DEC-0002: Tarnas as Structural Model, Booth Excluded

Decision

Richard Tarnas's The Passion of the Western Mind is the structural model for the Western Canon series. Mark Booth's The Secret History of the World is excluded entirely from the project. The project constructs its own content.

Context

The human explicitly stated: "Richard Tarnas is better than Mark Booth as a good reference" and "lets not depend on Mark Booth at all and construct our own content." This was integrated as both an editorial position (docs/editorial-positions.md) and a Vale lint rule that errors on any reference to Booth (styles/MysterySchools/BoothReference.yml).

Rationale

Tarnas is a philosopher-historian whose participatory epistemology aligns with the project's thesis about consciousness evolution. Booth is a popular esoteric writer whose approach risks conflating traditions and lacks the scholarly rigor the project demands.

The lint rule makes this decision enforceable by automation — no agent can accidentally introduce Booth as a reference without the commit being flagged.

Superseded By

None.