Terms and disclaimers

What Arcanum is

Arcanum is a research explorer. It helps you find subjects and, more importantly, learn to ask sharper questions about them. It is not an authority and it does not settle debates.

Health disclaimer

Arcanum never presents health content as diagnosis, treatment, or medical advice. Entries in health-adjacent categories describe what has been claimed, what has been tested and what has not. They are not a recommendation to start, stop or change any treatment.

If you are making a decision about your health, speak with a qualified clinician who knows your history.

How claims are labelled

Established evidence: supported by peer-reviewed research or primary documentation that is broadly accepted.

Disputed claim: on record, but qualified sources actively disagree.

Historical belief: documented as something people believed or practised, not as a factual claim about the world.

Speculation: unverified interpretation, hypothesis or folklore, presented as an open question.

No invented numbers

Arcanum does not display relevance, confidence, accuracy, probability, similarity or match percentages. A number implies a measurement, and we will not fabricate one.

Search results carry plain labels instead: Direct name match, Related term, Category connection, or No indexed match. Each result states exactly why it was returned. If a query has nothing behind it, Arcanum says so rather than manufacturing a near miss.

If a percentage ever appears in Arcanum, it will come from a real deterministic calculation and the method will be documented on the page where it appears.

Sources

Entries list their sources and the kind of source each one is: unverified link, primary-source claim, peer-reviewed work, reference, reporting or interpretive material. Where a claim rests on a single contested source, the entry says so.

Source URLs are carried over verbatim from the archive so you can check them yourself. Listing a link is never a claim that Arcanum has verified it, and no citation is invented to fill a gap. Where no sources were migrated for an entry, the entry says that plainly instead of implying support it does not have.

Cross-entry 'interpretive threads' are labelled as one researcher's reading. They are not evidence and are not presented as such.

Visual material

Arcanum uses visual material to support navigation and atmosphere. Images identified as illustrations are decorative. They are not photographs, artifacts, archival records or evidence supporting an entry.

Some decorative illustrations may be created using digital or AI-assisted tools. Arcanum does not present generated imagery as a recovered object, historical photograph or factual reconstruction. Documentary images, if added later, will carry their source and rights information.

The origin, intended use and documentary status of Arcanum's visual assets are recorded internally. An image does not alter the evidence label or source status of the subject beside it.

Open access

Entries, categories, source links and search results are public. No account and no payment is required to read anything in the library. Sign-in exists only as a placeholder for personal bookmarks and notes, and the Vault remains disabled.

Your data

Arcanum keeps its accounts and personal data separate from The Fey Seam. The two projects share a brand, not a database.

In this phase, bookmarks and notes are stored locally in your browser and are not transmitted anywhere. When accounts move to a hosted backend, private notes stay private to your account.

Accessibility

Arcanum targets WCAG AA contrast, full keyboard navigation, visible focus indicators, semantic labelling and touch targets of at least 44 pixels. If something blocks you, that is a defect and we want to hear about it.