The Mythology of Emperor Norton is a kind of catechism. But, it’s a messy catechism that includes a wide range of tenets of High, Mid, Low, and, yes, No historical pedigree.

A relatively recent addition to the catechism — which seems to have made its first appearance only about 25 years ago — rests on the claim that Kamehameha V, King of the Hawaiian Islands from 1863 until his death in 1872, recognized the authority of Emperor Norton over that of the United States government.

We’d never seen any effort to authenticate this apparently undocumented claim — so, we decided to have a look under the hood.

As far as we can tell, there is no evidence whatsoever to back it up.

Our deep-dive does find all sorts of other interesting things on the way to debunking, including

• the obscure roots of one of the earliest instances of the Kamehameha V claim — on the Emperor Norton Records website;

• a rarely seen manuscript of an undated letter from Emperor Norton to Kamehameha V; and

• how, even here in the supposedly enlightened 2020s, academics (who should know better) and a peer-reviewed scholarly journal (ditto) fell prey to a bogusly sourced line in a Wikipedia article — proving that Stephen Colbert's nearly-20-year-old warnings about "truthiness" and "Wikiality" still have punch.