Ethics

REALMS documents entities from living traditions whose practitioners are, in many cases, still alive. What follows is how we try to do that responsibly, and where we draw lines.

What we include

REALMS covers Tier 1 (classical religious and indigenous traditions — Yoruba, Hindu, Greek, Norse, Celtic, Slavic, Mesoamerican, Sub-Saharan African, Native American, Siberian, Polynesian, and others), and Tier 2 (regional folklore and culturally-attested legendary creatures — wendigo, kelpie, chullachaqui, leshy, kitsune, jiangshi, and kindred). Every entity has at least one source citation.

What we exclude, and why

• Tier 3 — modern entheogenic / visionary entities. "DMT machine elves," psychedelic contact entities, tulpamancy constructs, and similar are excluded. These belong to a distinct modern literature that doesn't carry the ethnographic depth of folk tradition. Including them would conflate two very different claims.
• Tier 4 — modern occult, chaos magic, fiction, UFO-adjacent. Slenderman, Thelema egregores, contactee entities, creepypasta. These are fascinating but belong on dedicated fan-sites, not a research database.
• Ritual procedure. We document entities, not ceremonies. If a source describes a song, offering, or initiation sequence, we record that it exists without reproducing it. Where communities have marked material as closed (e.g., kiva-specific Hopi observances), we stop at the marker.

Primacy of living practitioners

Where a living tradition's practitioners would dispute a Wikipedia or academic characterisation, the practitioners are correct. REALMS is a secondary-literature index, not a source of truth. Every entity page includes links to its source texts so readers can trace back to the primary record and, where available, to living communities' own statements.

If you are a practitioner, scholar, or community member who finds material here that misrepresents your tradition, please report it — every entity page has an inline "Report an issue" form and we review every submission.

Indigenous knowledge & the public-domain question

Much of the published ethnography we draw on was recorded by outside researchers who did not ask for consent in the terms we'd demand today. We use this material because it's the publicly available record, but we flag it as secondary and prefer practitioner-authored work when it exists. The tier_3 corroboration badge on an entity signals that multiple source types agree; a single tier_1 badge is a prompt to look harder before trusting it.

Syncretism

Many entities here are syncretic — Catholic saints mapped to Yoruba orishas under Santería and Candomblé, Roman gods layered over Greek antecedents, buddhas absorbed into Shintō kami lineages. We record syncretistic identifications as explicit relationships (syncretized_with) rather than collapsing them into one entity, so each tradition's distinct characterisation remains visible.

No monetisation of sacred material

REALMS is free, open, ad-free, tracker-free, and CC-BY-4.0. We take no money from companies that would prefer to profile our readers. The one thing we ask in exchange for the data is attribution when you cite it.

What we are not

REALMS is not a spiritual practice guide, a shopping catalogue for appropriated ceremony, a theological authority, or a neutral arbiter of religious truth. It is an index of what published sources say about these entities, held to a measurable standard of verification. What you do with that index is your own.

Contact

Ethics concerns, redaction requests, or disputes over characterisation: use the "Report an issue" form on the relevant entity page (issue type: ethics). Reports are reviewed by a human within 14 days and logged in a public audit trail.