Sources by Tradition: How We Reference What We Claim

We distinguish academic scholarship (peer-reviewed work and reference works such as the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy), surviving primary material (inscriptions, manuscripts, codices, and their scholarly treatments), documented living practice (what present-day practitioners of a tradition actually do), and modern practitioner literature (the numerology books of the last century).

Each kind answers a different question. Scholarship and primary material can support claims about history. Living practice can support claims about what a tradition means to its practitioners today. Practitioner literature can only support claims about modern numerology itself — it cannot prove anything about antiquity, and we do not use it that way.

Our historical claims about Pythagoras and the Pythagorean school are checked against the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy's entry on Pythagoras, which is also where we take the dating convention (c. 570–495 BCE) and the caution that Pythagoras left no writings — the reason this site does not credit him with the modern A–Z chart.

Where an article's claims rest on well-established general knowledge — that Hebrew letters carry numeral values, that the Maya kept a 260-day count, that Roman numerals are letters — we say so in plain text and keep the claim modest enough to be uncontroversial. Anything stronger waits for a listed source.

Every Learn article now has a structural home for sources: when an article carries references, they appear at the end of the article and in its machine-readable metadata. We are adding them article by article, starting with the essays that carry the heaviest historical claims.

An article without a listed bibliography is not claiming to be unsourced folklore — it means its references have not been formally attached yet. In the meantime, its historical claims follow the same rules as everywhere else: hedged, attributed, and corrected when wrong.

We do not decorate articles with impressive-looking citations we have not read, credit invented experts, or cite numerology blogs as historical evidence. A shorter, honestly-sourced reading list beats a long fabricated one — fabricated sourcing is the single fastest way for a site like this to forfeit trust.

We also do not pretend the traditions themselves agree with each other, or with modern adaptations sold under their names. Where an article covers a system whose link to its named culture is a modern construction, the article's historically-attested section says so.

If you have scholarly background in one of the traditions we cover and see a claim that needs correcting or a source that should be listed, we want to hear from you through the contact page. Reviewers are credited by name on the articles they help improve.

Corrections that change a historical claim are noted on the affected article, so readers can see what changed and why.