Open Questions

Open Elder (Ruis)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.

Open Dzogchen

Why It Is Open The Nyingma tradition attributes Dzogchen's transmission to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century CE, but the earliest securely datable Dzogchen texts are placed later by scholars, and the surviving Dunhuang manuscripts leave the relationship between early Dzogchen and Chan Buddhist teaching in Tibet unresolved.

What Would Settle It Further codicological dating and textual comparison of the Dunhuang Dzogchen and Chan manuscripts against securely dated Chan sources, by scholars working directly with the manuscript corpus.

Expertise Needed Tibetology; Buddhist studies; manuscript studies

Question posed in Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers.

Open The Pearce-Pratt Distance Series

Why It Is Open C. E. M. Hansel examined the buildings in the 1960s and argued that a route existed by which the subject, unobserved in the library, could have reached a position from which the cards were visible. Rhine and Pratt disputed the sightlines, the timing, and whether such an absence would have gone unnoticed. Neither side conceded, and the buildings have since been altered, so the question can no longer be settled by inspection.

What Would Settle It Original architectural plans of the Social Sciences building and the campus library as they stood in 1933 and 1934, together with any contemporaneous record of Pearce's whereabouts during the sessions.

Expertise Needed History of science; architectural history; archival research at Duke University

Question posed in ESP: A Scientific Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel.

Open The Affaire de Bizoton

Why It Is Open No trial transcript survives. The case is known only through accounts by foreign observers who had arrived already persuaded of the charge, above all Spenser St John, who published his twenty years afterwards and who recorded that the confessions had been beaten out of the accused. The court proceeded in French before Creole-speaking defendants, and the Haitian government, seeking diplomatic recognition, had an interest in a public conviction watched by European envoys. No scholar holds a reconstruction of the events, because there is nothing to reconstruct one from.

What Would Settle It Recovery of Haitian judicial or police records for 1864, whether in Port-au-Prince or in the French, British and American consular archives that received contemporary reports, together with a critical edition of the surviving foreign accounts collated against one another rather than read singly.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history and the history of criminal justice, with Haitian Creole and nineteenth-century French palaeography.

Question posed in Hayti, or the Black Republic, Spenser St John.

Open The Deorala Sati of 1987

Why It Is Open Contemporary accounts contradict one another completely, and no court has made a finding. The prosecutions for abetment and for glorification ran for decades and ended in acquittals, the last in 2024, so nothing was ever established judicially. Witnesses were villagers in a community under intense external scrutiny, and the accounts collected at the time were gathered by parties with declared positions on the question.

What Would Settle It A judicial or commission finding on the abetment question, which the acquittals have now foreclosed; failing that, a scholarly reconstruction that collates the police record, the contemporary press, the depositions and the investigations by women's organisations against one another and states what each can and cannot support. Such a collation has not been published.

Expertise Needed Legal history and the sociology of contemporary India, with access to the Rajasthan police and trial record.

Question posed in The Commission of Sati (Prevention) Act, 1987, Parliament of India.

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 The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Juratus)

Why It Is Open The Sworn Book of Honorius names Honorius of Thebes as the magician who compiled it at the direction of an assembly of masters. No document outside the Liber Juratus tradition itself mentions such a person, no Theban connection is corroborated, and the framing assembly of eighty-nine masters reads as a legitimating device rather than a record. The name may belong to a real compiler, to a deliberate pseudonym, or to a confusion with one of the popes named Honorius, to whom a separate grimoire was later ascribed.

What Would Settle It A datable manuscript, charter, university record or inventory naming a magician of that name independently of the Sworn Book, or a codicological study of the surviving manuscript families that placed the attribution earlier or later than the text it introduces.

Expertise Needed Medieval Latin palaeography and codicology, with the history of learned magic.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Lag BaOmer

Why It Is Open The rabbinic sources report the deaths of Akiva's students as a plague and do not connect them to the revolt. A reading that treats the plague as a veiled account of wartime losses is in circulation, and the counter-reading takes the sources at their word. This pass found no source it could verify on either side, so it wrote no relation between the holiday and the revolt.

What Would Settle It A study of the talmudic and geonic witnesses to the Akiva tradition set against the documentary and archaeological record of the revolt, establishing whether the connection is ancient or a later harmonisation.

Expertise Needed Rabbinic literature; Roman-period Jewish history

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

Open Splendor Solis

Why It Is Open Splendor Solis is attributed to Salomon Trismosin, described in the alchemical literature as the teacher of Paracelsus. Nothing outside that literature attests him. Paracelsus, who names many of his sources and quarrels with most of them, never mentions such a teacher. The name itself reads as constructed, joining Solomon to a Hermetic epithet, which is a common pattern in alchemical pseudonymity.

What Would Settle It An archival trace independent of the alchemical corpus, such as a matriculation record, a guild or civic register, a will, or a correspondence naming him, or conversely a manuscript study showing the attribution was added to an already circulating text at a datable point.

Expertise Needed Early modern German archival history and the philology of the alchemical manuscript tradition.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open The Book of Abramelin

Why It Is Open The Book of Abramelin is narrated by a Jewish traveller of Worms who writes for his son. The narrative frame is circumstantial enough to look autobiographical and conventional enough to be a device. Proposals identifying him with a known figure of the period have been made and none has carried the field, and the surviving German and Hebrew witnesses do not agree closely enough to settle whether the persona belongs to the earliest layer of the text.

What Would Settle It A stemmatic study establishing the relationship of the German and Hebrew witnesses and which of them carries the frame narrative first, or an archival identification of a Jewish traveller of Worms matching the biography the text gives.

Expertise Needed Yiddish and Hebrew manuscript studies, with the social history of Ashkenazi Jewry in the late medieval Rhineland.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Parshvanatha

Why It Is Open Critical scholarship accepts Parshvanatha and Mahavira as historical figures. Jain tradition holds all twenty four to be historical teachers. For the remaining twenty two there is no independent attestation, so a single answer applied across the group would misdescribe most of it in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It Independent attestation for any individual Tirthankara beyond the two, whether inscriptional, textual from outside the tradition, or archaeological.

Expertise Needed Indology, Jain studies, and South Asian archaeology.

Question posed in The Jains, Paul Dundas, Second edition, page 19.

Open Edward Kelley

Why It Is Open The Enochian material rests entirely on Kelley's reports of what appeared in the showstone, recorded by John Dee. Dee's diaries are strong evidence of what Dee believed and weak evidence of what actually occurred. Frances Yates called Kelley a fraud outright; others treat him as a genuine visionary or as self-deceived. The question is central to how the whole Enochian corpus should be read and is not settled.

What Would Settle It It may be unresolvable in principle, which is worth recording as such. It would move on evidence of Kelley preparing material in advance, or on linguistic analysis of the Enochian corpus bearing on whether it was composed rather than received.

Expertise Needed Early modern history, palaeography, and historical linguistics for the Enochian corpus itself.

Question posed in John Dee's Conversations with Angels: Cabala, Alchemy, and the End of Nature, Deborah E. Harkness, Pages 11 and 24.

Open Frank Podmore

Why It Is Open The 1910 inquest could not establish how Podmore entered the water and returned no verdict of intent. Suggestions of suicide, tied to the risk of a scandal over his private life, have circulated since among historians of the Society for Psychical Research but have never been substantiated, and no further inquiry has been undertaken.

What Would Settle It A search of the original coroner's inquest papers and the Malvern and Worcestershire newspaper coverage of August 1910, which may hold testimony not yet examined by SPR historians.

Expertise Needed Archival research, history of science

Question posed in The Founders of Psychical Research, Alan Gauld.

Open Ergot

Why It Is Open Proposed by Wasson, Hofmann and Ruck in 1978. It would explain how an experience initiates consistently described as overwhelming could be produced reliably for thousands of people on a schedule. But no ancient source describes anything of the kind, the water extraction needed to separate soluble from toxic alkaloids is delicate, and the argument reasons backwards from the reported effect to a cause that would account for it.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis of vessels securely associated with the Eleusinian rite, or a text that describes the preparation. Absent either, the question may be permanently undecidable, since the Mysteries were kept for roughly two thousand years and the secret held.

Expertise Needed Classics, ancient history, archaeochemistry, mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

Open Holy See

Why It Is Open The Vatican's most valuable holdings, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums' collections, are inalienable and never appraised for sale, so there is nothing to price against a market the way an ordinary asset is valued. The Holy See's own financial disclosures (APSA's patrimony report, the Secretariat for the Economy's consolidated statement, the IOR's own report) each cover a defined administrative scope and none of them attempts a valuation of the art or the buildings themselves.

What Would Settle It There is no method that would settle this honestly, since a genuine market valuation would require a willingness to sell that the Holy See has never expressed and that the objects' religious and cultural status makes very unlikely ever to exist. What would change the picture is not a single figure but a named methodology the Holy See itself adopted and published for insurance or heritage purposes, stating clearly that it is not a sale value.

Expertise Needed Cultural heritage economics and museum insurance valuation practice, in dialogue with the Holy See's own financial administration.

Question posed in How Much Money Does the Catholic Church Have?.

Open Calligraphic Roundels of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque (Blue Mosque)

Why It Is Open Published encyclopedia and visitor-education accounts describe the roundels only in prose, as massive circular panels hung from the four dome piers, without giving a measured diameter or any other numeric dimension, and no published architectural survey of the mosque's interior fittings could be found.

What Would Settle It A published architectural survey or conservation report of the Sultan Ahmed Mosque's interior fittings giving the roundels' measured diameter, or a direct measurement taken and published by a future visitor or researcher with access to the mosque's own restoration records.

Expertise Needed Ottoman architectural history, historic building conservation

Question posed in The Divine Script: Decoding the Calligraphy of the Blue Mosque (bluemosque.tr).

Open Telepathy

Why It Is Open The original series reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance, but no other laboratory reproduced the effect, and the series itself was never repeated at a comparable scale. Irvin Child argued in 1985 that the result was dismissed rather than evaluated, which is a claim about how the field responded rather than a claim that anyone has since run the missing replication.

What Would Settle It A preregistered, multi-night sleep laboratory replication with automated target selection, blind judging of dream transcripts against a randomized image pool, and a sample size and analysis plan fixed in advance.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; experimental psychology; meta-analytic methodology

Question posed in Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan.

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open The Autoganzfeld Series

Why It Is Open Hyman and Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would look like. No series run since has been accepted by both sides as meeting it. Two later meta-analyses, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions on differently defined study pools, so the accumulated literature cannot settle it either.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered adversarial collaboration with laboratories on both sides of the dispute, an analysis plan agreed and lodged before data collection, and a commitment from all parties to publish whatever results.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology; meta-analysis; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy, Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton.

Open The Huei Tzompantli Excavation

Why It Is Open The structure runs under standing colonial buildings on Calle Guatemala in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, and only the portion reachable around them has been exposed. Every published count is a count of that partial exposure and has risen with each season of work. No scholar has proposed a total, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement. The sixteenth-century figures are narrative rather than counts and cannot stand in for one.

What Would Settle It Full exposure of the structure, which would require access beneath the buildings above it, together with a minimum-number-of-individuals count taken across the complete assemblage rather than across the reachable part. Short of that, a defensible estimate would need the geometry of the excavated portion projected onto the full plan of the rack, published with its assumptions.

Expertise Needed Archaeology and bioarchaeology, with urban heritage engineering for access beneath protected colonial buildings.

Question posed in Programa de Arqueologia Urbana: the Huei Tzompantli excavations at the Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.