Open Questions

Open Yoshi Yoshitani

Why It Is Open A commonly repeated line describes her as born in California and raised in numerous locations, but no primary source could be found actually saying this; interviews specifically about her mixed race, multi location upbringing discuss moving frequently without ever naming a place.

What Would Settle It A statement from Yoshi Yoshitani herself, or a primary record, naming her actual birthplace.

Expertise Needed Biographical research

Question posed in Yoshi Yoshitani (official site), Yoshi Yoshitani.

Open Robert Wang

Why It Is Open Wang's own published autobiography, and every other source located, describe his career as an artist and esoteric scholar, from his occult studies at seventeen through his collaboration with Israel Regardie on the Golden Dawn Tarot, in real detail, but none states a birth year or birthplace.

What Would Settle It A statement from Wang himself, or a publisher's biographical note, or public records research naming his birth year and place.

Expertise Needed Biography; history of modern tarot and Western esotericism

Question posed in Autobiography of Robert Wang, Creator of the Jungian Tarot Deck (Zero Equals Two!), Robert Wang.

Open Thomas Rudd

Why It Is Open The Harley, Sloane and Wellcome manuscripts attributed to Rudd carry no colophon naming his birth or death, and the attribution of the pairing scheme to him is itself questioned; nothing in the catalogued source establishes his life dates.

What Would Settle It A parish register, will, or dated professional record, a military engineering commission or a mathematical publication, identifying this Thomas Rudd distinctly from others of the same name, or a codicological study dating the Harley and Sloane manuscripts against a known biography.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, seventeenth century English biography

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Ibn Mujahid

Why It Is Open The modern study of Ibn Mujahid's selection of the seven readers works from his writing and its later citation; it does not supply his own birth or death year, and no other catalogued source does either.

What Would Settle It A biographical dictionary entry from the classical Islamic biographical literature giving his dates, checked against the Kitab al-Sab'a's own internal dating to the early fourth century AH.

Expertise Needed Islamic intellectual history, Arabic biographical literature

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Johann Kaspar Hechtel

Why It Is Open The source that documents Hechtel's 1799 death and the game's publication gives no birth year, and no other catalogued source supplies one.

What Would Settle It A Nuremberg civic or guild record identifying Hechtel's baptism or birth, of the kind that has dated other Nuremberg engravers and publishers of the period.

Expertise Needed German book and print history

Question posed in A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett.

Open Rama Prasad

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas cites treats him as a conduit for the tattvas rather than as a subject, and gives his publications without giving his life. No source consulted here supplies birth or death years, and the atlas has therefore recorded a period of activity in place of a lifespan rather than quote a date it cannot support.

What Would Settle It Theosophical Society membership registers and the Adyar archives, which record members' details, together with contemporary Indian periodical indexes, would establish the dates and probably the rest of the bibliography.

Expertise Needed History of the Theosophical movement, and archival work in Indian colonial-period periodicals

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Everything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.

What Would Settle It A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.

Expertise Needed Javanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelago

Question posed in Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.

Open Diego de Landa

Why It Is Open Four Maya codices survive in the world. Landa records twenty seven books burned at Maní, but the Relación survives only as a shortened copy of a lost original, so his own figure cannot be verified against what he wrote. No census of the pre conquest manuscript corpus was ever made, and Maní was not the only burning. Nobody holds a position on the size of the corpus, which makes this an unfilled gap rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A recovered fuller copy of the Relación would establish what Landa actually claimed. An archaeological find of interred or cached bark paper manuscripts, of the kind that has produced fragmentary codices in Maya burials, would begin to establish the scale of production. Systematic study of codex fragments already excavated but too degraded to read may become possible with improved imaging.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy and archaeology; colonial Spanish archival history; conservation imaging

Question posed in Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa.

Open Dutty Boukman

Why It Is Open He is one of the most consequential individuals in Caribbean history and no document has been produced that establishes his origin. The suggestion of an anglophone Caribbean birth rests on a reading of his name and has never been tested against a record. Because he was enslaved, the paperwork that would ordinarily answer this, if it ever existed, was made by people with no interest in his identity.

What Would Settle It A plantation inventory, notarial act, baptismal entry or ship manifest naming him, from the archives of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica or the French colonial administration. Much of the relevant colonial notarial material survives in France and in Haiti and has not been searched systematically for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history; Atlantic slave trade record linkage; onomastics

Question posed in Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Metraux.

Open Juan Chocne

Why It Is Open The records of Cristóbal de Albornoz carry the suppression of Taki Onqoy and the abjuration of its leaders, and then stop. No later document naming Chocne has been produced. He was not tried by the Inquisition, which did not hold jurisdiction over indigenous people, so the usual sentencing paperwork does not exist for him. The gap has never been the subject of a dedicated study, so this is an absence rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A search of the Cuzco ecclesiastical and notarial archives, and of the Albornoz probanzas de méritos in Seville, for any later mention of the name. Parish registers of the reducciones in the Huamanga region for the 1570s would be the other place to look.

Expertise Needed Andean colonial archival history; Quechua palaeography

Question posed in The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy.

Open Martín Ocelotl

Why It Is Open The trial file ends at the sentence of confiscation and perpetual exile. No arrival record, prison register or burial entry in Spain has been shown to name him, and no later Mexican document mentions him. The story that the ship carrying him was lost at sea circulates in secondary accounts without a document behind it. Nobody has taken a position on his fate, because there is nothing to take a position on.

What Would Settle It A search of the Casa de la Contratación records in Seville for the sailing that carried him, and of the registers of the religious houses and prisons to which exiled offenders of the period were sent. The relevant Seville material is catalogued and has not been searched for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Spanish colonial archival history; Nahuatl palaeography

Question posed in Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543, Richard E. Greenleaf.

Open Ahmad Yasavi

Why It Is Open No birth year is recorded anywhere, and the received death year rests on hagiographical sources written centuries after the life. Nobody argues for a particular birth year, because there is no evidence to argue from; the reference literature simply omits it.

What Would Settle It A twelfth or thirteenth century document, endowment record or inscription from Yasi, Sayram or Bukhara that names him with a date.

Expertise Needed Central Asian documentary history and Persian hagiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open Dhu Nuwas

Why It Is Open The Sabaic inscriptions of his reign stop at the Aksumite conquest, the Syriac accounts of the killings at Najran do not describe his end, and the story in which he rides his horse into the sea rather than be taken appears only in much later Arabic narrative. The reference literature reports the death as approximate for exactly this reason.

What Would Settle It A dated south Arabian inscription from the period of the Aksumite takeover that names the outcome, or an early Aksumite, Syriac or Byzantine notice of the campaign that reports how the Himyari king was disposed of.

Expertise Needed South Arabian epigraphy, Ethiopic and Syriac historiography

Question posed in The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, G. W. Bowersock.

Open Donatus Magnus

Why It Is Open No source gives a birth year. His exile in 347 is documented in the imperial and conciliar record, but the death is placed around 355 only by later writers arguing against his church, and no burial place is recorded. The standard reference works print both dates as approximations.

What Would Settle It An African or Gallic epigraphic or documentary find naming him with a date, or an unremarked notice in the conciliar and imperial correspondence of the 350s.

Expertise Needed Late Roman prosopography and North African epigraphy

Question posed in The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, W. H. C. Frend.

Open Musaylima

Why It Is Open Every reported revelation of his survives only as quotation inside the writings of the tradition that defeated him, presented in order to be ridiculed, and no manuscript, inscription or non-Muslim notice offers a control. This is a gap rather than a dispute: no scholar holds a position on the content of his teaching, because there is nothing independent to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A documentary or epigraphic find from al-Yamama independent of the Islamic historiographical tradition, or an early non-Muslim notice of the Hanifa movement of the 630s.

Expertise Needed Arabian epigraphy and early Islamic historiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open Elsie Wheeler

Why It Is Open Every account of her, including this entry, is drawn from Marc Edmund Jones's own description of her in his writing on the 1925 Sabian sitting. No independent biographical, genealogical or newspaper record naming her birth or death year has surfaced in the sources checked for this entry.

What Would Settle It A genealogical or California newspaper archive search for a clairvoyant medium named Elsie Wheeler active in the San Diego area in the 1920s, or a period Theosophical Society membership record naming her.

Expertise Needed Biographical and archival research

Question posed in The Sabian Symbols in Astrology, Marc Edmund Jones.

Open Johannes Angelus

Why It Is Open The degree images printed under the name of Johannes Angelus in 1488 are generally traced to earlier material circulating in manuscript and associated with the name of Pietro d'Abano, but the atlas has no citable study collating those manuscripts against the incunable. Without one, a statement that a particular degree image originates in this book cannot be checked, and the printed edition risks being treated as a source when it may only be a witness.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving manuscript witnesses of the degree image material against the 1488 Augsburg printing, establishing the recension the editor worked from and the extent of editorial change.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; incunable and manuscript studies; textual criticism

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Hubert Pearce

Why It Is Open The parapsychological literature records his trial results to several decimal places and almost nothing about the man. This atlas could not verify a birth date, a death date, or any account of his later life from an accessible source, and records no dates at all rather than estimating them.

What Would Settle It Duke Divinity School enrolment and graduation records for the early 1930s, or the Rhine Research Center's own archive of laboratory correspondence, which would identify him well enough for ordinary genealogical work.

Expertise Needed Archival research; genealogy

Question posed in A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt.

Open William Crookes

Why It Is Open Writers since the 1960s have argued that Crookes either knew the materialisations were produced by Cook herself or was personally involved with her, and that this explains his willingness to vouch for phenomena he would have tested rigorously in any other setting. The arguments rest on circumstantial reading of his published accounts and on later recollection, and no documentary proof has been produced in either direction.

What Would Settle It Contemporary correspondence between Crookes and Cook, or household records establishing the arrangements at the sittings, if any survive in family or institutional archives.

Expertise Needed History of Victorian science; archival research

Question posed in The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ruth Brandon.

Open Tituba

Why It Is Open The 1692 court papers record her enslaved status and her testimony and nothing about her birth, her passage or her later life. Elaine Breslaw's reconstruction of an Arawak origin by way of Barbados works from indirect records and is explicitly circumstantial; other readings of the same material remain open, and the later life is a blank rather than a dispute.

What Would Settle It Documentary evidence tying her to a named vessel, cargo manifest, inventory, parish register or estate record, in Barbados, Massachusetts or elsewhere. A subsequent record of her under any name after 1693 would answer the second half.

Expertise Needed Colonial American and Caribbean archival history; the history of slavery and of Atlantic shipping records

Question posed in Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem: Devilish Indians and Puritan Fantasies, Elaine G. Breslaw, Breslaw, Tituba, Reluctant Witch of Salem.