The Dositheans are the archive’s Samaritan and Simon Magus milieu, and Adams’s founder is a Samaritan magician who pretended to be the Messiah.
In Hannah Adams
In Adams’s own words, from the 1817 Dictionary. Each passage is quoted verbatim under its own entry.
Dositheans. The founder of this sect was a magician of Samaria, who pretended to be the Messiah. He had thirty disciples, answering to the days of the month, and one woman, called Luna.
Hannah Adams, A Dictionary of All Religions (Boston, 1817), entry “Dositheans.”