Open Questions

Open Discordianism

Why It Is Open Discordianism has no central organisation, no membership process and no agreed test for who counts as a practitioner rather than a reader enjoying the joke, so no census or registry exists to consult, and scholars of the tradition treat the boundary question itself as open rather than merely uncounted.

What Would Settle It A sociological survey using a stated, defensible definition of practice, or, short of that, a scholarly argument for why the question is not meaningfully answerable for a tradition of this kind.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, Carole M. Cusack.

Open Theosophy

Why It Is Open The original Theosophical Society split after Blavatsky's death, chiefly into the Adyar based Theosophical Society and the Pasadena based Theosophical Society founded by William Quan Judge, and each rival body keeps and reports its own membership rolls without any shared or independently audited combined count.

What Would Settle It A single count published jointly, or independently compiled from each Society's own reported rolls with a stated methodology and date, across the Adyar, Pasadena and any other surviving Theosophical bodies.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin.

Open Turkey

Why It Is Open Turkish national censuses do not ask about sectarian or Alevi religious identity, so no official count of the Alevi population exists. Published estimates commonly range from about 10 to 20 percent of the population, a spread wide enough to reflect the absence of a count rather than disagreement over one.

What Would Settle It A nationally representative census or independently conducted survey that specifically asks about Alevi self-identification, which the Turkish state census currently does not do.

Expertise Needed Demography, religious studies

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Syria

Why It Is Open The last widely cited figures, about 74 percent Sunni Muslim, 11 percent Alawite, 10 percent Christian, describe the pre-2011 population. A decade of civil war, mass displacement and emigration has since altered the population in ways no subsequent census or survey has measured, so the current composition is not known.

What Would Settle It A new nationally representative census or demographic survey conducted once conditions allow it, accounting for returnees, refugees and the dead.

Expertise Needed Demography

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open Lebanon

Why It Is Open No official religious census has been taken in Lebanon since 1932, by policy, to avoid disturbing the sectarian power-sharing arrangement fixed at that count. Every percentage in circulation, including the estimate recorded here, is a modeled estimate rather than a count.

What Would Settle It An official national census that asks and records sectarian religious affiliation, which Lebanese governments have avoided for over ninety years for the same political reason the number stays unknown.

Expertise Needed Demography, political science

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

Open West African

Why It Is Open The grouping gathers deities from at least four distinct traditions: Ala, Amadioha and Chukwu are Igbo, Nyame, Asaase Yaa and Ananse are Akan, Amma and Nommo are Dogon, Roog is Serer, and Mami Wata is pan-regional rather than belonging to any of them. A pantheon in this atlas is tied to a single tradition, so naming one tradition for this grouping would assert that all of these deities belong to it, which is false. Vodun (West African) is already catalogued as a tradition in its own right, and the Fon pantheon points at it, so the umbrella is not simply a missing tradition.

What Would Settle It A scholarly judgment on whether a region can stand as a pantheon at all, or whether a pantheon must belong to a single tradition. If it must, the grouping splits into Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer pantheons and each deity is reassigned to the tradition that holds it. If it need not, the comparative grounds for treating West Africa as one pantheon need stating, and each deity still needs its own tradition recorded alongside the regional grouping.

Expertise Needed West African religious studies; Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer ethnography

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

Open Mexican Folk

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Santa Muerte, and this atlas has no entry yet for Mexican folk Catholicism or for any tradition that would hold her. The gap is a missing tradition, not a missing link, so no connection can be recorded today.

What Would Settle It A decision on whether folk Catholicism should be catalogued as its own tradition or as a denomination of Catholicism, then the entry itself. The atlas already treats syncretic Afro-Caribbean traditions as their own traditions, which is the nearest precedent.

Expertise Needed Latin American religious studies; anthropology of folk Catholicism

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

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds Cybele and Attis and this atlas has no entry yet for Phrygian religion or for the Roman cult of Magna Mater that carried it westward. Several neighbouring ancient traditions already have their own entries, Hittite Religion, Etruscan Religion and Canaanite Religion among them, so the absence looks like a gap rather than a decision.

What Would Settle It An entry for Phrygian religion, or a decision that the cult belongs under an existing tradition such as Roman Religion, in which case the deities need reassigning rather than the pantheon relinking.

Expertise Needed Anatolian archaeology; Greco-Roman religion

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

Open Maasai

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Engai, and this atlas has no entry yet for Maasai traditional religion. Comparable East and Southern African traditions already have their own entries, Zulu Traditional Religion and Shona Traditional Religion among them, so the absence is a gap in coverage rather than a considered position.

What Would Settle It An entry for Maasai traditional religion, written to the same standard as the Zulu and Shona entries, after which the pantheon links with no further decision.

Expertise Needed East African ethnography; Maasai religious studies

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

Open Halqa ࡀ

Why It Is Open Hebrew, Syriac and Arabic all use their letters as figures, and Mandaic descends from the same Aramaic stock, so the practice would be unremarkable. No alphanumeric numeral system for Mandaic is described in the reference literature consulted, and the modern character standard encodes no Mandaic digits. Nothing states that the practice was absent either, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A survey of numbering in dated Mandaean manuscripts and inscribed lead rolls, checking colophons, quire marks and folio numbers for letters standing as figures, together with a reading of the standard Mandaic grammars on how numbers are written out.

Expertise Needed Semitic palaeography and Mandaean manuscript studies

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium, Mandaic block, U+0840 to U+085F.

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

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 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 Parah Adumah (The Red Heifer)

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Parah is the only source that supplies a count, and it records a dispute over the total rather than a settled figure. No independent documentary, epigraphic or archaeological attestation of any single performance has been identified, so there is nothing outside that one list against which the number can be checked. Nobody holds a defended position on the true count; the record is simply absent.

What Would Settle It An independent Second Temple period attestation would settle at least one performance: an ostracon, papyrus or inscription referring to the preparation of the ashes or to the water of lustration, or a securely dated installation on the Mount of Olives identifiable with the rite. Systematic re-reading of the Judaean desert documentary material for purity-water vocabulary is the cheapest place to look.

Expertise Needed Second Temple epigraphy and papyrology, archaeology of Roman Judaea

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Parah.

Open Extispicy and Haruspicy

Why It Is Open No book of the Etruscan discipline survives in any language. The Piacenza liver assigns divine names to regions of the organ and says nothing about method, and the Roman authors who describe haruspicy were writing from outside the tradition, often centuries later, and were not attempting to transmit a procedure. Nobody has proposed and defended a reconstruction of the method, so what is missing is evidence rather than agreement.

What Would Settle It An Etruscan haruspical text of any length would settle it, and a bilingual would settle it decisively. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the Piacenza liver against the far better documented Mesopotamian liver models and their accompanying omen compendia would at least establish whether the two systems share a method, which would constrain the possibilities.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, Etruscan epigraphy, Assyriology

Question posed in The Religion of the Etruscans, Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.).

Open The Bengal Presidency Sati Returns

Why It Is Open The only numerical record is the East India Company series of 1815 to 1828, which covers one presidency, was compiled while prohibition was being argued for, and is concentrated around the seat of the administration that compiled it. The positions in circulation, that the practice was rare and inflated by reformers or that it was widespread and understated, are competing readings of that single series rather than independent measurements. Nobody has produced a count for any earlier period.

What Would Settle It A regional demographic study built from evidence the Company never touched: memorial stones for immolated women, which survive in numbers across western and southern India and can in principle be dated, located and counted; vernacular temple, land and family records for periods and districts outside Company reach; and inscriptional corpora already published but never assembled for this question. Both bodies of material have been used locally and never aggregated.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and inscriptional history, historical demography, and regional social history working in the relevant vernaculars.

Question posed in Contentious Traditions: The Debate on Sati in Colonial India, Lata Mani.

Open Intinction

Why It Is Open Churches suspended the common cup during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and again in the epidemics of the following century, and intinction and individual glasses spread as a result. This run deliberately made no claim about transmission risk because it could not verify one, and the relationship between what has been measured and what churches actually decided is not established here.

What Would Settle It A review of the published microbiological and epidemiological studies of the shared chalice, paired with the actual decisions of church authorities, to establish whether the evidence drove the practice or followed it.

Expertise Needed Epidemiology; liturgical studies

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

Open Slavic

Why It Is Open Every surviving description of Slavic religion was written by Christian outsiders recording what they intended to destroy, and none of them records a cosmogony. The dualist earth-diver story usually printed as the Slavic creation myth is attested only in folklore collected after a thousand years of Christianity, in a form shared with Finno-Ugric and Turkic neighbours. Attempts to recover a pre-Christian original from it have produced competing reconstructions and no agreement, and most specialists have stopped trying.

What Would Settle It A pre-Christian Slavic text of any length would settle it, and none is known to exist. Short of that, an inscribed or iconographic find from a pagan-period sanctuary that depicts a creation sequence, of the kind Arkona or Zbrucz might still yield, would give the reconstruction something outside the folklore to stand on.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the archaeology of pagan-period sanctuaries in the western Slavic lands

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

Open Etruscan

Why It Is Open The Etruscan language is read only in short, largely formulaic texts, and the longest survivals, the Zagreb mummy wrappings and the Capua tile, are ritual calendars rather than narrative. What Roman writers preserved of the Etrusca disciplina is the part that interested them, the reading of lightning and livers, and it does not include a cosmogony. Nobody holds a position on what the Etruscan account was, because there is nothing to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A long Etruscan narrative text would settle it. The known corpus is almost entirely epigraphic and funerary, so the realistic route is a new find of the length of the Zagreb wrappings that is narrative rather than calendrical.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, with epigraphy and the archaeology of Etruscan sanctuary sites

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