Library Acquisition Program

The Wheel of Heaven Library is being built to be authoritative on two axes at once: breadth like the Internet Sacred Text Archive and scholarly depth like Sefaria. This page documents the acquisition program that decides which texts enter the corpus, in which form, and in what order.

The companion pages:

• Source-Text Translation is the production side — how a chapter becomes a WoH Translation once it has been acquired.
• The Translation Roadmap is the prioritisation side — what’s next in the queue.
• This page is the strategic frame — what’s in the corpus and why.

The strategic frame#

Two principles, both load-bearing:

Original language first. The library acquires texts in their source language, not as existing translations. Where no usable public-domain English exists, the project translates the source text in-house through the WoH Translation pipeline. This is the legal moat (a CC0 corpus cannot rest on copyrighted critical editions) and the scholarly moat (for many texts, the WoH translation will be the only freely-licensed modern English version on the web).

Read through the Raëlian-canon lens, presented at scholarly register. Comparative material is read with the Raëlian canon as foundational. Other traditions, scientific context, and critical scholarship are included, but they sit in dialogue with the canon, not as alternatives competing for canonical status. The lens lives in the apparatus — glossary entries, per-verse commentary — not in the translated text itself. The discipline is recorded throughout Principles.

Two tracks#

Every tradition entering the program starts with an Edition-track or small Translation-track pilot first; full build-out is gated on the pilot proving the pipeline handles the new language. The two-track distinction is also reflected at the book level — the translationProgram: true flag in catalog.json marks Translation track books, conventionally suffixed -woh in their slug.

Source-licence classes#

A recurring clean pattern: the digital portal is unlicensed or non-commercial, but the print edition it was keyed from is fully public domain. When in doubt, key from the PD print scan and treat the portal as a collation aid.

The baal-cycle-woh book’s “best-effort reconstruction” provenance model is the established precedent for cases where even the working base is mixed: the source file’s source.versionTitle declares “reconstruction from named scholarly editions”, and every reference edition consulted is cited verbatim in source.citation.

The 20 traditions#

data-library/catalog.json defines twenty traditions, each with zero or more collections. The boundaries are deliberately broad (e.g. “Levantine” covers the Ugaritic corpus and West-Semitic material in Hittite preservation) and the IDs are stable. New collections are added under an existing tradition before a new tradition is added.

For the canonical list with full multilingual names and descriptions, read catalog.json.traditions directly.

The acquisition catalogue#

Every text the project intends to acquire is recorded in catalog.json with status: "planned" and a populated versionSource field that names the specific open-licensed source edition the translation will be built from. Two examples:

{
  "slug": "vendidad-woh",
  "code": "VID-WOH",
  "tradition": "persian",
  "collection": "woh-translations",
  "originalLang": "ave",
  "primaryLang": "ave",
  "status": "planned",
  "priority": 5,
  "versionSource": "Geldner, Avesta: the Sacred Books of the Parsis, vol. 3 (1886-96, PD); avesta.org as collation aid; Darmesteter SBE 4 (1880, PD) as reference",
  "translationNote": "Planned Wheel of Heaven Translation from the Avestan. Initial scope: Fargard 2 — Ahura Mazda warns Yima of catastrophic winters and commands the vara, an enclosed refuge stocked with the seed of every species; the strongest engineered-survival narrative outside the flood cluster.",
  "wohCurated": true,
  "translationProgram": true
}

{
  "slug": "book-of-abraham",
  "code": "ABR",
  "tradition": "mormon",
  "collection": "lds-restoration",
  "originalLang": "en",
  "primaryLang": "en",
  "status": "planned",
  "priority": 5,
  "versionSource": "Pearl of Great Price, pre-1930 PD editions (1851 Liverpool; 1921), via Wikisource/archive.org",
  "translationNote": "Edition track: PD pre-1930 text hosted directly...",
  "versionLicense": "Public Domain"
}

priority is a coarse integer ordering (5 = pilot wave / cluster completion, 6 = build-out, 7 = long tail). status flips from planned → partial → complete automatically as chapters ship — see Library Book.

The exhaustive per-tradition source assessments — which open edition to key from, which print is PD, which reference translation is acceptable — are at Source acquisition.

Sensitivity carve-outs#

Some living traditions are entered with conservative posture, stated in the relevant book’s methodology note:

• Qur’an — divine names (Allāh, ar-Raḥmān, ar-Raḥīm) and the Throne (al-`Arsh) held in transliteration with carve-outs; consult Muslim scholarship before shipping speculative readings.
• Bahá’í — divine titles held in transliteration on first pass; WoH translations stated as unofficial and independent of the authorised Bahá’í World Centre renderings; transcribe from PD lithographs (H-Bahai, INBA facsimiles via Afnan Library) rather than copying the BWC e-texts, sidestepping edition-copyright claims.
• LDS — Edition track only (no source-language layer exists); pre-1930 edition explicitly named; the Book of Abraham’s relation to the Joseph Smith Papyri is an active controversy, hosted in wiki/commentary with critical sourcing, not in the edition itself.
• Caodai, Oomoto — small traditions with living hierarchies; courtesy contact with the source-text archives (daotam.info, reikaimonogatari.net, Oomoto Foundation) accompanies any licence-status questions.

What this is not#

This is an acquisition catalogue, not a delivery schedule. Reviewer bandwidth remains the binding constraint. The 72 planned books in catalog.json represent verified sourcing — every entry has a real open-licensed source edition identified — but the rate at which they move from planned to partial to complete is set by the roadmap, not by their presence in this catalogue.