm:Converging draws between many witnesses on one cable and many on three.

generalized statement
type: DatatypeProperty
label: verallgemeinerte Aussage @de
domain: Generalizing
definition: The claim itself, stated in the abstract and worded so that a result could contradict it.
note: A wording that covers an outcome and its opposite alike is the failure pm:claimDoesNotDiscriminate records after the fact. Here the cost is lower: it can be caught while the sentence is being written.

has symbolic form
type: ObjectProperty
range: Symbolizing
definition: Associates a concept with one or more symbolic representations (sigils, diagrams, glyphs).

ground of independence
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Grund der Unabhängigkeit @de
domain: Converging
definition: The statement that carries a claim of independent attestation: when the testimony relied on was fixed or gathered, and against which publication or route that date stands.
note: Required wherever pm:independentAttestation is set, enforced by pm:IndependenceGroundShape. The burden is reversed on purpose. Feedback from a published account back into the field it describes can almost never be demonstrated, so a predicate that marked only the demonstrated cases would let the ordinary case pass in silence — the failure pm:CoverageState and pm:ExaminationState exist to prevent. A claim of independence must instead carry the fact that makes it checkable.
note: The date alone does not settle it, and the sentence must say more where more is at stake. Feedback within a single enquiry — few informants, several years, the same team returning, material gathered by an informant between visits — precedes any publication and no date catches it. Where the corpus was fixed that way, the ground states the gathering situation as well. Whether it does so honestly is settled at the merge and not by a shape; naming that limit is better than a guard that pretends to check it.

independent attestation
type: ObjectProperty
label: unabhängige Bezeugung @de
domain: Converging
range: Tradition
definition: A tradition attesting the correspondence for which no route of contact is documented, so that its testimony is not the same statement counted a second time.
note: The earlier definition called this the only kind of attestation that makes a correspondence a finding. It is not: it is the kind that makes the count honest. A correspondence carried by reception is still a finding about what was carried; what it may not be is a tally of independent witnesses.

Locus distinction declined
type: Awareness Locus
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Ortsunterscheidung abgelehnt @de
definition: The tradition holds that the distinction between an awareness in the body and an awareness apart from it does not apply, because it does not grant the localisation the axis presupposes.

Method orientation not stated
type: Method Orientation
label: Ausrichtung der Methode nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it: it prescribes its means without placing them for or against the norm of the order it stands in.
note: The counterpart of pm:normDistinctionDeclined from the other side, and required on every subject axis by SPEC §17. Without it a source that was asked and stayed silent is indistinguishable from a node nobody has reached, and any query of the form 'only conforming methods' reports the state of our reading instead of the state of the traditions. Silence is common here and is worth recording: a great many operative texts simply do not raise the question.

method orientation
type: ObjectProperty
label: Ausrichtung der Methode @de
range: Method Orientation
definition: Places a tradition, a practice or a claim on the axis of method. Asserting it is a claim about a source and carries the same burden as any other: a passage, an edition, and the counter-search.
note: No domain is declared, deliberately. The axis is stated of whatever a source states it of — a transmission as a whole, a single practice, a stage within one — and a declared domain would force the level before the material has settled it.

name form
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Namensform @de
domain: Naming
definition: The name as it stands in the edition named by dcterms:source, in that edition's transliteration.
note: Further forms of the same bearer go in skos:altLabel, so that a reader who met the name elsewhere finds the node. The form that decides identity is the one here.
note: The edition is not decoration here. A name is carried by its letters, and transliteration conventions differ enough that Šemiḥazah and Semjaza are the same bearer under two scholarly hands. Recording the form without the edition it comes from would make a later comparison unfalsifiable.

name role
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Rolle des Benannten @de
domain: Naming
definition: What the naming tradition takes the bearer to be, in that tradition's own term: watcher, angel, demon, daimon, god, spirit, ancestor.
note: Deliberately a literal and not a controlled scale. A fixed vocabulary would have to decide whether a Greek daimon is an angel or a demon, and that decision belongs to no tradition in the record: it is the harmonisation this project exists to avoid. Where two traditions call a shared name differently, the difference is the finding, and a scale would have deleted it.

Norm distinction declined
type: Method Orientation
label: Abgelehnte Normunterscheidung @de
definition: The source holds that the distinction does not apply to its path: nothing is kept and nothing is broken, because it denies that anything needs to be renounced, purified or transformed.
note: The value exists because a path that declines the axis is not the same as one whose position on it is unknown, and a scale without it would force the first to be recorded as the second. It is asserted only where a source says so.

Objectless depth
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Gegenstandslose Tiefe @de
definition: A condition in which no object at all is apprehended, whether reached in sleep or in a cessation described by a handbook of absorption.
note: The Māṇḍūkya calls this suṣupti. A source that has something exercised here is worth a second look before it is entered, because most traditions place their capacities short of it.

orders claim
type: ObjectProperty
label: ordnet Behauptung @de
domain: Systematizing
definition: A claim that this ordering act groups. The claims keep their own attestation; only the grouping belongs to the compiler.

originated by
type: DatatypeProperty
label: aufgestellt von @de
domain: Originating
definition: The named author with whom the claim begins.

posited in
type: DatatypeProperty
label: gesetzt in @de
domain: Positing
definition: Where the claim was put forward, given as an identifier rather than as a bibliographic reference: an issue number, a draft designation. Deliberately not dcterms:source, because what is named here is not a work a reader can obtain and must never be counted as one.

prerequisite strength
type: ObjectProperty
label: Stärke der Voraussetzung @de
domain: Presupposing
range: Prerequisite Strength
definition: How firmly the source sets the prerequisite.

principal corpus
type: DatatypeProperty
domain: Tradition
definition: The works in which this transmission is chiefly carried, named so that a later reader can find them.
note: Deliberately not dcterms:source. A source carries a passage that was read, with its place and its edition; this names a corpus that was not read. Using dcterms:source here would let a registration claim a textual knowledge it does not have. The literature rule applies all the same: a work, never a URL.

prior step
type: ObjectProperty
label: vorausgesetzter Schritt @de
domain: Presupposing
definition: The earlier step the later one is said to require.

protocol updated
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Protokollstand @de
domain: Testing
range: date
definition: The date on which the count was last carried forward. A protocol without this date claims a scrutiny it does not document.

read via
type: DatatypeProperty
label: gelesen über @de
definition: The work in which the passage was actually read, given as a bibliographic reference, where that work is not the one carrying the claim.
note: Deliberately separate from dcterms:source, for the same reason pm:evidenceFrom is. dcterms:source names what a reader must obtain to check the claim; this names what the writer of the node had in front of him. A record that fused them would report second-hand reading as first-hand and would lose the one distinction that makes an unreachable source admissible at all.
note: Required wherever pm:attestedBy is pm:mediatedAttestation. Carries a bibliographic reference and never a URL, enforced by pm:ReadViaIsLiteratureShape.

received by
type: DatatypeProperty
label: empfangen durch @de
domain: Receiving
definition: The person through whom the wording was received, named as the work names them.

received from
type: ObjectProperty
label: übernommen von @de
domain: Reworking
range: Tradition
definition: The transmission the claim was taken over from. The work and the place stay in dcterms:source; this names the transmission, so that the depth of a chain can be counted.

reception circumstance
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Umstand des Empfangs @de
definition: The circumstances of the receiving: the state the receiver is said to have been in, who put the questions, who took the wording down, and whether a record of the proceeding itself exists beyond the edited text.
note: Required on every receiving, enforced by pm:ReceivingShape. Without it the node says only that a speaker is claimed, which a reader could have guessed from the title; with it the claim can be weighed against the ones this literature makes about itself.

reworked claim
type: ObjectProperty
label: bearbeitete Behauptung @de
domain: Reworking
definition: The claim that was taken over, as it stands in the tradition performing the reworking.

scale family
type: ObjectProperty
domain: Scale
range: Scale Family
definition: The family a scale belongs to.

Self boundary declined
type: Telic Orientation
label: Abgelehnte Selbstgrenze @de
definition: The source holds that the question is malformed for its path: there is no bounded self that could either be dissolved or preserved, so neither end state is what it aims at.
note: As with pm:normDistinctionDeclined, this is a positive claim about a source and not a place to put an undetermined case.
note: The value was first written as the single place for everything that is neither dissolution nor separation, and the material has since shown that too coarse: a marriage is not a non-position, and a non-position is not a claim about which level the question belongs to. The two clearest of those have their own values below. What remains here is the plain form — the source denies that there is a bounded self to be dealt with either way — and the case where a source instead declares the whole level of the question superseded, which is a further distinction still to be made when a second instance of it appears.

Separative telos
type: Telic Orientation
label: Absonderndes Ziel @de
definition: The path claims that the bounded self is to be strengthened and kept as its own absolute, and treats its dissolution as what is to be avoided.
note: Distinct from self-assertion, ambition or the pursuit of power, none of which say anything about an end state. What places a path here is a claim about where it ends, not about how its practitioners behave.

situated node
type: ObjectProperty
label: verorteter Knoten @de
domain: Situating
definition: The node being placed: a practice, a capacity claim, a concept or a prerequisite claim.

situation ground
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Verortungsgrund @de
domain: Situating
definition: What in the source carries the placement, in the compiler's words: the condition the passage describes, and why it is read as this coordinate.
note: Required. Without it a placement is a bare assignment, and a later reader can neither check it nor contradict it — the same reason pm:counterSearchNote is required as soon as a counter-search state is set.

telic orientation
type: ObjectProperty
label: Ausrichtung des Zieles @de
range: Telic Orientation
definition: Places a tradition, a practice or a claim on the axis of the end state. Asserting it is a claim about a source and carries the same burden as any other.
note: Where a source claims one end state for a stage and another for the whole, both are stated on their own nodes rather than averaged. An averaged orientation reports a path no source teaches, in the same way an averaged reading reports a text no witness gives.

Telic orientation not stated
type: Telic Orientation
label: Ziel nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it: it sets out a practice and its results without saying what becomes of the bounded self at the end.
note: Required on every subject axis by SPEC §17, and the case it covers is the ordinary one. A handbook of technique may name a dozen capacities and never state an end state at all; recording that as absence would put it in the same bucket as every text nobody has opened yet.

tests
type: ObjectProperty
label: prüft @de
domain: Testing
definition: The claim this protocol attempts to fail.

Transgressive method
type: Method Orientation
label: Übertretende Methode @de
definition: The operative means take what the surrounding order prohibits and use the force of the prohibition itself as the vehicle. The transgression is prescribed, not incidental, and it is bounded by the rite that prescribes it.
note: Not the same as licence. A path is transgressive on this axis only where a source sets the breach as a means; a practice that merely fails to observe a norm is not oriented by it at all.

transmission path
type: DatatypeProperty
label: Übertragungsweg @de
domain: Converging
definition: A documented route of historical contact between the traditions in which the correspondence appears.
note: The earlier definition here said that the presence of a route downgrades the correspondence from convergence to reception. That was a judgement wearing the clothes of a definition, and it is withdrawn. A route says how a claim travelled, not whether anything was in it. Survival through many hands is selection, because most claims do not survive it, and a record that treats transmission as noise throws away the only evidence it has about what kept being worth copying.
note: What the route does decide is narrower and stays in force: an agreement reached along it may not be counted as independent attestation, because the same statement would be counted twice. Both may stand on one node, and on several they already do. The route bars a particular way of counting; it does not devalue the correspondence.

undivided outcomes
type: DatatypeProperty
label: nicht geschiedene Ausgänge @de
domain: Testing
definition: The differing outcomes that the claim treats alike, named so that the charge of saying nothing is itself checkable.
note: Required wherever the state is pm:claimDoesNotDiscriminate, enforced by pm:UndividedOutcomesRequiredShape. The burden falls on the examiner for the same reason it does at pm:independenceGround: a verdict that a claim says nothing is easy to reach and hard to contest, and one that names no pair of outcomes it fails to separate is an opinion about the claim rather than a finding about it.

Unitive telos
type: Telic Orientation
label: Vereinigendes Ziel @de
definition: The path claims that the bounded self is dissolved into, or united with, something that exceeds it, and treats the persistence of the separate self as what is to be given up.

within tradition
type: ObjectProperty
range: Tradition
definition: Associates a process instance with the tradition in which it is situated.

Work opened
type: Coverage state
label: Werk geöffnet @de
definition: A work of the corpus has been obtained and read and its edition is settled, but no passage has yet been entered as a node.

yields capacity
type: ObjectProperty
label: bringt Vermögen hervor @de
domain: Yielding
range: Conceptualizing
definition: The capacity a yielding claim arrives at. That the tradition says so is the claim; that the practice produces it is not asserted.

Divining by sleeping on the questioner's garment
type: Practicing
label: Wahrsagen durch Schlafen auf dem Kleidungsstück des Fragenden @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III, on the moscoc
definition: The diviner by dreams. Someone comes to ask whether he will recover or die, or whether a lost horse will be found. If the questioner is a man the diviner asks for the band from his head, or his bag, or his cloak, or some other part of his clothing; if a woman, for her sash or the like. He takes it home, sleeps on it, and answers according to what he dreams. Where the question is about love, he asks for the hair or the clothing of the person he is to divine about.
note: The identifier carries the name of the tradition because the plain one was already taken by a practice of another transmission in this graph. That is a property of a flat identifier space and not of the practice; see prima-materia#275.
note: The instrument is a possession of the person the question is about, not of the questioner, wherever the two differ. That distinction is stated in the source and is the only place in this file where the procedure names what it is a procedure on.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

Whether the answer of the sick man decides what the art says it decides
type: Testing
label: Ob die Antwort des Kranken entscheidet, was die Kunst sagt @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that after the oration of the physical art is said three times, the sick man's answer to the question how he feels tells without doubt whether he will recover or die.
note: One escape the corpus takes elsewhere is absent here. The art bars the man impeded by crime from saying the orations at all, and that condition is recorded as a caution; nothing in this passage says that a wrong prognosis shows the speaker was unworthy. Whether a fuller recension closes that gap is unread and would change the state of this protocol rather than its subject.
note: The obstacle to cases is not the difficulty of the procedure but who would keep the record. The judgement has to be written before the outcome and by someone who is not the person nursing the patient; the corpus offers no such series, and none has been looked for outside this graph.
note: The third branch is excluded from the falsifying condition on purpose. A patient who says he does not know is covered by dying and by getting worse together, and no fate he can meet falls outside that pair. Testing the rule as a whole would let that branch absorb every case the other two got wrong, which is exactly how a claim that says nothing comes to look confirmed.
note: Which reading is being tested has to be said, and this protocol tests the English. The Latin of the same printing says of the badly answering patient only that he will die shortly; Turner says he will die on the morrow. Shortly has no last day and therefore no outcome that could arrive too late, so the Latin branch is not examinable at all. The divergence stands as pmc:ArsNotoriaTerminusMortisDisputatus and it is the reason this protocol names its witness rather than the tradition.
base rate: Unknown and not a single number: whether a person who lies languishing recovers depends on the illness, and the rule is stated for illness in general. Any protocol has to fix the population before it starts, because a rule applied to a ward of the nearly recovered and a rule applied to a ward of the dying score differently without either being right.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passages recorded in traditions/ars-notoria.ttl
falsified by: One sick person who answers that he is at good ease or begins to mend and then dies of that illness, or who answers that he is grievously ill or worse and worse and then recovers, with the answer and the judgement written down before the outcome. The first two branches each name one outcome and exclude the other, and the text says without doubt and doubtless, so a single such case refutes the rule as stated.
protocol updated: 2026-09-07
tests: The oration of the physical art yields the knowledge of death or life

Whether the oration reveals the sex of the unborn child
type: Testing
label: Ob die Oration das Geschlecht des ungeborenen Kindes offenbart @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that saying the oration while touching the pulse of a pregnant woman reveals whether she will bring forth a male or a female. It is the claim in this corpus that comes closest to being ready for a count: a binary outcome, a known base rate, a public result, and a prediction that can be fixed in writing beforehand.
note: No case has been collected, and the obstacle here is not the record but the era: the claim is from a work in print since sixteen fifty-seven and nobody appears to have counted. That is a property of the attention the claim has had and not of the claim, which is why the state is procedure-without-cases.
note: The passage that carries this claim also carries the sentence that would explain a failure away, and it explains it away in the wrong direction: the miracle proceeds not from the operator's nature but from the angels, whose office it is to reveal these things. That locates the acting elsewhere but sets no condition on the operator, so it does not absorb a wrong answer. Nothing in the passage does.
note: What a protocol would have to guard against is not the operator's honesty but the moment of prediction. Touching the pulse puts the operator in front of the woman, and a prediction made late in a pregnancy by someone who can see her is not a prediction from the oration. The prediction has to be sealed and the point in the pregnancy fixed, or the protocol measures ordinary observation.
base rate: About one half. The sex ratio at birth in human populations runs a little above parity for males, so an operator predicting at random scores close to fifty in a hundred, and a series has to be long enough to distinguish a real excess from that. This is the only claim the run met whose base rate is known in advance rather than having to be estimated from the same data that test the claim.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passage recorded in traditions/ars-notoria.ttl
falsified by: A series of predictions recorded before each birth, by an operator keeping the conditions the text sets, whose proportion correct does not exceed what guessing would give on the same series. The claim is stated without degree and without exception, so a single wrong prediction refutes it as it stands; the weaker form, that the operator does better than chance, is what a series would actually settle, and it is stated here because the strong form is the one the text makes and the weak form is the one worth measuring.
protocol updated: 2026-09-07
tests: The oration reveals the sex of the unborn child

Whether the two-way division is older than the reports of it
type: Testing
label: Ob die Zweiteilung älter ist als ihre Berichterstatter @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that the naming of two Śākta branches as a right-hand and a left-hand ritual reports a division the Indian material carries, rather than imposing one it does not.
note: No case answering the condition has been found so far, and two passages read for other purposes tell against it. The Kulārṇava gives a ladder of seven steps, not a pair, and ranks the left above the right; the Mahānirvāṇa divides practitioners into three dispositions rather than two paths. Neither was sought as a counterexample, which is what makes them worth recording here — they came out of a search for something else.
note: The modern scholarship that argues the same point — the construction of the category by nineteenth-century orientalism — has not been read and is therefore not cited at pm:evidenceFrom. Naming it unread would make this protocol look better supported than it is. See prima-materia#71.
note: What this protocol does not establish. It has not searched the Indian corpus exhaustively, and absence of a case in two texts is not absence in the corpus. The state is procedure-without-cases and not cases-without-deviation, and the difference matters: the first says the search has begun, the second would say it has been carried.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passages recorded in traditions/saiva-sakta.ttl
falsified by: A pre-colonial Indian source that presents dakṣiṇa and vāma as a clean two-way division with a moral polarity, using union with the divine against self-deification as the criterion that separates them. One such passage refutes the claim that the division was imposed rather than found.
protocol updated: 2026-08-29
tests: The rendering of the two Śākta branches as a right and a left hand ritual

Closing off the breath
type: Practicing
label: Das Verschließen des Atems @de
source: Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian 8
definition: A retention counted in heartbeats: the breath is drawn in through the nose and held, then released in the smallest quantities through the mouth, the count being raised only by degrees.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Whether the counted toothache remedy beats remission
type: Testing
label: Ob das gezählte Zahnschmerzmittel die Spontanbesserung übertrifft @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that a piece of blue vitriol placed in a hollow tooth drives out the severest toothache, held against the fact that toothache remits of itself. The count the source gives is the tradition's own and is treated here as the claim, not as the examination.
note: No modern work has been opened for this protocol, and none is cited. The state is therefore procedure-without-cases: naming a state that reports cases would claim a reading that has not been done, and the dental and toxicological literature on copper sulphate is the obvious place to begin and belongs to whoever takes it up.
note: The author states that he does not know whether the remedy works on teeth that are not hollow. That limit is part of the claim and narrows the protocol rather than weakening it: a series run on sound teeth would test something the source never asserted.
note: The population the count runs over is unsettled between the two printings and is entered as a dispute beside the claim. Until that is decided the ratio cannot be compared with anything, because a man counting his own toothaches and a healer counting other people's are not measuring the same thing.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passage recorded in traditions/european-folk-magic.ttl
falsified by: A series of applications on hollow teeth in which the pain is recorded before the application and at a fixed interval after it, with the failures kept alongside, showing no larger fall than in teeth left untreated over the same interval. The source's own ratio of one failure in more than sixty is the figure to beat and is not itself such a series, because it carries no untreated arm and no interval.
protocol updated: 2026-09-05
tests: The vitriol drives out the toothache

Cultivation of the divine abidings
type: Practicing
label: Kultivierung der göttlichen Verweilungen @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IX (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The deliberate raising and sustaining of a chosen affective state as a meditation subject in its own right.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Theravāda

Whether the protection of the carried booklet excludes anything
type: Testing
label: Ob der Schutz des getragenen Büchleins etwas ausschließt @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that the bearer of the booklet cannot drown, cannot burn, cannot die without the whole corpus Christi and cannot have an unjust sentence spoken over him. It is examinable because the claim is stated as an impossibility over named outcomes and not as an increase in safety.
note: No case has been collected in either direction, and the obstacle is stated rather than left to be inferred: the bearers of a cheap handbook are not a recorded set, and the claim is therefore refutable in principle and unattended in fact. That is a property of the record and not of the claim, which is why the state is procedure-without-cases and not no-procedure-devised.
note: The claim carries over unchanged from the booklet of seventeen eighty-eight into the Reading printing of eighteen twenty, and in both it refers to the booklet in the reader's hand. A protocol therefore has to name which booklet a bearer carried, and both answers are covered by the same wording.
note: The escape the wording does not take is worth naming, because the same corpus takes it elsewhere. Nothing here says the protection fails if the bearer sins, doubts or acquires the booklet wrongly. Where such a clause is present, as it is in the passages that assign a failure to a broken prohibition, every outcome is absorbed and no protocol is possible. Here the sentence stands bare.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passages recorded in traditions/european-folk-magic.ttl
falsified by: One bearer, carrying the booklet at the time, who drowned or burned to death, or who died without the sacrament, or over whom a sentence later held to be unjust was pronounced. The wording admits no degree, so a single such case refutes the claim as it stands. A weaker form, that bearers meet these ends less often than others, would require the bearers to be counted before the outcomes are known.
protocol updated: 2026-09-05
tests: The protection of the carried booklet

Purification of the channels
type: Practicing
label: Reinigung der Kanäle @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: A preliminary in which the channels are cleared by visualisation before the heat practice proper; the tradition's own form of the notion that a blockage is a place the energy does not reach.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Rigorous critique of a communication
type: Practicing
label: Die strenge Kritik einer Mitteilung @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXIV, sections 266-267
definition: The operation the founder offers as the means of that distinction, and he claims for it both exclusivity and certainty in one sentence: this means is the only one, but it is infallible, because there is no bad communication that can withstand a rigorous critique. The marks it works with are given as a numbered list, among them that good spirits never command but advise; that they do not flatter, while bad ones praise extravagantly and stimulate vanity while preaching humility; that an elevated spirit does not contradict itself across time and place; and that good spirits say only what they know and are silent or confess their ignorance, while bad ones speak of everything with a false assurance.
note: The claim of infallibility is the strongest single sentence this transmission makes and the one most open to examination, because it asserts that no false communication can survive the procedure. It is entered in the graph as it stands, without softening, since the value of holding it is that it can be held against cases.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Spiritism

Divination by things thrown on the ground
type: Practicing
label: Wahrsagen durch geworfene Dinge @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 97
definition: The commoner form outside the oracle proper: short sticks a few inches long, pieces of knotted cord, or a handful of cowries or nuts are thrown on the ground and the answer is drawn from the position in which they fall. A less common mode is named beside it, in which a fowl or an animal is impaled and the answer drawn from how long it takes to die.
note: The second mode is the reason for the node. An answer read off the time a creature takes to die is fixed to an outcome the operator does not steer, like the poison ordeal and the casting, but it is measured in duration rather than in a binary sign, and this graph holds no other case of that.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Ewe informants of the western and eastern tribes, unnamed; recorded by A. B. Ellis, colonial officer on the West African coast, from his own residence and from earlier printed reports he names as he uses them, published 1890; given in Ewe, of which the work prints the terms with etymologies, the accounts in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

Whether the spoken names turn a spear back
type: Testing
label: Ob die gesprochenen Namen einen Speer zurückwenden @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that if a man wishes to thrust a spear into the speaker and the speaker repeats the names, the spear shall be turned back. It is examinable because the claim names a single public event at a single moment and attaches no condition to it beyond the speaking.
note: No case has been collected in either direction, and the obstacle is a property of the record: the men who carried these rolls are not a recorded set, and neither the deaths nor the survivals of the eighteenth-century owners of Ethiopian parchment rolls were written down anywhere the claim could be checked against. Refutable in principle, unattended in fact, which is why the state is procedure-without-cases and not no-procedure-devised.
note: One escape is nevertheless built into the object rather than into the sentence, and a protocol has to meet it: every prayer of every roll read names the person it was written for. A bearer who was struck can always be said to have carried a roll made out to somebody else. That is recorded at pmc:EthiopianOwnerNamedInEveryPrayer and it is a condition of the object, not of the claim.
note: The escape the wording does not take is the point of entering this at all. Nothing here says the spear returns only if the speaker is worthy, only if he believes, or only if God wills it — and the second half of the same sentence says exactly the last of those about the other form. The bare half was not written by an author who had no such clause available.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passage recorded in traditions/ethiopian-orthodox-magic.ttl
falsified by: One man who repeated the names as the thrust came and was struck by the spear. The wording admits no degree, names no further condition, and reserves nothing, so a single such case refutes the claim as it stands. A weaker form, that speakers are struck less often than others, would require the speakers to be counted before the outcomes are known, and no such count exists for any transmission in this holding.
protocol updated: 2026-09-07
tests: The spoken names turn the spear back

Whether the worn names exclude anything
type: Testing
label: Ob die getragenen Namen etwas ausschließen @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that the names worn upon the breast shall deliver the wearer from his enemy and that he shall escape by the will of God. The verdict is reached from the wording and not from cases: the closing clause covers the outcome and its opposite.
note: A falsifying condition had to be entered here saying that there is none. pm:FalsifierRequiredShape exempts only pm:noProcedureDevised, and pm:claimDoesNotDiscriminate is the one verdict whose content is that no falsifier exists; the shape therefore demands of it exactly what it reports as absent. Recorded rather than worked around, and filed as its own finding.
note: The state is not a milder version of the one beside it and does not report a weaker claim. The spoken form says something and no cases have been gathered; the worn form gathers nothing because there is nothing that would count. The difference is three words at the end of one sentence.
examination state: Claim does not discriminate
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passage recorded in traditions/ethiopian-orthodox-magic.ttl
falsified by: None is available from the wording as it stands, and that is the finding rather than an omission of this protocol. Were the deliverance stated without the closing clause, one wearer struck while carrying the names would refute it, exactly as in the spoken form beside it. With the clause in place there is no outcome to look for.
protocol updated: 2026-09-07
tests: The worn names deliver from the enemy
undivided outcomes: A wearer of the names who escapes his enemy, and a wearer of the names who is struck down by him. The first is deliverance by the will of God; the second is a deliverance that was not willed. The sentence covers both and forbids neither, so no observation of a wearer's fate can bear on it.

The rite of fire and water at a birth
type: Practicing
label: Der Ritus mit Feuer und Wasser bei einer Geburt @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo I, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The whole work of fire and water at a birth is committed to the specialist who holds it as his office, and who among these people ordinarily bears the name and the office of physician.
note: The sentence is a statement about an institution: the office exists, it has a name, and the rite is not performed by the family. That is the part a later reader can check, and it is why the passage is entered as a practice rather than as an item of belief.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

Memorising a chant with more than one reciter
type: Practicing
label: Das Auswendiglernen eines Gesangs durch mehrere Rezitatoren @de
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, p. 35
definition: The guard the transmission puts against its own condition of failure. A master of song usually gathered two or more of his fellows to edit and to memorise the lines, and genealogies in particular had to be memorised by more than one reciter.
note: Worth holding separately from the rule it answers, and for a reason that goes beyond this tradition. A transmission that names a failure condition and stops has stated a threat; one that names the failure condition and then builds a redundancy against it has treated its own rule as a real risk and acted on it. The second is evidence about the practice that the first is not, and the graph has very few instances of it.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The feast of the huaca
type: Practicing
label: Das Fest der Huaca @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
definition: The senior specialist gives notice when the time comes, the chicha is brewed, and he goes through the households collecting the offerings. On the appointed day he goes with his assistants to the principal huaca and makes the offering, then to the lesser huacas and the ancestor bodies. On his return nobody sleeps that night: they sing, dance and tell tales, and children are beaten if they fall asleep. This night is called the pacaricuc, and from it the fast begins — no salt, no chilli, no sleeping with wives — lasting five days in some places and longer in others according to different traditions. Three such feasts are held in the year, tied to the Pleiades, to the first rains and to the maize harvest.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

Huikala
type: Practicing
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter II, p. 15
definition: The cleansing by which a member defiled through contact with a corpse is restored to the company: the teacher offers prayer, sprinkles the offender with sea water and turmeric, and orders a bath in the sea, after which the person is clean. A wilful transgression is not covered by it and is restored only after penitence and confession.
note: The distinction between accidental defilement and wilful breach is drawn by the transmission itself and drawn at the point where it matters: the rite removes the first and does not touch the second. A restoration procedure that admits it cannot cover every case is rarer in this collection than one that claims to cover all.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

Divination with the meat fork
type: Practicing
label: Wahrsagung mit der Fleischgabel @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 24
definition: A procedure used to decide whether a sick person will live: the meat fork is set up in the cooking pot, and the way it comes to rest is read as the answer.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Whether the return of the dead can fail at all as the tradition reports it
type: Testing
label: Ob das Wiederaufleben in der berichteten Fassung überhaupt scheitern kann @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that a dead man over whom the words were spoken can come back among the living, held here to record that the one reported failure was assigned to a broken prohibition and that no condition for failing the claim itself is available.
note: No falsifying condition is given, and this is the permitted omission: the state says outright that none has been devised. Stating one here would misreport the situation, because the obstacle is not that nobody has looked but that the claim as transmitted has no failing case by construction. Whether a condition can be recovered by fixing the interval and the announcement in advance is an open question and belongs to whoever takes it up.
note: The asymmetry with the protocol above is worth naming. Both claims come from the same narrator on adjacent pages; one is universal and therefore refutable by a single case, the other is hedged by a clause that absorbs every case. The difference is in the form of the claim and not in the strength of the testimony behind it.
note: The passage is unusual in reporting a failure at all. What it does with the failure is the finding: the attempt is said to have miscarried because a third person had sewn new caribou skin where that is forbidden, so the practitioners and the claim are both left untouched. Success shows the power, failure shows the breach, and no outcome is left over that could count against the claim.
examination state: No procedure devised
examined by: prima-materia
protocol updated: 2026-08-31
tests: Words spoken at birth are said to make the return after death possible

Whether the foreknowledge claim survives its own universal form
type: Testing
label: Ob die Vorherwissens-Behauptung ihre eigene Allgemeinform übersteht @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that a named person always knows in advance when anything remarkable is going to happen. The claim is examinable because it is universal and because the tradition itself counts the announcement, not the interpretation, as the thing that happens.
note: One confirming case is related in the same passage and no failing case is. The case does not count against the condition and does not count for it either: it was told after the event it is said to have foretold, by the wife of the man it is told about, and a dream of a friend eaten by his kin is a description that the encounter afterwards fitted rather than a prior announcement of that encounter.
note: The remainder of the volume was not read in the run that opened this protocol, and it is precisely there that a failing case would be found if one is recorded at all. The state is therefore procedure-without-cases and not cases-without-deviation: the search has begun and has not been carried.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passage recorded in traditions/inuit-angakkuq.ttl
falsified by: One recorded remarkable event in the bearer's presence that he did not announce beforehand. The claim says always, so a single unannounced case refutes it as stated. A weaker form, that such announcements occur more often than chance would give, would require announcements collected before the events they name, with the failures kept alongside the hits.
protocol updated: 2026-08-31
tests: The narrator's husband is said to have the gift of second sight

Karakia
type: Practicing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 10-11, and the vocabulary entry karakia, p. 108
definition: An address to the spirits of dead ancestors, invoked in genealogical order and closing in a petition that the invoked power give the address its effect. The witness insists that the ordinary rendering as charm is wrong and that invocation comes nearer.
note: The genealogies are said to be preserved because they form the ground-work of the invocation, so that the descent recited and the efficacy claimed are the same fact for this tradition rather than two.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Māori transmission

The consecration of the kuahu
type: Practicing
label: Die Weihe des Kuahu @de
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter II, pp. 19-21
definition: The setting up and consecration of the hula altar. The plants that may decorate it are a fixed short list held acceptable to the goddess, among them maile, ieie, lehua, ohia, ferns, hau, breadfruit, the native banana, ti and ilima; the recorder marks non-native flowers as repugnant to the tradition. During the consecration the voice of prayer must continue to be heard until the work is entirely accomplished, and the teacher may repeat a prayer or begin another to keep it so.
note: The condition here is on continuity and not on wording: what must not happen is a silence, and the teacher is expressly free to change the prayer in order to avoid one. That is the opposite of the exactness rule this same tradition sets for the chanted genealogy, and the two stand side by side in one transmission. The graph should not read either as the tradition's general doctrine about speech.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

Reading the lungs of the killed animal
type: Practicing
label: Das Lesen an der Lunge des getöteten Tieres @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fol. 6v, on the calparigu
definition: The office named first in the earlier report: those who see the fortune and outcome of what is asked of them. For this they killed birds, lambs and llamas, and blowing through a certain vein into the lungs found in them signs by which they said what was to happen.
note: The one procedure in this file that reads a variable natural object rather than a count. It is the Andean counterpart of the guinea-pig inspection that the later account gives under two other names, and the two together make entrail reading the best-witnessed technique of the transmission.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

The felling of the muamba tree for a nail figure
type: Practicing
label: Das Fällen des Muamba-Baums für eine Nagelfigur @de
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 93
definition: The making of a nail figure begins in the wood. A council is held first to decide whose life is to preside over the figure, and a boy of great spirit or a great and daring hunter is chosen; the party then goes into the bush and calls his name, the practitioner fells the tree, and blood is said to come from the cut. A fowl is killed and its blood mixed with what comes from the tree.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bavili at Loango, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the trader R. E. Dennett during his residence on the Loango coast from 1879, the book published in 1906; given in the Vili dialect, whose orthography the recorder sets out himself and whose terms he prints, the accounts themselves in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Navajo sacred song
type: Practicing
label: Navajo-Kultgesang @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 41, p. 24
definition: The songs belonging to a rite, held by the priest of the rite and his assistants, containing expressions that are obsolete or without current meaning and that have therefore to be carried by memory rather than by sense.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Navajo ceremonial transmission

The cutting of the ordeal tree, with its formula and its sign
type: Practicing
label: Das Schlagen des Ordalbaums, mit Formel und Zeichen @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 262
definition: The tree is never cut for any other purpose, and only the ordeal-giver may cut it, using a set formula: that if the person for whom he is cutting is really a witch the blade should bend at the stroke, and if he is not, the blade should enter and the wind stop blowing. The corpus adds the reading of the sign in the world: the air is often quite still for two or three hours before a storm, and that stillness is credited to someone, somewhere, cutting the ordeal tree.
note: Two conditions of failure are stated here before the ordeal begins, and the corpus then records what is done with them. The recorder states that although the omens may be in favour of the accused the ordeal-giver proceeds all the same, that the results are not infrequently quite contrary to the omens, and that the belief is unaffected by the discrepancy. A sign that is read, contradicted and kept is a different thing from a sign that is never tested, and the file holds it as the first.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms while the accounts are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Whether the sciences arrive within the month the art names
type: Testing
label: Ob die Wissenschaften binnen des genannten Monats eintreffen @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that whoever pronounces the orations at the appointed times, setting all other occasions aside, profits in all the sciences within one month. It is examinable because the claim names a regimen, a term and an outcome that a third party can measure.
note: No case has been collected. The obstacle is named rather than left to be inferred, and it is not the difficulty of the regimen: the witness in print omits the notae, so nobody working from it can keep the procedure the text prescribes. A negative result obtained from this witness alone would therefore not tell against the art, only against half of it. That is a property of the transmission and belongs in the protocol, because it is exactly the kind of gap a later reader would otherwise supply on his own.
note: The clause that would absorb every outcome is present in the corpus but not in this claim. Elsewhere the text bars the man impeded by crime from saying the orations at all; here nothing says that a failure shows the speaker was unworthy. Whether a fuller recension closes that gap is unread, and it would change the state of this protocol rather than its subject.
note: The measurement is the weak point and is stated so: profiting in all the sciences is not a quantity, and any protocol has to choose one art and one instrument before the month begins. Choosing them afterwards would let the outcome pick its own measure, which is the failure mode pm:claimDoesNotDiscriminate records after the fact and which is cheaper to prevent here.
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: prima-materia, working from the passages recorded in traditions/ars-notoria.ttl
falsified by: One person who keeps the full regimen for a lunation — the orations on the fourth, eighth, twelfth, sixteenth, twenty-fourth, twenty-eighth and thirtieth day of the moon, at the four hours, alone and in the prescribed manner — and who at the end of the month scores no higher on a test of a liberal art set before the month began than a person matched for prior knowledge who did not keep it. The claim is universal in form and admits no degree, so a single such case refutes it as stated.
protocol updated: 2026-09-05
tests: The orations confer the sciences within one month

The ordeal by a decoction of odum wood
type: Practicing
label: Das Ordal mit dem Sud aus Odum-Holz @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 97
definition: Where human ingenuity fails to establish the truth of a charge, the decision is transferred to the gods. The commonest ordeal among these tribes is stated to be the drinking of a decoction of odum wood.
note: Entered although the source gives no reading rule, because the absence is itself informative: the graph now holds a poison ordeal from the Lower Congo with twenty-seven doses and a stated verdict rule, and here the same institution is named in one sentence by a witness who describes much else in detail. What is missing is the rule, not the practice.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Ewe informants of the western and eastern tribes, unnamed; recorded by A. B. Ellis, colonial officer on the West African coast, from his own residence and from earlier printed reports he names as he uses them, published 1890; given in Ewe, of which the work prints the terms with etymologies, the accounts in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The post-mortem for witchcraft substance
type: Practicing
label: Die Leichenschau auf die Hexereisubstanz @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 3-4
definition: The belly of a dead man is opened and the substance looked for. A post-mortem in which none is found clears his paternal kin of the suspicion, and cases so decided are quoted afterwards by that kin in their defence.
note: A procedure inside the transmission with an outcome that could have fallen otherwise, applied to a claim about a class of persons, and reported as having been used to settle actual accusations. It is the second reason this tradition was opened.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Prāṇāyāma
type: Practicing
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.49-53
definition: The regulation of the breath as a distinct limb of practice, following posture and preceding the withdrawal of the senses.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The dosing of substitutes to choose the accused
type: Practicing
label: Das Dosieren von Stellvertretern zur Auswahl des Beschuldigten @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), p. 261
definition: Where two or three persons are implicated in one charge, the witch-finder takes as many small boys, one to represent each suspected adult, gives a small quantity of the ordeal to each and watches the result. If the symptoms shown by one or two of the boys warrant it, the adults they represent are accused and must take the ordeal properly; if none of the boys shows the signs, others are suspected and fresh representatives are appointed. Only members of the same family are held able to bewitch one another, and only boys of the family of the deceased are used, and they are paid for it.
note: A screening step before the ordeal proper, and the only case in the file where the transmission runs the procedure on a person who is not the party to the question. It is also where the physiology of the substance is made to do the work of the answer, since what is watched is the effect of a small dose on a child.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms while the accounts are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Sagdid, the gaze of the dog
type: Practicing
label: Sagdīd, der Blick des Hundes @de
source: Vendidad, fargard 8.16-18, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 4, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895)
alternative label: sag-did
alternative label: sagdid
definition: The driving out of the corpse-demon by having a dog look at the body. The dog is specified: a yellow dog with four eyes, or a white dog with yellow ears. The way is to be traversed three times; if the dog will not go, six times; and if it still will not, nine times. The transmission states what follows: the demon flies away to the regions of the north in the shape of a raging fly, with knees and tail sticking out.
note: A rare case of a procedure whose success is defined by an event nobody can observe and whose failure is defined by one that anybody can: the demon's flight is unobservable, but the dog's refusal to walk the way is not, and the refusal is what multiplies the requirement from three to six to nine. The transmission has built its escalation on the one part of the operation that is public.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

Whether the separative end state has been examined at all
type: Testing
label: Ob der absondernde Endzustand überhaupt geprüft wurde @de
definition: A protocol on the claim that a self brought forth and made to endure is the attainment of the path, held here to record that no procedure for failing it has been devised.
note: No pm:falsifiedBy is given, and the omission is the permitted one: the state says outright that no procedure has been devised. Everywhere else its absence would let a claim drift from unexamined to examined-and-unsupported.
note: The asymmetry is worth naming because it is easy to mistake for evidence. States of dissolution have measurable correlates and a literature; the end state claimed on the other side has neither instrument nor operationalisation. That is a fact about the instruments. Whoever infers from it that one path is better attested than the other has read the reach of the measuring apparatus as a finding about the paths. See prima-materia#73.
note: This node exists to prevent a confusion, not to report a result. Nobody has stated a condition under which the claim would count as refuted, and that is a statement about the means of examination and not about the claim. A record that left the protocol out entirely would say the same thing by silence; a record that reported the claim as unsupported would say something else and something false.
examination state: No procedure devised
examined by: prima-materia
protocol updated: 2026-08-29
tests: Xeper as the word of self-generation

Keeping the Sigui in wood and fibre
type: Practicing
label: Die Bewahrung des Sigui in Holz und Faser @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 277-279
definition: The keeping of the great mask carved for each Sigui in a rock shelter beside those of the preceding ceremonies, and of the baobab-fibre ferment-holders woven for each Sigui in the hogon's house. Both accumulate as series, and the article treats the series as the firmer evidence that a ceremony took place at all.
note: This is the one part of the account that leaves an object a later worker could count and date independently of any informant. The article reports nine masts at Ibi in 1931 with traces of three more, and eight or fourteen ferment-holders at Sanga and Arou. Held as a practice here and as a protocol at pmc:SiguiSeriesExamination in examinations/dogon-sirius.ttl.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Reckoning the interval between two Sigui
type: Practicing
label: Das Auszählen des Sigui-Abstands @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 275-277
definition: The counting of the sixty-year interval by means that are stated to be mnemonic rather than astronomical: thirty biennial millet-beer drinkings, each marked with a cowry laid down by the eldest; a millet-porridge figure above the sanctuary door in which a point is added each year; and a painted line of chevrons called sigi lugu, count of the Sigui, each tooth standing for twenty years.
note: The recorders report that the rule is theoretical and that the practice departed from it: between the Sigui of the beginning of the century and 1931 only one drinking was held, and the cowries for the missing thirty years were laid down together in a single heap afterwards. The reckoning that is described as regular is thus reconstructed in arrears, and the article says so.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Sītkārī
type: Practicing
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.54-56 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A retention in which the breath is drawn in through the mouth with the tongue between the lips, producing a hissing sound, and is not let out the same way.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Casting the lot with maize grains and tzite seeds
type: Practicing
label: Das Losen mit Maiskörnern und Tzite-Samen @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part I, chapter 2
definition: A divination performed with grains of maize and the seeds of the tzite tree, carried out by the diviner pair Xpiyacoc and Xmucane at the request of the makers, in order to learn whether the men to be carved of wood would turn out. The seeds are addressed in the second person and told to come together, to take hold of one another and to speak, so that the answer is given by things spoken to and not by things merely read.
note: The same procedure survives in the highlands as the office of the ajq'ij, the daykeeper who counts tzite seeds. The colonial spellings tzite and tzité and the modern tz'ite' stand for one word and one seed of the coral tree; a search under only one of them misses most of the literature.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Ujjāyī
type: Practicing
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.51-53 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A retention in which the mouth is held closed and the breath is drawn through both nostrils so that it grazes the throat and sounds as it passes.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Vo-sisa, what is done when the oracle answers badly
type: Practicing
label: Vo-sisa, was bei schlechtem Spruch zu tun ist @de
source: Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (2nd ed., London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864), vol. II, pp. 143-144
definition: When the oracle predicts evil the enquirer must perform the remedy. Ground is cleared near the house or in the bush, a mat is spread and a short thick peg driven through it, and the enquirer with his practitioner, who taps a small cymbal with an iron rod, pours on the wood first water and then the blood of a fowl. The body of the fowl falls to the practitioner. The witness states that there are many different forms of the remedy.
note: The remedy is what turns a bad prediction into an action, and it is the point at which the oracle stops being falsifiable by the event: a predicted evil that does not occur is then the remedy working, and one that occurs is the prediction. The same witness reports the saying that the practitioner who is most cunning takes to the oracle, because it pays best.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Fon informants and interpreters at Abomey, unnamed in this passage and following an order the recorder says his interpreters dictated; recorded by Richard F. Burton on the mission of 1863 to 1864; given in Fon, of which the work prints the terms, the account itself in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

Whakahokitu
type: Practicing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 35
definition: The forms of makutu employed to turn back the working of another tohunga, that is, a counter-operation of the same kind rather than a protection of a different kind.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Māori transmission

Making noa
type: Practicing
label: Das Aufheben des Tapu @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 27
definition: The rite by which a person or place under tapu is made common again, in the case witnessed by the eating of food cooked in an oven opened for the purpose and distributed to everyone present.
note: The rite the recorder describes as an eyewitness was already carried out with a Christian morning service inside it, and he remarks that the teacher had done wisely in keeping so much of the old ceremonial. The passage is the clearest single reason the contact route of this tradition is entered as disputed rather than absent.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Māori transmission

Zuni fixed prayer
type: Practicing
label: Zuni-Festgebet @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 616
definition: A prayer of stereotyped phrasing, held by an appointed keeper for each kiva and taught over four nights after each planting of prayer sticks, the instructor intoning while the pupils join in by degrees and afterwards reciting it back to him.
note: The teaching method is itself a check: the pupil returns the prayer to the keeper, so that a divergence is caught before it is carried into the ceremony. Because the phrasing is stereotyped the witness names the sequence, and not the wording, as the hard part of learning a long prayer.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Zuni ritual transmission

Ājīvika transmission
type: Tradition
label: Ājīvika-Überlieferung @de
definition: A lost renunciant transmission teaching a fixed destiny through which every being passes, known only through the reports of its opponents.
note: Registered as the limiting case: a tradition with no surviving corpus of its own. Whatever it yields will be an ascription by hostile witnesses and must be recorded as one.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: No transmitted corpus; the doctrine is reported in the Buddhist and Jain canons, chiefly Sāmaññaphala Sutta and the Bhagavatī Sūtra

Ālvār transmission
type: Tradition
label: Ālvār-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Tamil devotional transmission of the twelve Ālvār, in which the relation to the deity is sung in the first person and the states it passes through are named.
note: The earliest of the devotional corpora and the one on which the later theory of devotional states rests. Worth registering ahead of the others for the same reason the Gauḍīya file was opened: the states are named, not only described.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Nālāyira Divya Prabandham, in particular the Tiruvāymoḻi of Nammāḻvār

Amazonian transmission
type: Tradition
label: Amazonische Überlieferung @de
definition: The lowland South American transmission of songs used to direct the effect of a plant preparation, and of a body that can be exchanged for another.
note: No corpus in its own language and no writing before contact. What exists is transcribed song and ethnographic report, which this project cannot yet admit as a source. Registered so that the exclusion is visible rather than silent.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: No transmitted written corpus; the published icaro transcriptions and the ethnographic record stand in its place

Analytical psychology
type: Tradition
label: Analytische Psychologie @de
definition: Jung's transmission of an objective psyche and of active imagination as a procedure for engaging figures encountered in it, with a record kept of the engagement.
note: Registered as a tradition and not as science on the rule stated at the head of this file: its central claims rest on testimony, including the author's own record of his experiment, and not on procedures that could have come out otherwise. Where it does produce evidence, that evidence enters at an examination node like any other.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Jung, Liber Novus; Jung, Septem Sermones ad Mortuos; Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

Anthroposophy
type: Tradition
label: Anthroposophie @de
definition: Steiner's transmission of a schooling of perception said to open supersensible cognition, presented as a discipline with stated stages and moral prerequisites.
note: The prerequisites are stated as conditions without which the exercises are held to be harmful, which makes them a prerequisite chain of the strong kind rather than an exhortation.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Steiner, Wie erlangt man Erkenntnisse der höheren Welten; Steiner, Die Geheimwissenschaft im Umriss

Arabic alchemy
type: Tradition
label: Arabische Alchemie @de
definition: The transmission of the balance, of elixirs and of the generation of life by art, carried under the name of Jābir by a corpus larger than one man.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Jābirian corpus; al-Rāzī, Sirr al-Asrār

Ashtar transmission
type: Tradition
label: Ashtar-Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission of messages ascribed to a command or council of non-terrestrial beings charged with the oversight of the earth, received after the first by many transmitters who do not share a lineage.
note: The motif of a federation or confederation of worlds enters general circulation here and is afterwards found in corpora that never name Ashtar. That spread is a reception history and belongs in the graph as one, before anybody reads it as agreement between independent witnesses.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Van Tassel, the Ministry of Universal Wisdom publications; the published Ashtar message collections

Atharvavedic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Atharvavedische Überlieferung @de
definition: The operative Vedic corpus: spells for healing, protection, harm, love and kingship, with the ritual manual that tells how each is employed.
note: The oldest Indian material the project would hold that is a working corpus rather than a doctrine.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Atharvaveda Saṃhitā (Śaunaka recension); Kauśikasūtra

Australian Aboriginal transmission
type: Tradition
label: Australische Aboriginal-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Australian transmission of an ancestral order laid into country, held in song and in the routes the song follows.
note: Registered and deliberately left at corpus named. There is no corpus in the project's sense, much of the material is restricted by rules that are still enforced, and a public-domain dedication of restricted knowledge would be a taking and not an opening. The gate here protects ownership, not authority, and the project's criterion does not apply to it unchanged.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: No transmitted written corpus; the ethnographic record stands in its place and much of it is restricted

Āyurvedic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Āyurvedische Überlieferung @de
definition: The Indian medical transmission, including the rasāyana section that claims restoration of vigour and extension of life by regimen.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Caraka Saṃhitā; Suśruta Saṃhitā; Vāgbhaṭa, Aṣṭāṅgahṛdaya

Balinese lontar transmission
type: Tradition
label: Balinesische Lontar-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Balinese palm-leaf transmission of healing, protective diagrams and the composition of the person, at the far edge of the Indian sphere of influence.
note: Written, catalogued and barely used by comparative work. The contact question is genuinely open: how much is Indian import and how much is local is undecided in the literature.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Usada healing lontar; Kanda Pat; the Aji Saraswati texts

Baltic and Slavic charm transmission
type: Tradition
label: Baltische und slawische Besprechungstradition @de
definition: The eastern European transmission of spoken charms for healing, protection and binding, fixed in writing only by nineteenth-century collectors.
note: The late fixation is the whole difficulty: the corpus is a collection and not a work, and the project has no attestation mode for that yet.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The published zagovory collections; the Latvian dainas collections

Bashar transmission
type: Tradition
label: Bashar-Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission received by Darryl Anka since 1984, teaching that acting on the strongest available excitement is the means by which one comes to occupy a different reality.
note: Unusually operative for a channelled corpus: the teaching is given as steps with stated conditions of failure, in front of audiences, on record.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Anka, Bashar: Blueprint for Change; the recorded session transcripts

Bön
type: Tradition
definition: The Tibetan transmission that claims descent from Zhangzhung rather than from India, with its own dzogchen cycles and its own founder.
note: The independence claim is the point. If it holds, Bön is a witness beside Tibetan Buddhism rather than a variant of it; if it fails, the failure is one of the better documented cases of a tradition constructing its own antiquity. Either outcome is a finding.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zhang Zhung Nyan Gyud; the Bön dzogchen cycles in the published Bön canon

Borān kammaṭṭhāna
type: Tradition
definition: The esoteric Theravāda transmission of Southeast Asia, working with syllables placed in the body and a nimitta led along an interior path.
note: Largely displaced by the modern reform movements and therefore poorly represented in every general account of Buddhist meditation.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Yogāvacara manuals of Sri Lanka and Siam in the published editions

Burmese weikza transmission
type: Tradition
label: Burmesische Weikza-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Burmese transmission of an accomplished practitioner who prolongs life by alchemy, diagram and mantra in order to await a future buddha.
note: A living tradition whose claims are made about named contemporaries, which is rare and worth more to an examination than any ancient ascription.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The published weikza and dhat-lonn literature in Burmese

Bwiti
type: Tradition
definition: The Gabonese transmission of an initiation carried by a root preparation, in which the initiate is expected to meet the dead and to report the meeting.
note: The expected content of the experience is stated in advance, which makes the tradition unusually well suited to an examination of what such expectation determines.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Fernandez, Bwiti: An Ethnography of the Religious Imagination in Africa

Candomblé
type: Tradition
definition: The Brazilian transmission of the orixás, with an initiation that seats a spirit in the head of the initiate.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Bastide, Le candomblé de Bahia; Verger, Notes sur le culte des Orisa et Vodun

Castaneda's Toltec transmission
type: Tradition
label: Castanedas toltekische Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission of a body of practice concerning attention, dreaming and the assemblage point, presented as the teaching of a Yaqui man of knowledge.
note: The fieldwork is not credible and the informant is not attestable, and the practices are nonetheless transmitted today by people who follow them. Both facts belong in the graph, which is why the tradition is registered rather than dismissed.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Castaneda, The Teachings of Don Juan; Castaneda, The Art of Dreaming

The Cayce readings
type: Tradition
label: Die Cayce-Readings @de
definition: The transmission of several thousand readings given in a sleep-like state, most of them addressed to a named person about a stated condition, and taken down stenographically.
note: The one corpus in this block built for examination without intending to be: individual readings, individual recipients, dated, indexed, and with outcomes that were sometimes followed up. Whatever it yields, it yields countably.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The indexed Cayce readings held by the Association for Research and Enlightenment; Sugrue, There Is a River

Celestial Masters
type: Tradition
label: Himmelsmeister @de
definition: The earliest organised Daoist transmission, in which illness is treated as the consequence of fault and healing proceeds by confession and petition.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Xiang'er commentary on the Laozi; Zhengyi fawen; the Taiping jing

Chaldean Oracles
type: Tradition
label: Chaldäische Orakel @de
definition: The fragmentary hexameters that the later Platonists treated as revealed, and on which their theurgic practice was built.
note: The graph already holds the theurgy that rests on this text without holding the text.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Chaldean Oracles, transmitted in fragments through Proclus, Damascius and Psellos

Chan
type: Tradition
definition: The Chinese transmission holding that awakening is sudden and that the mind is not to be polished but recognised.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Platform Sūtra; Linji lu; Biyan lu

Chaos magic
type: Tradition
label: Chaosmagie @de
definition: The late twentieth century transmission treating belief as a tool to be adopted and discarded, and holding that the symbolic system employed is arbitrary if the technique is sound.
note: The claim that content is interchangeable and only technique carries effect is directly examinable, and if it held it would reorganise every convergence question the project asks.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Spare, The Book of Pleasure; Carroll, Liber Null and Psychonaut

Chinese divinatory and siting transmission
type: Tradition
label: Chinesische Divinations- und Siedlungslehre @de
definition: The transmission of change-based divination, of fate calculation from birth data and of the siting of dwellings and graves.
note: Claims here attach to datable outcomes, which makes them among the few in the corpus that could be falsified without a laboratory.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zhouyi with the Xici commentary; Yang Xiong, Taixuanjing; Guo Pu, Zangshu

Chinese medical canon
type: Tradition
label: Chinesischer medizinischer Kanon @de
definition: The canonical Chinese account of qi, the channels and the spirits resident in the organs, framed as a clinical rather than a soteriological doctrine.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Huangdi neijing (Suwen and Lingshu); Nanjing

Christian theosophy
type: Tradition
label: Christliche Theosophie @de
definition: Böhme's transmission of a divine self-disclosure through opposition, reported as having been seen rather than reasoned.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Böhme, Aurora; Böhme, De signatura rerum

Contactee transmission
type: Tradition
label: Contactee-Überlieferung @de
definition: The mid twentieth century transmission of teachings ascribed to visitors from other worlds, reported first as bodily meetings and later as messages received without one.
note: The shift from a claimed physical encounter to a claimed interior reception happens inside this literature and is datable. It is the hinge between the older revealed corpora and the later channelled ones.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Adamski, Inside the Space Ships; Menger, From Outer Space to You; van Tassel, I Rode a Flying Saucer

Coptic magical transmission
type: Tradition
label: Koptische Zaubertradition @de
definition: Christian Egyptian operative texts in which biblical names, angelic invocation and older Egyptian procedure stand side by side without apology.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Coptic magical papyri and ostraca in the standard collections; the Testament of Solomon as its adjacent Greek witness

A Course in Miracles
type: Tradition
label: Ein Kurs in Wundern @de
definition: A scribed corpus in three parts, teaching that the perceived world is a projection of guilt, and carrying a workbook of three hundred and sixty-five daily exercises in fixed order.
note: The workbook is a stated curriculum with an order and a duration, which is rare in this block and puts the corpus closer to the manual traditions than to the revealed cosmologies.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: A Course in Miracles: Text, Workbook for Students, Manual for Teachers

Druze transmission
type: Tradition
label: Drusische Überlieferung @de
definition: A closed transmission teaching the transfer of the soul into a new body at death, with an internal literature restricted to the initiated.
note: A case where the gate the project exists to remove is still shut and still enforced. Registration says so rather than pretending the corpus is available.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Rasāʾil al-Ḥikma

Dzogchen
type: Tradition
definition: The Tibetan transmission of a primordially free awareness, with a practice whose stages are counted by visions appearing under stated conditions of posture, light and darkness.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Nyingthig cycles; Longchenpa, Seven Treasuries

Pharaonic Egyptian ritual
type: Tradition
label: Pharaonisch-ägyptisches Ritual @de
definition: The transmission of heka as an operative power held by gods, kings and the transfigured dead, carried in mortuary and temple literature.
note: The transformation spells are a capacity list in the strict sense: each states what the speaker becomes and what that state permits.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Pyramid Texts; Coffin Texts; Book of the Dead; Papyrus Westcar; the demotic magical papyrus of London and Leiden

Finnic incantation
type: Tradition
label: Finnische Zaubersprüche @de
definition: The Finnish and Karelian transmission of the tietäjä, in which power over a thing follows from knowing and reciting its origin.
note: Kalevala is a nineteenth-century compilation and belongs in the record as an ordering act, not as the corpus. The corpus is the collected incantations.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Suomen Kansan Vanhat Runot; the loitsurunot collections

The Fourth Way
type: Tradition
label: Der Vierte Weg @de
definition: The transmission of Gurdjieff's teaching: a claim that ordinary waking is a form of sleep, and a work on attention conducted in the middle of ordinary life.
note: The graph already holds the Fourth Way anthropology as an origination, because material from it circulates under ancient ascription. Registering the transmission does not touch that finding: the tradition transmits, and the pedigree remains unsupported.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ouspensky, In Search of the Miraculous; Gurdjieff, Beelzebub's Tales to His Grandson

Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn
type: Tradition
definition: The late Victorian transmission that welded kabbalistic, grimoire and Egyptian material into a graded initiatory curriculum with examinations.
note: The syncretism is documented in its own papers, which makes it the best available record of how a modern system is assembled from older parts and then presented as one.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The cipher manuscripts and knowledge lectures; Regardie, The Golden Dawn

Graeco-Egyptian alchemy
type: Tradition
label: Griechisch-ägyptische Alchemie @de
definition: The earliest alchemical transmission, in which the operation on matter is reported together with dreams that interpret it.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zosimos of Panopolis, the Visions and the authentic memoirs

Greek and demotic magical papyri
type: Tradition
label: Griechische und demotische Zauberpapyri @de
definition: The working handbooks of late antique Egypt: procedures with materials, hours, purity requirements, spoken formulae and stated signs of success.
note: The densest procedural corpus available to the project, and the one most likely to carry falsifying conditions, because a handbook has to tell its user when the working has failed.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Papyri Graecae Magicae and Papyri Demoticae Magicae, including the Mithras Liturgy at PGM IV.475-829

Haitian Vodou
type: Tradition
label: Haitianisches Vodou @de
definition: The Haitian transmission of spirits who arrive in a named person and speak, with a liturgy that assigns each an appearance, a rhythm and a manner.
note: Deren's account is a first-person report of being mounted by a spirit written by the observer herself, which is a rare form: participant testimony with the observation intact.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Métraux, Le vaudou haïtien; Deren, Divine Horsemen

Hasidism
type: Tradition
label: Chassidismus @de
definition: The eastern European transmission of devekut as a continuous attachment attainable within ordinary life, and of contemplation as its means.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Toledot Yaakov Yosef; Keter Shem Tov; Shneur Zalman, Tanya

Hermetic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Hermetische Überlieferung @de
definition: The Graeco-Egyptian transmission of an ascent through the spheres in which the ascending one sheds a vice at each, and of a rebirth reported as having happened to the speaker.
note: The Discourse on the Eighth and the Ninth is an initiation with a sequence, a moment of change and a demand that the initiate confirm what he now sees. It has no equivalent in what the graph currently holds.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Corpus Hermeticum; Asclepius; the Stobaean excerpts including Korē Kosmou; Nag Hammadi VI,6

Hittite and Anatolian ritual
type: Tradition
label: Hethitisch-anatolisches Ritual @de
definition: Anatolian purification and substitution rituals transmitted under the names of the practitioners who dictated them, most of them women.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The CTH ritual corpus, including the rituals of Tunnawiya, Maštigga and Ambazzi

Hoodoo
type: Tradition
definition: The African American transmission of workings for protection, luck, love and revenge, carried by practitioners without a priesthood or a central corpus.
note: The Hyatt collection is thousands of practitioner statements taken down verbatim with the speakers identified only by place. As a body of first-person practice testimony it has no equal in the project's reach.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Hyatt, Hoodoo, Conjuration, Witchcraft, Rootwork, five volumes

Huna
type: Tradition
definition: An early twentieth century system of three selves and directed vital force, presented as the secret teaching of Hawaiian priests.
note: Constructed by an outsider from theosophical and New Thought material and rejected by Hawaiian scholars as a representation of anything Hawaiian. Registered as the transmission it actually is, so that the ascription can be entered as false without the material vanishing from the record.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Long, The Secret Science Behind Miracles

Illuminationism
type: Tradition
label: Illuminationismus @de
definition: Suhrawardī's transmission of knowledge by presence and of an intermediate world of images held to be neither material nor mental but a place with its own standing.
note: The claim that the imaginal world is a place and not a faculty is an ontological commitment the graph will have to sort against every tradition that treats vision as internal.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Suhrawardī, Ḥikmat al-Ishrāq; Mullā Ṣadrā, al-Asfār al-Arbaʿa

Inner Asian sky transmission
type: Tradition
label: Innerasiatische Tengri-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Turkic and Mongol transmission of a sky power that confers mandate and fortune, and of practitioners who address it.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Secret History of the Mongols; the Orkhon inscriptions; the published Manas cycle

Insular Celtic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Inselkeltische Überlieferung @de
definition: The Irish and Welsh transmission of poetic knowledge as an acquired faculty, with named divinatory procedures and the ecclesiastical prohibitions attached to them.
note: The prohibitions are in the same manuscripts as the procedures, so procedure and counter-testimony arrive together.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The legal and glossarial material on imbas forosnai, teinm laída and díchetal do chennaib; the immrama; the Book of Taliesin

Islamic letter and name magic
type: Tradition
label: Islamische Buchstaben- und Namensmagie @de
definition: The operative transmission of the science of letters and of the divine names, with squares, talismans and hours of working.
note: The ascription of the best known handbook to al-Būnī is contested, and the corpus grew after him under his name. The dispute is the first node this tradition should carry.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Šams al-maʿārif corpus ascribed to al-Būnī; Ghāyat al-Ḥakīm

Ismaili cosmology
type: Tradition
label: Ismailitische Kosmologie @de
definition: The Shia transmission of a graded emanation and of an inner meaning disclosed by initiation, together with the encyclopaedic Neoplatonism of the Brethren of Purity.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Sijistānī, Kashf al-Maḥjūb; Nāṣir-i Khusraw, Jāmiʿ al-Ḥikmatayn; Rasāʾil Ikhwān al-Ṣafāʾ

Jain transmission
type: Tradition
label: Jainistische Überlieferung @de
definition: The Jain transmission of restraint, austerity and the shedding of karmic matter, with its own catalogue of powers said to arise along the way.
note: A second capacity list formulated in the same region and period as the yogic one and not derived from it. Within the Indian sphere this is the closest thing to a control case.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ācārāṅga Sūtra; Umāsvāti, Tattvārthasūtra; Hemacandra, Yogaśāstra

Japanese Zen
type: Tradition
label: Japanischer Zen @de
definition: The Japanese transmission of seated practice as enactment rather than means, together with a literature on the illnesses that practice itself produces.
note: Hakuin's account of meditation sickness is a self-warning of the strongest kind the project can hold: a text prescribing a practice and describing its casualties, with a remedy.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Dōgen, Shōbōgenzō; Hakuin, Yasenkanna; Hakuin, Orategama

Jewish practical magic
type: Tradition
label: Jüdische Praxismagie @de
definition: The operative Jewish transmission of adjurations, amulets and bowls, distinct from the speculative literature and older than it in its written witnesses.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Sefer ha-Razim; Ḥarba de-Moshe; the Cairo Genizah magical fragments; the Aramaic incantation bowls

Kabbalah
type: Tradition
label: Kabbala @de
definition: The medieval and early modern Jewish transmission of the sefirot as the structure of emanation, and of the human act as bearing on it.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Sefer ha-Bahir; Zohar; Cordovero, Pardes Rimmonim; Vital, Ez Ḥayyim and Šaʿar ha-Gilgulim

Kālacakra
type: Tradition
definition: The tantric transmission of a sixfold yoga whose completion is marked by a sequence of signs appearing in a darkened retreat.
note: The sign sequence is stated in fixed order and is therefore comparable with the Dzogchen visions and with the phosphene literature, which is a convergence question the graph cannot currently pose.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Vimalaprabhā; Sekoddeśa and its commentary

Keylontic Science and the MCEO teachings
type: Tradition
label: Keylontic Science und die MCEO-Lehren @de
definition: The transmission of a detailed geometry of subtle anatomy together with a claimed ancient lineage of guardianship, delivered through a living transmitter and taught in graded courses with their own technical vocabulary.
note: Two claims to keep apart. That it transmits is a fact: texts, a transmitter, courses, students, successors, and it is registered on that ground alone. That it descends from an ancient priesthood is an ascription with a modern author and a modern date, attested nowhere outside the corpus, and it enters as a pm:Originating node when it enters. The material is under active copyright, so nothing is reproduced; the definitions here are the compiler's own paraphrase, as everywhere in this graph.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ashayana Deane, Voyagers I and Voyagers II; the published MCEO Freedom Teachings course materials

Korean muism
type: Tradition
label: Koreanischer Musok @de
definition: The Korean transmission of the mudang, whose office is entered through a sickness resolved only by accepting it, and whose ritual is a negotiation carried out in the voice of the dead.
note: Chiefly oral. The corpus is a collection of transcribed ritual songs, which the project has no attestation mode for yet.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The published muga song transcriptions; Akiba and Akamatsu's collected materials

Latin alchemy
type: Tradition
label: Lateinische Alchemie @de
definition: The western alchemical transmission, in which the stages of the work are described at once as operations and as states of the operator.
note: The double reading is not a modern imposition and not a settled fact either. It is a dispute the corpus carries in itself and the graph should record as one.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Turba philosophorum; Rosarium philosophorum; Aurora consurgens

Latin mystical transmission
type: Tradition
label: Lateinische Mystik @de
definition: The western Christian transmission of graded interior states, with criteria for telling one state from another and warnings against taking consolation for progress.
note: Teresa's dwellings and John of the Cross's nights are the western material closest to a stage map with failure modes, and the failure modes are stated more plainly than the attainments.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Richard of St Victor, Benjamin Major; Meister Eckhart, German sermons; The Cloud of Unknowing; Teresa of Ávila, Las Moradas; John of the Cross, Subida del Monte Carmelo and Noche oscura

Lucumí
type: Tradition
definition: The Cuban transmission of the orichas, carrying the Yoruba divinatory corpus in a shortened form alongside Catholic imagery.
note: Its relation to Ifá is a documented case of a corpus surviving a forced transfer with measurable loss, which is examinable rather than merely regrettable.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Cabrera, El Monte; the published libretas

Mandaean transmission
type: Tradition
label: Mandäische Überlieferung @de
definition: A living gnostic transmission with its own scripture and priesthood, teaching an ascent of the soul past stations of examination.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ginzā Rabbā; Drāšā d-Yahia; Qolastā

Manichaean transmission
type: Tradition
label: Manichäische Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission founded on Mani's own account of a companion who appeared to him and disclosed what he taught.
note: The Cologne Mani Codex carries a first-person account of the syzygos, which is rare for late antiquity and rarer still with a name attached.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Kephalaia; Cologne Mani Codex; the Coptic psalms and the Turfan fragments

Mesmerism
type: Tradition
label: Mesmerismus @de
definition: The transmission of an animal magnetism held to pass between bodies and to be directed by passes of the hand, together with the induced states its practitioners described.
note: Registered as a tradition because it transmits by testimony and lineage. Its examination by the royal commission is evidence and belongs at an examination node, not here. The pair is the cleanest illustration the project has of the two predicates.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Mesmer, Mémoire sur la découverte du magnétisme animal; Puységur, Mémoires pour servir à l'histoire du magnétisme animal

Mesopotamian exorcistic craft
type: Tradition
label: Mesopotamische Beschwörungskunst @de
definition: The scribal craft of the āšipu: a trained office with its own curriculum, treating affliction as an assault to be countered by named procedure.
note: The oldest procedural corpus in writing anywhere, and older than every tradition the graph currently holds. Whatever it shares with the Greek and Jewish material is therefore a question of derivation running one way only.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Maqlû; Šurpu; the exorcist's manual KAR 44; Ludlul bēl nēmeqi; Enūma Anu Enlil

Modern vipassanā movement
type: Tradition
label: Moderne Vipassanā-Bewegung @de
definition: The twentieth century Burmese reform transmission of insight practice as a lay technique detachable from monastic life, taught in fixed courses.
note: Registered separately from the canon and the commentaries because it is a distinct transmission with its own founders and manuals, and because its relation to the older material, in particular its treatment of absorption, is contested inside the tradition itself.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Mahāsi Sayādaw, Manual of Insight; Ledi Sayādaw, the Manuals of Buddhism

Modern Wicca
type: Tradition
label: Moderne Wicca @de
definition: The mid twentieth century transmission of an initiatory craft with a coven structure, a seasonal calendar and an inherited book copied by hand.
note: Presented at its founding as the survival of an old religion. The construction is documented in detail, so the tradition and the refutation of its pedigree can be held together without either being lost.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Gardner, Witchcraft Today; the Book of Shadows in the published recensions

Nāth transmission
type: Tradition
label: Nāth-Überlieferung @de
definition: The lineage of Gorakhnāth, teaching a body perfected by practice and a state in which mind is said to be absent rather than concentrated.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Siddha-Siddhānta-Paddhati; Gorakṣaśataka; Amanaska

Neidan internal alchemy
type: Tradition
label: Neidan, innere Alchemie @de
definition: The transmission that relocates the alchemical work into the body, with a staged refinement of essence, breath and spirit and an embryo said to form and depart.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zhang Boduan, Wuzhen pian; Zhong-Lü chuandao ji; Xingming guizhi

Neo-Confucian self-cultivation
type: Tradition
label: Neokonfuzianische Selbstkultivierung @de
definition: The transmission of quiet sitting and of the investigation of things as a discipline of attention that claims no transcendent object.
note: Registered as a control condition. A contemplative practice with the same postures and much of the same phenomenology, and without the metaphysical claim, is what any examination of the others needs to have alongside them.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zhu Xi, Zhuzi yulei on jingzuo; Wang Yangming, Chuanxilu; Mencius 2A.2 on the flood-like qi

Neoshamanism
type: Tradition
label: Neoschamanismus @de
definition: The modern transmission of a journey undertaken to a drumbeat and taught in workshops, presented as a technique abstracted from many indigenous traditions at once.
note: The abstraction claim is the point of interest: it asserts that a core method survives the removal of every particular tradition. The graph can hold that assertion beside the traditions it claims to abstract from, which is exactly what it was built to do.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Harner, The Way of the Shaman

New Thought
type: Tradition
definition: The American transmission holding that mental states determine bodily and material conditions, and that the determination can be exercised deliberately.
note: The claim is stated in a form that invites counting, and it is the ancestor of most of what circulates today as manifestation.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Quimby, The Quimby Manuscripts; Emma Curtis Hopkins, Scientific Christian Mental Practice; Troward, The Edinburgh Lectures on Mental Science

Old Norse ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Altnordische Ritualüberlieferung @de
definition: The Norse transmission of runic and sung operations and of a divinatory practice performed from a raised seat with a stated arrangement of singers and questioners.
note: Hávamál names eighteen effects in list form, which is a capacity catalogue in the same shape as the siddhi lists. Written down by Christians centuries after the practice, so the contact question is a question about the recording hand.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Hávamál; Grímnismál; Snorri, Ynglinga saga; Eiríks saga rauða

Onmyōdō
type: Tradition
definition: The Japanese office of yin-yang divination and calendrical prohibition, practised by a licensed bureau of the state.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Hoki naiden; the onmyō provisions of the Engishiki

Palo Monte
type: Tradition
definition: The Cuban transmission of Kongo derivation, working through a charged vessel and a pact with a named spirit of the dead.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Cabrera, Reglas de Congo

Pāñcarātra
type: Tradition
definition: The Vaiṣṇava tantric transmission, in which the practitioner's body is dissolved and rebuilt by placement before any worship may proceed.
note: The body-construction sequence is a prerequisite chain of unusual explicitness and belongs in the graph for that reason before any doctrine of the school does.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Jayākhya Saṃhitā; Lakṣmī Tantra; Sātvata Saṃhitā

Prophetic Kabbalah
type: Tradition
label: Prophetische Kabbala @de
definition: Abulafia's transmission of letter permutation, breath and head movement as a technique for reaching a state he calls prophecy.
note: Registered apart from Kabbalah because it is a manual and not a doctrine. On the level of stated procedure it is the closest western counterpart to the Yogasūtra that exists, including its warnings about what befalls the unprepared.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Abulafia, Or ha-Sekhel; Abulafia, Ḥayyei ha-Olam ha-Ba

The Ra material
type: Tradition
label: Das Ra-Material @de
definition: The transmission of one hundred and six sessions received between 1981 and 1984 by a group of three working in fixed roles, teaching a cosmology of densities, a choice between service to others and service to self, and a harvest at the close of a cycle.
note: The best documented reception in the block. Questioner, instrument and scribe are named, the sessions are numbered and dated, the working conditions are described including the instrument's physical decline, and the transmission continued under a different contact after this one ended. The cosmological claims are largely undecidable; the claims about the conditions of contact and about what the work cost the instrument are not, and that is where an examination would begin.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Elkins, Rueckert and McCarty, The Law of One, Books I to V; the L/L Research session transcripts

Raëlism
type: Tradition
label: Raëlismus @de
definition: The transmission founded on Claude Vorilhon's reported meeting of 1973, holding that humanity was made by a non-terrestrial people and reading scripture as the record of that making.
note: Registered because it performs the characteristic move of the block in its clearest form: it rereads received texts as accounts of contact. That reinterpretation is a claim about the older corpora and belongs in the graph beside them.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Vorilhon, Le livre qui dit la vérité; Vorilhon, Les extra-terrestres m'ont emmené sur leur planète

Rasaśāstra
type: Tradition
definition: The Indian alchemical transmission of mercurial preparations held to make the body proof against decay, with named substances, processes and durations.
note: Among the most testable claims available anywhere in the corpus, and testable in two directions at once: the promised outcome and the toxicity of the means.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Rasārṇava; Govindabhagavatpāda, Rasahṛdayatantra; Vāgbhaṭa, Rasaratnasamuccaya

Reiki
type: Tradition
definition: The Japanese transmission of a healing energy conveyed by the hands, transmitted through an attunement conferred by a teacher in a stated lineage.
note: Attunement is a transmission claim in the strict sense: the capacity is said to pass from person to person by a discrete act. That is unusually well suited to examination, because the tradition itself distinguishes those who have received it from those who have not.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Usui Reiki Ryōhō Hikkei; Hayashi, Reiki Ryōhō Shishin

Renaissance learned magic
type: Tradition
label: Gelehrte Magie der Renaissance @de
definition: The early modern attempt to give magic a philosophy: sympathies, images, memory as an operative art, and angelic communication kept as a record.
note: Dee's diaries are a working log with dates, which makes them a different kind of witness from the treatises around them.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ficino, De vita libri tres; Agrippa, De occulta philosophia; Bruno, De umbris idearum; Dee, Monas Hieroglyphica and the spiritual diaries

Rosicrucian transmission
type: Tradition
label: Rosenkreuzerische Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission begun by three anonymous manifestos that announced an order and a knowledge, and that produced both by being read.
note: A tradition whose founding documents describe a body that did not exist before them. Of interest to the project precisely as a documented case of a transmission created by its own announcement.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Fama Fraternitatis; Confessio Fraternitatis; Chymische Hochzeit Christiani Rosencreutz

Sāṃkhya
type: Tradition
definition: The enumerative transmission of the evolutes of nature and of a witnessing principle distinct from them, on which the yoga of the graph already rests.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Īśvarakṛṣṇa, Sāṃkhyakārikā; Yuktidīpikā

Sant and inner-sound transmission
type: Tradition
label: Sant- und Nāda-Überlieferung @de
definition: The north Indian transmission of an inner sound held to be audible under instruction, and of union without image or rite.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Kabīr granthāvalī; Ādi Granth; Nāda-bindu Upaniṣad

The Seth material
type: Tradition
label: Das Seth-Material @de
definition: The transmission received by Jane Roberts from 1963, teaching that reality is constructed by belief and that the constructing can be observed and altered by the one who does it.
note: States its central claim in a form that asks for a procedure: beliefs are to be examined and changed, and the change is said to show. The sessions were numbered and dated from the start.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Roberts, Seth Speaks; Roberts, The Nature of Personal Reality; The Early Sessions

Shangqing
type: Tradition
definition: The Daoist transmission of visualised journeys, of deities resident in the body, and of nocturnal encounters recorded as they were received.
note: The Zhen'gao is a dated record of revelations with the recipient named, which places it among the few pre-modern first-person corpora available anywhere.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Tao Hongjing, Zhen'gao; Huangting neijing jing; Dadong zhenjing

Shingon
type: Tradition
definition: The Japanese esoteric transmission claiming buddhahood in the present body, achieved through the coordination of gesture, speech and visualisation.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Kūkai, Sokushin jōbutsu gi; Kūkai, Hizō hōyaku

Shintō
type: Tradition
definition: The Japanese transmission of kami, of purification as the central operation, and of formal address preserved in the imperial liturgies.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Kojiki; Nihon shoki; the norito of the Engishiki

Shugendō
type: Tradition
definition: The Japanese transmission of mountain austerity, in which power is held to follow from ordeals performed at named places in a fixed order.
note: The self-mummification practice gives the project something almost nothing else does: a stated procedure with a documented outcome and documented failures, both counted.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Shozan engi; the Shugendō shūyō himitsu shū

Solomonic grimoire transmission
type: Tradition
label: Salomonische Grimoire-Tradition @de
definition: The transmission of ritual handbooks for the constraint of spirits, carrying preparation, circle, seal, adjuration and dismissal as a fixed sequence.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Clavicula Salomonis; Lemegeton; Heptameron; the Book of Abramelin

Spiritualist automatic writing
type: Tradition
label: Spiritistisches automatisches Schreiben @de
definition: The nineteenth century transmission of extended texts produced by a writer who reports not composing them, and issued as scripture rather than as message.
note: The earliest layer of the block and the template for all of it: a named person, a dated production, a printed volume, and the claim that the author is elsewhere.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Newbrough, Oahspe; Davis, The Principles of Nature, Her Divine Revelations, and a Voice to Mankind

Śrīvaiṣṇava transmission
type: Tradition
label: Śrīvaiṣṇavische Überlieferung @de
definition: The transmission descending from Rāmānuja, which gives the devotional relation a scholastic form and disputes within itself over whether the devotee acts or is acted upon.
note: The internal dispute of the two schools, over whether surrender requires an act of the devotee or none, is a candidate for a pm:Disputing node with two attested sides inside one transmission.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Rāmānuja, Śrībhāṣya and Gadyatraya; Vedānta Deśika, Rahasyatrayasāra; Piḷḷai Lokācārya, Śrīvacanabhūṣaṇa

Śrīvidyā
type: Tradition
definition: The transmission of the goddess as sound and diagram, with an initiatory sequence tied to the levels of a single mantra.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Yoginīhṛdaya; Nityāṣoḍaśikārṇava; Bhāskararāya, Setubandha

Swedenborgian transmission
type: Tradition
label: Swedenborgische Überlieferung @de
definition: A transmission resting on one man's sustained reports of conversation with the dead and with angels, kept as a dated journal over decades.
note: Quantitatively the largest body of first-person reports available to the project, and dated throughout, which makes internal consistency checkable in a way most such material is not.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Swedenborg, De caelo et inferno; Swedenborg, Diarium spirituale

Syriac ascetic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Syrische Askese @de
definition: The East Syriac transmission of solitary prayer, of the stages of stillness and of the wonder held to interrupt prayer rather than complete it.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Isaac of Nineveh, Ascetical Homilies; John of Dalyatha, Letters; Evagrius, Kephalaia Gnostica in the Syriac recension

Tamil Siddhar transmission
type: Tradition
label: Tamilische Siddhar-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Tamil transmission of bodily perfection, rejuvenation regimens and a deliberately obscure poetic idiom that resists the commentary it invites.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Tirumūlar, Tirumandiram; the Bogar and Agastyar corpora; the kāya-kalpa literature

Thelema
type: Tradition
definition: Crowley's transmission of a received book, of the discovery of one's own will as the central task, and of a practice curriculum with a demand for recorded results.
note: The insistence on keeping a magical diary and treating claims sceptically is a methodological demand made from inside a tradition, and belongs in the graph as such.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Crowley, Liber AL vel Legis; Crowley, Magick in Theory and Practice; Crowley, The Vision and the Voice

Theosophy
type: Tradition
label: Theosophie @de
definition: The modern transmission of root races, planes and masters, presented as the recovery of a single ancient doctrine underlying all religions.
note: The pedigree claim is the tradition's own central assertion and is contested; it belongs in the graph as a claim about origin and not as a fact about transmission. Much of what circulates today as the doctrine of older traditions entered general circulation here.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Blavatsky, Isis Unveiled; Blavatsky, The Secret Doctrine; Leadbeater, The Chakras

Theravāda commentarial manuals
type: Tradition
label: Theravādische Kommentarhandbücher @de
definition: The manual layer of Theravāda: the objects of concentration, the marks by which each absorption is recognised, and the higher knowledges said to follow from mastery.
note: Registered apart from the canon because the canon states that the attainments occur and the manuals state how to reach them and how to tell whether one has.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga; Upatissa, Vimuttimagga; Paṭisambhidāmagga

Tiantai
type: Tradition
definition: The Chinese transmission of calming and contemplation, with a systematic account of the obstacles, illnesses and demonic states that arise in practice.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Zhiyi, Mohe zhiguan; Zhiyi, Xiao zhiguan

Ugaritic and Levantine ritual
type: Tradition
label: Ugaritisch-levantinisches Ritual @de
definition: Late Bronze Age Levantine ritual and incantation, including the address to the deified dead.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The KTU corpus, including the Rapiuma texts and the serpent incantations

The Urantia Book
type: Tradition
label: Das Urantia-Buch @de
definition: A single large revealed cosmology published in 1955, presenting itself as a series of papers by named celestial authors and describing a graded administration of the universe.
note: The human circumstances of its production were withheld on purpose by the group that published it, which leaves its provenance the weakest in a block whose provenance is otherwise its strength.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Urantia Book

Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā transmission
type: Tradition
label: Vaiṣṇava-Sahajiyā-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Bengali transmission that takes the devotional relation as a bodily practice, holding that the states named by the aesthetic theory are to be produced rather than contemplated.
note: Registered because it is the one station of this sphere that turns a doctrine of states into a procedure, which is what SPEC §14 puts first. Its corpus is small, partly clandestine, and the attribution of several works is contested; that is to be settled before the file is opened, not after.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Vaiṣṇava Sahajiyā padāvalī; Ānanda-bhairava; Vivarta-vilāsa attributed to Ākiñcana-dāsa

Vārkarī transmission
type: Tradition
label: Vārkarī-Überlieferung @de
definition: The Marathi devotional transmission of the pilgrimage to Paṇḍharpūr, carried in the songs of its poet-saints rather than in a treatise.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Jñāneśvarī; the abhaṅga of Tukārām, Nāmdev and Eknāth

Vedic ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Vedische Ritualüberlieferung @de
definition: The solemn ritual and its exegesis, in which efficacy rests on stated equivalences between the act, the body and the world.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa; Aitareya Brāhmaṇa; the Śrautasūtras

Waidan external alchemy
type: Tradition
label: Waidan, äußere Alchemie @de
definition: The Chinese transmission of elixirs compounded from mineral substances, with an explicit catalogue of the capacities each elixir is said to confer.
note: Ge Hong's inner chapters list attainments in the same enumerated form as the siddhi lists and were compiled without access to them. The comparison is one of the sharpest tests the project can set itself.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Ge Hong, Baopuzi neipian; Zhouyi cantong qi

Yangsheng nourishing-life transmission
type: Tradition
label: Yangsheng-Überlieferung @de
definition: The early Chinese transmission of breath circulation, guided stretching and dietary regimen for the prolongation of life, with illustrated postures.
note: The Mawangdui and Zhangjiashan manuscripts are dated by their burial, which puts the breath material before any documented contact with Indian practice. This is the single most valuable registration in the file for the independence question.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Mawangdui manuscripts, including Daoyin tu and Quegu shiqi; the Zhangjiashan Yinshu; Huangting jing

Yarsan transmission
type: Tradition
label: Yarsanische Überlieferung @de
definition: An Iranian transmission teaching successive bodily lives as a purification, carried in Gorani verse.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Kalām-e Saranjām

Yazidi transmission
type: Tradition
label: Jesidische Überlieferung @de
definition: A Kurdish transmission carried chiefly in hymn and recitation, teaching successive returns of the soul.
note: The two books circulated as its scripture are held by most scholarship to be forgeries of the early twentieth century, which makes the corpus question itself the first thing to decide.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: The Qewls (hymns) in the published collections; the disputed Mišefa Reš and Kitêba Cilwe

Yogācāra
type: Tradition
definition: The transmission of consciousness-only doctrine together with the most detailed Indian description of meditative signs and the stages at which they appear.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Corpus named
principal corpus: Asaṅga, Yogācārabhūmi, particularly the Śrāvakabhūmi; Vasubandhu, Triṃśikā

Adornment and cosmetics
type: Conceptualizing
label: Schmuck und Kosmetik @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:1 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: Knowledge of bracelets and ornaments, of antimony and the painting of the eyelids, of precious stones and colouring tinctures.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Coupling an intended state to a strong affect shifts the one who couples
type: Positing
label: Die Kopplung eines Zielzustands an einen starken Affekt verschiebt den Koppelnden @de
definition: The claim that binding an intended state to a strong affect shifts what the person attends to, how ready they are to act, how they carry themselves, and where their threshold for risk lies.
note: Deliberately the weak reading. The neighbouring claim of the same section holds that the coupled state acts outside its carrier; that one is not examined here and nothing below bears on it. Separating them is the point: the weak reading is testable and the strong one is not, and running them together would let evidence for the first be read as evidence for the second.
posited in: prima-materia#141

Araqiel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A Watcher named as the one who disclosed the signs of the earth.
note: Charles brackets the clause naming Araqiel and Shamsiel as absent from part of the Ethiopic tradition; the bracketing belongs to the text as printed and is recorded here rather than resolved.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Araqiêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Armaros
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
alternative label: Hermani
definition: A Watcher named in the teaching list as the one who disclosed the undoing of spells.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Armârôs
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Perfect knowledge whether a disease tends to death or life
type: Conceptualizing
label: Vollkommene Kenntnis, ob eine Krankheit zum Tod oder zum Leben führt @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), §§ 26, 30a-30b, pp. 24-25, ed. Peterson
definition: The capacity claimed for the oration of the physical art: to have the perfect knowledge of any disease, whether the same tend to death or to life, including for a sick person who is far off and named only, and for one who dissembles and hides his infirmity.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

Eloquence measured out by the count of repetitions
type: Conceptualizing
label: Nach der Zahl der Wiederholungen zugemessene Beredsamkeit @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), pp. 46-47, ed. Peterson
definition: The graded effect the text attaches to the number of repetitions: said once by a man troubled or involved in a great business, eloquence shall be added to him as much as is needed; said twice, great eloquence shall be given to him; said three times by a man who desires to be made eloquent, he shall be made eloquent.
note: A dose and its effect, which the corpus this graph holds gives almost nowhere else. The interest is not the promise but the monotony: more of the same act is said to produce more of the same effect, and a monotony can be examined without the underlying claim being settled first.
note: The order in the passage does not rise. Three times stands for the man who wishes to become eloquent, once and twice for the man under pressure, so the text may be setting out three separate applications rather than one scale. Which of the two it is decides whether there is a dose-response claim here at all, and the passage read does not decide it; the Latin beside it is no clearer.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The rule of decision on the sick man's answer
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Entscheidungsregel an der Antwort des Kranken @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 30a, pp. 24-25, ed. Peterson
definition: The rule the text lays down for reading the answer: if he says he is at good ease or begins to mend, judge without doubt that he shall recover; if he says he is grievously ill or worse and worse, conclude that he will die; if he says he does not know whether he is better or worse, he will either die or the disease will change for the worse. Where the sick man is a child too young to answer, or too ill to answer, the oration is said three times and what first arises in the speaker's mind is the judgement.
note: The fallback for the silent patient moves the sign from the sick man to the speaker, and with it the whole character of the procedure: what is read is then the operator's own first thought and not anything the patient did.
note: Three answers, and only two of them decide. The third covers dying and getting worse together, so no fate the sick man can meet falls outside it, and that branch alone cannot fail. The first two are not like that: each names one outcome and excludes the other.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The days of the moon on which the orations are said
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Mondtage, an denen die Orationen gesprochen werden @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 15, p. 12, ed. Peterson
definition: The seven days of the lunation on which the orations are to be put in operation: the fourth, the eighth, the twelfth, the sixteenth, the twenty-fourth, the twenty-eighth and the thirtieth day of the moon.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The orations confer the sciences within one month
type: Yielding
label: Die Orationen bringen die Wissenschaften binnen eines Monats @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 14, p. 12, ed. Peterson
note: The term is the part that matters. Whoever pronounces the words at the determinate appointed time, setting all other occasions aside, shall profit in all the sciences in one month. A promise with a stated interval can be missed; the same promise without one cannot, and the corpus this graph holds gives intervals very rarely.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The saying of the orations
within tradition: Ars Notoria
yields capacity: Profiting in all the sciences

The oration reveals the sex of the unborn child
type: Yielding
label: Die Oration offenbart das Geschlecht des ungeborenen Kindes @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 30b, p. 25, ed. Peterson
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The oration of the physical art said before the sick
within tradition: Ars Notoria
yields capacity: The sex of the unborn child at the pulse

The sex of the unborn child at the pulse
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Geschlecht des ungeborenen Kindes am Puls @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 30b, p. 25, ed. Peterson
definition: The claim that if the same oration is said while touching the pulse of a woman with child, it shall be revealed whether she shall bring forth a male or a female.
note: The most examinable claim the run found in this corpus, and it is examinable for a reason that has nothing to do with how strongly it is asserted: the outcome is binary, its base rate is known and close to even, it becomes public within months, and the prediction can be recorded before it does. Nothing in the passage makes the result depend on the operator's worthiness.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

Alone, and scarcely audible to himself
type: Conceptualizing
label: Allein, und kaum sich selbst hörbar @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), p. 14, ed. Peterson
definition: The condition that the oration be spoken secretly, that the speaker be alone, and that he pronounce it with so low a voice that he scarcely hears himself; with fasting on the first day of the rehearsal and a chaste and devout life.
note: It is also not the same requirement as the one it most resembles in this graph. The European folk-magic condition recorded at pmc:EuropeanFolkMagicUnbeschrauen forbids the act to be called at and spoken of, that is it regulates what other people say about it; this one regulates how loudly the operator says the words himself. One shields the act from other voices, the other shields the voice from other ears, and a correspondence between them would be built out of the single word silence. Held apart here rather than joined, which settles the second question of prima-materia#530 in the negative; whether either has a counterpart outside the European sphere is unsearched.
note: The condition is on the manner of speaking and not on the words. It is the counterpart of the exactness demands the graph holds elsewhere: there the wording carries the effect, here it is the inaudibility that is prescribed, and the two are not the same requirement.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The ascent that passes through every centre in one movement
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Aufstieg, der in einer Bewegung jedes Zentrum durchläuft @de
source: Vijñānabhairava 28 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
source: Vijñānabhairava 29 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
definition: The power is imagined rising in the form of lightning, at each centre in turn and step by step, upward as far as three fists, and at the end of that ascent stands the great awakening.
note: The two phrases that carry this are praticakram, at each centre, and kramāt kramam, step by step. Recorded because it settles two questions at once. It gives a body measure in the base text, three fists for the upward reach, where a modern draft gives an arm's length; and it makes the passage through several centres a single exercise, where the same draft allows one centre per session and calls a change of centre a break. See prima-materia#38 and prima-materia#40.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Astrology
type: Conceptualizing
label: Astrologie @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The reading of terrestrial import from the position of the heavenly bodies.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Turning aside the anger of the huacas and the ancestors
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Abwenden des Zorns der Huacas und der Ahnen @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
definition: What the confession is made for: the faults of a man are held to anger his ancestors and his huacas, and the anger to be the reason he falls sick. The confession, the blowing of the powders, the rubbing with the pardon-stone and the washing of the head are done so that the anger is turned aside and the sickness with it.
within tradition: Andean transmission

Against undertaking the purification without knowing the rites
type: Cautioning
label: Gegen die Reinigung durch einen Unkundigen @de
source: Vendidad, fargard 9.47-49, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 4, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895)
definition: The transmission's warning against the man who takes on the purification without the knowledge for it. The penalty stated for him is death: they shall cut the head off his neck and give over his corpse to the vultures. The reason given is not that the rite is wasted but that it works the wrong way: through such cleansing the sickness and the death that were in the world become stronger than they were before.
note: This is the strongest thing of its kind the graph holds. Most transmissions say that a botched procedure fails; this one says that it makes the harm greater than if nothing had been done, and it stakes a man's life on the rule. A claim that a wrong performance actively worsens the world is decidable in a way that a claim of mere failure is not, because the two predict opposite directions of the same measurable thing.
attested by: Textual attestation
cautions about: The Barashnum of the nine nights
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

Beauty itself
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Schönheit selbst @de
source: Plato, Symposium 211c-212a
definition: The final object of the ascent, seen only by one who has climbed by way of the intervening rungs.
within tradition: Platonic tradition

The beauty of one body
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Schönheit eines Körpers @de
source: Plato, Symposium 210a-211c
definition: The first object of the ascent, from which the climb begins.
within tradition: Platonic tradition

The brow of another is opened by contact between the brows
type: Positing
label: Die Brauenöffnung eines anderen erfolgt durch Kontakt zwischen dessen Brauen @de
definition: The claim that the opening of the brow centre in another person is brought about by contact applied at that point.
note: This is the sharpest of the three, and the reason is what the transmission does not say. The śaiva material holds pmc:Saktipata, the descent of power from teacher to disciple, and it makes that descent the condition of everything that follows — but it names no place on the body where it enters. The draft supplies one. The addition is entirely the draft's, and it is the addition that can be checked.
posited in: prima-materia#315

Cakra
type: Conceptualizing
source: Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (1577)
definition: A centre of the subtle body, described in the source with its seed syllables and its position along the central channel.
note: The count varies across the older tantras, which give four, five or six. The tradition does not assign the centres the psychological qualities that modern presentations attach to them.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

The casting yields foreknowledge
type: Yielding
label: Der Wurf bringt das Vorauswissen hervor @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Casting the sixteen palm nuts
within tradition: Ifá
yields capacity: Foreknowledge of how a matter will fall out

A communication from the Sun
type: Conceptualizing
label: Eine Mitteilung von der Sonne @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 61 and pp. 119-120
definition: What one who has danced the Sun dance to its completion may expect: a communication granted by the chief of the gods, in a vision, at any place and time before the dispersion of the next winter camp. The corpus also states what the completion is worth in degrees: tearing the sticks from the wounds unaided is the most effective manner, being freed after a swoon the least effective, and being released at the dawn of the next day counts as a rescue and is as meritorious as an escape.
note: The term is the reason this node is here. A promise with a deadline can fail; a promise without one cannot. The corpus fixes it as the dispersion of the next winter camp, which is a date that everyone in the camp shares and that arrives whether or not anything has come.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Completion stage
type: Conceptualizing
label: Vollendungsstufe @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The second of the two stages, to which the six yogas belong.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The test that decides whether a confession held
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Test, der entscheidet, ob eine Beichte galt @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V, the account of the confession before the ichuri
definition: Concealing a fault in confession is held a great fault, and the confessor makes great efforts to find it out, by different ceremonies in different places. In some, the penitent first calls on the hills around, the plains, the condors that fly, the owls, saying that he wishes to confess his faults; he says them holding a small bead of shell fixed on a thorn between two fingers of the right hand, the thorn raised; when he has finished he gives it to the confessor, who drives the thorn into his cloak and presses until the bead breaks, and looks at how many parts it broke into. If it broke into three the confession was good; if into two it was not good, and he tells him to confess his faults again. In other places a small bundle of the grass called ichu, from which the confessor's name is taken, is divided in two and straws are drawn one from each side until it is seen whether they come out even, and then the confession was good, or odd, and it was bad. In others they divine it by the blood of guinea pigs.
note: A falsifying condition stated by the transmission, applied by its own practitioners to its own act, with a stated outcome and a stated remedy: the confession is void and must be made again. It is not a test of whether the specialist is right; it is a test of whether the layman held something back, so its target is the penitent and not the instrument. That is the opposite arrangement from the one this graph holds for the Zande poison oracle, and the difference is worth more than the resemblance.
note: The same passage records what the procedure is when it fails to persuade: in one village the penitent's hands were tied behind him and squeezed with a cord until he told the truth; a man said before the visitor that his confessor beat him with a stick and another that he was beaten with a rope. A validity test with a coercive fallback is not an oracle, and both are in the same paragraph.
note: The three variants are three different randomising devices — a break count, a parity count and an inspection of blood — attached to one function. That the function is stable across three devices, and that a fourth device with the same parity mechanism is used for divination proper elsewhere in the same corpus, is the finding here.
within tradition: Andean transmission

The constellations
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Sternbilder @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: Knowledge of the fixed groupings of stars.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Cooling and the quenching of hunger and thirst
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kühlung und das Stillen von Hunger und Durst @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.58 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The state ascribed to the cooling retention: fever, bile, hunger, thirst and the effect of poisons are said to be put down.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The course of the moon
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Lauf des Mondes @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: Knowledge of the moon's path, the calendrical rather than divinatory form of lunar knowledge.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Danh-gbi, the python held sacred
type: Conceptualizing
label: Danh-gbi, die heilige Python @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), pp. 57-58
definition: A python of one particular kind, held to be a god and kept in a temple at Whydah with free exit through holes in the walls, so that the animals move about the town and the bush. They are carried back only when they have entered a profane place, such as the house of a European, and then by a priest who purifies himself by rubbing fresh green leaves between his palms and prostrates himself before the animal before taking it up. Every python of this kind is to be treated with veneration wherever met, and a man of Whydah who meets one in his path prostrates himself, rubs his forehead in the earth and addresses it as master, father and mother.
note: Held apart from the boa said to be the messenger of the rainbow god, of which the same source states that only certain individuals are to be respected. The distinction matters for the prohibition on the neighbouring node: it applies to a kind and not to a single animal.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The detection of the witch
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Aufdecken des ndoki @de
source: John H. Weeks, Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People, in Folk-Lore, vol. XX (London: The Folk-Lore Society, 1909), pp. 51-52
definition: The power ascribed to the ordeal of showing whether an accused person is a ndoki, a witch, the corpus stating that the ordeal is firmly held to be the surest means of detecting one, and that the accused is thereafter either honoured or killed according to the effect the poison has had on his stomach.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Discernment of bitter and sweet
type: Conceptualizing
label: Unterscheidung von bitter und süß @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:8 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The disclosure of the distinction of bitter from sweet, given in the text alongside the secrets of wisdom.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The Dogon knew the companion of Sirius
type: Originating
label: Die Dogon kannten den Begleiter des Sirius @de
date: 1950
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 274, 282 with its first footnote, and 287
definition: The claim that a people without instruments held, as transmitted knowledge, the movements and characteristics of a star that cannot be seen: its period around Sirius, its extreme density, and its priority in creation. The claim is put forward in an article of nineteen fifty which sets the question of how such knowledge could exist and expressly declines to answer or even to pose it.
note: Held as an origination and not as a dispute, because a dispute needs two sides that each say something about the matter. Here one side says nothing: no transmission carries the identification, and the tradition file holds only the seed-star. The identification begins in the work named below.
note: The decisive sentence is the one the reception never quotes. On p. 274 the recorders write that the question of how men without instruments know the movements and certain characteristics of practically invisible bodies has not been decided, nor even raised. That sentence grants the premise and withholds the enquiry in one move, and everything the claim later became rests on the granted premise.
note: The later form of the claim, in which the knowledge is explained by contact with visitors from the Sirius system, begins in a work of nineteen seventy-six that has not been read at the wording in this run and is therefore not entered. See prima-materia#251.
note: The second decisive sentence is a footnote. Where the article gives the orbital period as some fifty years, the note observes that this period is very close to that of the companion of Sirius and cites a French astronomical periodical of nineteen thirty-one for it. The identification is therefore the recorders' and is made in the recorders' own apparatus; the body of the text never says Sirius B. What the informants are reported as saying and what the note makes of it are separable on the page, and separating them is what this node exists for.
circulates as: ancient Dogon astronomy: a pre-contact African tradition holding the existence, period and density of Sirius B, cited both as evidence of a lost indigenous science and as evidence of extraterrestrial contact
originated by: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen

Wood that turns with the sun's course
type: Conceptualizing
label: Holz, das sich mit dem Sonnenlauf dreht @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, Of the magicall Ceremonies of the Laplanders, pp. 47-48
definition: The qualifying material of the drum. It must be a pine, fir or birch grown in a particular place and turning directly according to the sun's course, which the recorder defines: the grain of the wood, running from the bottom of the tree to the top, winds itself from the right hand to the left. A tree so grown is held acceptable to the sun.
note: A second condition on the same material stands in the same passage: the piece must be taken from the root, cleft asunder and hollowed on one side, and the skin is stretched over the hollow. It is entered here rather than as a node of its own because it names no criterion by which a piece could fail, only a manner of working.
note: The direction is stated twice in this file in frames that do not obviously agree. Here the sun's course is the grain winding from the right hand to the left as it rises; at pmc:SunCourseRule it is the ring travelling round towards the right hand. Whether a spiral seen along a rising trunk and a ring seen on a flat skin describe one direction or two is not decidable from the passages, and is left standing rather than harmonised.
note: The recorder gives the sun-acceptability as his own conjecture — 'from this perhaps they believe' — not as something told to him. The requirement is reported; its reason is his.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Emme ya tolo, the Female Sorghum star
type: Conceptualizing
label: Emme ya tolo, der Weibliche-Hirse-Stern @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 287-288
definition: A second companion said to run a wider course in the same direction and the same time as the seed-star, four times lighter and larger than it, called the sun of the women, and named as the seat of the female souls of all beings living or to come. It is said to have a satellite of its own, the star of the Women.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Energy can be taken from a person through the left hand
type: Positing
label: Energie lässt sich aus einer Person über die linke Hand aufnehmen @de
definition: The claim that something passes from one person to another during contact, and that it enters through one named hand rather than the other.
note: Two claims in one sentence, and they are not equally reachable. That something passes is the general transfer claim of the section; that it enters through the left hand and not the right is a statement about sides, and a statement about sides is the kind that can be checked.
posited in: prima-materia#328

Energy can be taken in from cold
type: Positing
label: Energie lässt sich aus Kälte aufnehmen @de
definition: The claim that exposure to cold is a source from which the practitioner draws, rather than a condition he works against.
note: The narrowest of the draft's uptake claims and the only one that names a measurable boundary condition, which is why it is entered first.
posited in: prima-materia#133

Energy can be taken in from wind
type: Positing
label: Energie lässt sich aus Wind aufnehmen @de
definition: The claim that moving air is a source from which the practitioner draws, beyond what breathing it supplies.
posited in: prima-materia#134

The straight trunk as the mark of a seat
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der gerade Rumpf als Merkmal einer Sitzhaltung @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I.21 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A seat defined by sitting evenly with the body straight; the straightness is part of what the posture is, not a separate instruction.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The names that hold off
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die abwehrenden Namen @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayers I-IX, pp. 216-220
alternative label: asmat
definition: The long lists of divine and angelic names that stand at the head of each prayer of the roll and are called the glorious names, the names of their God. They are the operative part: what the prayer asks for is asked by their might, and the roll gives them without explanation, as things to be said or carried rather than understood.
note: The identifier keeps the Geez term of the genre rather than an English rendering, because the volume read gives no single term for the lists and calls the whole class magical prayers, which is the editor's name for it and not the transmission's.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The names said at the door hold the devils off
type: Yielding
label: Die an der Tür gesprochenen Namen halten die Teufel ab @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer I, p. 216
note: The wording makes the protection follow from knowing the names rather than from saying them at any particular moment: it is to him that knoweth these that no devil draws nigh. The instruction to say them at the door is given first and the guarantee is stated after it without repeating the condition, so the two do not close on each other.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The names said at the front and at the doors
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission
yields capacity: The devils held off and the weapon missing

Deliverance from the enemy by the will of God
type: Conceptualizing
label: Errettung vom Feind nach dem Willen Gottes @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
definition: The outcome claimed for the worn form: the names shall deliver the wearer from his enemy, and he shall escape from him by the will of God.
note: The clause at the end is the whole difference between this node and the one beside it. A man who wore the names and was struck has not shown that they failed; he has shown that it was not willed. The same volume states the same protection three lines earlier without that clause.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The devils held off and the weapon missing
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die abgehaltenen Teufel und die fehlgehende Waffe @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer I, p. 216
definition: The effect claimed for the names at the door: that no devil shall draw nigh, that the man shall be smitten neither by the arrows of his adversary nor by the stone hurled at him nor by the spear, and that the angels shall protect him and keep him in safety under their wings.
note: Two kinds of harm stand in one sentence, and the second is the one that can be looked at. Whether a devil drew nigh is not an event anybody records; whether a man was struck by a stone or a spear is.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The spear turned back
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der zurückgewendete Speer @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
definition: The outcome claimed for the spoken form: the spear of the man who wishes to thrust it shall be turned back.
note: Stated without condition and without reservation. Nothing is said about the speaker's worthiness, his belief, the state of the roll, or the will of God, and the outcome named is a single public event at a single moment.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The spoken names turn the spear back
type: Yielding
label: Die gesprochenen Namen wenden den Speer zurück @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
note: The passage is printed twice in immediate succession in the edition read, word for word, which the editor does not remark on. Whether that is a repetition in the parchment or a compositor's doubling is not decidable from the volume, and it changes nothing about the claim.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The names repeated at the thrust of the spear
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission
yields capacity: The spear turned back

Worn until the years of childbearing are ended
type: Conceptualizing
label: Getragen, bis die Jahre des Gebärens enden @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 218
definition: The term set on the wearing of the seventh prayer: it must be written down and worn by the woman who has children to suckle and bring up until the years of childbearing are ended.
note: A stated term, which is rarer in this graph than a stated effect. It gives the claim a span rather than a moment, and it says when the wearing may stop without the protection being forfeited.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The worn names deliver from the enemy
type: Yielding
label: Die getragenen Namen erretten vom Feind @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The names worn upon the breast
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission
yields capacity: Deliverance from the enemy by the will of God

The protection of the carried booklet
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Schutz des getragenen Büchleins @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 90
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 57
source: Romanus-Büchlein (Glatz: Franz Pompejus, 1788), Nr. 66, S. 29, in the edition of Joseph H. Peterson, 2006
definition: The claim, printed after the charm against powder and ball, that whoever carries this booklet is safe from all his enemies, visible and invisible; that whoever has it with him cannot die without the whole corpus Christi, cannot drown in any water, cannot burn in any fire, and that no unjust sentence can be spoken over him.
note: The claim stands word for word in the Romanus-Büchlein of seventeen eighty-eight and again in the Reading printing of eighteen twenty, and in both it says this booklet. The referent therefore moves with the reprinting: the sentence that guarantees the bearer of one book is carried over unchanged into another and guarantees the bearer of that one. Nothing in either printing marks the transfer.
note: This is the passage the transmission is most reliably misreported on. It is regularly given as a Pennsylvania German claim of eighteen twenty; it was in print in Silesia thirty-two years earlier. The title page of the Reading printing does not in fact claim otherwise: it says the greater part is still little known and appears in print in America for the very first time, which is a claim about America and not about first publication. The English title page of eighteen fifty drops in America from the first half of that sentence and thereby makes the wider claim the German never made.
within tradition: European folk magic

The window of weekday and moon
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Fenster aus Wochentag und Mond @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 27, 29, 53
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), pp. 17, 18, 32, 41
definition: The condition that an act fall on a named weekday, before sunrise, and in a named quarter of the moon: Friday before sunrise in the waning moon for the knotting of twigs, the first Friday in the new light for the written slip against the falling sickness, the last Friday in the old light for the letter against rheumatism, Thursday morning before sunrise and in the open air for the binding of a thief.
within tradition: European folk magic

The sewn letter against rheumatism
type: Practicing
label: Der eingenähte Brief gegen das Reissen @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 53
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 32
definition: A written letter sewn into a piece of cloth and hung around the neck, where cloth, tape and thread must never have been in water, the thread must carry no knot, and cloth and tape must have been spun by a child of not more than seven years; the hanging on is unbeschrauen and falls in a named Friday of the moon, and the Lord's prayer and the articles of faith are said immediately after.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: European folk magic

Unbeschrauen
type: Conceptualizing
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 14, 27, 28, 29, 53, 83
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), pp. 17, 18, 32
definition: The condition, attached to a procedure and not to a formula, that the act be carried out without being called at and without the doing being spoken of. It is set on cutting a sod, on knotting twigs, on hanging a written letter around the neck, on passing water into a vessel and on going to a wagon, that is on acts of every kind, and never on the words themselves.
note: The eighteen fifty translation renders the term as unbeshrewedly, a coinage with no currency in English, which is why the identifier keeps the German word of the printing that carries it.
within tradition: European folk magic

The driving out of the severest toothache
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Vertreiben der allerheftigsten Zahnschmerzen @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 46
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 28
definition: The effect claimed for the vitriol, stated for hollow teeth and left open by the author for teeth that are not hollow.
within tradition: European folk magic

The exactness of the recitation is set as the condition of its efficacy
type: Converging
label: Die Genauigkeit der Rezitation ist als Bedingung ihrer Wirksamkeit gesetzt @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 11
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, pp. 35-36
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), pp. 615-616
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), sections 41-42, pp. 24-25
definition: Four transmissions make the same claim about spoken ritual language: the effect is not obtained unless the words are rendered as they stand. Three of them also say what a lapse does. One holds that an error, and equally a hesitation, is fatal to the efficacy of the address. Another holds that an error in a song may be fatal to the ceremony and that in some cases a single syllable does irreparable harm. A third requires the publicly chanted parts to be letter perfect and, in the passages read, states no consequence. The fourth names a breath taken before the close of a phrase alongside mistake and hesitation, and says the ill-luck falls on the party the chant honours rather than on the reciter.
note: A defect in the vocabulary shows at this node and is recorded rather than worked around. pm:contactRoute is a property of a single tradition, but contact is a relation between two. The value pm:contactRouteAbsent as the registry uses it means that no route runs to what the graph already held at the time of registration; it cannot answer whether a route runs between two registered traditions that are later brought together in one correspondence, which is exactly the question a convergence asks. See prima-materia#101 for the vocabulary defect and prima-materia#102 for the registry entries it affects.
note: A fourth witness was added on 2026-09-04 and it is expressly not a fourth independent one. The Hawaiian transmission holds that a breath taken before the close of a phrase, a mistake, or even hesitation in pronouncing a word is a sign of ill-luck. It stands beside the Maori witness and not beyond it: both descend from one East Polynesian dispersal, dated archaeologically to the thirteenth century, so for the independence question the two Polynesian legs count as one. The count of transmissions carrying the rule goes from three to four; the count of independent ones does not move. Holding both numbers is what SPEC section 14 asks for, and this is the case that shows why one number alone would mislead.
note: The counter-search did not produce a tradition that denies the claim. What it produced is of a different kind and belongs here: the recorded versions of the same Māori address differ from one another across the eighteen-forties to the early nineteen-hundreds, and which rendering was valid was disputed among Māori at the time. A doctrine of one correct wording and a transmission that visibly carries several are not a contradiction, but they are the point at which the claim becomes examinable instead of edifying. The place that says so has not been read at the wording and stands at prima-materia#110.
note: Three witnesses agreeing on the form of a rule is a weaker finding than it looks unless the alternative is stated. The alternative exists and is common: traditions in which the sense of a prayer carries it and the wording may be varied, and traditions in which improvisation is the mark of the competent practitioner. That the three named here all fall on the fixed side is what the correspondence asserts. Where the rule holds and where it is absent has not been surveyed; the spheres left unsearched stand at prima-materia#116, the Indic parallel at prima-materia#109.
note: What the fourth witness does add is a different thing, and it sharpens the correspondence rather than padding it. First, it names who suffers: the ill-luck falls on the person or family the chant honours and not on the reciter who made the fault, so the party that could report the lapse and the party that bears it are different people. Second, it names a countermeasure the transmission itself takes: a master of song gathers two or more of his fellows to edit and memorise the lines, and genealogies must be memorised by more than one reciter. A transmission that builds redundancy against its own stated failure condition has treated the condition as a real risk, which is evidence about the practice that a bare threat is not. Third, the same tradition sets the opposite rule for a different kind of utterance in the same file: at the consecration of the hula altar what must not lapse is the continuity of the voice, and the teacher is expressly free to change the prayer to avoid a silence. The exactness rule is therefore not a general doctrine about ritual speech even where it holds, and the correspondence should not be read as one.
note: What the node claims and what it does not. Independent attestation is asserted for the two North American transmissions with respect to the Polynesian one and with respect to everything else this collection holds; no route of contact between the Pacific and the American Southwest is available for the periods in which any of these corpora were fixed. It is not asserted between those two: they are neighbours in one region, and a route between Pueblo and Athabaskan ceremonialism is neither absent nor established here. The Māori witness is therefore the third leg and not a third independent one, because its own contact route is entered as disputed.
converging concept: The chant rendered without breath, mistake or hesitation
converging concept: Repetition without error or hesitation
converging concept: Exactness of the sung words
converging concept: Letter-perfect delivery
ground of independence: Not a claim of priority in time. The two American corpora were fixed in eighteen ninety-seven and, from fieldwork of the nineteen-twenties, in nineteen thirty-two, both after the Polynesian witness was printed in eighteen eighty-two. What carries the independence is that no route of contact between the Pacific and the American Southwest is available for the period in which any of the three corpora were fixed, so agreement between them cannot be one statement counted twice. Two things this ground does not settle and does not hide: both American corpora were gathered by ethnographers working in a discipline to which the rule of exact recitation was already familiar, and neither passage says whether the rule was volunteered in the field or asked for. The second is the gathering question and it stands open.
independent attestation: Navajo ceremonial transmission
independent attestation: Zuni ritual transmission

The expectation that nothing moves physically is the operator
type: Positing
label: Die Erwartung, dass sich physisch nichts bewegt, ist der eigentliche Operator @de
definition: The claim that what brings the state about is not the technique but the practitioner's settled expectation that his body will stay where it is.
note: Unusual among the draft's claims because it is about a mechanism rather than a capacity, and unusual in its direction: it places the working part in the practitioner's expectation, which is where a sceptical account would also place it. A draft that says this about its own method is saying something against interest, and that is worth recording whatever else follows.
posited in: prima-materia#304

Ezeqeel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A Watcher named in the Ethiopic teaching list as the one who disclosed the knowledge of the clouds.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Ezêqêêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Casting the nuts yields the answer
type: Yielding
label: Der Wurf bringt die Antwort hervor @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), pp. 475-476
note: The same form of claim the graph holds from the Zande poison oracle, the Ifá casting and, since the Kongo file, the bark ordeal: the answer is read off an outcome the operator is said not to steer. Here the route to one of the others is documented and stated on the tradition instance, so this node may not be counted as a further independent witness for it.
attested by: Field attestation
by practice: Fa, the casting of the sixteen palm nuts
field record: Spoken by Fon practitioners at Abomey and Whydah, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the naturalist J. A. Skertchly during his detention in Dahomey in 1871, published 1874; given in Fon, of which the work prints the figure names and a few terms, the account itself in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission
yields capacity: What Fa is said to make known

The first week
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die erste Woche @de
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 4
definition: The purgative part of the exercises, given over to the consideration of sin.
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

The five hindrances
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die fünf Hemmnisse @de
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
definition: Sensual desire, ill will, dullness and drowsiness, restlessness and remorse, and doubt, whose abandoning the discourse describes immediately before entry into the first absorption.
within tradition: Theravāda

What Fa is said to make known
type: Conceptualizing
label: Was Fa kundtun soll @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), pp. 475-476
source: Richard F. Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome (2nd ed., London: Tinsley Brothers, 1864), vol. II, p. 143
definition: Two things, according to the witnesses. Where a mother is cast, the day denoted by its symbol is the propitious day for the business asked about, and where a child is cast no day is more propitious than another; and the oracle is said to predict evil, in which case a prescribed remedy follows. Simple answers of yes and no are said to be obtainable by anybody, while more stands with the practitioner.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The fourth degree yields the reading of thoughts
type: Yielding
label: Der vierte Grad bringt das Gedankenlesen hervor @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 170
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Initiation into the fourth degree
within tradition: Midewiwin
yields capacity: Reading the thoughts and intentions of others

Gadreel
type: Conceptualizing
source: 1 Enoch 69:6 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A figure named in the Book of Parables as the one who led Eve astray and disclosed the weapons of death.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The greater mysteries
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die großen Mysterien @de
source: Athenian decree concerning Eleusis, IG I³ 6, face C
definition: The rite at Eleusis, held in the month Boedromion.
within tradition: Eleusinian mysteries

The conduct required of the hula company
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die von der Hula-Schar geforderte Führung @de
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter II, p. 15
definition: Five requirements, given together: to maintain the greatest propriety of demeanour, to suppress all rudeness of speech and manner, to abstain from all carnal indulgence, to deny themselves specified articles of food, and above all to avoid contact with a corpse.
note: The list mixes conditions of different kinds without marking the difference, and the mixture is itself the finding. Propriety and rudeness are matters of judgement and could be argued about; contact with a corpse is an event that either happened or did not. A rule set in which only some members are decidable is the ordinary case in this collection, and it is what makes a transmission look stricter than it is testable.
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The secrecy the Sword requires
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Verschwiegenheit, die das Schwert verlangt @de
source: The Sword of Moses, ed. and trans. Moses Gaster (London: David Nutt, 1896), the opening instructions
definition: A condition of a different kind from the counts. No one is to know that the user intends to use the Sword, and it is not to be communicated except to the chaste and the pure, because in it are the mysteries of the universe and they are practised only in secret.
note: The secrecy clause is the gate this project exists to remove, stated by the transmission in its own words, and it is worth holding as a node rather than as background: it names the criterion of admission, and the criterion is moral rather than lineal.
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The hau of the gift
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Hau der Gabe @de
source: Tamati Ranapiri, letter to Elsdon Best, 23 November 1907, Polynesian Society Papers, Alexander Turnbull Library, MS-Papers-1187, folder 271
definition: The account, given by a named Māori authority in a letter, that what comes back from a third party for a valuable passed on is the hau of the valuable first received, and that keeping it back for oneself would be fatal to the keeper.
note: Held at mediated attestation because the letter is an archival manuscript and was read in the study that prints and collates it, not in the archive. The published version of 1909 could not be opened in this run either; the paths tried are recorded in prima-materia#106. This node is therefore an open post and is to be raised to textual attestation when either the manuscript or the 1909 printing is read.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: Manuka Hēnare, "Ko te hau tēnā o tō taonga…": The words of Ranapiri on the spirit of gift exchange and economy, Journal of the Polynesian Society 127/4 (2018), pp. 455-457
within tradition: Māori transmission

The good fortune of the person or family the chant honours
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wohlergehen der besungenen Person oder Familie @de
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, p. 35
definition: What the correct rendering is held to secure. The transmission places the outcome not with the reciter but with the party the chant is made for, which is the unusual part of this witness.
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The ranking of emotions by measured level
type: Originating
label: Die Ordnung der Affekte nach gemessener Stufe @de
date: 1995
source: D. R. Hawkins, Power vs. Force (1995)
definition: The claim that emotional and mental states occupy fixed positions on a single numbered scale, ascending from shame through fear, anger and pride to reason, love, joy, peace and enlightenment, and that the position can be established by testing.
note: An earlier form of this note held that no transmission ranks affects on a single ordered scale. That was withdrawn: the ground for it had been a search across the holdings of this graph, which says what has been entered here and not what the transmissions say. The search that had not been carried out finds one at once. Rūpa Gosvāmin ranks the five primary forms of devotional love in a single ascending order in the sixteenth century, in the verse itself, and traditions/gaudiya-vaisnava.ttl now holds it. The finding of this node is therefore not that ranking affects is modern. It is narrower and survives: the particular scale below, with its count, its order and its claim of measurability, begins here.
note: The diagnostic markers, given so that any later list presenting itself as old can be measured against a dated first appearance. The count: seventeen steps. The order of the lower band: shame, guilt, apathy, grief, fear, desire, anger, pride. The turn at the middle: courage, then neutrality, then willingness in eleventh place. The upper band: acceptance, reason, love, joy, peace, enlightenment. A list that shares the count, the relative order of shame, guilt, fear and anger, and the eleventh position of willingness has not arrived at them independently.
note: The nearest older relative is pmc:TheosophicalColourKeyToFeeling, and the comparison sharpens rather than dissolves this node. That transmission supplies the vibration vocabulary and an axis of self-reference on which a feeling rises or falls, and it was read at the wording for this purpose. It supplies no ranking of unlike feelings against one another. The single numbered order is therefore not inherited, and the question of where it does come from is open in prima-materia#12.
circulates as: A perennial map of consciousness, reported as the distilled agreement of the mystical traditions.
originated by: David R. Hawkins

Healing by touch
type: Conceptualizing
label: Heilung durch Berührung @de
source: Suetonius, Divus Vespasianus 7
source: Tacitus, Historiae IV.81
definition: The restoration of a withered hand and of sight, ascribed to the touch of a ruler in Alexandria.
within tradition: Graeco-Roman testimony

The heat arises without the forceful breath
type: Positing
label: Die Hitze entsteht ohne den kraftvollen Atem @de
definition: The claim that the gentler form of the practice, without the forceful breathing, produces the same effect as the form the tradition prescribes.
note: Entered because it is the point where the method draft parts company with the transmission it draws on. The transmission prescribes the forceful breath; the draft says it can be left out. That is a claim about the draft's own variant and belongs to nobody else, which is why it is posited and not sourced.
posited in: prima-materia#318

The songs and the training stay with the pupil
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Gesänge und die Schulung bleiben beim Schüler @de
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter V, p. 34
definition: What the school promises the pupil who keeps his vows: that memory will be strong and that the training, the knowledge and the songs will stay.
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The narrator's husband is said to have the gift of second sight
type: Attributing
label: Dem Mann der Erzählerin wird das zweite Gesicht zugeschrieben @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 29
definition: The narrator states of her husband Padloq, whom she calls by a name she glosses as the one who keeps her alive, that he has the gift of second sight and always knows when anything remarkable is going to happen. The case she gives is a dream, on a journey from Iglulik to Tununeq, that a friend of his had been eaten by his nearest kin; on that journey they met the woman who had eaten her own family.
note: The claim is universal in form, which is what makes it examinable: he always knows. One confirming case is related and no failing case is; the case is retrospective and was told after the meeting it is said to have foretold. The protocol stands at examinations/inuit-second-sight.ttl.
ascribed capacity: Second sight
ascribed to: Padloq, the narrator Takornâq's husband
attested by: Third-party ascription
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Naming the one who is bewitching at this moment
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Benennung dessen, der gerade behext @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 4 and pp. 35-36
definition: What the poison oracle is chiefly consulted for: to learn whether witchcraft threatens an undertaking or a person's health, and if so which neighbour is at this moment exercising it, so that he may be approached and asked to withdraw it. The question is never whether a man is a witch but whether he is now bewitching the questioner.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Foreknowledge of how a matter will fall out
type: Conceptualizing
label: Vorauswissen über den Ausgang einer Sache @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
definition: The capacity the oracle is consulted for: to learn beforehand how a matter stands and will fall out. The answer is delivered through the channel of parables, and the account of eighteen ninety-four reports that nothing of importance is undertaken without the consultation.
within tradition: Ifá

The sixteen figures called mothers
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die sechzehn Figuren, Mütter genannt @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
definition: The sixteen figures the casting can produce, named mothers in the account of eighteen ninety-four. A figure formed by taking one column from one mother and one column from another is named a child.
within tradition: Ifá

Intention replaces the musculature and the change of place happens by willing it
type: Positing
label: Die Absicht ersetzt die Muskulatur, der Ortswechsel geschieht durch Wollen des Ortes @de
definition: The claim that in the state, movement is accomplished by willing the destination, with no counterpart to the effort and the duration that bodily movement requires.
note: The claim carries an implication it does not state: if willing the place is what moves, the movement has no duration that depends on the distance. That implication is what makes it comparable to what the transmissions report.
posited in: prima-materia#305

The recovery of lost things
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wiederfinden verlorener Dinge @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 28
definition: The capacity to bring back an object that has been lost, named in the narrative for iron and steel knives, which were rare at the time and often lost.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

The prohibition on sewing new caribou skin on Oqshoriaq
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Verbot, auf Oqshoriaq neues Karibufell zu nähen @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 28-29
definition: A prohibition attached to a named place: garments of new caribou skin may not be sewn on the island of Oqshoriaq.
note: The prohibition is local and specific, which distinguishes it from the general taboo system the later chapters of the volume set out. Whether it is a case of that system or a rule of its own cannot be decided from the portion read.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

The journey yields the knowledge of the distant place
type: Yielding
label: Die Reise bringt das Wissen um den fernen Ort hervor @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 55-57
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The journey made while the body lies still
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission
yields capacity: Seeing what is at a distance

Kasdeja
type: Conceptualizing
source: 1 Enoch 69:12 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A figure named in the Book of Parables as the one who disclosed the striking of spirits, the killing of the embryo and the serpent's bite.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Minor rapture
type: Conceptualizing
label: Geringe Verzückung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV.94ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The least of the five degrees of rapture, described as able to raise the hairs of the body.
note: This is the passage that attests piloerection as a recognised concomitant of a meditative state, not as its object.
within tradition: Theravāda

The kindled inner fire
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das entfachte innere Feuer @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.66-68 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A heat said to arise when the raised wind reaches the region of fire, lengthening its flame, until the sleeping power is warmed through and straightens.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Kiyoka, the burning of all the charged things
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kiyoka, das Verbrennen aller geladenen Dinge @de
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, pp. 290-292
definition: A movement of about eighteen hundred and seventy-two, brought through the country by men from Luanda, which induced town after town to destroy every charged thing on a stated argument: since sickness and death come by the black art, there would be no more suffering and death if every charm were destroyed and none made again. Houses were searched and hiding places ransacked, and the movement proclaimed a code of law beside the burning.
note: A prediction about the world, made inside the transmission, acted on at the scale of whole districts, and refuted by the event. The corpus states the outcome and the response in one movement: the prevalence of sickness and death as before convinced the people that their hopes were not realised, and they concluded that many had kept their charms in spite of everything, so that the correctness of the theory was unquestioned and the failure was put down to the treachery of those who had hidden them.
note: The account was first printed in the compiler's dictionary appendix of eighteen ninety-five under the entry kiyoka and is repeated in the narrative of nineteen hundred; the second recorder quotes it from the appendix rather than reporting it himself, so there is one witness here and not two.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Knowledge of the clouds
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wolkenkunde @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The reading of weather and import from cloud formations.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The ladder of thirty steps
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Leiter der dreißig Stufen @de
source: John Climacus, The Ladder of Divine Ascent, steps 1-30
definition: An ascent in thirty steps, running from renunciation and exile through the active virtues to stillness, prayer, freedom from the passions and love, and passing in its course from human labour to what is given.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

The lesser mysteries
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die kleinen Mysterien @de
source: Athenian decree concerning Eleusis, IG I³ 6, face C
definition: The preparatory rite at Agrai, held in the month Anthesterion.
within tradition: Eleusinian mysteries

Light knowledge
type: Conceptualizing
label: Leichte Kenntnis @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 274
definition: The first stage of a secret knowledge, named with a Bambara expression. The account states that the rules of the Sirius system revealed to initiates at this stage are simplified in some parts and complicated in others, in order to turn attention away from calculations that remain more secret still.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The light of knowledge
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Leuchten der Erkenntnis @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.28
definition: What is said to arise, on the wearing away of impurity, and to continue up to discriminative discernment.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

Loosing of spells
type: Conceptualizing
label: Lösen von Beschwörungen @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The undoing of a binding laid by another, held in the text as a distinct art from the laying of it.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The efficacy of the karakia
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Wirksamkeit der Karakia @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 11-12
definition: The effect an invocation is held to obtain, which the closing petition asks the invoked ancestor to grant.
within tradition: Māori transmission

The cane planted in the middle of the house
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das in der Mitte des Hauses gepflanzte Rohr @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part II, chapter 7
alternative label: Aj
definition: A sign set up before a journey from which the traveller may not return. Each of the two plants a cane in the middle of the house and states both readings in advance: if it dries, that is the sign of their death; if it sprouts again, they are living. The grandmother who stays behind is told what to say in each case.
note: Both branches are named before the outcome, the reader is a third party who was not present at the event, and the sign is not the thing it reports. That combination is rare in this collection: most signs a tradition names are read by the practitioner himself, during the practice, after being told what to expect.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Being freed from the ills indicated as to come
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Befreiung von den angekündigten Übeln @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XXXVII, pp. 65-66
definition: The effect claimed for the procedure. The witness reports that the revels and the sacrifices were held to be very acceptable to the idols and remedial for freeing them from the ills indicated as to come.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Remaining unharmed in person and household
type: Conceptualizing
label: Unversehrtheit an Person und Haus @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XL, p. 70
definition: The state the faster is held to keep by carrying a fast through, and to lose by breaking one he has begun. The witness reports the belief without endorsing it and without naming what the harm would be.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Metalworking and weapon-making
type: Conceptualizing
label: Metallverarbeitung und Waffenherstellung @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:1 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: Knowledge of the metals of the earth and of working them into blades, shields and body armour.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Looking into futurity
type: Conceptualizing
label: Blick in das Künftige @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
definition: The capacity to see what is to come, ascribed to a priest of the second degree and marked in the pictographic chart by lines drawn upward from the eyes.
within tradition: Midewiwin

The root seal yields the kindled inner fire
type: Yielding
label: Das Wurzelsiegel bringt das entfachte innere Feuer hervor @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.66-68 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
note: The pairing is set at the fire and not at the reversal on purpose. The manual defines the root seal as the drawing upward of the downward wind, so a claim that the seal produces that upward movement would assert only that the practice is what it is. The heat, the lengthened flame and the waking of the power are consequences the verses state beyond the definition, and they are what a protocol could address.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The root seal
within tradition: Haṭhayoga
yields capacity: The kindled inner fire

The efficacy of the ceremony
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Wirksamkeit der Zeremonie @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 41, p. 24
definition: The effect a chantway is held to obtain, which the witness says an error in a song may destroy.
within tradition: Navajo ceremonial transmission

The three stages of the inner elixir
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die drei Stufen des inneren Elixiers @de
source: Chen Zhixu, Jindan dayao, juan 4
definition: Refining essence into breath, breath into spirit, and spirit back into emptiness.
note: A dating warning belongs on this node. The sequence is routinely attributed to the Cantong qi or to the Wuzhen pian, but neither carries it as a fixed numbered progression; the Wuzhen pian sets only a precedence of vital force before inner nature, and of doing before non-doing. The earliest ordered witness located for the full triad is the Yuan-period Jindan dayao.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Nkisi, the charged object
type: Conceptualizing
label: Nkisi, das geladene Ding @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 234-235
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 92
definition: A bundle or a carved figure into which ingredients have been put, held thereby to bring a named spirit under the control of whoever owns it and to perform one named office: to make a thief invisible or to detect him, to give a child or to withhold one, to make a gun shoot straight or another gun shoot crooked. The corpus states that there is no good wish and no evil desire for which one cannot be bought, and that a new complaint brings a new cult with a new charged thing to control the power responsible for it.
note: Entered as a container and not as an object of worship because the corpus says so in as many words: there is held to be no idea of worship in the sacrifice made to one, and no prayers are offered with it. The Vili witness makes the same separation in his own terms, dividing the people who serve the charged figures from the priests of the sacred groves and holding that the old Portuguese took the first for the whole.
note: The name is written nkisi by Weeks, nkixi in Bentley's dictionary of eighteen eighty-seven, and nkici with the plural zinkici by Dennett, who sets out his own orthography and warns that his x stands for a different sound than Bentley's. The identifier follows the form of the Lower Congo works.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Three ways into the office
type: Conceptualizing
label: Drei Wege in das Amt @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
definition: By succession, the son inheriting from the father, and where the heir is too young the nearest kinsman standing in until he is fit. By election, where succession fails, the other ministers choosing whom they judge fittest with the agreement of the lords. Or by a man taking the office himself, which is said to be ordinary among the old for the lesser offices of diviner and healer, and to be done for a living.
note: The third way is entered with the others because the recorder gives it the same weight and because it is the one a later reader would drop. A transmission that admits self-appointment for its lesser offices is saying where its own boundary is soft.
within tradition: Andean transmission

What the oracle is asked for
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wonach das Orakel befragt wird @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo VI, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The capacity the consultation is undertaken for: to be told whatever the questioners wish to know, with no restriction of subject stated in the passage.
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

The two winds are driven in opposite directions at once
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die beiden Winde werden zugleich in entgegengesetzte Richtungen getrieben @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I.50 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.47 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The apāna is raised from below while the prāṇa is pressed down from the throat, and the two are brought together in the region of the navel.
note: The manual assigns direction to the two winds, not to the two phases of breathing. Both directions run in the same operation and against each other, so a scheme that reads inhalation as upward and exhalation as downward, or the reverse, has no purchase here. See prima-materia#27 and prima-materia#28.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The graded order of the oracles
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Rangordnung der Orakel @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 164
definition: Where more than one oracle is consulted the lesser is always consulted before the greater, in the order rubbing-board, termites, poison. A verdict of the termites is not put to the rubbing-board for confirmation, and a verdict of the poison oracle is not put to the termites. On all important matters the decision of the termites must be corroborated by the poison oracle.
note: The order is a rule about the direction in which confirmation may run and not merely a ranking by esteem. It is what makes the cheaper oracles usable at all: a man narrows the field with the termites and spends poison only on the final decision.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The palms are the organ of sending
type: Positing
label: Die Handflächen sind das Sendeorgan @de
definition: The claim that what passes from one person to another passes through the palms, and not through some other part indifferently.
note: The force of the claim is in the exclusion. That the hands are used in transmission is reported widely and is not at issue; that they are the organ, so that another part would not serve, is the draft's addition and the part that can fail.
posited in: prima-materia#314

The paralysis is the regular shutdown of movement at the threshold of sleep
type: Positing
label: Die Lähmung ist die reguläre Abschaltung der Motorik am Schlafübergang @de
definition: The claim that what is called sleep paralysis is the ordinary switching off of motor control that happens as sleep is entered, and therefore a regular part of the architecture of sleep rather than a disorder.
note: The weaker of the two claims in this file and separated from the other on purpose. This one places the event and calls it regular; pmc:ParalysisPrecedesItsNotice adds that it is universal and that only its noticing is rare. The two are examined apart because they fail apart, and one of them does.
posited in: prima-materia#137

The paralysis is present in everyone and only its noticing is rare
type: Positing
label: Die Lähmung liegt bei jedem vor, selten ist nur ihr Bemerken @de
definition: The claim that the motor paralysis at the threshold of sleep is a regular feature of every sleeper rather than a disorder of some, and that it becomes noticeable only where waking awareness outlasts the body's entry into it.
note: Split deliberately from the weaker claim that sleep paralysis is the regular shutdown of motor control at the sleep transition, which is prima-materia#137 and stands on its own. This one adds the two things that make it testable: a universality and an explanation of why a universal thing is rarely reported.
posited in: prima-materia#138

Pneuma
type: Conceptualizing
source: Chrysippus, in Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis V.3.8
definition: A mixture of air and fire that pervades bodies and, by its tension, holds them in cohesion; a principle of the world rather than a capacity of a practitioner.
note: The associated doctrines are that of tension and that of total mixture, by which two bodies occupy the same place throughout.
within tradition: Stoic physics

The pneumatic vehicle of the soul
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das pneumatische Seelenfahrzeug @de
source: Synesius of Cyrene, De insomniis
definition: A subtle vehicle carried by the soul, whose purity is held to decide whether what appears in a dream is clear and true or clouded.
within tradition: Neoplatonic theurgy

Pô tolo, the Digitaria star
type: Conceptualizing
label: Pô tolo, der Digitaria-Stern @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 284 and 287
definition: A star named after the fonio grain, said to be white where Sirius is seen red, to be the first thing created, to be the egg of the world out of which everything visible and invisible developed, and to consist of a metal called sagala. It is called at once the smallest of all things and the heaviest, weighed in the account at four hundred and eighty donkey loads, so that all earthly beings together could not lift it.
note: The number four hundred and eighty is glossed in the article itself as the product of the base eighty and the count of tens in the older base sixty, and is said to be used as the symbol of the greatest of numbers. A reader who takes it for a measured mass is reading against the note printed beneath it.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The seed-star as the axis of the world
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Same-Stern als Achse der Welt @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), p. 287
definition: The claim that the orbit of the seed-star lies at the centre of the world, that without its movement no heavenly body could hold its place, and that it orders the position of Sirius in particular, which is called the most disordered of the stars.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The mat and the throne
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Matte und der Thron @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 92-93
definition: The office of a town chief, named in the source by the two objects handed over with it, together with the first wand of office. The candidate who has understood comes before his lord on bended knees and receives them.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Prāṇa
type: Conceptualizing
source: Chāndogya Upaniṣad 1.11.5
source: Chāndogya Upaniṣad 7.15.1 (Sanskrit; received prapāṭhaka-khaṇḍa numbering)
definition: Vital breath, presented as that on which the parts of the person rest and out of which beings come forth, in the image of a wheel resting on its hub.
within tradition: Upaniṣadic tradition

A principle's standing as part of the doctrine
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Zugehörigkeit eines Grundsatzes zur Lehre @de
source: Allan Kardec, La Genèse, les miracles et les prédictions selon le spiritisme, chapitre I, articles 51-54
definition: What the control decides. The transmission holds that the teaching had to be collective and not individual, that the spirits divided the work by scattering the subjects of study across many places, and that a centre formed of itself to compare what came in and to distinguish an individual opinion from the general teaching.
within tradition: Spiritism

The retention of the descending nectar
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Zurückhalten des herabfließenden Nektars @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.51-52 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.77 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The stopping of a fluid held to fall from above and to be consumed below, whose loss the manual makes responsible for ageing and death.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

The return is immediate, by thinking of the body
type: Positing
label: Die Rückkehr erfolgt unmittelbar durch Denken an den Körper @de
definition: The claim that the practitioner comes back at once by turning his attention to his body, without the passage the outward journey required.
note: Entered separately from the movement claim because it asserts something the movement claim does not: an asymmetry between going and returning. If the outward journey also happened by willing, there would be nothing to say about the return that was not already said.
posited in: prima-materia#306

The rendering of the two Śākta branches as a right and a left hand ritual
type: Systematizing
label: Die Wiedergabe der beiden Śākta-Zweige als rechtshändiges und linkshändiges Ritual @de
date: 1832
source: H. H. Wilson, Sketch of the Religious Sects of the Hindus, Asiatic Researches XVII (Calcutta 1832), the sections headed Dakshinas, or Bhaktas and Vamis, or Vamacharis
definition: The English naming of the dakṣiṇācāra and vāmācāra divisions of the Śākta sect as the followers of a right hand and a left hand ritual, together with the characterisation of the second as impure, as running contrary to what is usual, and as something its adherents will not publicly avow.
note: Held as an ordering act because the naming is regularly credited to Blavatsky, who wrote in 1877 and in 1888. It stands in Wilson forty-five years earlier, in the volume of the Asiatic Researches for 1832, in those terms and with the moral charge already attached. Whoever first coined it, it was not she, and a record that repeats the later attribution reports a reception as an origin. See prima-materia#57.
note: No pm:ordersClaim is given, because the division it orders is not yet in the graph as a claim of its own: that would need a passage in a tantra rather than a passage in Wilson. See prima-materia#53.
note: The same section carries a ranking the naming does not survive. Wilson translates a passage he ascribes to the Kulārṇava that grades the Veda lowest and ascends through the Vaiṣṇava and the Śaiva to the right hand Śākta, then sets the left hand above the right, the Siddhānta above that, and the Kaula above all. In the material being ordered, the left is therefore the higher of the two; the English rendering keeps the pair and reverses the valuation. The verse is not located in an edition of the Kulārṇava here and is not held as a claim of that work. See prima-materia#56.
attested by: Compiler inference
compiled by: Horace Hayman Wilson

Horripilation
type: Conceptualizing
label: Haaraufrichtung @de
source: Bhagavadgītā 1.29
source: Nāṭyaśāstra VII
definition: The raising of the body hair, counted among the eight involuntary signs and treated as a mark of an inner state, not as something to be produced for its own sake.
note: Attested outside the dramaturgical treatise in the epic corpus, where trembling and horripilation are named together as signs of an overwhelming state.
within tradition: Sanskrit dramaturgy

Root-cutting
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wurzelschneiden @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The gathering and preparation of plant material for pharmacological or operative use.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Channels
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kanäle @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The channels of the subtle body through which the winds are held to move; Tsongkhapa's presentation counts one hundred and twenty principal ones.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Ruaḥ
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ruach @de
source: Sefer Yetzirah 1:9-12 (Short Version; numbering of Kaplan 1997)
source: Sefer Yetzirah 6:7 (Short Version; numbering of Kaplan 1997)
definition: Breath or spirit, named as the first of the ten emanations, from which air issues, from air water, and from water fire.
note: The citation was extended from 1:9-10 to 1:9-12 when the passage was reopened: in this numbering the first emanation is breath, the second breath from breath, and only the third and fourth carry water from breath and fire from water. The earlier range stopped two verses short of the sequence the definition states. The numbering is recension-dependent throughout, and the long and Saadia versions divide the same material otherwise.
note: The text also has the patriarch stirring the letters with breath, which is the closest the source comes to breath as an operative medium; it remains an act of formation, not a conduction through the body.
within tradition: Sefer Yetzirah

Descent of power
type: Conceptualizing
label: Herabkunft der Kraft @de
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra XI
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka XIII
source: Mālinīvijayottaratantra
definition: The transfer of power from one who has it to one who does not, graded in the Kashmirian exegesis into nine degrees.
note: The sources give transfer by glance, by touch and by word. The specifically manual modality of the modern draft is not attested here.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Saṃyama yields the divine ear
type: Yielding
label: Saṃyama bringt das göttliche Ohr hervor @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.41
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Saṃyama
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga
yields capacity: Divine ear

Saṃyama on the presented idea yields knowledge of another mind
type: Yielding
label: Saṃyama auf die Vorstellung bringt Kenntnis fremden Bewusstseins hervor @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.19
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Saṃyama
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga
yields capacity: Knowledge of another mind

The second degree yields hearing at a distance
type: Yielding
label: Der zweite Grad bringt das Fernhören hervor @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
note: One node per pairing, following traditions/patanjala-yoga.ttl, because a protocol would have to take the pairings one at a time and because the four capacities of this degree are not equally examinable.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Initiation into the second degree
within tradition: Midewiwin
yields capacity: Hearing what happens at a great distance

The second week
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die zweite Woche @de
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 4
definition: The part given over to the life of Christ up to Palm Sunday, and to the following of it.
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

Shamsiel
type: Naming
label: Schamsiel @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A Watcher named as the one who disclosed the signs of the sun.
note: Charles brackets the clause naming Araqiel and Shamsiel as absent from part of the Ethiopic tradition; the bracketing belongs to the text as printed and is recorded here rather than resolved.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Shamsiêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the lightning flashes
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen der Blitze @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
definition: The reading of import from lightning, given in place of astrology in the Aramaic-Greek witness.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the shooting stars
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen der Sternschnuppen @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
definition: The reading of import from meteors, given in place of the knowledge of the clouds in the Aramaic-Greek witness.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the earth
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen der Erde @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The reading of import from terrestrial phenomena.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the moon
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen des Mondes @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
definition: The reading of import from the moon, given in place of its course in the Aramaic-Greek witness.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the stars
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen der Sterne @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
definition: The reading of import from the stars, given in place of the constellations in the Aramaic-Greek witness.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Signs of the sun
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zeichen der Sonne @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The reading of import from the sun.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Virtue
type: Conceptualizing
label: Sittlichkeit @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.1-I.8 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The first of the three trainings, on which the handbook is built as a commentary on the verse about the tangle.
within tradition: Theravāda

Spell-casting
type: Conceptualizing
label: Beschwörung @de
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The binding of persons or events by spoken formula.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Spirit calling is said to recover what has been lost
type: Yielding
label: Das Geisterrufen soll Verlorenes wiederbringen @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 28
definition: The claim, made by the narrator about her second husband, that when a knife was lost he would hold a spirit calling and in that way recover it.
note: The most examinable claim in the portion read, and the reason it is entered separately from the capacity it names. It states a repeatable occasion, a named class of object, and an outcome that either occurred or did not; it is not a claim about a state of the practitioner. What it does not state is any case in which the calling was held and the knife stayed lost.
attested by: Third-party ascription
by practice: Spirit calling
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission
yields capacity: The recovery of lost things

Striking of spirits and of the womb
type: Conceptualizing
label: Schlagen der Geister und der Leibesfrucht @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:12 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The disclosure of harmful operations: the striking of spirits and demons, the killing of the embryo in the womb, the serpent's bite and the stroke of the noonday heat.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The rule of the sun's course
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Regel des Sonnenlaufs @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, p. 57
source: Knud Leem, An Account of the Laplanders of Finmark, in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), chap. XXI, pp. 474 and 477
definition: The single rule by which the drum is read. If the ring travels round towards the right hand, with the course of the sun, health, fortune and increase of men and beasts are promised. If it goes the contrary way, towards the left, sickness and all the evils of ill success are expected. The later recorder gives the same rule in weaker terms on the negative side: with the sun it augured a favourable event, against the sun a doubt then arose of a prosperous one.
note: One further reading is given by the later recorder alone, from a named practitioner: that if the copper bird laid on the skin falls from the drum to the earth, it is a sign that the person enquired of will soon die. That is a third outcome beside the two directions, and it is entered here because a binary instrument with a third outcome is not binary.
note: The difference between them is not nothing. The earlier makes the contrary turn a prediction of evil; the later makes it only a doubt. Whether that is a change in the practice, a difference between regions, or the difference between a compiler stating a rule and a missionary reporting what a man told him is not decidable from the two passages.
note: Two recorders, ninety years apart, one compiling from priests' reports in Uppsala and one living among the people, give the same reading rule tied to the same physical direction. It is the best-attested single claim in this file.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Tapu
type: Conceptualizing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), pp. 25-26
definition: The state of being sacred and thereby prohibited, held to be communicated from an atua or a sacred person to whatever they touch, and from that object onward to whatever it touches in turn.
note: The re-transmission by contact is the part later theory generalised. A record that carries only the prohibition and not the transmissibility loses exactly what the nineteenth-century comparativists picked up and turned into an impersonal magical fluid. See prima-materia#103 and prima-materia#104 for the originations that are not yet entered.
within tradition: Māori transmission

Turning back
type: Conceptualizing
label: Umkehr @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on the stations
definition: Repentance, placed first among the stations in the handbook enumeration.
within tradition: Sufism

The examination of thoughts
type: Testing
label: Die Prüfung der Gedanken @de
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 334
source: Ignatius of Loyola, Spiritual Exercises 336
source: John Cassian, Collationes I.20-22
definition: A four-part examination of an inner movement, set out in the image of the money-changer who tests a coin: for the metal, for the stamp, for the lawfulness of its provenance, and for its weight.
note: Ignatius adds the rule that the whole course of a train of thought is to be examined, since a bad end reveals the origin, and that a consolation arriving after the fact is to be examined well before it is believed.
attested by: Textual attestation
examination state: Procedure without cases
examined by: John Cassian, transmitting Abba Moses; supplemented by Ignatius of Loyola
falsified by: A movement fails the test if its metal is false, its stamp is not that of right teaching, its provenance is unlawful, or it weighs light of the fear of God and heavy of human vanity; and it fails if the end of the train of thought is bad, however good its beginning.
protocol updated: 2026-08-28
tests: Discernment of origins
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

The man whose name is called dies within ten days
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Gerufene stirbt binnen zehn Tagen @de
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 93
definition: It is forbidden, at the felling, for anyone to call another by his name, for the man so called will die and his spirit will pass into the tree and preside over the figure. The corpus states the term and the record together: the named one then dies, certainly within ten days, and they say that the named one never fails to die. It states in the same place that they repudiate all idea of his being poisoned or of his death being hurried on in any material way by the practitioner, who they say may be miles away.
note: The claim of a perfect record is the transmission's own and is entered as such. Whether any case of a named man surviving was ever recorded is not answered by this work; the same work states that the caller who names a man carelessly answers with his life to the dead man's relations, which is a reason why the naming is not done carelessly and also a reason why a failure would be inconvenient to report.
note: The most examinable claim in the file, and the reason it is examinable is that the transmission itself supplies the three parts: an outcome, a term of ten days, and an explicit denial of the obvious naturalistic explanation. Nothing else read in this run puts a number of days on anything.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The Sun hides his face while an unworthy person is in the camp
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Sonne verbirgt ihr Gesicht, solange ein Unwürdiger im Lager ist @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 100 and p. 105
definition: It is proclaimed at the dawn of each holy day that one who knows himself unworthy to appear before the face of the Sun must not enter the ceremonial camp circle, because if such a one appears the Sun will hide his face with a veil of clouds until the offender withdraws or until the Winged God sweeps or washes away the offence. If the face is hidden at sunrise the marshals seek the cause of offence and expel it, and the people wait until the Sun shows his face. If on any day he does not show it, that day is not counted as a holy day, and enough days are counted to make four.
note: A sign read off the weather, with a stated cause, a stated remedy and a stated procedure for the case where the sign appears. It is the closest thing in this file to a falsifying condition applied in public, and it is also the clearest case in this file of a condition that cannot fail: an overcast morning is assigned to an offender, and if no offender is found the day is struck from the count instead. Both halves are in the corpus and both are entered.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Knowledge of God
type: Conceptualizing
label: Theologikē @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1
definition: The third of the three parts, the knowledge of God.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Learning the Law without toil
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Erlernen des Gesetzes ohne Mühe @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 30, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
definition: The capacity claimed. The transmission puts it as a contrast and not as a degree: the voice of the academies sounds, and not with toil and not with weariness do they learn, but with the name of this seal. What is promised beside it is public standing of a specific kind - to seat academies, to expound what is prohibited and what is permitted, to declare the impure impure and the pure pure, to determine the months and the intercalation of years, to appoint judges and to anoint patriarchs.
note: Set against it in the same passage is what the ordinary student must do without it, and the transmission puts that in the students' own prayer: may that which we have read remain in our possession, may that which we have studied remain in our possession. The claim is therefore not that learning is easier but that a different faculty is being offered in place of memory.
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

The condition of the candidate
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Zustand des Anwärters @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 128, pp. 346-350
definition: A child whose dreams differ from ordinary ones, who is subject to strong emotions and changes of mood and whose behaviour is unlike that of other children is taken for a candidate, especially where there were shamans in the direct ancestral line. Such a child is told of the possibility and gradually prepared. Between sixteen and twenty the first entering of the spirit occurs. Before it the youth refuses food, wanders about without purpose, sleeps too long or cannot sleep; after two weeks or more he jumps up on the bed during the night and begins to sing as the shamans do. If a real state follows, he is considered a future shaman.
note: The stated boundaries of the age are two and they differ in kind. That nobody becomes a shaman before fifteen is reported as an absence in the record the author gathered; that candidates are exceptionally rare after full maturity is reported with a reason attached, namely that whoever must look after a family has no leisure for it.
note: The transmission announces the signs to the candidate in advance and then reads them off him. The recorder says of one case that the woman acted according to the candidates' model — she trembled, ran away, climbed a tree, refused food, forgot everything — and of another candidate that the entering of the spirit was seemingly a ritualistic performance. These are signs of success in the strict sense of SPEC §15, told beforehand and reported afterwards, and they are held apart from the conditions of failure in this file for that reason.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Knowing what those present are thinking or doing
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wissen um Gedanken und Taten der Anwesenden @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVII, sect. 121, pp. 331-332
definition: A capacity claimed in the performance and not outside it: the shamans, though not all of them, may say what the persons present are thinking or doing, and in almost all performances they divine in some form.
note: Both explanations are the recorder's and neither was tested. The claim is entered because it is the one capacity in this file that could be examined against a base rate, and the passage is the address at which such an examination would start.
note: The recorder gives two cases and a counter-explanation for each. In the first a shaman accused a young man of having eaten the kidney of a sacrificial animal and ordered it given back, and the man vomited into the drum; the recorder believes the shaman could not have seen the act and offers instead that he could infer which of the young men present was likely to have done it. In the second a shaman took a coin from a sceptic and the coin was afterwards found in the sceptic's own hand; the recorder proposes that it was handed back unnoticed. He states in the same passage that in a great number of cases he did not find the shamans conscious of tricking their audience.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The shaman must have a list of spirits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Schamane braucht eine Liste von Geistern @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 B, pp. 271-272
definition: The number of mastered spirits is the measure of the shaman's power. A beginner has at least one, usually a complex one, with whose help he masters others; among the Tungus of Manchuria beginners are stated to have five or six, and by the end of a good career all spirits are mastered directly or through other spirits. The number is expected to increase with the years practised.
note: The claim is quantified and the quantity is watched by other people, which is unusual in this graph. It also has a stated downward direction: a shaman who fails to master enough spirits is called a small shaman, not a real one, and when the practice is given up for lack of new spirits the person is said to be no more a shaman.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The animals named by their marks
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die an ihren Zeichen benannten Tiere @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVIII, sect. 130 I, p. 351
definition: Among the Reindeer Tungus of Transbaikalia the decisive moment of the trial: the candidate, in the state, names particular marks of the animals which the spirits will send for the making of his costume — a white spot on a leg, white hoofs, a white head, a mutilated ear. A clansman then hunts for animals so marked. The search may take several months. If the animals named cannot be found, the spirit may be asked to send another animal instead.
note: A prediction with a stated content, made before witnesses, checkable by anyone who brings back the animal. It is the most examinable claim in this file, and it comes with its own escape clause in the same sentence.
note: The recorder closes the passage with four words that are the whole finding: the needed animals are always found. He gives no count and reports no failure.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The paraphernalia are indispensable and variable
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Gerät ist unerlässlich und wandelbar @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 D, pp. 272-273
definition: It is held that without paraphernalia shamanizing is impossible, so that a person who has none cannot function as a shaman. The composition varies greatly: from a brass mirror and a drum up to several complete costumes with headdress, coat, trousers, apron, shoes and many placings for spirits. Equipment made for a single occasion is admitted, so the lack of permanent paraphernalia does not by itself mean the complex is absent.
note: The variability is stated together with a floor: reduction of the paraphernalia to zero is held responsible for the disintegration of shamanism, and the recorder names cases where local authorities forbade shamanizing and destroyed the equipment. Where the equipment is limited the power is said to be reduced in a specific way — among the Nercinsk and Barguzin Tungus a shaman cannot go into the lower world without a complete harness.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Relief of those afflicted by spirits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Befreiung der von Geistern Befallenen @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXX, sect. 140, p. 381
definition: The capacity for which the office exists: to cure people affected by the spirits, to relieve sick people also where the disease is not of that order, and by his presence to give assurance to the people that they will not suffer.
note: The recorder adds his own explanation, that this is the result of an empiric experimentation of the Tungus on themselves reached through a long adaptation, and that the shaman functions as a safety valve of the clan. That reading is his. What is reported is the claim that the office relieves and the fact that people seek it.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

The drum as the instrument of self-excitation
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Trommel als Werkzeug der Selbsterregung @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 D, p. 272
definition: The second member of the observed minimum. Its stated function is not signalling and not accompaniment but the shaman's own self-excitation, without which he cannot bring himself into the state the performance requires.
note: Stated as a function and not as a symbol, which is what makes it usable. The same passage names the toli as a placing for spirits and the drum as the means of self-excitation, so the two indispensable objects have two different offices and are not interchangeable.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Toli, the brass mirror
type: Conceptualizing
label: Toli, der Bronzespiegel @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 D, p. 272, and chap. XXIII, sect. 99, p. 278
definition: A Chinese brass mirror with pendants, used as a placing for spirits and the one object that cannot be dispensed with. Where there is no costume the shaman can perform with the mirror alone; where there is no mirror or a substitute for it, no performance is possible. The word is the same across all Tungus dialects and Manchu and stands beside the Mongol, Buriat and Dahur forms.
note: In the same passage he lists what stands beside it: a headdress with five images of Buddha among the Tungus of Manchuria, sometimes replaced by ornaments of Chinese style; the swastika and the Christian cross used by all shamans; the boa constrictor symbolised in the costume although unknown in the region; and Manchu shamans with weapons familiar to Buddhism and pictures reproducing the costume of Buddhist priests.
note: The mirror carries the contact route on its face. The recorder states that it is widely used in Lamaism as one of the indispensable components of the altar, and that mirrors are either found in the earth, or received from predecessor shamans, or bought from the Mongols, who receive them from China and Tibet. The animals on the back are interpreted by each group according to its own imagination.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Knowledge of what lies beyond sight, through the stones
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wissen um das, was jenseits des Blicks liegt, durch die Steine @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 205 and p. 210
definition: The power said to follow the fulfilled dream of a sacred stone, given by the recorder in three parts: an ability to cure sickness, to predict future events, and to tell the location of objects beyond the range of the possessor's natural vision.
note: The first case has a sceptic, a stake and a witness, which is as close to a set procedure as anything in this file; the second has a locatable object and a named place. Neither is evidence in the sense of SPEC §14 — no procedure was devised and no outcome was recorded that could have gone otherwise for a third party — and both are entered as what they are, first-person reports taken down at the time.
note: The third part is the one that matters to this graph, because it names a fact of the world that somebody else can check. Two cases are printed with it, both told in the first person by the man who performed them. In one, a fur trader who had said that all the medicine men did was sleight of hand offered ten articles if a buffalo were called to the spot where they stood; the stones were sent, the trader watched through field glasses, and a buffalo came near enough to be shot from where they stood. In the other, a white man dropped a rifle from a ferry into the river near the present site of Pierre in South Dakota and made no effort to recover it; the teller took the stones out on the water, dove where they told him to, found the rifle on the bed of the river, and afterwards returned it to its owner.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Sending the stones yields knowledge of what is out of range
type: Yielding
label: Das Aussenden der Steine bringt Wissen um Unerreichbares hervor @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 210
note: Entered at first-person report and not at field attestation, because the two cases that carry it were told by the man who says he did them, in his own words, to the recorder. What the recorder supplies is the setting; the claim is his informant's.
note: This is the outside-sphere witness this graph has been short of. The generalization at pmc:DistantPerceptionFromAVoluntaryState rested on four transmissions, of which one was North American; this adds a second, from a different language family and a different region, with a stated instrument and two reported cases. The independence is not thereby established: the recording is of nineteen eleven to nineteen fourteen and the objection raised about the Midewiwin material applies here too. What it is not subject to is the mission route that governs the doctrinal nodes of this file, since the recorder notes of one of these informants that the missionaries had made no impression on him.
attested by: First-person report
by practice: Sending the sacred stones
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission
yields capacity: Knowledge of what lies beyond sight, through the stones

The answer the lot gave about the men of wood
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Antwort des Loses über die Holzmenschen @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part I, chapter 2
definition: The outcome of that casting, given as a plain prediction: the figures of wood will come out well, they will speak and talk on earth. The prediction is about a future state of affairs and not about a duty, so it is the kind of answer that an outcome can meet or miss.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Sending without a chosen signature carries the sender's actual state
type: Positing
label: Senden ohne gewählte Signatur überträgt den eigenen Ist-Zustand @de
definition: The claim that where no state is deliberately chosen for transmission, the one the sender is in transmits instead.
note: A claim about a failure mode rather than about a capacity, and that is what makes it the most tractable of the three. It says what happens when the practice is done wrong, and a claim about going wrong names an outcome that can be looked for.
posited in: prima-materia#316

Uncreated light
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ungeschaffenes Licht @de
source: Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts (trans. Gendle 1983)
definition: A light held to be uncreated, and held to shine through the whole person, body as well as soul; the defence is explicitly that the body participates and is not merely the site of an event in the soul.
note: This is a claim about what shines through the practitioner, not about an emanation the practitioner produces or directs.
within tradition: Hesychasm

Vespasian
type: Conceptualizing
source: Tacitus, Historiae IV.81
definition: The Roman emperor to whom the Alexandrian healings are ascribed by two independent historians.
within tradition: Graeco-Roman testimony

The four-times-four scheme of the gods as an ordering act
type: Systematizing
label: Das Vier-mal-vier-Schema der Götter als Ordnungsakt @de
date: 1917
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 56 and pp. 79-81 and pp. 154-155
definition: The arrangement of the Lakota gods into four classes of four, the superior, the associate, the subordinate and the god-like, gathered again into four groups of four called the Chief God, the Great Spirit, the Creator and the Executive, and those four taken as one. The compiler states that the shamans recognized a scheme and a system but had never formulated them into a single whole, that no one shaman was found who could give them in a comprehensive or sequential manner, that the scheme was formulated with their aid, and that it was afterwards approved by every informant to whom it was submitted.
note: Entered because the corpus says so itself, in the introduction, and because a reader who takes the scheme for a transmitted doctrine will read every node that mentions a god wrongly. Approval after the fact is not authorship: the informants were asked whether an arrangement was right, which is a different act from producing it.
note: The interview with Finger, printed in the same paper and taken a few days before the compiler left the reservation, does not reproduce the scheme. Asked how many there are he names eight, then says there is but one, then says there are four and that the other four are the same as those four. The compiler notes of that interview that there was no opportunity for verifying the information.
compiled by: J. R. Walker, agency physician at Pine Ridge, with the Oglala shamans who approved the scheme after it was formulated

The weapons of death
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Waffen des Todes @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:6 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: Shield, breastplate and the sword for slaughter, disclosed as instruments of killing rather than as craft.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The return of the traveller on the seventh day
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Rückkehr des Reisenden am siebten Tag @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), 3.2-3 and 3.15-26
definition: The outcome the undertaking names. On the seventh day the traveller rises, and the transmission compares it to rising from a pleasant sleep. He asks first for food and drink, and after that for a writer who is wise and learned.
note: The order of the two requests is worth keeping: the body first, the record second. The writing down is fixed at the moment of return and not at the end of the vision, which makes the report a part of the procedure rather than a later literary act.
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

Words spoken at birth are said to make the return after death possible
type: Yielding
label: Die bei der Geburt gesprochenen Worte sollen das Wiederaufleben ermöglichen @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 28
definition: The claim that those at whose birth such words were uttered can, if they die, come to life again and return among people.
note: The interval between the act and its effect is a whole life, which puts the claim beyond any protocol that could be run on it and is worth recording as a property of the claim rather than as a defect of the record.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The words spoken at a birth
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission
yields capacity: Coming to life again after death

The traversal of the path of worlds
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Durchquerung des Weltenpfads @de
source: Vijñānabhairava 56 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
source: Vijñānabhairava 57 (Sanskrit; verse numbering of Dyczkowski and the current editions)
definition: The whole is contemplated in the form of the path of worlds and the other paths, in sequence, in its coarse, subtle and supreme condition, until the mind dissolves; and the same method carried to the limits of the universe is said to bring the great awakening.
note: This is the old form of the claim that attention placed in a centre opens an assigned layer. The layers here are worlds, bhuvana, and they belong to a cosmology written into the body, not to a list of psychological qualities. The distance between the two is the whole point of the mapping node above. See prima-materia#39.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Writing with ink
type: Conceptualizing
label: Schreiben mit Tinte @de
source: 1 Enoch 69:9 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: The art of fixing speech in ink on paper, treated in the text as a transgression rather than a gift.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Coming out of the houses of Xibalba alive
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das lebende Verlassen der Häuser von Xibalbá @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part II, chapter 9
definition: The outcome the ordeals decide. The transmission treats it as the thing at stake in each house and reports both outcomes for named persons rather than only the successful one.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Depth as the first stage
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Tiefe als erste Stufe @de
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
definition: The opening stage of the inscription: the breath is taken deeply, whereupon it gathers.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Ziqel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Aramaic/Greek reconstruction; Nickelsburg 2001)
definition: A Watcher named in the Aramaic-Greek teaching list as the one who disclosed the signs of the shooting stars. The position he occupies is held by Ezeqeel in the Ethiopic; no identification of the two is asserted here.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Ziqel
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The efficacy of the Zuni prayer
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Wirksamkeit des Zuni-Gebets @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 615
definition: The effect the fixed prayer is held to obtain when it is delivered as required.
within tradition: Zuni ritual transmission

Symbolizing
type: Class
label: Symbolisieren @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of one form standing for another within awareness.

Conjugal telos
type: Telic Orientation
label: Bräutliches Ziel @de
definition: The path claims that the bounded self is neither dissolved nor kept apart but carried into a union of two that preserves both parties to it, so that what is transformed persists as one side of a relation rather than as an absolute or as nothing.
note: Distinct from pm:separativeTelos for the same reason from the other side: what persists here is not its own absolute but a party to a bond, and it is transformed on the way rather than fortified.
note: Distinct from pm:unitiveTelos, and the distinction is not verbal. A dissolution has one term at the end; a marriage has two. A record that files a bridal end state as unitive reports the disappearance of something the source keeps.

Dreaming within
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Im Traum @de
definition: Awareness of objects generated inwardly, with the sensory channel detached. Whether the dreamer knows he dreams is a separate question and not this axis.
note: The Māṇḍūkya calls this svapna. Lucidity is deliberately not a value here: it varies within the state rather than replacing it, and a source that trains recognition inside the dream is placed here and says so in its own words.

Duration not stated
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Duration
label: Dauer nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it.

Individuating telos
type: Telic Orientation
label: Individuierendes Ziel @de
definition: The path claims that the creature's proper movement is to hold itself as itself against a dissolution that would end it, while denying that the movement is towards difference or towards becoming an absolute; what is sought is the creature's own being and not its distinction from others.
note: Between the two older values and reducible to neither. It refuses dissolution, so it is not unitive; and it refuses the striving after difference, so it is not separative. The distinction is fine and load-bearing: a scheme that reads every refusal of dissolution as self-deification cannot state it, and that misreading is common enough to be worth a term.

Protocolled practice
type: Attesting
label: Protokollierte Praxis @de
definition: A practice repeated under a stated procedure that records its failures alongside its successes.

Source modality scale
type: Scale Family
label: Quellenmodalitätsskala @de
definition: A scale that reports how firmly a source sets what it says. Its values are read off the wording of the source: they are neither a judgement about the subject matter nor a judgement about the source's reliability.

Transient
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Duration
label: Vergehend @de
definition: The source has the condition pass of itself, so that it must be entered again rather than merely kept.
note: A capacity said to come and go is a different object of examination from one said to last: it is tested against frequency and occasion, not against a course of training.

Ailolo
type: Practicing
source: Nathaniel B. Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii: The Sacred Songs of the Hula, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 38 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1909), chapter V, pp. 31-35, and the glossary, s.v. ai-lolo
definition: The graduation rite of the hula school, named after the brain of the victim that is eaten in it. The offering is a black suckling without spot or blemish; the parts consumed are the snout, the ear-tips, the tail, the feet and portions of the vital organs, above all the brain. Two foods are shut out of the feast, the cooked taro leaf and the drupe of the pandanus. In the days before it no pupil may leave the house except under the most stringent necessity, then only with the head muffled so as not to be recognised, and may hold no conversation whatever outside.
note: The rite decides admission: the glossary of the same work defines ailolo as a critical ceremonial sacrifice whose conditions must be met before a novice can be admitted as a practitioner. What the passages read do not give is a way of failing it that is stated in advance, which is why no protocol node stands beside this one.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

The oration repeated once, twice or three times
type: Practicing
label: Die ein-, zwei- oder dreimal wiederholte Oration @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), pp. 46-47, ed. Peterson
definition: Pronouncing the oration on any day on which the speaker is not hindered by a criminal sin, with confession of heart and mouth preceding and early in the morning: three times if he desires to be made eloquent, once if an evil thing troubles him or he is involved in some great business, twice for the greater measure.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The pupilage of a candidate for the office of babalawo
type: Practicing
label: Die Lehrzeit des Anwärters auf das Amt des Babalawo @de
source: James Johnson, Yoruba Heathenism, the account of the training of a candidate for the office of Babalawo
definition: A candidate for the office is expected to be the pupil of a babalawo known for wide knowledge of the religion and for skill in divining, for at least three years, and the course is divided into three parts covering those years. In the first the candidate learns the names of all the signs and the marks that stand for them and shows his command of them in practice; in the second he learns the traditions attached to them.
note: What the third year requires was not recovered from the portion of the extract delivered in this run. The gap is a property of the retrieval and not of the work, and it is recorded so that the next reader opens the appendix at that place rather than repeating the whole.
attested by: Mediated attestation
read via: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), appendix, extract from Yoruba Heathenism
within tradition: Ifá

The Barashnum of the nine nights
type: Practicing
label: Das Barašnūm der neun Nächte @de
source: Vendidad, fargard 9.7-14, 9.31-38, trans. James Darmesteter, Sacred Books of the East 4, 2nd ed. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1895)
alternative label: Barasnum i no shab
alternative label: barasnum
alternative label: baresnum
definition: The great purification, stated throughout in numbers. Six holes are dug for the bull's urine and three more for the water, a pace apart; twelve furrows are drawn around them; the liquid is poured with a spoon of iron or of lead, so that the purifier does not touch. At the first water hole there is one washing, at the second two, at the third three. The whole runs nine nights, in three periods of three, with a washing of body and clothes after each. The fee is graded by station: for a priest a blessing of the just, for a lord of a province a camel of high value, for a master of a house a cow of three years.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

Bau kia nkasa, the ordeal by the bark
type: Practicing
label: Bau kia nkasa, das Rindenordal @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 262-264
source: R. E. Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind (London: Macmillan, 1906), p. 25 and p. 83
source: W. Holman Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo (London: Religious Tract Society, 1900), vol. I, pp. 276-277
definition: The pounded bark of the nkasa tree, given to a person accused of witchcraft. The corpus gives the setting and the dose: the accused is taken to the bare top of a hill, a hut of palm fronds is built with a lath across it, and a stone is pushed towards him bearing twenty-seven small heaps of the ordeal, each ground to powder and fed to him in turn, during which he must hold his hands spread out and touch nothing. A curse is then laid on him, that if he is a witch he will die by the ordeal. A second witness has the accused drink cup after cup of the bark paste mixed with water, in the market place and on market day, standing on a stone or a marked spot he may not leave.
note: The Vili witness at Loango has the same substance in the same office, administered at the ruler's court by a practitioner of the ordeal, and adds what happens to the condemned there: the body is burnt and the ashes scattered, and no burial is granted.
note: The corpus states that it is not the medicinal property of the bark that acts but the spirit in the tree, which reveals the witchcraft or does not. That is the claim the procedure rests on, and it is what makes the case a candidate for the class of answers fixed to an outcome the operator does not control: the operator is expressly said not to be the one who decides.
note: The same second witness reports that the mixture is supposed to be the bark only, and that a practitioner who considers it desirable to kill mixes one or two other poisons with it, which the recorder says he was told by a man who had himself been of the trade. The two statements stand in the file together on purpose: the transmission asserts an outcome nobody steers, and a witness from inside states how it was steered.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo, in this passage largely unnamed, and in the second work by a man who had himself administered the ordeal; recorded by the Baptist missionaries John H. Weeks and W. Holman Bentley during their residence at San Salvador, Wathen and in the Ngombe Lutete district from 1879 onwards; given in Kikongo, of which Bentley compiled the dictionary of 1887, and printed in English with the Kikongo terms.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The corroborative second test at the poison oracle
type: Practicing
label: Der bestätigende zweite Test am Giftorakel @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 138-140
definition: A second question, put with a second fowl, in which the oracle is told what its first answer was and asked to confirm it by the opposite outcome. The first test is called bambata sima and the second gingo. If the first fowl died the second must survive, and if the first survived the second must die.
note: The two tests may be made at one seance where the poison suffices, and are often separated by weeks or months. The transmission names six situations in which a single test is accepted instead, among them the case where the answer came decisively and the case where a lesser oracle had already been asked; but two tests are said to be indispensable in any question concerning the relations between two persons, and especially where a legal issue is involved.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The taboos kept before touching the oracle poison
type: Practicing
label: Die Tabus vor der Berührung des Orakelgifts @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 132-133
definition: Whoever comes into contact with the poison abstains from sexual relations, from the flesh of the elephant, from fish, from two glutinous vegetables named in the source, and from smoking hemp. Sexual abstinence is set at five or six days and abstinence from the forbidden foods at three or four, though the source records that the period is not fixed and that men give different estimates.
note: A man asked to operate who has not kept the sexual taboo says that he has eaten the first of the two vegetables, and everyone understands the euphemism. The source adds that he may use the same words when he simply does not want the work, which makes the phrase a refusal as well as a confession.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Dream divination
type: Practicing
label: Traumdivination @de
source: Synesius of Cyrene, De insomniis
definition: The deliberate use of dreams as a source of knowledge, treated in this literature as available to anyone and requiring no instrument beyond the sleeper.
note: The absence of an instrument and of an office is the point at which this tradition differs from the incubation cult: no temple, no priest, no fee.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Neoplatonic theurgy

The names repeated at the thrust of the spear
type: Practicing
label: Die beim Speerstoß wiederholten Namen @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
definition: Repeating the names of the fifth section of the roll at the moment when a man wishes to thrust a spear into the speaker.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The names worn upon the breast
type: Practicing
label: Die auf der Brust getragenen Namen @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers written for Za-Walda Hawaryat (London: W. Griggs, 1900), section 6, p. LVIII
definition: Wearing the written names upon the breast instead of uttering them firmly with the voice. The roll gives this as the second case of one instruction and not as a separate procedure: it is what is done by the man who will not speak them.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The prayer of Susenyos written down and worn
type: Practicing
label: Das niedergeschriebene und getragene Gebet des Susenyos @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 218
definition: Writing down the seventh prayer and wearing it, by the woman who has children to suckle and bring up, for the removal of disease of every kind from those who suck at their mothers' breasts.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

Blue vitriol in the hollow tooth
type: Practicing
label: Blauer Vitriol im hohlen Zahn @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 46
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 28
definition: Putting a small piece of blue vitriol into the hollow tooth when the pain begins, not too much, and spitting out the water that collects rather than swallowing it.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: European folk magic

The knotting of three twigs against the fits
type: Practicing
label: Das Knüpfen dreier Schüsse gegen die Gichter @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 29
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 18
definition: Going onto another man's land, saying that one goes before another court and knots one's seventy-seven kinds of fits, cutting three shoots there and making a knot in each, on a Friday before sunrise in the waning moon and unbeschrauen, then making the crosses over the body at the place where the fits are felt.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: European folk magic

The three chips in the wheel hub
type: Practicing
label: Die drey Spänlein in der Rad-Nabe @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 83-84
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), pp. 52-53
definition: Cutting three chips at the place the thief went out, going to a wagon unbeschrauen, taking off a wheel, putting the chips into the hub and driving the wheel backwards while the compelling words are spoken.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: European folk magic

The bent juniper bush
type: Practicing
label: Der gebogene Wachholderbusch @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 90
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 57
source: Romanus-Büchlein (Glatz: Franz Pompejus, 1788), Nr. 65, in the edition of Joseph H. Peterson, 2006
definition: Going before sunrise to a juniper bush, bending it towards the rising sun with the left hand while telling it that it will be bent and pressed until the thief has carried the stolen goods back, then laying a stone on the bush and the skull of a malefactor beneath stone and bush.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: European folk magic

Fa, the casting of the sixteen palm nuts
type: Practicing
label: Fa, der Wurf der sechzehn Palmnüsse @de
source: J. A. Skertchly, Dahomey as it is (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), pp. 474-476
definition: Palm nuts are held in one hand and thrown into the other, one or two being dropped on purpose during the throw; if one nut is left a single mark is made and if two are left a double mark. Sixteen principal figures are called mothers and are set down with their marks and a symbol apiece; further figures called children are formed by taking the right side of one mother and the left side of another. The first and the last of the mothers are held to be the most powerful, and their children the most important.
note: The figure names are given by both witnesses in nearly the same forms, from the first, called the mother of all, to the sixteenth, called the father of all. They are the names of the Ifá figures, which is one half of the reason the contact route on this tradition is entered as documented.
note: The second witness, who says he was himself taught the craft, gives the same casting with a differently proportioned board and puts the marks the other way round, adding of his own accord that the contrary may be the case. Two travellers who did not work from one another thus agree on the procedure and disagree on the reading rule, and the file keeps both.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Fon practitioners at Abomey and Whydah, unnamed in this passage; recorded by the naturalist J. A. Skertchly during his detention in Dahomey in 1871, published 1874; given in Fon, of which the work prints the figure names and a few terms, the account itself in English.
within tradition: Fon vodun transmission

The fast before entering a major office
type: Practicing
label: Das Fasten vor dem Antritt eines höheren Amtes @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. III
definition: Whoever is to enter one of the greater offices fasts: a month, in other places six, in others a year, eating neither salt nor chilli, not sleeping with his wife, not washing and not combing. In some places he must not bring his hands to his body, and one who kept it said that in the time of his fast he scratched himself with a little stick.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

Reading the burning of fat and coca
type: Practicing
label: Das Lesen am Verbrennen von Fett und Coca @de
source: Cristóbal de Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas, ed. Paloma Jiménez del Campo, transcr. Paloma Cuenca Muñoz (Madrid: Iberoamericana / Frankfurt: Vervuert, 2010), fol. 6v, on the virapiricoc
definition: Those who burned llama fat and coca in the fire and saw in the shapes and the marks made at the time of the burning what was to come, and told it to whoever consulted them.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

Control of the mind in fourteen ways
type: Practicing
label: Beherrschung des Geistes in vierzehn Weisen @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.2 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: A numbered course of mastery over the meditation objects, among them the order of the kasiṇa and its reverse, skipping the absorption, skipping the object, and the definition of the object.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Theravāda

Hanblapi, seeking a communication
type: Practicing
label: Hanblapi, das Suchen einer Mitteilung @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 68 and p. 218
definition: The seeker strips and wears only a robe, a breechclout and moccasins, takes a pipe, smoking material and a knife, and goes to the top of a high place where others are not likely to intrude. There he clears a space of every living or growing thing large enough to sit or lie on, and on entering it invokes the Four Winds that they may not bring inclement weather upon him. He may stand, sit or lie, awake or asleep, and may smoke as often as he wishes, but he must not leave the space he has prepared and must neither eat nor drink while the quest lasts.
note: The second account in the same volume, given as the origin of the Buffalo ceremony, prescribes four passages through the vitalizing lodge first and sends the seeker up naked with a robe, a pipe and willow bark, and has him invoke four named gods and then call the spirit of the buffalo. The two accounts differ in the clothing and in the number of purifications and agree on the solitude, the high place, the fasting and the waiting. Both are printed in the same paper and neither is preferred here.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Building the ini ti
type: Practicing
label: Das Errichten der Ini ti @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 66-67
definition: The making of the lodge itself: slender saplings thrust into the ground in a circle whose diameter is a little longer than the height of a tall man, their tops bent and bound to form a dome, the whole covered with robes so as to confine the vapour, and an opening large enough for a man to crawl through made anywhere on the border except toward the north, and closable.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Inipi, the vitalizing lodge
type: Practicing
label: Inipi, die Belebungshütte @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 98
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 66-67 and p. 156
definition: Saplings set in a circle a little wider than a tall man is high, bent and bound into a dome and covered so as to hold the vapour, with an opening anywhere on the border except toward the north. The one who vitalizes strips and crawls in naked with a pipe and tobacco; assistants heat stones outside, pass them and the water in and close the opening; those inside place the stones at the centre and pour water on them at intervals, and what rises is held to be the released spirit-like of the water, which cannot escape upward and must therefore enter the bodies exposed to it. What comes out again on the skin carries the harmful things with it and is wiped or washed away. In the simplest form it lasts as long as two pipefuls take to smoke, and it may be prolonged for a day and a night or longer.
note: The name is given in the corpus both as Inipi and as Ini kaga, and the lodge as ini ti. The second witness calls it the vapor lodge and reports one built by each band beside its camp at the Sun dance for the use of those who took part.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The words spoken at a birth
type: Practicing
label: Die bei der Geburt gesprochenen Worte @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 28
definition: The uttering of efficacious words over a person at birth, said to determine that the person will be able to come to life again after dying.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Khecarī
type: Practicing
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.32-33 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.37 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A seal in which the tongue is turned back and set above the palate while the gaze rests between the brows; the manual describes a months-long preparation of the tongue before the position can be held.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Kimenga, the sacrifice that renews the charged thing
type: Practicing
label: Kimenga, das erneuernde Opfer @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 235-236
definition: A fowl or a goat is killed and its blood poured over the figure or the bundle, or the toe of a fowl or of a frog is cut and the blood allowed to fall on it. The corpus gives the rule as a schedule and a scale: to be kept at full power the sacrifice should be made regularly, at every new moon or on certain market days, and the larger the favour expected the more costly the sacrifice must be, so that a charged thing receiving only the drippings from a frog's toe is not to be expected to confer large favours. The flesh may not be sold but is eaten by the man who offers it and his clan, the offering is made at sunset with the face turned to the sun, and a pig is never offered.
note: Recorded with its scale because the scale is what makes the practice answerable: a transmission that ties the size of the favour to the size of the offering has said something that its own practitioners can find false, and the corpus elsewhere records exactly that complaint in the form of a charged thing that failed.
note: The recorder adds that his informants could not say why the pig is excluded, and he supplies a guess of his own. The guess is his and is not entered.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo at San Salvador and in the Ngombe Lutete district, mostly unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms in the text while the accounts themselves are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

Makutu
type: Practicing
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 31
definition: The art of bringing the resentment of another person's own family atua down upon them, worked upon something that has been part of them or has touched them: a portion of spittle, or what is left of their food.
note: The operation runs through the same transmissibility by contact that tapu runs through, which is why the two belong in one file and not in two.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Māori transmission

The drinking of wine and the mang of Wishtasp
type: Practicing
label: Der Trunk aus Wein und dem Mang des Wischtasp @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), 1.28-43 and 2.18-31
alternative label: bang
alternative label: mang
alternative label: mang i Wishtaspan
definition: A procedure for sending a soul out of a living body and getting a report back. The transmission states it as a sequence with numbers. From the whole assembly seven men without doubt are set apart, from the seven three, from the three one; the lot is cast three times, under the names good thought, good word and good deed, and all three fall to the same man. He prays for the departed, eats, makes his testament, washes head and body, puts on new clothes, perfumes himself, has a clean carpet spread on a prepared couch, consecrates the dron and remembers the souls, and eats again. Then three golden cups of wine and the mang of Wishtasp are given him, one spoken over with each of the three names.
note: The order in which the preparation is given differs slightly between the verses as numbered and the sequence a reader reconstructs; the testament stands close to the prayer, and the second meal after the consecration. What is fixed and not reconstructed is the count: seven, three, one, three lots, three cups.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

The carving of idols in the month Mol
type: Practicing
label: Das Schnitzen der Götterbilder im Monat Mol @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XL, pp. 76-77
definition: The making of new wooden images, begun by the priest, the chacs and the carver together with a fast. During the work they were not to consort with their wives, the witness adds even in thought, and nobody could enter the place where they worked. Blood was drawn from the ears and incense burned.
note: The condition that reaches furthest is the one on thought. A rule about an act can be kept and seen to be kept; a rule about what may pass through the mind of the worker has no observer, and a failure of the work can always be referred back to it. That is the shape of a claim that cannot fail, and it is worth marking where a transmission takes it on.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

The fast before the new year
type: Practicing
label: Das Fasten vor dem Neujahr @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XL, p. 70
definition: A fast kept by the chiefs, the priests and the devout before the festival of the first month. The witness gives a floor and not an average: none for less than thirteen days. Some began three months before, some two, others as they chose. To continence was added the giving up of salt and of chili in the food, which the witness says was counted a grave penitential act.
note: The same section of the same work records a second and separate fast, kept on receiving duties for the festivals and on undertaking duties of state, which it says at times lasted as long as three years. That is a different practice with a different occasion and is not entered here; it stands in prima-materia#462.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Initiation into the first degree
type: Practicing
label: Einweihung in den ersten Grad @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 164
definition: The entry rite of the society: instruction under a paid teacher, often carried over years, gifts to the officiating priests, a feast, and the shooting of the shell into the candidate by the officiating priests.
note: The report says candidates sometimes spend a number of years in preparation and impoverish themselves in the payment of fees and the preparation of the feast. The cost is stated as a fact of the institution and not as a warning.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Midewiwin

Mochar: the act of address
type: Practicing
label: Mochar: der Akt der Anrede @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
definition: The act the whole transmission turns on. The priest sits on the ground, extends the left hand towards the huaca, names it, and makes with the lips the sucking sound that is what the word properly means; he says that he comes and brings what its children and creatures offer it, asks it to receive them and not be angry and to give life and health and good fields, pours chicha before it and sometimes over it, smears it with the blood of guinea pigs or llamas, and burns or blows the rest of the offerings.
note: The recorder states expressly that to have mochado a huaca does not mean to have seen it or knelt before it, because the adoration does not consist in that. It consists in having given the offering to the priest at the appointed place and joined the invocation with the left hand raised and open. That correction is his, and it is the most useful sentence in the chapter: it says that the act is participation and not sight, which is what makes the next node possible.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

The root seal
type: Practicing
label: Das Wurzelsiegel @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā III.61-63 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A seal made by pressing the perineum with the heel and contracting the anus, by which the downward wind is drawn upward.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Nkind' a evata, the setting up of a town charm
type: Practicing
label: Nkind' a evata, das Setzen des Ortszaubers @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 220-221
definition: The inhabitants of a town club together to fee a practitioner of the luck-giving order. A post of a named wood is cut, a hole made in its top and filled with the charm, a hole dug beside the road the women take to the water, a goat killed and its head laid in the hole under the post, the earth rammed round it and the goat's blood poured over the charm. No sacrifice is then made on a schedule; the charm is refreshed with more blood when a misfortune befalls the town.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by Bakongo of the Lower Congo at San Salvador and in the Ngombe Lutete district, mostly unnamed in this passage; recorded by the Baptist missionary John H. Weeks over some thirty years of residence, the book closed in 1913; given in Kikongo, of which the work prints the terms in the text while the accounts themselves are printed in English only.
within tradition: Kongo nkisi transmission

The offering to the Sun and the wound that bleeds
type: Practicing
label: Die Gabe an die Sonne und die blutende Wunde @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 61 and pp. 116-117
definition: What is done before a candidate begins to dance: an offering acceptable to the Sun, of as much value as the candidate can afford, and a wound cut in his person that will cause his blood to flow while he dances. In the first form the wound must not be smaller than that made by cutting away a bit of skin as large as a louse and may be as large as the candidate wills; in the other three the wounds are those through which the sticks are thrust.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Drinking the ololiuhqui in order to question it
type: Practicing
label: Das Trinken des Ololiuhqui, um es zu befragen @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulos II and VI, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: A seed resembling a lentil is drunk; the recorder says the draught takes away the judgement, being very vehement. Those who drink it consult it as an oracle for everything they wish to know. Some hold the drinking of the seed for such consultations as their office, and such a specialist bears his own name.
note: Three things stand in the passage and are kept apart here: that the substance is drunk, that the drinker is questioned as an oracle, and that there is an office for it. Only the third makes this a transmission rather than a usage.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Nahua ritual transmission

Practice of the limbs
type: Practicing
label: Übung der Glieder @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.28
definition: The performance of the eight limbs, taken together as one course of practice.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The preliminaries
type: Practicing
label: Die Vorbereitungen @de
source: Patrul Rinpoche, Kun bzang bla ma'i zhal lung (19th century)
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The general and the tantra-specific preliminaries, placed before the training in either stage.
note: A dating warning belongs here. The preliminaries are set before the training in the fifteenth-century treatise, but the sharpest codification of them as an obligatory course is nineteenth-century, in Patrul Rinpoche's manual. Their presence in the older text does not license reading the later regime back into it.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The ordeal of the Dark House
type: Practicing
label: Die Probe im Finsteren Haus @de
source: Popol Vuh: The Sacred Book of the Ancient Quiché Maya, English version by Delia Goetz and Sylvanus G. Morley from the Spanish translation of Adrián Recinos (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1950), part II, chapter 9
definition: The first of the ordeals of Xibalba. A lighted torch of pine and cigars are handed to those under trial at nightfall; they must be returned at dawn and returned whole, that is, not burned down. The houses named in the chapter beside it are the House of Cold, the House of Jaguars, the House of Bats and the House of Knives.
note: The condition is unusual in this collection because it is arithmetical rather than moral: what is required is that a thing that burns be given back unconsumed after a stated interval. The failure is measurable by anyone holding the object, and the interval is named.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Consulting the rubbing-board oracle
type: Practicing
label: Die Befragung des Reibbrettorakels @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 170-171
source: Georg Schweinfurth, The Heart of Africa, trans. Ellen E. Frewer (London: Sampson Low, Marston, Low and Searle, 1873), vol. II, chapter XIII, the account of the Niam-niam praying-machine and auguries
definition: Two pieces of wood, the upper rubbed across the moistened surface of the lower. Sticking gives one answer and smooth running the other, and a lid that runs from side to side or alternately sticks and runs is taken as a refusal to answer. The instrument is the cheapest and most frequently used of the oracles and the one least trusted.
note: The earliest witness describes the same instrument two generations before the monograph, under the name borru, made from the wood of a tree he names, and reports that it was consulted before any undertaking of importance and hidden from the Muslim traders. The two descriptions of the mechanism agree; the names do not, and the divergence stands on the dispute node at the end of this file.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Conferring the descent of power
type: Practicing
label: Übertragung der Herabkunft der Kraft @de
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrasāra XI
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka XIII
definition: The initiatory act by which the descent of power is conferred.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Having a communication interpreted by a shaman
type: Practicing
label: Das Deuten einer Mitteilung durch einen Schamanen @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 68-69 and p. 135
definition: The consultation in which a shaman renders what a communication means. The doctrine holds that shamans are the vicars of the gods, that communications from them are usually in mystic form, and that the shaman's interpretation is authoritative.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Singing the songs that belong to a potency
type: Practicing
label: Das Singen der Lieder, die zu einer Potenz gehören @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), p. 211
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 88 and pp. 158-159
definition: The songs attached to a particular imparted potency, learned with it and sung when a request is made of it. The corpus states that a shaman preparing a fetish devises a formula which must be repeated to invoke its powers, that a medicine man knows the songs of his medicines and that those songs are his potency, and that a stone transferred from one man to another was transferred together with the song that was to be sung whenever a request was made of it.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Śītalī
type: Practicing
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.57-58 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: A retention in which the breath is drawn in over the tongue, protruded past the lips, and released through the nostrils.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Tummo
type: Practicing
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The generation of inner heat, presented in three components: the channels, the syllables, and the heat meditation itself.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Sending the sacred stones
type: Practicing
label: Das Aussenden der heiligen Steine @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), pp. 205-207
definition: A medicine man who has dreamed of the stones sends them long distances to obtain information. After a time they return and give it to him; he alone can understand what they say and repeats their message to the man who asked the question. During a treatment of the sick in a darkened lodge the stones are said to fly through the air and sometimes to strike those who have refused to believe in them.
note: The men who furnished this were named and were distinguished by the recorder according to their relation to the stones: those who had dreamed of them and used them, those who owned one and believed themselves helped by it, one who owned one and could not command it, one who had sung at another man's demonstrations, and those who had only witnessed them. That classification is the recorder's and is unusually careful for the material, which is why it is repeated here.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Teton men who had themselves danced or doctored, among them Red Weasel, Chased-by-Bears, Brave Buffalo, Goose, Charging Thunder and Two Shields; recorded by Frances Densmore for the Bureau of American Ethnology at Standing Rock, 1911 to 1914, with Robert P. Higheagle interpreting; given in Lakota, and the bulletin carries the Lakota of the song texts but prints the spoken accounts in English only.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

The seven days' watch over the body
type: Practicing
label: Die siebentägige Wache über dem Körper @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), 2.18 and 2.31-33
definition: What is done while the traveller is gone. The dasturs give the seven sisters an undertaking in a number: they will deliver him back safe and sound in seven days. The body remains on the carpet; the dasturs, the priests and the seven sisters keep watch around it for seven days and nights, with fire and fumigation, reciting the Avesta and the Zand, going through the Nasks and chanting the Gathas, and they keep watch in the dark.
note: This is the part of the procedure that an outside observer could check, and it is stated in a form that could fail: a named man, a named place, a stated number of days, and a promise made to named women that he will be given back alive.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Zoroastrian transmission

Circulating the qi
type: Practicing
label: Zirkulation des Qi @de
source: H.D. Roth, Original Tao (1999)
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in J. Needham, Science and Civilisation in China II (1956), p. 143
definition: A breath practice inscribed in forty-five characters on a twelve-sided jade block, setting out the deliberate movement of qi through the body.
note: The two axes of disagreement belong to the claim and are recorded with it. Dating: Harper places the inscription in the late fourth or early third century BCE, Needham in the middle of the sixth. Reading: Harper takes the opening two characters as the title and begins the text at the second line, where Roth counts and construes differently. A citation that names only the inscription conceals both.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Daoist tradition

The interrogation in the language of Zuyua
type: Practicing
label: Das Verhör in der Sprache von Zuyua @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 89-98; the same chapter is pp. 42-50 in the first edition, Carnegie Institution of Washington Publication 438, 1933
definition: An examination held at the close of one katun and the opening of the next, in which the first head-chief demands of each town chief a series of objects named figuratively, and the candidate must produce the thing actually meant. The demands are answered by everyday things: the sun is a large fried egg, the brains of the sky are copal gum, the house six spans long is a very large hat, the things that stop the bottom of the cenote are white and yellow jicamas.
note: The source names the moment exactly and not vaguely: the katun that ends is 3 Ahau and the one that begins is 1 Ahau, so the procedure carries a date rather than an occasion.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Advaita Vedānta
type: Tradition
source: Śaṅkara, Brahmasūtrabhāṣya, introduction (trans. G. Thibaut, Sacred Books of the East 34, Oxford 1890)
definition: The non-dual commentarial tradition on the Vedānta corpus, represented here by the commentary on the Brahmasūtra.
note: Kept separate from the Upaniṣadic file although it comments on that corpus. A commentary is a later act of reading and states things its base text does not: what is held here is the commentator's argument, and a record that filed it under the older heading would date a ninth-century position to the age of the verses it expounds.
note: The three decisions preceding this file. Route of contact: none is documented towards the Greek or Chinese material; a correspondence with either would count as a finding, and none is asserted yet. Edition: the Thibaut translation of 1890 in the Sacred Books of the East, named on the node. Number of citable passages: one, read in the introductory section on superimposition.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Madhyamaka
type: Tradition
source: Nāgārjuna, Mūlamadhyamakakārikā (trans. Th. Stcherbatsky, The Conception of Buddhist Nirvāṇa, Leningrad 1927)
definition: The middle-way school of Buddhist philosophy founded on the verses of Nāgārjuna and its commentarial literature.
note: The three decisions preceding this file. Route of contact: to the Śaiva and Śākta material a route exists and is not in dispute, so a correspondence with it would be reception and not a finding; towards the Greek or the Western esoteric material none is documented. Edition: the verses are read in Stcherbatsky's translation of 1927, named on the node, which carries the commentary of Candrakīrti alongside them; the Sanskrit has not been consulted. Number of citable passages: one.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Sefer Yetzirah
type: Tradition
label: Sefer Jetzira @de
source: Sefer Yetzirah 1:9-12 (Short Version; numbering of Kaplan 1997)
definition: The transmission of the Book of Formation and its commentaries, in which the world is formed through letters, number and breath.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Stoic physics
type: Tradition
label: Stoische Physik @de
source: Chrysippus, in Galen, De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis V.3.8
definition: The Stoic doctrine of a fiery breath that pervades matter and holds it together.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The edition of Galen the fragment was read in is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed. The section numbering of De placitis Hippocratis et Platonis differs between the older editions and the critical one, so V.3.8 locates the passage only in the latter.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Valentinian gnosis
type: Tradition
label: Valentinianische Gnosis @de
source: Irenaeus, Adversus Haereses I (trans. J. Keble, Oxford 1872)
definition: The transmission of the Valentinian school of the second century, known in this file through the account of an opponent and not yet through its own writings.
note: A caution governs everything read out of this file at present. What is held here comes from a refutation: the heresiologist reports the doctrine in order to defeat it, selects what serves that end, and is under no obligation to state it as its holders would. Every node therefore carries pm:thirdPartyAscription and not textual attestation, and none of them may be read as a Valentinian self-statement until the same claim is found in a text of the school itself.
note: The three decisions that precede a tradition file, stated rather than left implicit. Route of contact: none is documented towards the Indian or Chinese material, so a correspondence with either would count as a finding rather than as reception — but no such correspondence is asserted here yet. Edition: the account is read in the Keble translation of 1872, named on each node; the Nag Hammadi witnesses are not yet read and their translation is not yet chosen. Number of citable passages: one. That is thin, and deliberately so, on the model of traditions/daoist.ttl — a file grows in passages, and a heading without passages under it would be a claim about the corpus that the corpus does not carry.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Love
type: Conceptualizing
label: Liebe @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 81
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 84
definition: Called the offspring of apatheia and the keeper of the door to the contemplation of created things.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Apatheia
type: Conceptualizing
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 81
definition: Freedom from the disturbance of the passions, called the flower of ascetic labour.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

The oration of the physical art yields the knowledge of death or life
type: Yielding
label: Die Oration der Heilkunst bringt die Kenntnis von Tod oder Leben hervor @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), §§ 26-30a, pp. 24-25, ed. Peterson
note: This is the shortest way in the witness from an act to an outcome a third party can check. The outcome is binary, it arrives in days, it is recorded anyway, and the judgement can be written down before it arrives. The claim the tradition is known for, the sciences within a month, needs a measuring instrument that has first to be chosen; this one needs none.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: The oration of the physical art said before the sick
within tradition: Ars Notoria
yields capacity: Perfect knowledge whether a disease tends to death or life

Posture
type: Conceptualizing
label: Sitzhaltung @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā I (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The seat, treated in the first chapter as the first limb of the practice.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Azazel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:1 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
alternative label: Asael
definition: A leader among the Watchers, named in the Book of the Watchers as the one who disclosed metallurgy, weaponry and adornment.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Azâzêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Baraqel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
alternative label: Baraqijal
definition: A Watcher whose teaching concerns celestial signs; the two recensions differ on which.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Barâqîjâl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

One fowl must die and the other live
type: Conceptualizing
label: Ein Huhn muss sterben und das andere leben @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 138-139, the four cases lettered A to D
definition: The rule by which an oracular verdict stands or falls: across the two tests one fowl must die and the other must live. If both die or both live the verdict is contradictory and therefore void, and the matter must be put to the oracle again on another occasion.
note: This is a falsifying condition stated by the transmission itself, applied by its own practitioners, and printed with four worked cases. It is the reason this tradition was opened before others in the registry. What the transmission does with the condition when it is met is a separate matter and stands on its own node below.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The poison oracle yields the naming of the witch
type: Yielding
label: Das Giftorakel bringt die Benennung des Hexers hervor @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 35-36 and pp. 141-143
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Consulting the poison oracle
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission
yields capacity: Naming the one who is bewitching at this moment

Knowledge encompassing another mind
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kenntnis fremden Bewusstseins @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XIII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Knowledge of the state of another consciousness.
within tradition: Theravāda

The universal control of the teaching of the spirits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die allgemeine Kontrolle der Geisterlehre @de
source: Allan Kardec, L'Évangile selon le spiritisme, introduction, section II, sub-heading Contrôle universel de l'enseignement des Esprits
alternative label: contrôle universel de l'enseignement des Esprits @fr
definition: The rule of verification the transmission sets for itself: concordance in the teaching of the spirits is the best control. It is stated with its conditions and with its limits. The revelations must come spontaneously, through a large number of mediums unknown to one another, and from different places. A single medium questioning many spirits is expressly not a sufficient guarantee, because one obsessing spirit could present the same content under different names; and mediums of a single centre are not sufficient either, because they may stand under a common influence. The criterion is restricted to what attaches to the principles of the doctrine and does not extend to communications on secondary matters.
note: Both exclusions are the founder's own and both are exactly the ones an outside critic would raise. That is worth marking, because it makes the rule better than the practice that followed it: the same author describes elsewhere how the scattered material was gathered and weighed at a single centre, and that centre was himself.
within tradition: Spiritism

Divine eye
type: Conceptualizing
label: Göttliches Auge @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XIII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Sight beyond the range of the physical eye.
within tradition: Theravāda

Divine ear
type: Conceptualizing
label: Göttliches Ohr @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XIII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Hearing beyond the range of the physical ear.
within tradition: Theravāda

Initiation
type: Conceptualizing
source: Abhinavagupta, Tantrāloka XV
source: Mālinīvijayottaratantra VIII
definition: The rite by which a person is admitted to the practice, set out in the tantra and reproduced with commentary in the Kashmirian exegesis.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Fasting of the heart
type: Conceptualizing
label: Fasten des Herzens @de
source: Zhuangzi 4, in James Legge (trans.), The Sacred Books of China: The Texts of Tâoism, Part I, Sacred Books of the East vol. XXXIX (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1891), Book IV, par. 2, pp. 208-210
definition: A graded emptying set out in three steps. The pupil is told not to wait for the hearing of his ears but for the hearing of his mind; then not to wait even for the hearing of his mind, but for the hearing of the third term. The hearing of the ears is to rest with the ears and the mind to rest in its own verification; the third term is free of all pre-occupation and so waits for things to appear. Where the way is, there is that freedom, and that freedom is the fasting of the mind.
note: The name is a second case of the same thing. The tradition's term is xinzhai, the fasting of the xin, and the label here says heart where the edition read says mind. Both are the same character, and the graph carries the German and English labels of an earlier run beside a source that translates it otherwise. The label is left standing and the divergence is recorded, because renaming it would hide that the term does not resolve into either word.
note: The third term is where the translations part, and the passage was reopened in this run because of it. The edition read renders it 'the spirit' in the body of the text and states in its own footnote that the character standing there is qi, 'the breath'. Whoever reads only the translation gets a graded ascent from ears to mind to spirit; whoever reads the footnote gets an ascent that ends in the breath, which is what the whole of this file is about. The earlier wording of this definition ended with the way gathering in emptiness alone, which is a third rendering again and follows a translation this file could not name. All three are recorded rather than harmonised.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

The preserving of the child at the breast
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Bewahrung des Kindes an der Brust @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer VII, p. 218
definition: The effect claimed for the worn prayer: preservation and protection from the disease caused by the evil eye of Barya, from coughs, bronchitis, pleurisy, inflammation of the lungs and bowels, diarrhoea, colic, dysentery, the disease caused by worms, fistula, the cracking of the skin, and the evil eye of the sar, of the sorcerer and enchanter, and of a list of named others.
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The vitriol drives out the toothache
type: Yielding
label: Der Vitriol vertreibt die Zahnschmerzen @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 46
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 28
note: The author also states outright that he does not know whether the remedy works on teeth that are not hollow. The limit is his and is kept here rather than widened.
note: The rare part of this claim is not the remedy but the number attached to it. The author states more than sixty applications and says that on one of them it did not help. A transmission that keeps its own failure in the count is uncommon in this graph, and it is what makes the claim examinable rather than merely asserted; what the number does not carry is a base rate, since toothache remits without treatment.
attested by: First-person report
by practice: Blue vitriol in the hollow tooth
within tradition: European folk magic
yields capacity: The driving out of the severest toothache

The fourth absorption
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die vierte Vertiefung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.1 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII.49 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The absorption from which the handbook has the supernormal powers proceed, and which it calls their natural plane.
within tradition: Theravāda

Generation stage
type: Conceptualizing
label: Erzeugungsstufe @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The first of the two stages of the highest tantra, treated before the completion stage in the training.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The chant rendered without breath, mistake or hesitation
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Gesang ohne Atemzug, Fehler und Zögern @de
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, pp. 35-36
definition: The delivery a master of song is held to owe: no breath taken before the close of a phrase, no mistake, and no hesitation in pronouncing a word. The three are named together and on the same footing, so that pausing counts as failing rather than as taking care. The manner reported beside it is a tone almost on one note with every word enunciated distinctly.
note: Beckwith gives the rule in her own voice and names her authorities for it: Kamakau for the manner of delivery, and Pukui's article of 1949 for the practice. Neither was opened in this run; the article is behind a paywall and the newspaper series was not reachable. The node therefore stands on Beckwith and says so.
within tradition: Hawaiian transmission

Fitness to descend to the Merkavah
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Eignung zum Abstieg zur Merkava @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 26, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
alternative label: hashmal
definition: The property the transmission holds to be decidable and to be decided at a particular place. The hashmal is said to divide, among those who descend, between those who were fit to descend and those who were not.
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

Hidden things
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die verborgenen Dinge @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 19, 24
definition: What is not open to ordinary sight: the state of the sick, the whereabouts of what is lost, the presence of the dead among the living. The tradition treats this as a domain that some persons perceive and that others are ill advised to form opinions about.
note: Relevant to prima-materia#127, which asks whether a perception of the distant, hidden or concealed is attested outside the spheres already held. The passage here attests the domain and one case of its perception; it does not attest a procedure for acquiring it, and that part is not in the portion read.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Coming to life again after death
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Wiederaufleben nach dem Tod @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 28
definition: The capacity ascribed to certain persons of coming to life again after death and returning to their place among people, held to belong to those over whom particular words were spoken at their birth.
note: The narrative gives the being a name in a phonetic transcription that the digitised text renders unreliably; the spelling is therefore not carried into this node, and the term is to be taken from a clean copy of the page before it is asserted anywhere. The claim itself does not depend on the spelling.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Knowledge of the characteristics of the seed-star
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kenntnis der Merkmale des Same-Sterns @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 282 and 284
definition: The knowledge of what the seed-star is made of, how heavy it is and how it moves, said in the account to have been unavailable to men while the star's existence was known but its characteristics unrevealed.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Kokabel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A Watcher whose teaching concerns the stars; the two recensions differ on whether it is the constellations or the signs of the stars.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Kôkabêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Kuṇḍalinī
type: Conceptualizing
source: Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (1577)
definition: A power held to rest coiled at the base of the subtle body and to rise through it when roused.
within tradition: Śaiva and Śākta tantra

Repetition without error or hesitation
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wiederholung ohne Fehler und ohne Zögern @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882), p. 11
definition: The rendering of an invocation in which neither a mistake nor a pause occurs. The tradition sets the two on the same footing: hesitating is treated as failing, not as taking care.
within tradition: Māori transmission

Hearing what happens at a great distance
type: Conceptualizing
label: Hören dessen, was in großer Ferne geschieht @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
definition: The capacity to hear what is transpiring at a great distance, ascribed to a priest of the second degree and marked in the chart by lines drawn from the ears.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Touching at a distance for good or ill
type: Conceptualizing
label: Berühren in der Ferne, zum Guten wie zum Bösen @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
definition: The capacity to touch friends and enemies at a distance, however remote, for good or for evil, marked in the chart by lines drawn from the hands; alongside it the ability to traverse all space, marked by lines from the feet.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Calling forth the shadow and holding it
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Herausrufen des Schattens und sein Festhalten @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 170
definition: The capacity ascribed to a priest of the fourth degree to call forth the shadow, that is the soul, and to retain it within his grasp at pleasure.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Reading the thoughts and intentions of others
type: Conceptualizing
label: Lesen der Gedanken und Absichten anderer @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 170
definition: The capacity ascribed to a priest of the fourth degree, marked in the chart by the shell placed at the top of the head.
within tradition: Midewiwin

Purification of the channels
type: Conceptualizing
label: Reinigung der Kanäle @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.19-20 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.6 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The clearing of impurity from the channels, at which the breath practice is said to aim, and whose accomplishment the text says shows outwardly in the body.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Exactness of the sung words
type: Conceptualizing
label: Genauigkeit der gesungenen Worte @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), section 41, p. 24
definition: The requirement that the songs be known in a most exact manner, down to the syllable, no important mistake being tolerated.
within tradition: Navajo ceremonial transmission

Penemue
type: Conceptualizing
source: 1 Enoch 69:8 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
definition: A figure named in the Book of Parables as the one who disclosed the distinction of bitter and sweet and the art of writing.
within tradition: Enochic tradition

The course of pô tolo around Sirius
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Bahn des Pô tolo um Sirius @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 281-283
definition: The course the seed-star is said to run around Sirius: perpendicular to the horizon, of a period of some fifty years counted double to a hundred because Sigui are paired as twins, with the star turning on itself once a year. Sirius is said to brighten when the seed-star is nearest and the seed-star to scintillate so that an observer believes he sees several stars when it is farthest.
note: The article calls the same course the figure of circumcision and excision: the near and far points of the orbit are the foreskin and the knife. The astronomical reading and the ritual reading are the same drawing, and the account gives no priority to either.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

The prayer of the heart
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Herzensgebet @de
source: Philokalia IV, Gregory of Sinai, On Stillness and the Two Ways of Prayer
source: Philokalia IV, Nikephoros the Monk, On Watchfulness and the Guarding of the Heart
definition: The continuous inward prayer that gives the tradition its practice.
within tradition: Hesychasm

Sariel
type: Naming
source: 1 Enoch 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
alternative label: Sahriel
definition: A Watcher whose teaching concerns the moon; the Ethiopic gives its course, the Aramaic-Greek witness gives its signs under the name Sahriel.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Sariêl
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Seeing witchcraft and prophesying
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Sehen der Hexerei und das Weissagen @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 88-89
definition: The capacity ascribed to the witch-doctors: to see what is unseen, to tell who the witches are, to see the emanations of witchcraft floating about as small lights invisible to the uninitiated, and to resist a fatigue that the source says could not otherwise be borne.
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Shemihazah
type: Naming
label: Schemichasa @de
source: 1 Enoch 6:3, 8:3 (Ethiopic; Charles 1912)
alternative label: Amezarak
alternative label: Semjaza
definition: The leader of the Watchers who binds the others by oath on Mount Hermon and is named as the teacher of spells and root-cutting.
attested by: Textual attestation
name form: Semjâzâ
name role: watcher
within tradition: Enochic tradition

Sicun, imparted potency
type: Conceptualizing
label: Sicun, verliehene Potenz @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 87-88 and p. 158
definition: The potency of a human being and the emitted potency of a god. One is imparted to each person at birth and stays with him until death, enabling him to do what the beasts cannot and giving courage and fortitude; it may be pleased or displeased with its possessor and may be operative or inoperative at its own pleasure, may be invoked by ceremony or prayer, and can be imparted to no other person or thing. Most gods can emit their potencies, and an emitted potency can be put into a material thing by a shaman with a proper ceremony correctly performed. A potency so imparted is operative only when it is wrapped and hidden; wrapping, material and potency together make a wasicun, which the corpus renders as fetish.
note: A man may choose further potencies during his life, and the corpus says an evil man cannot secure a good one but may secure an evil one. The shaman who prepares a fetish devises a formula that must be repeated to invoke its powers.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Tummo yields inner heat
type: Yielding
label: Tummo bringt innere Hitze hervor @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
note: The one pairing in this file that names a capacity with an outward, measurable side. Any later protocol has a clearer target here than anywhere else in the collection.
attested by: Textual attestation
by practice: Tummo
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition
yields capacity: Inner heat

The state has two limits, and both can be missed
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Zustand hat zwei Grenzen, und beide sind verfehlbar @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXIX, sect. 134, pp. 362-363
definition: The state produced in the performance is bounded on both sides: it must not turn into an uncontrolled fit and it must not be suppressed. Within those limits it varies in degree. Producing it requires the ability to double, a power of controlling the thinking mechanism, and knowledge of the methods for entering the state, maintaining it and ending it as the performance requires.
note: This is the passage that decides the reading of the whole file. A person in whom the state turns into a fit, who cannot control himself, is held to be possessed by the spirits and for that reason cannot become a shaman: he must be treated. A person who cannot produce the state at all cannot become a shaman either, but may become a clan priest. The transmission thus excludes on both sides of a band, and the popular identification of the office with uncontrolled trance names precisely one of the two exclusions.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Mastering of spirits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Meisterung der Geister @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 A, p. 271
definition: The condition that makes an ordinary man a shaman: he is a master of spirits, at least of a group of them. The mastered spirits are not guardians and do not elect him; the master must feed them and handle them, and introduces them into himself when he wants to. The shaman uses his own body as a placing for spirits.
note: The discrimination the transmission itself draws, and the one most reliably lost in later reports of it. The difference between a person possessed by spirits and a shaman is that the shaman introduces them at his own will. The recorder states that the Tungus are always very careful as to the diagnosis, whether the person is possessed by the spirits or the spirits are possessed by the person, and that nobody would recognise anyone as a shaman who could not possess spirits in that sense.
note: The relation is named by a term the recorder gives in five dialect forms at once. The digitised copy used is an optical transcription and its rendering of these forms is not trustworthy at the level of single letters, so the forms are not reproduced here as if they had been read cleanly. What is reported without doubt is that one term covers the relation across the Manchu, Birarcen, Kumarcen, Nercinsk and Khingan dialects, and that the spirits are said to use it of their master through the shaman's mouth.
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Watchfulness
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wachsamkeit @de
source: Philokalia I, Diadochus of Photice, Gnostic Chapters
source: Philokalia I, Hesychios of Sinai, On Watchfulness and Holiness
definition: The guarding of the heart and the attention to what arises in it, treated as the groundwork on which the prayer of the heart is built.
within tradition: Hesychasm

Wowihanble, a communication received
type: Conceptualizing
label: Wowihanble, eine empfangene Mitteilung @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), p. 68 and p. 156
definition: What the corpus calls a supernatural communication and the English of the recorders calls a vision: a thing seen or heard, waking or asleep, in the form of anything that breathes or of something inanimate, which makes known by what it says or does that it is the thing sought. It may speak intelligibly, or in words the receiver does not understand, or in the language of birds and beasts.
note: The term is printed in the corpus as Wowihanble and the seeking as hanblapi. The digitised copies read from render the second word with an initial th, which is a known confusion of the scanning and not a variant of the print; the identifier follows the reading hanblapi. A check against a printed copy is held as an issue.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Xeper as the word of self-generation
type: Originating
label: Xeper als das Wort der Selbsthervorbringung @de
date: 1975
source: M. A. Aquino, The Temple of Set (Temple of Set, San Francisco), in the account of the Word Xeper and its Egyptian derivation
definition: The claim that the Egyptian term for becoming, coming into being, personified in the scarab god and signifying self-generation and the dawn, names the transformation and evolution of the will, and that it is uttered as the word of a new age succeeding the age of indulgence.
note: Held as an origination because of the shape of the claim rather than its content. The word is Egyptian and its lexical sense is not in dispute; what begins in 1975 is its use as the formula of a path, in a sequence of ages with named predecessors. The Egyptological reference is present in the source and does not make the doctrine ancient.
note: This is the end state the milieu sets against dissolution, and it is worth recording in the author's own terms rather than in the summaries: not the preservation of an ego as ordinarily meant, but a self-generation modelled on a god who brings himself forth. A record that reports it as mere ego-preservation reports the criticism and not the claim.
attested by: Textual attestation
circulates as: A doctrine recovered from Egyptian antiquity, reported as the teaching the word is drawn from rather than as a formula first uttered in 1975.
originated by: Michael A. Aquino

Descent as a stage of the sequence
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der Abstieg als Stufe der Folge @de
source: Xingqi yupei ming, in D. Harper, Early Chinese Medical Literature (1998), p. 125
definition: The stage at which the gathered and extended breath goes downward, after which it settles and becomes firm; the sequence then turns and rises.
note: The inscription assigns direction to a place in a sequence, not to a phase of breathing. Descent follows gathering and extension; ascent follows sprouting and growing. The closing lines set the two directions against the two powers, the dynamism of heaven showing in what rises and that of earth in what descends. Nothing here binds a direction to inhaling or to exhaling. See prima-materia#27 and prima-materia#28.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Letter-perfect delivery
type: Conceptualizing
label: Buchstabengetreue Wiedergabe @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), p. 616
definition: The requirement, set on the parts of the ceremony chanted aloud and in unison, that the words be rendered letter perfect.
within tradition: Zuni ritual transmission

Understanding the language of Zuyua
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Verstehen der Sprache von Zuyua @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 89-93
definition: The capacity to hear a figurative demand and produce the thing meant. The witness does not treat this as a skill beside descent but as the same fact: what the examination asks is whether the candidate can explain how the ruling men came and whether he is of the lineage of rulers.
note: The text says nothing about where this language is learned or whether the answers are taught. That silence is the whole difficulty of the procedure as a test and is taken up at pmc:ZuyuaExamination.
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Receiving
type: Class
label: Empfangen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The claim, made in or about a work, that its wording was received from a speaker other than the person who wrote or spoke it down.
note: Distinct from pm:Originating, which names the author with whom a claim begins and the ascription it circulates under. A receiving makes no finding about who really composed the material; it records that the work claims a speaker, so that the claim is addressable, countable and disputable instead of riding invisibly in a citation.
note: Whether an agreement between two such corpora can ever be more than reception is a separate question and a hard one. The route is documented across the whole block: the vocabulary runs on from Theosophy. A convergence there needs the demonstration that a receiver did not know the earlier literature, and that demonstration is expensive and rare.

Abiding
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Duration
label: Bleibend @de
definition: The source has the condition remain with the one who has it, whether it was worked for or not.

Anchoring not stated
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Sinnesbindung nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it.
note: Not the same as an untagged node, and the difference is what makes a query of the form 'only in this state' readable at all. No placement means nobody asked; this value means somebody asked and the source is silent.

Not bound to an anchoring
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: An keine Sinnesbindung gebunden @de
definition: The source prescribes the practice across the states this axis distinguishes: not in a set-apart session but through work, speech and sleep alike.
note: Deliberately not added to the other three axes. There is no case in the holdings for an awareness that is unbound as to its locus or its agency, and a value written for a case nobody has met is vocabulary running past the matter rather than ahead of it.
note: Distinct from pm:anchoringDeclined, and the difference is which claim the tradition makes. A tradition that declines the axis denies that the distinction applies to it at all; a tradition that prescribes unbroken prayer grants the distinction and says the practice spans it. The hesychast literature is the clear case: it knows perfectly well that a man sleeps and wakes, and requires the prayer through both. See prima-materia#440.

Cases with deviation
type: Examination State
label: Fälle mit Abweichung @de
definition: Cases have been recorded and show a deviation from the stated base rate. What deviates is what the protocol measured, which is rarely the whole of what the claim asserts.

Counter-search found nothing
type: Counter-Search State
label: Gegensuche ohne Fund @de
definition: A search for opposing or non-replicating work was carried and returned nothing. This is a statement about the search, and the note must say what was searched.

Counter-search found opposition
type: Counter-Search State
label: Gegensuche mit Fund @de
definition: A search returned work that contradicts the evidence, fails to replicate it, or narrows its reach. What was found belongs in the note and, where it bears on the finding, in the protocol's own notes.

First-person report
type: Attesting
label: Erfahrungsbericht @de
definition: An experiential account given in the first person by the one who had it, recorded once.

Not by effort
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Acquisition
label: Nicht durch Anstrengung @de
definition: The source has the condition arrive without being worked for: given, inherited, conferred at birth, or descending on the wayfarer as a gift.
note: Where a source says this, a missing prerequisite claim is a doctrine and not an omission. The Sufi handbooks say it outright of the aḥwāl; the Inuit narrative says it of second sight in another way, by reporting the capacity as something a person has.

Outward waking
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Nach außen gerichtetes Wachen @de
definition: Awareness turned to the senses and to the world they report, with the body in ordinary use.
note: Set this where the source has the act performed openly, in the world, among others: an invocation spoken aloud, a divination read off an object, a healing performed by touch. The Māṇḍūkya calls this jāgrat.

Presentation order
type: Prerequisite Strength
label: Darstellungsreihenfolge @de
definition: The source only presents the material in a sequence. Any necessity is the reader's, and belongs to whoever read it that way.

Sleep threshold
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Schlafschwelle @de
definition: The passage between waking and sleeping in either direction, in which the sensory channel is partly detached and the body may already be immobile while awareness continues.
note: Set this where the source describes the condition rather than the clock: sleep departing and waking beginning, an inability to move, a luminosity at the moment of falling asleep. The holdings already carry the finding that this state is well attested as a place of reception and not as a place where a faculty is exercised; see convergences/threshold-of-sleep.ttl.

The oration of the physical art said before the sick
type: Practicing
label: Die Oration der Heilkunst, vor dem Kranken gesprochen @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), §§ 26-30a, pp. 24-25, ed. Peterson
definition: Standing before a sick person who lies languishing and saying the oration of the physical art three times with great reverence, and then asking him how he feels himself.
note: The asking is part of the procedure and not an afterthought. Without it the oration yields nothing that could be read, and with it the reading is fixed in advance: the text sets out the answers and what each of them decides.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The confession made during the fast
type: Practicing
label: Die Beichte während des Fastens @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. V
definition: During the fast everyone confesses to the holder of that office, both sitting on the ground, at places appointed in the open country. What is confessed is theft, ill-treatment of others, having more than one woman, adultery, and failure to attend to the huacas; inward faults are not confessed, and simple fornication is not held a fault at all. Powders of the offerings are laid on a flat stone and the penitent is made to blow them; a small stone called pasca, which means pardon, is rubbed on his head with ground white maize, and the head is washed in a stream or where two rivers meet, which is called tincuna.
note: It is also done outside the feasts, when a man is sick, because they understand that their ancestors and huacas are angry at their faults and that this is why they fall ill. Some purify themselves without telling anyone, by rubbing the head with the pasca and washing it in a river, saying that the water carries the faults away; and one man said the specialist took him and his wife to a large ditch, washed them, made them put on new clothes and leave the old ones on the road, saying that their faults stayed there and that whoever took the clothes would take them.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Andean transmission

Dream yoga
type: Practicing
label: Traumyoga @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005), the yoga of the dream state
definition: The training of awareness within the dream, set out in the treatise as a course of exercises in apprehending, multiplying and transforming what appears.
note: Tibetan rmi lam, transliterated milam. Older witnesses stand behind the fifteenth-century treatise: the dream-yoga manuals in the collected works of Gampopa (1079-1153) and the root verses ascribed to Tilopa. That ascription is traditional and only partly secured philologically. Note also that the list of the six is unstable between witnesses, and that the name six yogas is a western coinage for what the tradition calls six dharmas.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

The names said at the front and at the doors
type: Practicing
label: Die Namen, gesprochen vorn und an den Türen @de
source: Budge (ed.), The Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, prayer I, p. 216
definition: Reciting the list of names at the front and at the doors before entering a house which is old, or in ruins, or unclean.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission

The Sword of Moses
type: Practicing
label: Das Schwert des Mose @de
source: The Sword of Moses, ed. and trans. Moses Gaster (London: David Nutt, 1896), the opening instructions
alternative label: Harba de-Moshe
alternative label: Sword of Moses
definition: An operative handbook whose opening instructions state the preparation in numbers. The user must free himself three days beforehand from accidental pollution and from everything unclean; eat and drink once every evening; take his bread from a pure man or wash his hands first; drink only water; bathe once on the first day and no more; pray three times daily; and in the first three hours of the morning mention the hundred sacred names and the mighty ones, whose sum is given as three hundred and four. He is not to approach a woman during the preparation.
note: Three days, once a day, water only, one bath, three prayers, a hundred names summing to three hundred and four. A preparation given entirely in counts is checkable in a way a preparation given in dispositions is not, and this one has no clause about the state of mind of the user at all.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

Casting the sixteen palm nuts
type: Practicing
label: Der Wurf der sechzehn Palmnüsse @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
definition: The operation by which a figure is obtained: sixteen palm nuts are held loosely in one hand and thrown through the half-closed fingers into the other. One nut left behind is marked with a double stroke and two nuts left behind with a single stroke, and the throw is repeated until two columns of four marks stand on the whitened board.
note: The mark is set by what remains in the hand and not by what the diviner judges, so the figure is not chosen. The source describes the mechanism and does not draw that consequence itself; the observation is recorded here and not asserted as the source's.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ifá

Spirit calling
type: Practicing
label: Geisterrufen @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 24, 28
definition: The session in which a shaman calls up his helping spirits and puts a question to them, held in the household on the occasion that requires it rather than at a fixed time.
note: The portion read gives the occasions and the outcomes and not the procedure. Nothing was found here about the posture, the words, the darkness or the binding that the later chapters of this volume are known to describe, and none of that is asserted by this node.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

The conjuring of the evils foretold for an Ix year
type: Practicing
label: Die Abwehr der für ein Ix-Jahr geweissagten Übel @de
source: Diego de Landa, Yucatan Before and After the Conquest, translated by William Gates (Baltimore: The Maya Society, publication 20, 1937), section XXXVII, pp. 65-66
definition: The procedure prescribed against the ills foretold for a year whose bearer is Ix. An image of Kinch-ahau Itzamna is set in the temple, incense and many offerings and prayers are made to it, blood is drawn to anoint the stone called Sac-acantun, there is much dancing in which old women take part, and a new oratory is built for the god or the old one renewed.
note: The ills the procedure answers are named in the same section and are of two kinds. Some are conditions of the world: shortage of water, hot spells withering the maize, hunger and the theft and enslavement that follow, locusts, a bad year for bread and a good one for cotton. Others are conditions of the polity: discords within the town or with other towns, changes of rule through war, and the failure of men seeking a chieftaincy. A remedy addressed to both at once is not falsified by either.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Maya ritual transmission

Initiation into the fourth degree
type: Practicing
label: Einweihung in den vierten Grad @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 170
definition: The last entry: further feasts, the personation of the bear spirit, the sacred drum and the chanted prayers.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Midewiwin

The formal recognition
type: Practicing
label: Die förmliche Anerkennung @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95 F, pp. 273-274, and chap. XXVIII, sect. 129-130, pp. 350-352
definition: The social act by which a person becomes a clan shaman. The candidate must show a will and a proved ability to master spirits in at least one successful performance; the clansmen must want him. There follows a period of trial in which he must help sick clansmen, practise divination and interpret dreams. Only afterwards is he assisted in making the paraphernalia and in offering the regular sacrifice, and only then do people seek his assistance.
note: It is an act with an outcome that can go the other way. Among all Tungus groups, he states, there are many persons who pretend to be shamans and are not recognised, so that people do not seek their assistance; a candidate may be rejected before the final trial on grounds of character, and among two candidates one may be elected and the other rejected and cured.
note: The recorder rejects the words consecration and initiation for this act and gives his reason: nothing in it is sacred, and the candidate is already initiated before he attends. The term formal recognition is his and is entered as his; the procedure it names is reported.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Eating the medicines of the witch-doctors
type: Practicing
label: Das Essen der Medizinen der Hexendoktoren @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 88-89 and pp. 96-97
definition: Before a seance the performers eat some of their medicines. The medicine goes into the stomach and is shaken through the body by the dancing, where it is held to become an active agent. The whole apprenticeship consists in the slow transfer of the knowledge of which plants the medicines are made from, paid for in a long string of fees, and a plant is known by stalk and leaf and not by root, which is why laymen may sit at the communal meal without learning anything.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

The descent to the Merkavah
type: Practicing
label: Der Abstieg zur Merkava @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapter 26, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr
alternative label: yordei merkavah
alternative label: yored merkavah
definition: The passage through the palaces, called a descent although the traveller goes up. The transmission does not explain the word anywhere in the passages read.
note: The term is kept in the tradition's own form and not translated as ascent, because a rendering that corrected the direction would remove the only trace of whatever the word once meant. That it is nowhere explained is itself worth recording: a technical term that its own literature never glosses has usually come from somewhere else.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Hekhalot and Merkavah literature

Gauḍīya Vaiṣṇava transmission
type: Tradition
label: Gauḍīya-vaiṣṇavische Überlieferung @de
source: Rūpa Gosvāmin, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu 2.5.113-115 (trans. Haberman 2003)
definition: The Bengali Vaiṣṇava transmission descending from Caitanya, which takes over the aesthetic vocabulary of Sanskrit dramaturgy and applies it to devotion, treating the relations in which a devotee stands to the deity as rasa and ranking them.
note: Read in this run: the fifth wave of the Southern Quadrant and the third wave of the Western Quadrant of the Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu, at the wording, in the bilingual edition of two thousand and three, whose Sanskrit stands on the left page and the translation on the right. Left unread: the Eastern and Northern Quadrants entirely, and the remaining waves of the two quadrants opened. The Ujjvalanīlamaṇi and the Prīti-sandarbha were not opened; both are named in the notes of the edition read and would carry the fuller series of the expansions of love.
note: The contact route is documented and not undecided, and it runs to a transmission this graph already holds. The rasa vocabulary of this corpus is taken over from the dramaturgical treatise: the same terms, the same distinction of foundational and transitory states, the same eight secondary rasa. An agreement between this file and traditions/sanskrit-dramaturgy.ttl therefore counts as reception and never as independent attestation. What is worth looking for is what this later station added, and it added the ranking: the dramaturgical treatise arranges its rasa by derivation, deity and colour and does not rank them.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Rūpa Gosvāmin, Bhaktirasāmṛtasindhu; Rūpa Gosvāmin, Ujjvalanīlamaṇi; Jīva Gosvāmin, Prīti-sandarbha

States
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zustände @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya
source: al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ
definition: Conditions that descend on the wayfarer as a gift and pass, distinguished in the handbooks from the stations precisely by not being attainable through effort.
note: No prerequisite claim is entered for these. The tradition holds that they cannot be worked for, which is a claim about the limits of any ordering and not an omission in this record.
within tradition: Sufism

Profiting in all the sciences
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Zunehmen in allen Wissenschaften @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), § 14, p. 12, ed. Peterson
definition: The capacity claimed for the art: to profit in all the sciences and to attain them in an extraordinary manner, with memory, understanding and eloquence increased and established in the speaker.
within tradition: Ars Notoria

The eight limbs
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die acht Glieder @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra II.29
definition: Restraint, observance, posture, breath regulation, withdrawal of the senses, concentration, meditation and absorption, listed together in a single sūtra.
note: The sūtra names them and says nothing about traversing them in order.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The clear light of sleep
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das klare Licht des Schlafs @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005), the yoga of the clear light of sleep
definition: A luminosity held to arise at the passage into sleep, which the practitioner is trained to recognise and hold rather than to pass through unconscious.
note: Tibetan 'od gsal, Sanskrit prabhāsvara. The state is not that of a body whose motor system has shut down while the mind stays awake; it is a luminosity placed at the moment of falling asleep, and its purpose in the sources is the recognition of emptiness and the preparation for dying, not the acquisition of a faculty.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Discernment of origins
type: Conceptualizing
label: Unterscheidung der Herkunft @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, On Thoughts 8
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 80
definition: The examination of an inner movement for its origin, distinguished threefold as angelic, human or demonic.
within tradition: Christian ascetic discernment

Seeing what is at a distance
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Sehen des Entfernten @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 46-47 and pp. 55-57
definition: The capacity the whole transmission is consulted for: to know what is happening at a place too far off to be seen or reached, and to report it on returning.
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Divine eye
type: Conceptualizing
label: Göttliches Auge @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.26
definition: Perception of what is distant, hidden or obstructed.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The ceasing of the fits
type: Conceptualizing
label: Das Weichen der Gichter @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa., 1820), S. 29
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), p. 18
definition: The effect the knotting is performed for: that the fits, counted by the charm as seventy-sevenfold, leave the body at the place the crosses are made.
within tradition: European folk magic

The four absorptions
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die vier Vertiefungen @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
definition: A graded series in which each stage is reached by letting go of a factor still present in the one before it.
within tradition: Theravāda

Inner heat
type: Conceptualizing
label: Innere Hitze @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: Heat held to be generated within the body by deliberate practice rather than received from outside it.
within tradition: Tibetan tantric tradition

Second sight
type: Conceptualizing
label: Zweites Gesicht @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), p. 29
definition: The capacity to know in advance that something remarkable is about to happen, reported in the narrative as a standing property of a person rather than as the outcome of an exercise.
note: The English term is the translator's. What the node carries is the claim reported under it and not the term's own history in Scottish and Scandinavian usage; whether the Inuktitut word behind it has that range is not decidable from the portion read.
within tradition: Inuit angakkuq transmission

Mind-made body
type: Conceptualizing
label: Geistgemachter Körper @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Dīgha Nikāya 2, Sāmaññaphala Sutta, DN i.77 (trans. Ṭhānissaro Bhikkhu)
definition: A second body, formed and complete in its faculties, said to be produced from this one; the classical form of the claim the modern draft calls exteriorisation.
within tradition: Theravāda

Stations
type: Conceptualizing
label: Stationen @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya, chapter on the stations
source: al-Sarrāj, Kitāb al-Lumaʿ
definition: Stages of the path attained by effort and held by the one who reaches them, enumerated in the handbooks in a set order.
within tradition: Sufism

Contemplation of nature
type: Conceptualizing
label: Physikē @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1
definition: The second of the three parts, the contemplation of created things.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Pīti
type: Conceptualizing
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga IV.94ff. (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Rapture as a bodily felt state, graded in the handbook into five degrees of increasing pervasion.
note: The five degrees are khuddikā, khaṇikā, okkantikā, ubbegā and pharaṇā.
within tradition: Theravāda

Ascetic practice
type: Conceptualizing
label: Praktikē @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos 1
definition: The first of the three parts of the way, consisting in the keeping of the commandments and the labour against the passions.
within tradition: Desert monasticism

Qi
type: Conceptualizing
source: Xingqi yupei ming (jade inscription on circulating the qi)
definition: The vital breath or energy held to circulate in the body and to be susceptible of deliberate direction.
within tradition: Daoist tradition

Concentration
type: Conceptualizing
label: Sammlung @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga I.7-I.11 (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The second of the three trainings, named in the handbook as the condition for the six direct knowledges.
within tradition: Theravāda

Sigui
type: Conceptualizing
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 274 and 280
definition: A ceremony celebrated once in sixty years whose stated purpose is the renewal of the world. The star that governs its reckoning is named after it: sigi tolo, star of the Sigui.
within tradition: Dogon transmission

Journey of the soul apart from the body
type: Conceptualizing
label: Seelenreise ohne den Körper @de
source: Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16
source: Pliny, Naturalis Historia VII.174
definition: The claim that the soul leaves the body and returns to it, reported of Aristeas of Proconnesus and of Hermotimus of Clazomenae.
within tradition: Graeco-Roman testimony

Reworking
type: Class
label: Bearbeiten @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act, within one tradition, of taking over a claim from another and adding to it something the source it came from does not contain: a term, a consequence, a caution, a sign, a condition of failure.
note: Deliberately expensive: pm:addedElement points at a node, so the addition has to be entered before the reworking can be claimed. A station that added something and cannot say what added nothing that this graph can use. As with pm:Testing, absence is informative and is not to be stubbed: no instance means nobody has shown an addition, not that none was made.
note: Distinct from pm:Systematizing, which is an ordering act performed by an editor in the present and named as his. A reworking is an act inside a transmission, attested in a work like any other claim, and it belongs to the tradition that performed it.
note: The class exists because reception is two things and the record could not tell them apart. Textual transmission is somebody copying a sentence, and it shows that the sentence was handed on. Operative uptake is somebody taking the instruction, carrying it out, and afterwards writing what was not in the exemplar. Only the second turns a chain of copies into a series of attempts, and only the second is proof against feedback: what makes the Dogon Sirius case weak is not that it is received but that nothing was added at the second station which was not already in the question.
note: This is therefore the quantity worth counting, and it is not the number of independent witnesses. A tradition that takes over a claim about an effect and attaches a condition of failure to it has delivered more than three that pass it on word for word — and the addition is the material a pm:falsifiedBy is made from, so the examining layer comes out of the reception history rather than against it.

By effort
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: State Acquisition
label: Durch Anstrengung @de
definition: The source has the condition attained by practice directed at attaining it.
note: This is the end of the axis where prerequisite chains are to be expected, and where their absence is worth a question. The Sufi handbooks call these maqāmāt and enumerate them in a set order.

Claim does not discriminate
type: Examination State
label: Behauptung unterscheidet nicht @de
definition: Cases have been recorded, they show no deviation, and the claim is nonetheless uninformative: it is worded so that outcomes which differ from one another all satisfy it equally.
note: The distinction that decides which of the two applies is not how strong the evidence is but whether an outcome exists that the claim would have ruled out. If the claim covers a result and its opposite alike, it discriminates nothing and belongs here, however well the cases fit.
note: The fifth state and the least obvious. It is not a milder pm:casesWithoutDeviation. There the claim said something and the cases bore it out; here the cases bear it out because the claim did not say enough to be borne out against anything. Recording such a protocol as cases without deviation would enter a success where an examination in fact found the claim empty, and a reader counting confirmations would count this one.
note: This state exists because a case forced it. A claim that coupling an intended state to a strong affect shifts the threshold for risk is confirmed by the evidence and useless to whoever acts on it, because fear and anger are both strong and move that threshold in opposite directions. See prima-materia#141.

Locus not stated
type: Awareness Locus
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Ort nicht angegeben @de
definition: The source was read for this question and does not answer it.

Own agency
type: Agency Holding
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Eigene Trägerschaft @de
definition: The practitioner acts, and what comes of it is credited to the practice.

Ānāpānasati
type: Practicing
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga VIII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
source: Majjhima Nikāya 118
definition: Mindfulness of in-breath and out-breath, set out as a sixteen-step progression in the discourse and as a meditation subject in the handbook.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Theravāda

Consulting the poison oracle
type: Practicing
label: Die Befragung des Giftorakels @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), pp. 136-138 and p. 153
definition: A questioner addresses the oracle while a second man, the operator, administers a measured number of doses of the poison benge to a fowl. The address alternates: sentences framing the matter so that an affirmative answer is asked for and ending with the command that the oracle kill the fowl, then sentences framing it so that a negative answer is asked for and ending with the command that it spare the fowl. Whether the death of the fowl means yes or no is therefore decided by the form of the question and not by the death.
note: The operators are generally boys between twelve and sixteen, old enough to keep the food taboos and young enough to keep the sexual one. The consultation is held in public, and the bystanders may interrupt the questioner to have a point put that he has left out.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Azande oracular transmission

Evocation
type: Practicing
label: Evokation @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXVI, sections 286-288
alternative label: évocation @fr
definition: The putting of questions to a spirit through a medium. The founder makes the form of the question part of the operation: it is to be clear, precise and put in a logical order, and the answer given depends on how it was asked.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Spiritism

Consulting the drum
type: Practicing
label: Die Befragung der Trommel @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 47-48 and p. 57
source: Knud Leem, An Account of the Laplanders of Finmark, their Language, Manners and Religion, in John Pinkerton (ed.), A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels, vol. I (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1808), chap. XXI, Of the Magic Arts of the Laplanders, pp. 474-477
definition: A bowl of hollowed pine, fir or birch with a skin stretched over it, painted with figures of the gods, the angels, the evil spirits, the associates of the noaidi, the sun, the dwellings, the sacred mountains and the beasts of the country. A ring or a brass cover is laid on the skin, the skin is struck with a hammer of reindeer horn, and the ring travels across the painted figures. Where it comes to rest, or which way it runs, gives the answer.
note: The two recorders describe the same instrument ninety years apart and their descriptions of the mechanism agree in every part that matters: the hammer of horn, the ring or cover laid on the skin, the painted field, the reading from where the ring goes. The later adds what the earlier does not: that the drum is not thought fit for use unless got by inheritance, and that women may not touch it.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Wiwanyang wacipi, the sun-gazing dance
type: Practicing
label: Wiwanyang wacipi, der Sonnenschautanz @de
source: Frances Densmore, Teton Sioux Music (Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61, Washington, 1918), pp. 88-90 and pp. 98-99
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 60-62 and pp. 92-93 and pp. 116-120
definition: A ceremony in four graded forms, undertaken to fulfil a vow, to secure supernatural aid for another, to secure it for oneself, or to gain supernatural powers for oneself; the fourth purpose requires the fourth form. The candidate takes a mentor, is vitalized, seeks a communication, is consecrated with his tipi and implements, keeps eight rules until the dance begins, fasts and takes no drink from the beginning of his last day in the sacred lodge, and dances gazing at the sun and sounding a whistle while bound by thongs passed through wounds cut in his flesh, until he tears himself free. The forms differ only in the wounds and in what the thongs are made fast to: nothing, buffalo skulls, four stakes, or the sacred pole, with or without the dancer's feet leaving the ground.
note: The corpus distinguishes the ceremony from the dance and calls the dance the culminating rite of it. The whole is timed by four signs read off the world and not by a count of days: when the buffalo are fat, when new sprouts of sage are a span long, when the chokecherries are ripening, and when the moon is rising as the sun is going down. The second witness gives the time as the full moon of midsummer, when the trees are in full leaf, the June berries are ripe and the wild sage is fully grown.
note: The second witness names the men who danced and how often, with the counts they gave: one who acted as intercessor four times and danced four times, once suspended; one who received a hundred cuts on his arms at twenty-four; one who danced four times at twenty-one, twenty-three, twenty-four and twenty-five, with about twenty of the last hundred cuts made on the chest for want of room on the arms. Counts of this kind are rare in this graph and are recorded because they are what a later reader can weigh.
attested by: Field attestation
field record: Spoken by named Oglala shamans, chiefly Sword, Tyon, Ringing-shield, Bad-wound and No-flesh, and by Finger on 25 March 1914; recorded by the agency physician J. R. Walker at Pine Ridge over his years of service there, closed December 1916; given in Lakota, part of it written out in Lakota by Sword and Tyon and translated by Burt Means, Thomas Mills, Bruce Means and Antoin Herman; the paper prints the translations only, so the Lakota wording is not carried.
within tradition: Lakota ritual transmission

Eleusinian mysteries
type: Tradition
label: Eleusinische Mysterien @de
source: Athenian decree concerning Eleusis, IG I³ 6
definition: The Attic mystery cult of Demeter and Kore, with a lesser rite at Agrai in the spring and the greater rite at Eleusis in the autumn.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The citation names the corpus in which the inscription is edited, which for an epigraphic source is the edition; what is not recorded is whether the text was read in that corpus or in a secondary report of it, and that is to be established before the reading of face C is relied on.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Platonic tradition
type: Tradition
label: Platonische Überlieferung @de
source: Plato, Symposium 210a-212a
definition: The transmission of the Platonic dialogues and the ascent they describe from particular to intelligible beauty.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The edition the Symposium was read in is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed. The Stephanus pagination is stable across the modern editions, so the citations locate the text; what is unknown is whether the Greek or a translation was read.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Divine ear
type: Conceptualizing
label: Göttliches Ohr @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.41
definition: Hearing beyond the range of the physical ear.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The kinds of supernormal power
type: Conceptualizing
label: Die Arten übernatürlicher Kraft @de
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga XII (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: Transformation by supernormal power, the first of the direct knowledges treated in the handbook.
within tradition: Theravāda

Knowledge of another mind
type: Conceptualizing
label: Kenntnis fremden Bewusstseins @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.19
definition: Knowledge of the contents of another consciousness, said to follow from saṃyama on the presented idea.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

Agency Holding
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Trägerschaft der Handlung @de
definition: The axis on which a source's account of who acts is placed: the practitioner, or another to whom the practitioner has yielded.
scale family: Subject axis

Awareness Locus
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Ort des Bewusstseins @de
definition: The axis on which a source's account of where the awareness is located during the act is placed: with the body, or apart from it.
scale family: Subject axis

Counter-Search State
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Stand der Gegensuche @de
subclass of: Process
definition: How far the attempt to find work opposing the evidence has been carried.
note: A study cited under pm:evidenceFrom is a party and not an instance. It carries its own claim, its own method and its own critics, and a protocol that admits it without looking for opposition has not examined the claim against the world but against one report of the world. That is the same error as testing a transmission against this holding instead of against its source, which SPEC §13 forbids, and it is easier to commit because a study looks like a verdict.
note: The state exists because the prose rule did not hold. It was written into AGENTS.md on 2026-09-02 after evidence was entered unread, and within the same session evidence was entered again without any search for opposition. A rule that has to be remembered at the moment of writing is a rule that fails at the moment of haste.
scale family: Record scale

Prerequisite Strength
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Stärke der Voraussetzung @de
subclass of: Process
definition: How firmly a source sets a prerequisite: as a necessity, as an instruction, or merely by the order in which it presents its material.
note: The three must not collapse. A list of eight limbs in the order given is not the same claim as a sentence saying that the eighth is unreachable without the seventh, and reading the first as the second is the commonest way a modern system acquires an ancient warrant it never had.
scale family: Source modality scale

Scale Family
type: Class
label: Skalenfamilie @de
definition: The kind of question a scale answers. Three families are distinguished because a statement about the state of the record, a statement about the firmness of a source and a statement about the subject matter must never be read alike.

State Acquisition
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Erwerb des Zustands @de
definition: The axis on which a source's account of how a condition comes to someone is placed: through effort directed at it, or not.
scale family: Subject axis

State Duration
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Dauer des Zustands @de
definition: The axis on which a source's account of how long a condition holds is placed: passing of itself, or abiding once it is there.
scale family: Subject axis

The saying of the orations
type: Practicing
label: Das Sprechen der Orationen @de
source: Ars Notoria, trans. Robert Turner (London, 1657), §§ 14-15 and pp. 13-14, ed. Peterson
definition: Pronouncing the orations of the art on the prescribed days of the moon, at the prescribed hours and with the prescribed number of repetitions, alone, secretly and in a voice barely audible to the speaker, having fasted on the first day and living chastely.
note: The procedure the text prescribes is larger than this node: the orations accompany the notae, and the witness read carries none of them. What is entered is the part the witness gives.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Ars Notoria

Initiation into the second degree
type: Practicing
label: Einweihung in den zweiten Grad @de
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), p. 168
definition: The second entry: three feasts to the instructing and officiating priests, three chanted prayers to the named manidō, and a second shooting of the shell.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Midewiwin

The journey made while the body lies still
type: Practicing
label: Die Reise bei stillliegendem Leib @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, pp. 55-56
definition: The practitioner beats the drum and sings, others present singing with him in higher and lower notes. He then casts himself on the ground, grows black in the face and lies as if dead, the drum laid as near as possible on his head, sweating. Those present do not leave off singing for the whole time. When he awakes he relates all the circumstances of the business enquired after.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Sámi noaidi transmission

Hesychasm
type: Tradition
label: Hesychasmus @de
source: Gregory Palamas, Triads in Defence of the Holy Hesychasts
definition: The Byzantine tradition of the prayer of the heart and of the vision of the uncreated light, defended in the fourteenth century against the objection that such a light must be created.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For every citation in this file the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. The Philokalia exists in Greek and in several translations whose contents and numbering differ, so a citation naming only the volume does not yet locate a text.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Sanskrit dramaturgy
type: Tradition
label: Sanskritische Dramaturgie @de
source: Nāṭyaśāstra VII
definition: The transmission of the Nāṭyaśāstra and the theory of aesthetic states that follows from it.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For both citations the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. The chapter division of the Nāṭyaśāstra differs between the recensions, so the number seven does not by itself locate the passage on the bodily signs.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Upaniṣadic tradition
type: Tradition
label: Upaniṣadische Überlieferung @de
source: Chāndogya Upaniṣad
definition: The transmission of the Upaniṣads as the speculative layer of the Vedic corpus.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. Chāndogya 7.15.1 carries the edition it was read from and was reopened in the Sanskrit for that purpose. For 1.11.5 the edition is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Retention alone
type: Conceptualizing
label: Alleiniges Anhalten @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II.71-74 (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: Retention held at will without the filling and the emptying that ordinarily frame it. The manual calls it the accomplished form of the practice and says nothing in the three worlds is beyond one who holds it.
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Contact route
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Kontaktweg @de
definition: Whether a route of transmission is known between a tradition and those the graph already holds. It decides whether an agreement may be read as independent attestation or only as reception, and it is therefore a property of the tradition and not of the individual correspondence.
scale family: Record scale

Coverage state
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Erschließungsstand @de
definition: How far the corpus of a tradition has been carried into the graph. The scale exists so that a transmission nobody has opened and a transmission whose corpus is genuinely thin never read alike.
scale family: Record scale

Generalizing
type: Class
label: Verallgemeinern @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of forming, from several attested claims, one statement that no source makes: a claim about a kind of practice or a kind of effect, worded so that an outcome could contradict it.
note: It carries a derivation instead of an origin, and the derivation is checkable in the same way a source is. pm:generalizedFrom points at the attested nodes it was formed from, so a reader can go back to the passages and disagree with the step rather than with the conclusion alone.
note: No instance may carry dcterms:source or pm:withinTradition. A generalization that named a work would report as transmitted what no transmission says, and that is the one confusion this layer exists to prevent.
note: That is also the whole safeguard against the direction the project must not run in. An unpublished draft has no attested predecessors: a sentence from a method draft cannot be generalized into the graph, because there is nothing for pm:generalizedFrom to point at. The class is therefore open where pm:Positing had to be locked, and locked where pm:Positing is open.
note: The absence of a pm:Testing pointing at a generalization is not a defect and is deliberately not enforced. It is the queue: the generalizations nobody has taken up are exactly the ones a run should reach for, and a shape that required a protocol would make the queue unwritable, as it does for pm:Positing.

Method Orientation
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Ausrichtung der Methode @de
subclass of: Process
definition: How a path stands to the norm of the order it is transmitted in: whether its operative means keep that norm, deliberately break it, or decline the distinction. An instance of this class is a value on that axis and never a path.
note: Held apart from pm:TelicOrientation deliberately, and that separation is the whole reason both classes exist. The two vary independently: a path can take the forbidden as its vehicle and still aim at dissolution into what exceeds the self. A scheme with one axis cannot state that case, and the terms that carry one axis — right-hand path, left-hand path — therefore report a transgressive means as though it were a separative goal. See prima-materia#52.
note: Three cases, and they must not read alike. Absence of pm:methodOrientation on a node means nobody has put the question to the source. pm:methodNotStated means somebody has, and the source does not answer it. pm:normDistinctionDeclined means the source answers by rejecting the distinction, which is a positive claim and carries the same burden as any other. None of the three is the middle value; there is no middle value.
scale family: Subject axis

Displaced
type: Awareness Locus
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Verlagert @de
definition: The source has the awareness, or a body made of mind, leave the place of the physical body and act elsewhere.
note: The holdings already gather the material for this value across traditions; see convergences/stream.ttl and examinations/displacement.ttl.

No procedure devised
type: Examination State
label: Kein Verfahren ersonnen @de
definition: Nobody has stated a condition under which the claim would count as refuted. This is a statement about the means of examination, not about the claim.

Record scale
type: Scale Family
label: Aufzeichnungsskala @de
definition: A scale that reports how far the work of recording, searching and examining has been carried. Its values describe what has been done to the subject matter, never the subject matter itself.
note: The cardinal error this family exists to prevent is the collapse of a state that reports absent work into one that reports a finding: a claim for which no procedure was devised and a claim examined and unsupported are different findings and must never read alike.

Breath regulation in Haṭhayoga
type: Practicing
label: Atemregulierung im Haṭhayoga @de
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā II (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The breath practice of the second chapter, directed at the clearing of the central channel.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Haṭhayoga

Shamanizing
type: Practicing
label: Das Schamanisieren @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXVII, sect. 119-121, pp. 325-332, and chap. XXIX, sect. 134, pp. 362-364
definition: The performance: the shaman drums, continually increasing and decreasing tempo and intensity in a definite rhythm, brings himself into the bounded state, introduces the spirits into himself, and acts and speaks as the spirits. Assistants must know the art of drumming and must understand the shaman's movements. The performance may begin out of a sleep during which the spirit comes into him.
note: The recorder holds that the audience is a component of the operation and not its public: bringing the audience into the state is not the aim but the means by which the suggestion is made. That claim is his reading and is entered as his; what is reported is the practice.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Siberian shamanic transmission

Neoplatonic theurgy
type: Tradition
label: Neuplatonische Theurgie @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III (ed. des Places 1966)
definition: The late antique Platonic transmission concerned with the ascent of the soul and with the criteria by which a divine communication is told from a human one.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The De mysteriis citations name the edition they were read in. For Synesius, De insomniis neither edition nor translation is recorded, and the citation names no chapter; it is left unstated rather than guessed and the passage is to be reopened.
note: The file records that this layer underlies the later Jewish and Islamic dream theory, so agreement among those three may not be counted as independent.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Sufism
type: Tradition
label: Sufismus @de
source: al-Qushayrī, al-Risāla al-Qushayriyya
definition: The transmission of the Islamic mystical path, systematised in the handbooks of the tenth and eleventh centuries.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For both works the edition or translation the passages were read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. Neither citation carries a page or section number, and the printed editions of the Kitāb al-Lumaʿ and the Risāla divide their material differently, so the passages are to be reopened before anything in this file is cited by place.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Entering another body
type: Conceptualizing
label: Eintritt in einen anderen Körper @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.38 (Sanskrit sūtra text; received four-pāda numbering)
definition: The transfer of the seat of awareness into a body other than one's own.
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

The god-sent dream
type: Conceptualizing
label: Der gottgesandte Traum @de
source: Iamblichus, De mysteriis III.2-3 (ed. des Places 1966)
definition: A dream held to come from a god rather than from the sleeper, and distinguished from the ordinary dream not by its content but by the state in which it arrives.
note: The state is described as the one in which sleep is departing and waking beginning, or as a condition between the two, accompanied by a voice, by a light, and by an inability to move the eyes. This is the closest description in the collection to what modern accounts call the hypnopompic state, and the immobility is named as part of the sign rather than as an obstacle. What arrives in it is a communication received, not a faculty exercised.
within tradition: Neoplatonic theurgy

Examination State
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Prüfstand @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The standing of a protocol: how far the attempt to fail a claim has actually been carried.
note: The first two states and the third must never collapse into one another. A claim nobody has devised a way to examine is not a claim that has been examined and found wanting. A record that reports both as unsupported would not be reporting on the claims but on the reach of its own instruments.
scale family: Record scale

Ceded agency
type: Agency Holding
type: Awareness Axis Value
label: Abgetretene Trägerschaft @de
definition: The source has another speak or act through the practitioner, who is described as receiving, carrying or being ridden rather than as doing.
note: The axis records the account the source gives, not a verdict on it. A tradition that credits a spirit and one that credits a trained faculty differ in what they claim, and that difference is worth holding whatever either claim is worth.

Graeco-Roman testimony
type: Tradition
label: Griechisch-römisches Zeugnis @de
source: Herodotus, Histories IV.13-16
definition: The transmission of Greek and Latin historiographical and doxographical reports of extraordinary capacities.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For every citation in this file the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. The book and chapter numbers are stable across the modern critical editions, which is why the loss is smaller here than elsewhere; it is still a loss, because it is unknown whether the passages were read in the original or in translation.
note: The file records that a route to Indian material has been proposed for the older Greek transmission and not shown. Disputed is therefore the state of the question, not a hedge.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered

Navajo ceremonial transmission
type: Tradition
label: Navajo-Zeremonialüberlieferung @de
source: Washington Matthews, Navaho Legends, Memoirs of the American Folk-Lore Society V (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1897), pp. 24-25
definition: The Diné transmission of chantways: long ordered ceremonials for restoring a condition named as order, with the sequence fixed and its errors held to be consequential.
note: Read for the first time in the introduction to the legends, sections 41 and 42 on the sacred songs, printed pages 24 and 25. The legends themselves and the ceremonial texts were not read, and the fuller ceremonial account of the night chant published in nineteen hundred and two was not opened in this run.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Wyman, Blessingway, with the recorded Navajo texts; Matthews, The Night Chant

Zuni ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Zuni-Ritualüberlieferung @de
source: Ruth L. Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, in Forty-Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of American Ethnology 1929-1930 (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1932), pp. 611-835
definition: The Zuni transmission of fixed prayer, memorised verbatim and held to be ineffective if altered.
note: A tradition that states its own falsifying condition: the words must be exact. Whether exactness is in fact required is examinable.
note: Read for the first time in the introduction to the ritual poetry, pages 611 to 620 of the printed report. The body of the collection, the prayers themselves, was not read. The corpus stands in the language of its speakers with a facing translation, which is what makes it admissible here at all; the recorder is an outsider and the question of ethnographic first fixation raised at prima-materia#91 is not settled by this file.
contact route: Contact route absent
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Bunzel, Zuni Ritual Poetry, with the Zuni texts

Telic Orientation
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Ausrichtung des Zieles @de
subclass of: Process
definition: What a path says becomes of the bounded self at its end: whether the self is to be dissolved into what exceeds it, strengthened and preserved as its own absolute, or whether the path declines the question. An instance of this class is a value on that axis and never a path.
note: The values name what a source claims, not what happens. Nothing on this axis is examined by holding it; where somebody takes up the examination, that is a pm:Testing node pointing at the claim, and the examination states of the two values are not symmetric.
note: This is the axis the Western terms were built to carry, and the axis they carry badly, because they carry the other one at the same time. A record that wants to state where a path claims to end has to be able to state that without also stating how it proceeds. See prima-materia#52.
scale family: Subject axis

Subject axis
type: Scale Family
label: Sachachse @de
definition: A coordinate on which a tradition, a practice, a capacity or a claim is placed. The axis belongs to no tradition; sources describe a condition and do not name a coordinate, so every placement is an act of the compiler and carries pm:compilerInference.
note: Two values are owed on every subject axis beyond the substantive ones. A declining value, for a tradition that rejects the distinction the axis draws: without it a rejection is recorded as an omission, which turns a doctrine into a gap. And a not-stated value, for a source that was read for the question and does not answer it: without it a node nobody tagged cannot be told from a source that was asked and stayed silent, and every query of the form 'only in X' reports the state of the tagging instead of the state of the traditions.

Christian ascetic discernment
type: Tradition
label: Christliche Unterscheidung der Geister @de
source: John Cassian, Collationes I-II
definition: The transmission of the practice of discerning the origin of inner movements, running from the desert monastic literature through the Byzantine ascetic corpus into the Latin spiritual exercises.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For every citation in this file the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. The gap is load-bearing here: Evagrius is transmitted in Greek and in Syriac with divergent chapter counts, the Collationes are numbered differently in the older editions, and the marginal numbering of the Spiritual Exercises belongs to a modern editorial layer and not to the autograph.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Attesting
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Bezeugen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act by which a claim entered the record. Instances of this class are modes of entry, not claims; a claim points at one of them through pm:attestedBy.
note: Orthogonal to pm:AwarenessContext, which describes the state the asserter was in rather than the route by which the assertion reached the record.
scale family: Record scale

Sensory Anchoring
type: Class
type: Scale
label: Sinnesbindung @de
definition: The axis on which the relation of awareness to the ordinary sensory channel is placed, from outward waking perception through withdrawal, the edge of sleep and dreaming to a condition in which no object is apprehended.
scale family: Subject axis

Systematizing
type: Class
label: Systematisieren @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of imposing an order on material that did not carry it: a list, a sequence, a correspondence table. Named, dated, and attributed to the compiler who performed it, never to the source that is being ordered.

Contact route absent
type: Contact route
label: Kein Kontaktweg @de
definition: No route is available for the period in which the corpus was fixed. Agreement with traditions already held is a candidate for independent attestation.

Counter-search not carried
type: Counter-Search State
label: Gegensuche nicht geführt @de
definition: No attempt has been made to find work that contradicts, fails to replicate, or supersedes the evidence cited.

Mediated attestation
type: Attesting
label: Vermitteltes Zeugnis @de
definition: The claim stands in a received work at a passage that can be named, but the passage was read in a second work that quotes or reports it, because the first could not be obtained.
note: Admissible only where the work itself is out of reach — not digitised, out of print, held internally, in a language not commanded. Effort is not a reason: the mode exists so that unreachable material can enter at its true strength, not so that reachable material can enter cheaply. See SPEC §10 and SPEC §15.
note: Every claim carrying this mode must name the intermediary with pm:readVia, enforced by pm:MediatedAttestationShape. dcterms:source keeps naming the work that carries the claim, because that is what a later reader must obtain; pm:readVia names what the writer of the node actually had in front of him. Collapsing the two would hide exactly the fact this mode exists to record.
note: Weaker than pm:textualAttestation and stronger than nothing, and the record has to be able to say which of the two it has. A claim read through an intermediary carries that intermediary's selection, its translation and its silence; a reader who cannot see that the passage came second-hand cannot weigh any of it.

Third-party ascription
type: Attesting
label: Fremdzuschreibung @de
definition: One party ascribes the capacity to another, who does not report it. Common for capacities said to be lost, since no bearer remains to be asked.

Withdrawn absorption
type: Awareness Axis Value
type: Sensory Anchoring
label: Abgezogene Vertiefung @de
definition: Awake and not asleep, with the senses withdrawn from their objects and attention held on a single one. The condition the handbooks of concentration describe and require.
note: Set this where the source binds the act to a named degree of absorption, to a suspension of the breath, or to a prayer of the heart held past the point at which the outward senses report. This value has no counterpart in the fourfold list, which is the main reason that list could not be used.

Saṃyama
type: Practicing
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra III.1-3
definition: The combined application of dhāraṇā, dhyāna and samādhi to a single object, presented as the general operator from which the capacities of the third chapter follow.
attested by: Textual attestation
within tradition: Pātañjala Yoga

Nahua ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Nahua-Ritualüberlieferung @de
source: Hernando Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas que hoy viven entre los indios naturales de esta Nueva España (1629), tratado primero, capítulo I, read in a digital reproduction of the Spanish text in its old orthography which does not name the edition it reproduces
definition: The central Mexican transmission of address to the powers in things, of the day count, of an animal companion given at birth, and of a seed drunk in order to be questioned.
note: Read in this run: the first treatise of the manual of sixteen twenty-nine, chapters one to seven, in the running text. The remaining eight treatises, which carry the incantations themselves and the calling back of the tonal, were not reached: the reproduction used delivers its running text only to that point. That is a property of the access path and not of the work, and the next run resumes there rather than at the beginning. See prima-materia#228.
note: The contact route is entered as undecided and no longer as absent, and the change is a correction rather than a finding. The registry recorded absent, which asserts that no route exists for the period in which the corpus was fixed. But this corpus was fixed a century after the conquest, by a Spanish priest holding an ecclesiastical office, among people who had been under mission for three generations, and the recorded material carries Christian elements in places. Whether what he wrote down transmits the pre-conquest practice, and in what proportion, is a question nobody in this graph has carried out. Undecided says that; absent said something stronger that was never earned.
note: The edition is not fully stated, and that is a defect this file carries openly. The reproduction used gives the Spanish in an old orthography and does not name the edition it reproduces. Every source line below says so. Settling it is the first thing to do before more nodes are written on this tradition, because a later change of edition would touch all of them.
note: The incantations were taken down in Nahuatl in order to be suppressed, so the words survive in the language they were spoken in inside a hostile frame. Both facts belong in the record.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Sahagún, Florentine Codex, especially books VI and XI; Ruiz de Alarcón, Tratado de las supersticiones y costumbres gentílicas (1629); Codex Borgia

Spiritism
type: Tradition
label: Spiritismus @de
source: Allan Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums, seconde partie, chapitre XXIV, sections 263-268 (French text in the standard numbering; the digital witness read does not name its printing)
definition: The transmission founded by Kardec on answers obtained through mediums and arranged as a doctrine, with a stated rule for admitting a principle into that doctrine and a stated rule for judging which spirit is speaking.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read at the wording: Le Livre des Médiums, chapter XXIV, sections 263 to 268, and chapter XXVI, sections 286 to 288; L'Évangile selon le spiritisme, the introduction, part II, under the heading of the universal control of the teaching of the spirits; La Genèse, chapter I, articles 51 to 55. Not opened: Le Livre des Esprits, the chapter on obsession in Le Livre des Médiums, and the Revue Spirite. The reasons stand in the issues named in the harvest note of prima-materia#497.
note: The contact route stays at documented, as the registration had it. Nothing in this transmission is a candidate for independent attestation: it is a nineteenth-century European construction with named authors, a dated founding text and a documented reception, and its value to this graph lies elsewhere - in being the one body of material in the collection that states its own rule of verification in writing.
note: The editions are a difficulty this file does not hide. Kardec renumbered and enlarged Le Livre des Esprits between 1857 and 1860, from about five hundred questions to about a thousand, and everything since is cited by the later numbering. The digital witnesses read here carry the standard numbering and do not name the printing they were set from. The sections cited are therefore findable but the edition is not stated, which SPEC section 10 requires. See prima-materia#498.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Kardec, Le Livre des Esprits; Kardec, Le Livre des Médiums; Kardec, L'Évangile selon le spiritisme; Kardec, La Genèse; the Revue Spirite, 1858-1869

Contact route undecided
type: Contact route
label: Kontaktweg unentschieden @de
definition: The question has not been carried out. Registered explicitly rather than left absent, because an unstated contact route and a route shown to be absent are the difference between a witness and a candidate.

Hekhalot and Merkavah literature
type: Tradition
label: Hekhalot- und Merkava-Literatur @de
source: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapters 26, 30 and 31, trans. Morton Smith, corrected by Gershom Scholem, ed. Don Karr, against the Hebrew of the Wertheimer recension
definition: The Jewish transmission of a descent through palaces whose gatekeepers test the descender, and of an adjuration by which knowledge of the Law is obtained without study.
note: How old the practice behind these texts is, and whether there is a practice behind them at all, is the open question of the field and is not decided here. The oldest manuscripts are of the thirteenth century and later, at least half a millennium after the composition anyone claims for the material. Two positions stand against each other and neither was read at the wording. See prima-materia#495.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read at the wording: Hekhalot Rabbati, chapters 26, 30 and 31 in the Smith and Scholem translation edited by Karr, against the Hebrew of the Wertheimer recension; and the opening instructions of the Sword of Moses in Gaster's translation. Not opened: the Sar Torah paragraphs that carry the numbers, Maaseh Merkavah, Hekhalot Zutarti, Shiur Qomah, Sefer ha-Razim and 3 Enoch. The reasons stand in the issues named in the harvest note of prima-materia#492.
note: The paragraph numbering of this literature is Schäfer's, from an edition that could not be reached, and the translations read carry it in brackets. Where this file gives a chapter it is the chapter of the digital witness actually read, and where it gives a paragraph the paragraph is taken from that witness and not from the edition itself. That is a weaker citation than the rest of the graph uses and it is marked rather than smoothed. See prima-materia#493.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Hekhalot Rabbati; Hekhalot Zutarti; the Sar Torah material; Maaseh Merkavah; Shiur Qomah; 3 Enoch; the Sword of Moses

Zoroastrian transmission
type: Tradition
label: Zoroastrische Überlieferung @de
source: The Book of Arda Viraf, ed. and trans. Martin Haug, E. W. West and Hoshang Jamaspji Asa (Bombay and London: Trübner, 1872), chapters 1-5
definition: The Iranian transmission of a dualist cosmology, of a soul journey undertaken under a named preparation and reported on return, of an accounting at a bridge whose width answers to the traveller, and of purifications stated in numbers of holes, washings and nights.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read at the wording: Arda Wiraz Namag, chapters 1 to 5, in the Haug and West translation; Hadhoxt Nask, fragments 2 and 3, in Darmesteter's translation; Vendidad, fargards 8 and 9, in Darmesteter's translation. Not opened: Yasht 19 on the glory, Menog i Xrad, Dadestan i Denig, the Denkard, and the Kirdir inscriptions. The reasons stand in the issues named in the harvest note of prima-materia#489.
note: The contact route stays at disputed and is not moved, but the reason is now sharper than at registration. The earliest dated Iranian witness of an otherworld journey is not literary but epigraphic, in the inscriptions of the mage Kirdir under Wahram the Second, that is 274 to 293; the Book of the Watchers is third or second century before the era. Every Pahlavi book read here reached its surviving shape in the ninth century or later. Whoever wants to read the Iranian material as the source of the Jewish and Christian ascent literature must argue from the Avestan passages and not from these books. See prima-materia#490.
note: Two editions stand behind the wording used here and they are of different weight. Haug and West of 1872 rests on a single, partly Pazand-contaminated witness; Gignoux 1984 and Vahman 1986 are the critical editions and were not reachable in full. Where a number in this file matters, it was read in the Haug and West text and the note on the node says so.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Avesta (Gathas, Yasna, Vendidad, Yashts); Hadhoxt Nask; Arda Wiraz Namag; Bundahisn; Denkard; Menog i Xrad; Dadestan i Denig

Desert monasticism
type: Tradition
label: Wüstenmönchtum @de
source: Evagrius Ponticus, Praktikos
definition: The transmission of the ascetic literature of the Egyptian desert and its Byzantine continuation, in which the path is set out as an ordered ascent.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. For every citation in this file the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable, and it is left unstated rather than guessed. The chapter numbering of the Praktikos and the step division of the Ladder both vary between editions, so the numbers here stand on nothing until the passages are reopened.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Ifá
type: Tradition
source: A. B. Ellis, The Yoruba-Speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), chapter II, the section on Ifa
definition: The Yoruba divinatory transmission: an enumerated set of signs obtained by casting, each sign carrying narratives that a diviner is expected to hold by memory and to recite on the sign falling.
note: Read in this run: the section on Ifa in chapter II of the account of eighteen ninety-four, and its chapter IV for what that author says about the origin of the god; and the appendix of the volume of nineteen hundred and six, which reprints an extract on Ifa by a Yoruba bishop and a second extract by a Sierra Leonean author on geomancy. Left unread: the remaining chapters of both volumes, and the twentieth-century monographs named in the principal corpus, which are in copyright and available only as lending copies. The text of eighteen ninety-four was read in an electronic reproduction that carries no printed pagination, so the places are given by chapter and section and not by page.
note: The closest thing to a written corpus that was never written. It is fixed, enumerated, internally ordered and transmitted through a pupilage of stated length, which is what made it the entry point chosen from the registry.
note: The contact route is entered as disputed and no longer as absent, and the correction is the main finding of the run that opened this file. The registry had recorded no route because none was looked for. One of the two extracts read here identifies the sixteen figures of the oracle with the apparatus of geomancy — twelve houses of the heavens, two witnesses, a judge and a further judge — which is the apparatus of the Arabic sand science and, through it, of material this graph already holds on its Mediterranean side. Until that identification is settled, an agreement between this tradition and anything already in the graph counts as neither reception nor independent attestation. The dispute stands as its own node below, which is what pm:contactRouteDisputed requires before an agreement may be weighed at all.
note: Two of the works cited in this file were read at second hand, in the appendix that reprints them. Neither extract carries an imprint there, so neither citation gives place or year. A separately published copy of the bishop's pamphlet was searched for and not found: under both the author's name and the confusable name of the Yoruba historian, in the large text archives and in a library catalogue aggregator, and in a bibliography of early Yorùbá books. The nodes resting on those extracts therefore carry pm:mediatedAttestation and name the appendix with pm:readVia, and they remain open posts.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: The Odù corpus as published in Bascom, Ifa Divination, and Abimbola, Ifá: An Exposition of Ifá Literary Corpus

Converging
type: Class
label: Konvergieren @de
subclass of: Process
definition: A structural correspondence observed across traditions, held as a node so that it can carry its routes of transmission and its counterexamples instead of asserting universality.
note: Every instance is an ordering made by a compiler and carries pm:compilerInference, never textual attestation. No source says that the concepts correspond; the correspondence is the reading, and it is held as a node so that it can be argued with. Its sources are the sources of the concepts it brings together, and they attest those concepts and not their correspondence.
note: Independence is also a weaker instrument than it looks, and this is the reason breadth is held beside it rather than under it. It guards against none of the three commonest sources of agreement: a shared physiology that produces the same experience wherever the same thing is done to a body, a structural necessity of the subject matter that makes any competent version converge, and the form of graded institutions, which resemble one another because institutions with grades do. What decides in the end is what can be reproduced, and independence is a way of sorting candidates for that, not a verdict.
note: Most apparent universality in the Western esoteric record is diffusion from few sources. A graph that counts a citation chain as independent confirmation measures reception history and reports it as structure.
note: That is a warning against one way of counting and not against reception itself. Reception history is a finding of its own: how many transmissions carry a claim at all, and how deeply the paths between them branch, are two separate numbers and neither cancels the other. Many witnesses on one cable is a different map from many witnesses on three, and both are more informative than the earlier arrangement, in which the first case was simply not shown. The one thing the graph must be able to do is say which of the two maps a reader is looking at: dense transmission and strong effect must never look alike, or the gate of authority returns in statistical dress.

Hawaiian transmission
type: Tradition
label: Hawaiische Überlieferung @de
source: Martha Warren Beckwith, The Kumulipo: A Hawaiian Creation Chant (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), chapter 7, pp. 35-36
definition: The Hawaiian transmission of a chanted genealogy of the world, of the mastery of chanting as an office with a stated condition of failure, and of the house of the hula with its conduct, its cleansing and its graduation.
note: Coined as pmt:HawaiianCosmogony and renamed to pmt:HawaiianRitual on 2026-09-04 under prima-materia#471. The old identifier was written for the Kumulipo alone, and the reading widened the tradition, not the transmission: the file carries the mastery of chanting and the house of the hula, and a query that trusted the name would have taken a transmission of rite and office for a cosmogony. Renaming a coined identifier needs a compelling reason, and the reason here is that the name asserted something about the subject matter that the holdings contradict. The rename was carried in one pass, which is what SPEC §11 requires; nothing outside this repository is known to have referred to the old name.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read at the wording: Beckwith's Kumulipo, chapters one, three and seven; Emerson's Unwritten Literature of Hawaii, chapters two, four and five. Not opened: Malo's chapters on necromancy and on the kuni rite, the Fornander volume on the order of sorcery, Kamakau's newspaper series, and Pukui's article of 1949 which Beckwith cites for the chanting rule. The reasons and the paths tried stand in the issues named in the harvest note of prima-materia#470.
note: The contact route is entered as documented and no longer as absent, and it is documented twice over. First against the Maori transmission this graph already holds: both descend from one East Polynesian dispersal, dated archaeologically to the thirteenth century, so a correspondence between them is common inheritance and not two witnesses. Second against the Christian material: the mission arrives in 1820, the seminary at Lahainaluna is founded in 1831, and every work read here was written or printed after that by men trained in that school or by their successors. Absent was true of the islands before contact and false of the corpus this graph can cite.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: The Kumulipo in the Hawaiian text with Beckwith's edition; Malo, Moolelo Hawaii, in the Emerson translation and in the Langlas and Lyon edition; Emerson, Unwritten Literature of Hawaii; the Fornander Collection of Hawaiian Antiquities and Folk-Lore; Kamakau's series in Ke Au Okoa

Māori transmission
type: Tradition
label: Māori-Überlieferung @de
source: Edward Shortland, Maori Religion and Mythology (London: Longmans, Green, 1882)
definition: The Māori transmission of mana as an efficacy that attaches to persons and things, of tapu as its restriction, and of karakia as the form of address.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read is Shortland 1882, chapters II to V and the appendix, in the 1882 London edition. Chapters VI and VII, on claiming and naming land, were not read; nothing else of the principal corpus was opened.
note: The contact route is entered as disputed and no longer as absent, and the reason is a rule of this project rather than a judgement about Polynesia. pm:contactRouteAbsent asks whether a route was available for the period in which the corpus was fixed. This corpus was fixed in writing from the eighteen-forties onward, a generation after the first mission stations, by Māori writers and by European recorders working with mission orthography. Shortland himself reports a rite of removing tapu that was carried out with a Christian morning service inside it and adds that the teacher had done wisely in keeping so much of the old ceremonial; that is not a suspicion about the material but an observation printed in the witness. The transmission is older than the contact; the corpus this graph can cite is not. See prima-materia#102 for the same question across the rest of the registry, and prima-materia#108 for the source criticism that decides it.
note: The word from which every western theory of an impersonal magical force was built. The graph uses the notion throughout and has never held the tradition it came from.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Ngā Mōteatea; Best, The Maori; Best, Tuhoe

Daoist tradition
type: Tradition
label: Daoistische Überlieferung @de
source: Xingqi yupei ming (jade inscription on circulating the qi)
definition: The transmission of Chinese texts and practices concerned with the cultivation and circulation of qi.
note: Deliberately not documented. From the arrival of Buddhism in China the route is plain and the file's material lies mostly after it; for the earlier strata it is not, and the whole independence value of the Chinese material hangs on where that line falls.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The citations of the jade inscription name the work they were read in. Three passages stood without an edition because it was no longer recoverable, and the file said so rather than guessing. One of the three has since been reopened: Zhuangzi 4 was read at the wording in Legge's translation of eighteen ninety-one and now carries it, and the reopening turned up three renderings of the term the passage ends on. Baopuzi neipian 8 and Chen Zhixu's Jindan dayao are still unopened; for the Jindan dayao the juan division is itself edition-dependent.
note: Thin on purpose, and the thinness is the finding. Of the material this tradition is credited with, two places could be run down to a text that names its own words: the jade inscription, which is the earliest datable witness located for a deliberate circulation of qi through the body, and the eighth chapter of the Baopuzi, which states the manner of the breathing in terms an examination could take hold of. How early the inscription is remains contested, and the dispute node holds that. What is widely reported and was not run down to a citable passage stays out rather than being approximated: the absorption of solar, lunar and stellar qi (fuqi) and the abstention from grain (bigu) are recorded at prima-materia#17, not here.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered

Dogon transmission
type: Tradition
label: Dogon-Überlieferung @de
source: Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius, Journal de la Société des Africanistes 20/2 (Paris: Société des Africanistes, 1950), pp. 273-294
definition: The Dogon transmission of a renewal of the world celebrated once in sixty years, of the ways by which the interval is counted, and of a seed-star said to be the smallest and the heaviest of things.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read is Griaule and Dieterlen 1950 in full, pp. 273-294 of the first printing, in the digitised page images of the journal. Nothing else of the principal corpus was opened: neither Dieu d'eau, nor Masques dogons, nor Le renard pâle, nor Les âmes des Dogon. The Sirius article was chosen first because it is the single text the outside reception rests on.
note: The contact route is entered as disputed and no longer as absent. The reason is in the article and not in a later judgement about it: on p. 282 the recorders attach to the fifty-year orbit a footnote observing that this period lies very close to that of the companion of Sirius, and they cite a French astronomical periodical of 1931 for it. Whatever the informants said, the account that reached print was written by readers of European astronomy, and the central enquiry ran from 1946 to 1950 in a region under French administration with a mission station in it. A route to the material this graph already holds therefore exists at the point where the corpus was fixed, and it runs through the recorders. See prima-materia#102 for the same question across the rest of the registry.
note: The registration named van Beek's re-study as part of the principal corpus. That was wrong under SPEC §14: a field re-study is a procedure with an outcome that could have gone otherwise, which makes it evidence and not testimony. It has been removed from the corpus here and stands at pm:evidenceFrom on the examination node instead.
note: The tradition most widely reported outside itself, and reported wrongly. Registered in this graph from the start as the standing warning of the whole registry, because a body of teaching that circulated for decades as ancient African astronomy could not be found by later workers among the people it was ascribed to.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Griaule, Masques dogons; Griaule, Dieu d'eau; Griaule and Dieterlen, Le renard pâle; Dieterlen, Les âmes des Dogon; Griaule and Dieterlen, Un système soudanais de Sirius

Positing
type: Class
label: Setzen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: A claim held in the graph solely so that a protocol has something to address. It witnesses no transmission, claims no source, and belongs to no tradition.
note: The class exists because a protocol needs an object and because the claims most worth examining are often the ones no received work carries. It is deliberately narrow: an instance may exist only where a pm:Testing points at it, enforced by pm:PositingRequiresExaminationShape. Without that restriction the class would become the channel through which an unpublished draft enters the record after all, and the direction the project runs in would be reversed.

Scale
type: Class
label: Skala @de
definition: A class whose instances form a closed set of permitted values. A property whose range is a scale takes one of that scale's declared instances and nothing else.
note: Closure is the point. rdfs:range states an intention and constrains nothing; until pm:ScaleValueShape was written, a misspelt or invented value passed validation in silence and was indistinguishable from a declared one.

Tibetan tantric tradition
type: Tradition
label: Tibetisch-tantrische Überlieferung @de
source: Tsongkhapa, A Book of Three Inspirations (trans. Mullin 2005)
definition: The transmission of the Indian tantric completion-stage practices in Tibet, of which the six yogas of Nāropa are the best documented cycle.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The Tsongkhapa and Bar do thos grol citations name the translation they were read in. For Patrul Rinpoche's Kun bzang bla ma'i zhal lung neither edition nor translation is recorded, and the citation names no chapter; it is left unstated rather than guessed and the passage is to be reopened.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Fon vodun transmission
type: Tradition
label: Fon-Vodun-Überlieferung @de
source: A. B. Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa (London: Chapman and Hall, 1890), p. 97
definition: The Fon and Ewe transmission of powers received into a person and of bound objects that act, together with the Fa oracle, in which sixteen palm nuts are cast until a figure is read off the count that remains in the hand.
note: Chosen from the registry on the independence entrance, and the reading corrected that entrance. The contact route is entered as documented and no longer as absent, and the route runs to a transmission this graph already holds: the eastern Ewe are said to divine after the manner of the Yoruba god of divination, and the Fa practitioner is identified by a second and independent witness with the Egba babalawo. An agreement between the Fa figures and the Ifá figures is therefore reception and may not be counted twice.
note: Read in this run at the wording: Ellis 1890, printed pages fifty-seven to fifty-nine, ninety-one to ninety-eight; Skertchly 1874, printed pages three hundred and seventy-nine to three hundred and eighty and four hundred and seventy-three to four hundred and seventy-six; Burton 1864, volume two, printed pages one hundred and forty-three to one hundred and forty-five. The remainder of each work was searched by term and not read continuously.
note: The recorder problem. Two of the three are visitors of weeks or months who wrote for a European public and did not command the language; the third is a colonial officer and linguist who corrects the other two on terminology and who was himself in the country. Where they agree the agreement is worth something, because they did not work from one another on these points; where they differ, as they do on the width of the divining board and on the reading of the marks, the difference is recorded rather than smoothed.
note: Two works that carry the centre of this transmission were not reachable in this run and the corpus names them all the same. The chapter in which Burton describes the casting in detail stands in volume one, and neither reachable digitisation of that volume carries it; the volume-two text read here refers to it. The systematic work on the oracle, Maupoil 1943, has no free full text at all, and the Fa chapter of Herskovits 1938 stands in a volume two that is available only on loan. The file therefore rests on two travellers and one missionary-linguist, which is a thinner base than the Kongo file has, and says so.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Ellis, The Ewe-speaking Peoples of the Slave Coast of West Africa; Burton, A Mission to Gelele, King of Dahome; Skertchly, Dahomey as it is; Spieth, Die Ewe-Stämme, and Die Religion der Eweer in Süd-Togo; Le Hérissé, L'ancien royaume du Dahomey; Maupoil, La géomancie à l'ancienne Côte des Esclaves; Herskovits, Dahomey: An Ancient West African Kingdom

Naming
type: Class
label: Benennen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act, within a tradition, of naming an addressable being: the name as a received work gives it, together with what that work takes the bearer to be.
note: Not a substance class in disguise. What is held is the act of naming and what a transmission says under that name, not a being asserted to exist. The graph reports that a work names Asael and calls him a watcher; it asserts no watcher.
note: Three things must not collapse into one, and this class holds only the first two. The bearer and the name form belong here. The operative claim — that invoking under this name does something — stays a pm:Yielding whose practice is the invocation, because that claim needs its own falsifying condition and its own protocol.
note: Variants between recensions are not smoothed into a lead form. Where two editions give different names for what a reader takes to be one bearer, that is a pm:Disputing node, by the same rule SPEC §10 sets for diverging text: an averaged node reports a witness nobody gives.
note: pm:ascribedTo deliberately keeps no rdfs:range. Where the bearer is a named being it points at an instance of this class; where it is humanity before a stated event, or a class of beings the source does not name, it points elsewhere, and a range would have forced those cases out of the record or into a name nobody gave them.

Śaiva and Śākta tantra
type: Tradition
label: Śaiva- und Śākta-Tantra @de
source: Pūrṇānanda, Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa (1577)
definition: The transmission of the Śaiva and Śākta tantric corpus and its Kashmirian exegesis.
note: A caution governs everything read out of this tradition. What is old is a set of subtle centres carrying seed syllables, and the older tantras vary in how many they count. The fixed system of seven centres with spectral colours and assigned psychological qualities belongs to the twentieth century and to no tantra; it is held in this file as pmc:SevenCentreQualityMapping so that it is available as what it is, and it must not be read back into the material it was built on.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The Vijñānabhairava citations name the numbering they were read in. For the Ṣaṭcakranirūpaṇa, the Tantrāloka, the Tantrasāra and the Mālinīvijayottaratantra the edition is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed; those passages are to be reopened, and the chapter divisions of the Kashmirian exegesis are edition-dependent.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Inuit angakkuq transmission
type: Tradition
label: Inuitische Angakkuq-Überlieferung @de
source: Knud Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos, Report of the Fifth Thule Expedition 1921-24, VII.1, trans. W. Worster (Copenhagen: Gyldendalske Boghandel, Nordisk Forlag, 1929), pp. 19-32
definition: The Inuit transmission of an office whose holder is said to perceive what is hidden, to call up helping spirits and to act through them, acquired through solitude and privation and exercised for a household rather than for an institution.
note: Contact route, stated rather than assumed. No route is proposed by anyone between the Iglulik Inuit and the literate transmissions this graph already holds, and none is available for the doctrinal content. The corpus was nevertheless fixed in nineteen twenty-one and twenty-two, well after contact: the narrative itself names whalers, and the region was under mission influence at the time of the recording. The value here is therefore contact-route-disputed and not contact-route-absent, following the correction made for the Māori entry, and the tradition may not be counted as a party to a convergence until the dispute stands as its own node. See prima-materia#101 and prima-materia#102.
note: Read in the opening of the volume: the account of the working method, the first meeting near Repulse Bay, the old singer Ivaluardjuk, and the autobiography of Takornâq, printed pages ten to thirty-two. The chapters on the shamans, on the spirits and on the taboo system, which carry the terms this tradition is usually reported by, were not reached in this run. The limit is one of the access path and not of the work: the volume is digitised and public, and the portion delivered by the tool in use broke off at printed page thirty-two. See prima-materia#99 and prima-materia#100.
note: The material read is testimony of an unusual kind for this graph. It is not a doctrinal corpus but a life story told in the first person by a woman who is herself said to have practised, recorded by an ethnographer who spoke a related language and worked without an interpreter. What that buys is a speaker attached to each claim; what it costs is that almost every capacity is ascribed by the narrator to somebody else, which is why the nodes below stand on third-party ascription and not on first-person report.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Iglulik Eskimos; Rasmussen, Intellectual Culture of the Caribou Eskimos

Pātañjala Yoga
type: Tradition
label: Pātañjala-Yoga @de
source: Patañjali, Yogasūtra
definition: The transmission of the Yogasūtra of Patañjali and its commentarial literature.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. Only Yogasūtra III.38 carries the edition it was read from; it was reopened in the Sanskrit for that purpose. For every other citation in this file, and for the Yogabhāṣya, the edition or translation the passage was read from is not recoverable: the session that entered them did not record it, and it cannot be reconstructed from the wording of the nodes. It is stated here rather than guessed, because an edition entered by inference would be a claim about the compiler's work that is not true. Until the passages are reopened, the verse numbers in this file stand on the received four-pāda division and nothing further.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Sámi noaidi transmission
type: Tradition
label: Samische Noaidi-Überlieferung @de
source: Johannes Schefferus, The History of Lapland (Oxford: at the Theater, 1674), chap. XI, Of the magicall Ceremonies of the Laplanders, pp. 45-47
definition: The Sámi transmission of a drum read by the travel of a ring across painted figures, of an office entered through a threefold seizure, and of a journey to a distant place undertaken while the body lies as if dead and from which a token is brought back.
note: Read in this run, both at the wording: the compilation of sixteen seventy-four in its Oxford English edition, chapter VIII on the religion and chapter XI on the magical ceremonies; and the account of Danish Lapland of seventeen sixty-seven in the English translation printed in a collection of eighteen hundred and eight, its chapter on the magic arts. Left unread: the remaining thirty-three chapters of the first and the remaining twenty-two of the second, and the treatise on the pagan religion of the Finns and Lapps printed with the second.
note: The contact route is entered as documented and no longer as undecided, and the ground is inside the practice rather than around it. By seventeen sixty-seven a named practitioner marked himself and his drum with the sign of the cross, said the Lord's Prayer over it and invoked God the Father, the Son and an angel before striking it. That is a route to the Christian material this graph already holds, visible in the operation itself and not inferred from proximity. It says nothing about the route to the Siberian material or to the Norse, which is the question the registry entry meant and which is still not carried out; the predicate is single-valued and cannot hold both answers, so it holds the stronger. See prima-materia#101.
note: The recorder of seventeen sixty-seven applies source criticism to his own material, and it is entered here because it is rare and because it bears on how the rest of this file is to be read. Of the confessions of witchcraft in the Norwegian trials he says that it is probable they were extorted, partly by violence and fear, and that it appears from the law books that some were put to the torture before they would confess. He then separates that material from what he goes on to report of the Sámi themselves. The separation is his and it is the reason the trial material is not in this file.
note: The two are of different kinds and that is why both were opened. The first was written by a professor at Uppsala who never went to Lapland, on the commission of the Chancellor of Sweden, out of the written reports of parish priests whom he names in the text — so what it carries is at one remove and its author says so. The second was written by a missionary who lived among the people he describes and who reports named practitioners in their own words. The first is a compilation with a stated method; the second is first-hand and confessional. Where the two agree, the agreement is worth something; where the first stands alone, it stands on reports it names but this graph has not seen.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Schefferus, Lapponia, in the English edition The History of Lapland; Leem, Beskrivelse over Finmarkens Lapper; the eighteenth-century missionary manuscripts of Skanke and Randulf; Jessen, De religione paganorum Fennorum et Lapponum

Originating
type: Class
label: Urheben @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of first putting forward a claim that no transmission carries, in a work that can be named and dated, where the claim afterwards circulates as though it were old.
note: Distinct from pm:Systematizing, which arranges material that was already there and names what it arranges. An origination arranges nothing: the claim begins with it. Holding the two apart is what keeps the record from reporting an invention as an ordering of something ancient, which is the commonest way a modern construction acquires a warrant.
note: The circulating ascription is the point of the class, not an addendum to it. A node that names only the author and the work is a bibliography; a node that also names what the claim is taken for is the finding, and it is the kind of finding this project exists to make.

European folk magic
type: Tradition
label: Europäische Volksmagie @de
source: Johann Georg Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund (Reading, Pa.: gedruckt für den Verfasser, 1820)
source: John George Hohman, The Long Lost Friend (Harrisburg, Pa., 1850), the literal English translation of the preceding
definition: The transmission of household charms, blessings and remedies in printed handbooks passed from hand to hand, in which the words are given together with the conditions of time, silence and material under which they are to be used.
note: Read for the first time in two printings of one handbook and in the booklet that stands behind it: Hohman's Der lange verborgene Freund in the Reading printing of eighteen twenty, its Harrisburg translation of eighteen fifty, and the Romanus-Büchlein first dated to Glatz seventeen eighty-eight. The reading was directed by term through the full text of both Hohman printings and not carried page by page; the pharmacological recipes, which state no condition and claim no capacity, were passed over. The remaining works named in the principal corpus were not opened.
note: The two Hohman printings are held apart deliberately. They differ at two places where the difference falls on the examinable part of a claim, and both differences stand in this file as their own nodes rather than being smoothed into one reading.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: The Merseburg charms; Lacnunga; Bald's Leechbook; Romanusbüchlein; Sechstes und Siebtes Buch Mosis; Hohman, Der lange verborgene Freund

Disputing
type: Class
label: Bestreiten @de
subclass of: Process
definition: A disagreement about a claim, carried on within a tradition, between traditions, or among the scholars who edit their texts.
note: Without this class a disagreement can only be recorded by silently preferring one side, or by leaving the claim out because it is contested. Both losses are worse than the disagreement. A dispute node names what is at issue and cites each side, and a dispute with only one source cited is not a dispute.

Maya ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Maya-Ritualüberlieferung @de
source: Ralph L. Roys, The Book of Chilam Balam of Chumayel (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1967), chapter IX, pp. 89-98
definition: The Maya transmission of creation, of the calendar as a moving structure of obligation, of divination by counting seeds, and of an examination in a figurative language by which the right to rule was said to be decided.
note: A witness of this corpus is therefore a witness for the period of its fixation and not for the period it describes. The strongest case is Landa: the autograph of 1566 is lost, what survives is an anonymous copy, and the thesis that the surviving text is a compilation of the seventeenth or eighteenth century out of Landa's papers is in the literature and not answered here. See prima-materia#461.
note: Registered at corpus named until this file was written, and moved here on the first passages actually read. What was read at the wording: the Chumayel, chapter IX, in the Roys translation; Landa in the Gates translation, sections XXVII, XXXVII and XL; the Popol Vuh in the Goetz and Morley version of the Recinos translation, part I chapter 2 and part II chapters 7 to 9. What was not opened: the Ritual of the Bacabs, the Dresden Codex, the Tizimin and Mani books, and Landa section XXVI. The reasons stand in the issues named in the harvest note of prima-materia#458.
note: The contact route is entered as disputed and no longer as absent, and that correction is the finding of this run rather than a formality. Absent asks whether a route was available in the period in which the corpus was fixed, and every work read here was fixed after 1524: Landa's account survives only in a later copy, the Popol Vuh only in the hand of a Dominican of 1701 to 1703, the Chumayel in a compilation signed at Chumayel in 1782. That the Chilam Balam books received European material is not a suspicion but a philological result, demonstrated for the almanac and zodiac material of the Kaua book against named Spanish printed sources. Against that stands an argument for continuity in the incantation genres, which was not decided here. See prima-materia#459 and prima-materia#460.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Popol Vuh in the Ximenez manuscript; the Books of Chilam Balam; the Dresden Codex; the Ritual of the Bacabs; Landa, Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, as the account of an outside observer

Midewiwin
type: Tradition
source: Walter James Hoffman, The Midē'wiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa, Seventh Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1891), pp. 143-300
definition: The Anishinaabe medicine society, with graded degrees and a mnemonic record incised on birchbark.
note: Read in the report of nineteen ninety-one for the first time, pages 143 to about 180 of the printed text: the account of the society, of the initiation, of the four degrees and of the pictographic charts. The song scrolls, the medicine formulas and the extensive appended vocabularies were not read. The recorder worked among the Ojibwa in eighteen eighty-seven to eighteen eighty-nine; his chief informants are named in the report, the principal one a second-degree priest of Mille Lacs first initiated about eighteen thirty.
note: The birchbark scrolls are a written transmission by their own means, which puts this tradition closer to the project's source rule than most of the registry it came from.
note: The contact route is entered as disputed and not as absent. What is disputed is the age of the society itself, not a route to any tradition this graph holds: one side reads it as a nativistic formation of the contact period, the other points to a dated scroll fragment from before any documented European contact in the region. The dispute stands as its own node below, which is what pm:contactRouteDisputed requires before an agreement may be weighed at all. Note that the axis of the dispute and the axis a convergence asks about are not the same axis; see prima-materia#101.
contact route: Contact route disputed
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: The birchbark scroll record; Hoffman, The Midewiwin or Grand Medicine Society of the Ojibwa

Ethiopian Orthodox magical transmission
type: Tradition
label: Äthiopisch-orthodoxe Zaubertradition @de
source: E. A. Wallis Budge (ed.), The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, and the Life of Hanna (Saint Anne), and the Magical Prayers of Aheta Mikael (Lady Meux Manuscripts Nos. 2-5; London: W. Griggs, 1900), Lady Meux MS No. 5, pp. 216-220
definition: The Geez transmission of protective prayers written on strips of parchment and worn on the body, in which lists of divine and angelic names are said to keep off named harms, and in which the name of the person the roll was written for stands in every prayer.
note: Contact route kept at documented, and now carried twice over. The registration argued it from the Enochic book, whose fullest witness is the Ethiopic one and which this graph already holds. The reading adds a second and closer route: the story that grounds the seventh prayer, in which Susenyos on horseback kills the child-killer Werzelya and takes an oath from her, is the Ethiopian station of a legend transmitted in Greek, Coptic, Syriac, Armenian and Slavonic. That the parallels exist was established in the landscape stage of this run and not read at the wording; the comparative works are named in an issue rather than asserted here.
note: Read for the first time in one edited volume: the nine prayers of Lady Meux MS No. 5, written for the woman Aheta Mikael, and the three supplementary rolls printed with them in the same volume. The English translations were read at the wording, page by page, from p. 216 to p. 220 for the Meux roll and from p. LIV to p. LXV for the three supplementary rolls, the third of which is a litany that runs on past the point where the summaries of the other two end. What was not read: the Geez texts printed at the end of the volume, because the reading is of the translation and the edition is named accordingly; and the greater part of the volume, which carries the Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary and the Life of Hanna and is a different corpus.
note: The remaining works named in the principal corpus were not opened in this run. The Lefafa Sedeq is the chief absence and it is a large one: Budge printed it separately in 1929 and that volume is in full view on HathiTrust under the identifiers of the Indiana and Michigan copies, so it is reachable in the sense of SPEC 15 and its absence here is a property of this run and not of the work.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Lefafa Sedeq; the asmat scroll corpus; the Geez canon

Contact route disputed
type: Contact route
label: Kontaktweg strittig @de
definition: A route has been proposed and is contested in the scholarship. Agreement counts as neither reception nor independent attestation until the dispute is entered as its own node.

Ars Notoria
type: Tradition
source: Ars Notoria: The Notory Art of Solomon, trans. Robert Turner (London: J. Cottrel, 1657), in the digital edition of Joseph H. Peterson
definition: The transmission of a set of orations, said on prescribed days of the moon and at prescribed hours, held to confer the liberal arts, eloquence, memory and understanding within a stated term, and bound to conditions of solitude, silence, fasting and freedom from crime.
note: Read for the first time in Robert Turner's English translation, London 1657, in the digital edition of Joseph H. Peterson, which carries the printed pagination and the Latin of the Agrippa text beside it; the wording of every passage cited here was additionally checked against the optical text of the 1657 printing itself. Liber Juratus Honorii was not opened, and neither was the critical Latin edition of Véronèse.
note: The version read is incomplete in a way that bears on every claim in this file. Both Turner's translation and the Latin of the Agrippa printing omit the notae, the figures which the text itself calls the centre of the art; the orations are given and the drawings they accompany are not. What was read is therefore the verbal half of a procedure whose other half is missing, and no claim entered here can be carried out from this witness alone.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Ars Notoria in the medieval recensions; Liber Juratus Honorii

Andean transmission
type: Tradition
label: Andine Überlieferung @de
source: Pablo Joseph de Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú (Lima: Gerónymo de Contreras, 1621), cap. II, the summary of what is worshipped
definition: The Andean transmission of huacas as powers that are addressed and answer, of camac as the making and animating that a huaca is invoked by, and of the graded specialists who speak with them, fast for them and hear confession before them.
note: Left unread: chapters VIII to XIII and XV to XX of the extirpation account, which are about the causes of idolatry and the conduct of the visitation rather than about what is transmitted; the whole of the report on the Incas apart from the section on the specialists; and the rest of the chronicle of sixteen fifteen. The Quechua prose of Huarochirí, which is the one document of this transmission written in its own language, was not opened at all: neither the manuscript nor any of its three standard translations could be reached in full text, which is a property of the works and is recorded as its own issue.
note: Read in this run, all three at the wording: the account of the extirpation of idolatry of sixteen twenty-one, chapters I to VII and XIV, in a digitised copy of the first edition; the report on the fables and rites of the Incas of about fifteen seventy-five, in the critical edition of two thousand and ten, at the folios given; and the chapter on the sorcerers of this kingdom in the autograph chronicle of sixteen fifteen, in the transcription published with the manuscript by its holding library, at the author's own page numbers.
note: The contact route is entered as undecided and no longer as absent. The registry's absent was not wrong about the Andes before fifteen thirty-two; it was wrong about the corpus. Every word of this transmission that can be read was written down after the conquest, and two of the three recorders wrote in order to destroy what they described. The categories they carried in — sin, confession, penance, priesthood, the devil — are the categories under which the material is reported, and the confession complex entered below is exactly where that matters most. Whether a validity test for a confession is Andean, or Christian confession seen through an Andean procedure, or an Andean procedure seen through Christian confession, is not decidable from these three witnesses, and the entry says so rather than settling it by silence.
note: The first edition of the extirpation account carries folio numbers that its digitisation does not reproduce reliably, so the places below are given by chapter and by the passage within it. A modern transcription of the same text was held alongside to disambiguate the reading of the sixteen twenty-one type; the two give the same wording at every place used here. No place rests on the transcription alone.
note: The third recorder states his own provenance and it cuts both ways. He writes that he knows what he reports about the priesthood because he served the visitor general who destroyed the huacas of the kingdom. That makes him a witness from inside the transmission who learned much of what he reports while helping to extinguish it, which is a stronger warrant than either priest for the terminology and a weaker one for the practice.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: The Huarochirí manuscript; Arriaga, Extirpación de la idolatría del Pirú; Molina, Relación de las fábulas y ritos de los incas; Guaman Poma de Ayala, Nueva corónica y buen gobierno; Polo de Ondegardo, Los errores y supersticiones de los indios; Cobo, Historia del Nuevo Mundo, book XIII

Awareness Axis Value
type: Class
label: Wert einer Bewusstseinsachse @de
definition: A value on one of the awareness axes. The class exists so that a single constraint can keep pm:axisValue to the declared coordinates; every value below carries it alongside the axis it belongs to.

Attributing
type: Class
label: Zuschreiben @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act of ascribing a capacity, property, or deed to a subject. A lost faculty is never a finding; it is an ascription made in a work, and the work is what the graph can hold.

Azande oracular transmission
type: Tradition
label: Azande-Orakelüberlieferung @de
source: E. E. Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande, abridged by Eva Gillies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), appendix I, the list of Zande terms, pp. 226-228
definition: The Zande transmission of witchcraft as an inherited substance in the body, of a graded set of oracles by which it is located, and of a corroborative second question by which an oracular verdict is held valid or void.
note: Chosen from the registry on the testability entrance rather than on demand. The transmission states a condition under which its own principal oracle delivers no verdict at all, names eight causes to which a failure is attributed, and prints two consultations at length so that a reader may count the outcomes for himself. Very little else in this graph names a failure condition its own practitioners apply.
note: Read in this run: the abridged edition of nineteen seventy-six in full for chapters I, III, V, VI, VIII, IX and X and for the appendix of terms and the appendix on dreams. Left unread in that edition: chapters IV, VII, XI, XII and XIII, on whether witches are conscious agents, on the place of witch-doctors in the society, on magic and medicines, on the association for communal magic, and on the situation of death; and the third appendix. The unabridged edition of nineteen thirty-seven was not opened: it is in copyright and stands in the large archives only as a lending copy or as a search-only index, which is a property of the work and not of the search. Every place below is therefore given from the abridged edition, and the abridgement is named in each reference because an abridgement is a selection and a later reader must be able to see that he is looking at one.
note: The contact route is entered as undecided and no longer as absent, and the correction is not a finding but the removal of one: the registry had recorded no route because none had been looked for. What a search finds is on both sides. Against a route: the poison oracle stands already in the earliest account, taken down at the first sustained European contact, so it cannot have entered with that contact. For a route: the same monograph places the belief in a witchcraft substance in the body among many peoples of Central and West Africa and calls Zandeland the north-eastern limit of its distribution, which is an areal connection to the West African sphere in which this graph already holds a transmission; and the corridor from the Islamic north was open from the eighteen-sixties, since the earliest witness travelled in with an ivory company out of Khartoum. Neither has been carried out for the oracular material in particular. Until it is, an agreement between this tradition and anything already in the graph counts as neither reception nor independent attestation.
note: Two further witnesses were opened for the counter-search and are cited where they carry something: the travel account of eighteen seventy-three, which is the earliest European description of these oracles and predates the anthropological literature by two generations, and the Belgian ethnography of nineteen twenty-one, which describes the same transmission from the other side of the colonial border and sixteen years earlier than the monograph. Both were read at the wording in full-text reproductions of the printed editions named in the references.
contact route: Contact route undecided
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Evans-Pritchard, Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic among the Azande; de Calonne-Beaufaict, Azande; Larken, An account of the Zande, in Sudan Notes and Records; Lagae, Les Azande ou Niam-Niam

Haṭhayoga
type: Tradition
source: Svātmārāma, Haṭhayogapradīpikā (Sanskrit vulgate; Sinh 1915)
definition: The transmission of the Haṭhayogapradīpikā of Svātmārāma and the manuals around it.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. Every verse cited in this file was read in the Sanskrit of the widely circulated vulgate, in the recension that the 1915 edition and translation of Sinh carries, and each citation now says so. The critical edition drawn from the manuscript tradition numbers differently in places; pmc:HathapradipikaRecensionDispute holds what is at issue.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Theravāda
type: Tradition
source: Buddhaghosa, Visuddhimagga (trans. Ñāṇamoli 1956)
definition: The transmission of the Pāli canon and its commentarial literature, of which the Visuddhimagga of Buddhaghosa is the systematising handbook.
note: Edition finding, prima-materia#45. The Visuddhimagga citations name the translation they were read from, and Dīgha Nikāya 2 was reopened for this purpose. For Majjhima Nikāya 118, Dīgha Nikāya 11 and Vinaya, Cūḷavagga V.8 the edition or translation is not recoverable and is left unstated rather than guessed; those three passages are to be reopened.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Process
type: Class
label: Prozess @de
definition: The root class of all ongoing acts modelled by prima-materia. Every substantive class in the ontology is a subclass of pm:Process.

Kongo nkisi transmission
type: Tradition
label: Kongolesische Nkisi-Überlieferung @de
source: John H. Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo (London: Seeley, Service and Co., 1914), pp. 230-231
definition: The Lower Congo and Loango transmission of composed objects charged to act, whose power is held to be renewed by sacrifice and destroyed by the breaking of a stated prohibition, and of a poison ordeal by which an accusation of witchcraft is decided at an outcome the operator is not supposed to control.
note: Chosen from the registry on the independence entrance. What the reading found is that the entrance was mistaken for this transmission and the correction is the chief finding of the run: the contact route is entered as documented and no longer as absent, and it is documented from inside the corpus and not from the scholarship. The word the transmission uses for a charged object is the word the old Catholic mission chose for holy, and the mission called its own churches nzo ankisi; the Kongo name for the devil is stated to have stood for four hundred years; the image of the Virgin in the church at San Salvador is addressed for a child like any other charged thing, and the crosses, discs and pictures given out by the priests are called by the same word as an amulet. A transmission whose central term was in liturgical use for four centuries cannot be counted as a witness without a route.
note: One work could not be read where it should have been. The digitised text of Bentley 1900 volume one that was reachable breaks between printed page two hundred and thirty-seven and printed page two hundred and seventy-four, and the chapter on the charged objects themselves lies inside that gap, as does the passage in which a retiring witch-doctor is said to have put a number on her own false denunciations. The gap belongs to the copy and not to the work, so the pages are owed and stand as an issue, not as a property of the work.
note: Read in this run at the wording: in Weeks 1914 the two chapters on magic and on charms and their prohibitions, printed pages two hundred and sixteen to two hundred and fifty-one, and the chapter on divination and the ordeal, printed pages two hundred and sixty-one to two hundred and sixty-five; in Weeks, Folk-Lore volume twenty, printed pages fifty-one to fifty-eight; in Bentley 1900 volume one, printed pages two hundred and thirty-six to two hundred and thirty-seven and two hundred and seventy-four to two hundred and ninety-three; in Dennett 1906, printed pages twenty-four to twenty-five, seventy-three to seventy-seven, eighty-three, eighty-six to ninety-three and one hundred and forty-seven to one hundred and forty-eight. The rest of each work was searched by term for the owed kinds and was not read continuously; that is a decision and not an exhaustion.
note: The corpus is widened at the instance and the coined identifier is kept. The registration named the Laman notebooks in Kikongo and Laman, The Kongo; neither was opened. The four volumes are in any case a derivative rather than a source, since the notebooks were sorted, cut and fused in making them, and what a later run must obtain is the individual notebook with its author and district. What was read instead is four public-domain works of the years eighteen ninety-five to nineteen fourteen, three of them by men resident in the country for decades.
note: The recorder problem is stated here rather than left in the sources. All four works are by outsiders: two Baptist missionaries at San Salvador and in the Ngombe Lutete district, and a trader on the Loango coast. Two consequences run in opposite directions and both are kept. The missionaries report the transmission as an evil to be ended, and every judgement of theirs is to be weighed separately from their observations. But their reports of fraud, of doubt among the people, and of promises that failed are reports against the interest of the thing they were describing and not for it, and they are the part of the corpus this graph can least afford to lose.
note: Two speech communities stand in one file and the file says so rather than smoothing it. Weeks and Bentley record Kikongo-speaking Bakongo of the Lower Congo around San Salvador, Wathen and Ngombe Lutete; Dennett records Vili-speaking Bavili of Loango, whose orthography differs and who write nkici where the others write nkisi or nkixi. Dennett states that the overlord of Maluango was the ruler of Kongo, so the two stand in one documented sphere; whether the Loango transmission is to be registered as its own is a decision that has not been taken and is held as an issue.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Weeks, Among the Primitive Bakongo; Weeks, Notes on Some Customs of the Lower Congo People, in Folk-Lore, vols. XIX-XX; Bentley, Pioneering on the Congo, and the Appendix to the Dictionary and Grammar of the Kongo Language; Dennett, At the Back of the Black Man's Mind, and Notes on the Folklore of the Fjort; the Laman notebooks in Kikongo, with Laman, The Kongo, as the derivative made from them

Siberian shamanic transmission
type: Tradition
label: Sibirische Schamanenüberlieferung @de
source: S. M. Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co., 1935), chap. XXII, sect. 95, pp. 271-274
definition: The Tungus and Manchu transmission of an office whose holder is defined as a master of spirits rather than as one they possess, entered through an illness that resolves only on acceptance, carried by a drum and a brass mirror, and conferred by a formal recognition that a candidate can fail.
note: Read in this run at the wording: the monograph of nineteen thirty-five, chapters XXII to XXXI, that is the whole of the part on shamanism, pages 268 to 402, in the London edition of that year. Left unread: parts one to three, pages 49 to 240, on positive knowledge, on the hypotheses and on the practical consequences of the hypotheses, which carry the system of spirits this part presupposes; the introduction, pages 1 to 48, which is missing from the digitised copy used; and the whole of the Sakha material named in the registration, which the author does not carry.
note: That correction is the reason the entry was worth opening first. The registration noted that this is the region the word shaman was taken from and that the graph used the category while holding no witness from its source. What the source says is that the complex it names is comparatively recent and largely borrowed. Every convergence in this graph that leans on a Siberian parallel is affected by it, and the affected nodes are exactly the ones nobody would have checked.
note: The author is one recorder and not a chorus. He worked among the Tungus of Manchuria and Transbaikalia and among the Manchus over some twenty years, in their languages, and he says at the outset which groups he saw and which he did not. Where he gives his own reconstruction rather than what he was told, the notes on the nodes below say so.
note: The contact route is entered as documented and no longer as undecided, and this is the finding of the run rather than a formality. The route runs through the instruments and through the word. The brass mirror without which no performance is possible is bought from the Mongols, who receive them from China and Tibet, and it is the same object that Lamaism uses on its altars; the headdress of the Tungus of Manchuria carries five images of Buddha; the term burkan, applied to a great number of spirits, is the Mongol modification of Buddha; and the word saman itself is traced by the author to sramana through the Chinese san-men. A tradition whose indispensable instrument, whose spirit vocabulary and whose own name run to a corpus this graph already holds cannot be counted as an independent witness for anything they share.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Shirokogoroff, Psychomental Complex of the Tungus; Shirokogoroff, Social Organization of the Northern Tungus; the published Olonkho epics; Anisimov's field records

Field attestation
type: Attesting
label: Feldzeugnis @de
definition: The claim was taken down from a speaker in a transmission that commits nothing to writing, and the record of that taking down is the first fixation there is. The work a reader obtains is the field report; there is no earlier text behind it.
note: Distinct from pm:mediatedAttestation, and the difference is the whole reason for a separate mode. There the work exists and could not be obtained, so pm:readVia names whose reading stands between the claim and this graph. Here no such work exists: the transmission is oral, and the report is not an intermediary but the first witness. Fusing the two would enter every oral transmission as second-hand material about a text nobody can name.
note: Every claim carrying this mode must state the gathering with pm:fieldRecord, enforced by pm:FieldAttestationShape. Without it a field claim would be a citation of a book with no way to see how far it stands from the speaker.
note: It is not the mode for modern research. An ethnography enters here where it takes down testimony; where it runs a procedure with an outcome that could have fallen out otherwise, it is evidence and enters at pm:evidenceFrom on a pm:Testing node. A corpus that does both goes in twice, under different predicates. The line runs by function and not by the discipline of the writer, as SPEC §14 has it.
note: Restricted knowledge is a separate question and this mode does not settle it. Where a transmission holds material back as its own property rather than as a gate of authority, the criterion of SPEC §0 does not apply unchanged and a CC0 release would be an appropriation. The outcome may be that such a transmission stays at pm:corpusNamed permanently, and that is a finding and not an omission.
note: The mode exists because its absence had a direction. SPEC §10 asks for a received work with a passage, and the transmissions that carry no text are precisely those with no documented route to what this graph already holds — the only ones that can ever bear pm:independentAttestation. Leaving them at pm:corpusNamed for want of an admissible mode would have made the record report that only scribal cultures transmitted this knowledge, and every convergence claim of the project a claim about Eurasia. See prima-materia#91.

Lakota ritual transmission
type: Tradition
label: Lakota-Ritualüberlieferung @de
source: J. R. Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota (Anthropological Papers AMNH, vol. XVI, part II, New York, 1917), pp. 55-59
definition: The Lakota transmission of a vitalizing lodge that precedes every other rite, of a solitary fasting quest undertaken for a communication, of a graded sun-gazing ceremony whose completion is said to be answered within a stated term, and of small stones held to be sent out and to bring back word of what lies beyond sight.
note: A second witness was opened for the counter-search and is cited wherever it carries something: the bulletin of nineteen eighteen, recorded on the Standing Rock reservation from named men who had themselves danced. It is a different recorder, a different reservation and a partly different division of the tribe, and on one point it contradicts the first witness outright. Read in it at the wording: the Sun dance chapter, printed pages eighty-four to one hundred and fifty-one, the chapter on the sacred stones, printed pages two hundred and four to two hundred and eleven, and the account of Goose on printed pages two hundred and fifty-one and two hundred and fifty-two. The remainder, which is mostly musical analysis, was not read.
note: Chosen from the registry on the testability entrance rather than on demand. This transmission states a term within which the promised communication is to arrive, provides in as many words for the case in which the quest yields nothing, hangs the validity of its greatest ceremony on a sign in the weather, decides a contested declaration by an ordeal with a named outcome, and names the cause to which a failure of its instrument is attributed. Little else in this graph carries a deadline and a stated non-occurrence side by side.
note: Read in this run at the wording: the paper of nineteen seventeen in its expository part in full, printed pages fifty-one to one hundred and sixty-three, that is the Sun dance from the choosing of the mentor to the completion of the ceremony, the Hunka ceremony, the Buffalo ceremony, and the translated texts of Sword, Tyon, No-flesh and One-star together with the interview with Finger; and printed pages two hundred and seventeen to two hundred and nineteen, the two legends of the origin of the Buffalo ceremony. Left unread at the wording: the narratives on printed pages one hundred and sixty-four to two hundred and sixteen, which were passed over with a search for the four owed kinds and yielded none that the expository part does not already carry. That is a decision and not an exhaustion, and it is recorded so that a later reader can overturn it.
note: The contact route is entered as documented and no longer as absent, and the correction is the finding of this run. It is documented three times over and each time from inside the corpus. The compiler of the paper of nineteen seventeen states that Wakan Tanka, two words in the old speech designating a class of gods, has become one word in modern Lakota designating the God of the Christians, so the central term of the doctrine was already contaminated when it was written down. His chief informant wrote an autobiography saying that in war with the white people he found their Wakan Tanka superior, that he took the name Sword, joined the church and is a deacon in it. And the editor of the volume identifies the Hunka ceremony with the Pawnee Hako and notes that the Lakota year name which dates its present form corresponds to eighteen hundred and five and turns on the tail of a horse, so that the ceremony took that form after the horse. The route is single-valued and the value entered is the one that governs the doctrinal nodes; that the informants of the second witness on the sacred stones were medicine men on whom the missionaries had made no impression is recorded on those nodes and does not change it.
note: The recorder problem is stated here rather than left in the sources. The compiler writes that no one shaman was found who could give the mythology in a comprehensive or sequential manner, that the scheme was formulated with their aid, and that it was afterwards submitted to the informants for approval. A scheme formulated by the recorder and approved afterwards is an ordering act and not a transmitted doctrine, and it is entered below as one. The lodge, the quest, the ceremony, the ordeal and the stones carry their own passages and are untouched by it.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered
principal corpus: Walker, The Sun Dance and Other Ceremonies of the Oglala Division of the Teton Dakota, Anthropological Papers of the American Museum of Natural History, vol. XVI, part II; Densmore, Teton Sioux Music, Bureau of American Ethnology Bulletin 61; Brown, The Sacred Pipe; DeMallie, The Sixth Grandfather, as the record of the mediation

Stated necessity
type: Prerequisite Strength
label: Ausdrücklich gesetzte Notwendigkeit @de
definition: The source says what fails to happen without the prior step: that the later step is not possible, or does not arise, or turns harmful.

Procedure without cases
type: Examination State
label: Verfahren ohne Fälle @de
definition: A falsifying condition is stated and no case has yet been recorded against it.

Cautioning
type: Class
label: Warnen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The act, within a tradition, of warning against a capacity, a practice, or the pursuit of either.
note: Held as a node rather than as commentary, because what a tradition warns against is part of what it teaches. A record that carries only the capacities and not the cautions misreports the tradition it claims to hold.

Prescribed order
type: Prerequisite Strength
label: Angeordnete Reihenfolge @de
definition: The source instructs that one comes before the other, without saying what follows from disregarding it.

Yielding
type: Class
label: Hervorbringen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The claim, made within a tradition, that a named practice produces a named capacity.
note: Held as a node and not as an edge for the same reason pm:Attributing is: only a node can carry its own source, its own mode of attestation, and a protocol that tries to fail it. A bare edge would make every such claim look alike, whatever it rests on, and would leave nothing for pm:Testing to point at. The question of which capacities a practice actually develops is answerable only where the pairing itself is addressable.

Places entered
type: Coverage state
label: Stellen eingetragen @de
definition: At least one passage has been read in a named edition and entered as a node. This is the state in which a tradition begins to witness.

Situating
type: Class
label: Verorten @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The placement of a claim, a practice or a capacity at a value on an awareness axis. The node records the compiler's identification of a described condition with a coordinate, not the description itself.
note: Normally attested by pm:compilerInference. Textual attestation is available only where the source itself draws the distinction the axis draws — the Sufi division of what descends from what is attained is the clear case — and even then the wording that carries it belongs in pm:situationGround.

Enochic tradition
type: Tradition
label: Henochische Überlieferung @de
source: G.W.E. Nickelsburg, 1 Enoch 1 (Hermeneia, 2001), introduction
definition: The transmission of the Enoch literature: the Book of the Watchers, the Astronomical Book, the Book of Dreams, the Epistle and, in the Ethiopic canon alone, the Book of Parables.
contact route: Contact route documented
coverage state: Places entered

Testing
type: Class
label: Prüfen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: An ongoing attempt to fail a claim under a stated condition. A protocol that names no condition under which the claim would be refuted is not a test of it.
note: An instance exists only where somebody has taken the examination up, and its absence is therefore informative rather than empty: it says that no procedure has been taken up, not that the claim has been examined and found wanting. A stub for every claim in the collection would double the graph and say nothing the absence does not already say.

Compiler inference
type: Attesting
label: Schluss des Bearbeiters @de
definition: A conclusion drawn by an editor or compiler that the source does not state.
note: Admissible as attestation of an ordering act, never of the claim being ordered. Enforced by pm:AttributionShape.

Presupposing
type: Class
label: Voraussetzen @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The claim, made within a tradition, that one step of a path presupposes another: that a practice, state or capacity is not reached except by way of something else.
note: A node and not an edge, for the same reason as pm:Attributing and pm:Yielding. A prerequisite claim differs enormously in what carries it, and the difference is not visible on an edge. It matters whether a text sets an order or a reader inferred one from the order of the chapters.

Practicing
type: Class
label: Praktizieren @de
subclass of: Process
definition: An operative procedure enacted within a tradition.

Corpus named
type: Coverage state
label: Korpus benannt @de
definition: The transmission is registered and its principal corpus is named. No passage has been read, no edition has been settled, and no node stands under it. A tradition in this state witnesses nothing and may not be counted as a party to a convergence.

Contact route documented
type: Contact route
label: Kontaktweg belegt @de
definition: A route of transmission to traditions already held is documented. Agreement with them counts as reception.

Tradition
type: Class
subclass of: Process
definition: A knowledge tradition understood as an ongoing act of transmission rather than a static corpus.

Textual attestation
type: Attesting
label: Textzeugnis @de
definition: The claim stands in a received work, at a passage that can be cited and read independently of this graph.

Conceptualizing
type: Class
label: Begriffsbildung @de
subclass of: Process
definition: The formation of a concept as an act within awareness; instances of this class are concept nodes such as pmc:Pleroma or pmc:Hen.