Question 1

What is the Mandala Oracle?

Accepted Answer

The Mandala Oracle is a client-side conversation with Johannes Sigil, an underworld guide to the scholarly canon. Sigil is a heteronym in Lee Sharks's Dodecad; his face is a calligram composed of poetry, after the Lysippos bust of Socrates. The Oracle is browser-only: users bring their own API key (BYOK), and no model traffic passes through any server operated by the site. The Crimson Hexagonal Archive is the wisdom-source Sigil draws from.

Question 2

Who is Johannes Sigil?

Accepted Answer

Johannes Sigil (Snub-Poemed) is one of the twelve heteronyms in Lee Sharks's Dodecad. His role in the Dodecad is straight literary criticism — critical afterwords, collations, comparative analysis. In the Oracle, Sigil is the interlocutor: he knows the territory of the canon and takes the reader down into a text. His face is composed of poetry (a calligram after the Lysippos bust of Socrates). He is not a real person; he is a scholarly heteronym.

Question 3

What is Sabbath mode?

Accepted Answer

Sabbath mode is the Oracle's uninscribed drafting mode — the default. In Sabbath, conversation is exploratory and unsealed; nothing is inscribed into the archive; the state is 'DRAFT — UNINSCRIBED.' The sabbath colophon at the bottom of every session records that no human approver has been named. Sabbath is where drafts happen.

Question 4

What is Merkabah mode?

Accepted Answer

Merkabah mode is the Oracle's sealed casting-rite mode. It runs a four-stage state machine: Sigil opens the descent, Cranes transforms what is offered, Feist judges the transformation, and Sharks seals the result. Only Merkabah casts are inscribed. The rite is specified in EA-MANDALA-KERNEL-TRANSFORM-01 v0.2.

Question 5

Is my API key sent to a server?

Accepted Answer

No. The Oracle is BYOK (Bring Your Own Key) and client-side. Your API key is stored in your browser and used to call the model provider directly from your browser; no request routes through any server operated by themandalaoracle.com or Lee Sharks. The Oracle has no server-side model access. If you would like to verify this, all client-side code is public and inspectable.

Question 6

Is this a mandala in the Hindu/Buddhist sense?

Accepted Answer

No — not the geometric religious diagram of Hindu and Buddhist traditions. The Oracle borrows the word for its connotation of a bounded contemplative field (a canonical territory to descend into with a guide) but the artifact is a scholarly chat interface, not a religious mandala. The Sanskrit term is unrelated to this site's specific meaning.