Open Questions

Open Saraswati (Ravi Varma)

Why It Is Open Retail and auction sources consulted give three different years for Ravi Varma's Saraswati, 1881, 1886 and 1896, and none of the sources consulted names a current institutional home for the original oil with confidence; a compiled hobbyist list places a differently dated version at a named museum, but this atlas could not corroborate that against a museum catalogue record.

What Would Settle It A museum or gallery catalogue record, an exhibition history, or a scholarly catalogue raisonne of Ravi Varma's work that fixes the painting's completion year and names its present custodian with documentary support.

Expertise Needed Art historical provenance research, South Asian art history

Question posed in Wikipedia, "Raja Ravi Varma", Wikipedia contributors.

Open Osei Tutu

Why It Is Open His life before becoming chief of Kwaman rests entirely on Asante oral tradition; various accounts guess at Kokofu Anyinam, Akrokerri or an Akuapem shrine, but these read as retellings without a documented basis rather than competing scholarly claims.

What Would Settle It A documented oral tradition or record traceable to a named source, treated critically, distinguishing his birthplace from his later seat of rule at Kwaman.

Expertise Needed Asante history; African oral tradition studies

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Britannica: Verified Biographies (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors.

Open Kislev

Why It Is Open Several Hebrew month names carry an accepted native gloss (Adar, mighty; Av, father; Elul, search or inquiry; Iyar, blossoming), already recorded on this atlas. Kislev, Shevat, Tevet and, separately, the deity name Tammuz do not: their Babylonian origin is well established but no settled etymology for the specific Hebrew forms is recorded in the sources consulted for this pass.

What Would Settle It An Assyriological or comparative Semitic source tracing each Babylonian calendar-month name to its own root meaning, matched against the accepted glosses already recorded for the other months in the same cycle.

Expertise Needed Assyriology and comparative Semitic philology

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open Uruk: the Eanna Precinct

Why It Is Open Inanna holds Eanna throughout the historical period and there is no doubt about that. The earliest monumental levels are several centuries older than any readable statement of dedication. The tablets recovered from them are accounts and word lists, the buildings carry no dedicatory inscription, and no foundation deposit naming a recipient has been found. The usual identification is an inference backward from later certainty, and no scholar has argued a rival case, because there is nothing to argue from.

What Would Settle It A dedicatory inscription, a foundation deposit or an archaic text from the Uruk V or IV levels that names the recipient of the buildings. Failing that, a decisive advance in reading the non-administrative part of the proto-cuneiform corpus, which would let the archaic lists be read as statements rather than inventories.

Expertise Needed Assyriology and proto-cuneiform palaeography, working with Near Eastern archaeology of the fourth millennium BCE.

Question posed in Ancient Mesopotamian Gods and Goddesses, Nicole Brisch (ed.).

Open Geshtinanna

Why It Is Open Sumerian art rarely labels its figures, and reference studies of Mesopotamian iconography have not been able to isolate a scene or attribute as distinctively Geshtinanna's, unlike her brother Dumuzi or her rival Inanna, both identifiable from repeated attributes across many surviving objects.

What Would Settle It A securely inscribed or otherwise firmly identified image of Geshtinanna, distinguishing her from the generic Mesopotamian goddess type, turning up in excavation or in a museum collection reassessment of unattributed glyptic art.

Expertise Needed Assyriology, Mesopotamian art history and archaeology

Question posed in Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.

Open Mount Hor

Why It Is Open The biblical text places Mount Hor in an itinerary rather than at a location, on the border of Edom between camps that are themselves unidentified. The traditional identification with Jebel Harun above Petra is comparatively late and rests on the tradition itself. A competing identification places the mountain considerably further north, nearer the edge of the Negev, on a different reading of the route.

What Would Settle It Excavation or survey producing an independent identification of any camp on the wilderness itinerary, or an early inscription or cultic deposit on either candidate summit that ties it to Aaron independently of the later shrine tradition. Failing that, the question stays open and the atlas records the identification as traditional.

Expertise Needed Biblical archaeology and historical geography of the southern Levant

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

Open Ark of the Covenant

Why It Is Open The Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church restricts access to a single guardian monk and has never permitted independent examination of the chapel contents, so the claim rests on church tradition alone.

What Would Settle It An examination conducted by the church itself, or release of any documentary or photographic record it holds, since outside access is not permitted.

Expertise Needed Biblical archaeology, Ethiopian studies

Question posed in Church of Our Lady Mary of Zion, Aksum (Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church).

Open Chet, Avon and Pesha

Why It Is Open The three terms stand together in Leviticus 16 and Exodus 34 without any definition attached, and the graded reading is supplied by rabbinic literature centuries afterwards. Whether biblical Hebrew already distinguishes the three roots this way, or whether the distinction is a rabbinic construction laid over a rhetorical triplet, is a question of lexical semantics that this entry did not attempt to settle.

What Would Settle It A corpus study of every occurrence of the three roots in the Hebrew Bible, read alongside the Northwest Semitic epigraphic material, testing whether the intention grading holds independently of the rabbinic gloss.

Expertise Needed Biblical Hebrew lexicography; Northwest Semitic philology

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

Open Storax

Why It Is Open Genesis 37:25 and other passages mention tsori, translated balm, among trade goods, but scholarly identification of tsori is divided between storax, mastic gum and other resins, so it cannot honestly be cited as storax's own earliest attestation without settling that identification.

What Would Settle It A study settling the botanical identification of the Hebrew term tsori among its candidate resins.

Expertise Needed Biblical philology, archaeobotany

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open The Identification of Biblical Hyssop

Why It Is Open The identification is reached by inference from later regional usage rather than from an ancient botanical description, and no archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context have been identified to species.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical remains recovered from a securely dated ritual context and identified to species, or an ancient description precise enough to fix the referent independently of later regional usage.

Expertise Needed Biblical philology; archaeobotany

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher.

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 Brenda J. Dunne

Why It Is Open Dunne's education and long career at Mundelein College, the University of Chicago and the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory are well documented, but no obituary or profile located names her birthplace.

What Would Settle It An obituary, biographical profile or public record naming her birthplace; she died in 2022, so a fuller obituary or family record may yet surface.

Expertise Needed Biographical research; parapsychology history

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

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 Hyssop

Why It Is Open The Hebrew ezov is rendered hyssop by long translation convention, but Hyssopus officinalis is not native to the southern Levant and does not match the plant's described uses. Origanum syriacum, Syrian oregano, fits the ecology and the ritual use better and is the leading candidate, but the identification rests on inference rather than on any ancient description precise enough to settle it.

What Would Settle It A botanical description in an ancient source specific enough to exclude the alternatives, or archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context that can be identified to species.

Expertise Needed Botany and Biblical Hebrew philology together. Neither field settles it alone, which is why it has stayed open.

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher, Volume 42, pages 232 to 241.

Open Myrrh

Why It Is Open Myrrh is traded and described across the ancient world as one commodity, but the genus has several resin-producing species and the ancient sources do not distinguish them. A genetic study of commercial myrrh found only a small proportion of samples matching the pharmacopoeia species, so even the modern trade is not one thing.

What Would Settle It Species-level identification of resin residues from a securely dated archaeological context, ideally from more than one trade period.

Expertise Needed Botany, archaeobotany, and the economic history of the incense routes.

Question posed in Deciphering Insights into Commercial Myrrh Species Authenticity from the psbA-trnH Genetic Region, Changhong Cao, Wenting Zhong, Feng Gao, Ying Zhang, Zhiguo Ma, Hui Cao and Menghua Wu, Article e0320731, results on species identification.

Open União do Vegetal

Why It Is Open The date is agreed in every account, including the church's own. The place is not. The church describes the founding as taking place in the Amazon forest without naming a settlement, and several accounts place it at a rubber camp near the Bolivian frontier, while widely circulated reference summaries give the town of Porto Velho instead.

What Would Settle It The church's own founding records and the recollections of the first members, read against Brazilian civil registration and land records for the rubber camps of the upper Madeira in 1961.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious history and archival research

Question posed in Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil, Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae (eds.).

Open Barquinha

Why It Is Open The tradition is the least documented of the three Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Santo Daime and the Uniao do Vegetal have been surveyed, counted and litigated over, and the Barquinha has not. Most of what exists is recent Brazilian scholarship, and the atlas has found no figure it is willing to publish for the number of houses or their distribution.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Acre houses and any outside the state, undertaken with the communities rather than from a distance, giving the lines of descent from the founding centre.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of Amazonian religion

Question posed in Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil, Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae (eds.).

Open The Threefold Refuge (Tisarana)

Why It Is Open Tradition places its first use at the very start of the Buddha's teaching career, but the Buddha's own chronology is unsettled among historians, and no source assigns the formula a specific year.

What Would Settle It A firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the formula's earliest use independently of the traditional narrative that carries it.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies

Question posed in The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin.

Open The Eight Garudhammas

Why It Is Open Several of the eight presuppose an order of nuns that already exists and has its own procedure, which they cannot have had at the moment of foundation. The sixth requires ordination from both communities, which is impossible for the first generation and is contradicted within the same collections. Six of the eight appear elsewhere in the discipline as ordinary rules, each with its own account of the incident that occasioned it. The Pali, Chinese and Tibetan recensions differ in wording and in order. Tradition places the rules at the founding of the bhikkhuni order during the Buddha's own ministry, but the Buddha's own dates are themselves unsettled and no source assigns the rules a specific year within it.

What Would Settle It Comparative work across all surviving recensions of the foundation account, including those preserved only in Chinese and Tibetan translation, with attention to which items are stable across lineages that separated early. Bhikkhu Analayo and Ute Husken have carried this a long way and the field has not converged. Independently, a firmer scholarly resolution of the Buddha's own chronology, or textual evidence dating the rules apart from the ordination narrative that carries them, would settle the date even where the recension question remains open.

Expertise Needed Buddhist studies; Pali, Chinese and Tibetan vinaya philology

Question posed in The Foundation History of the Nuns' Order, Bhikkhu Analayo.

Open Bulgarian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open The Bulgarian Orthodox Church's own governing Statute, adopted by the Sixth Church-People's Council on 11 December 2008 at Rila Monastery and read in full at its official hosted address, covers ecclesiastical structure, the selection of church leaders, synodal organization and diocesan administration, and contains no provision anywhere on parish funding, member giving, tithes, dues or voluntary contributions. No other Bulgarian Orthodox source addressing member giving specifically has yet been found on this axis.

What Would Settle It A primary Bulgarian Orthodox Church source (a parish or diocesan stewardship statement, a Holy Synod financial policy) or a scholarly study of Bulgarian Orthodox parish finance, stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set amount or percentage.

Expertise Needed Bulgarian Orthodox studies, primary source review of Bulgarian Orthodox Church financial governance

Question posed in Statute of the Bulgarian Orthodox Church.