Open Questions

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 The Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir

Why It Is Open The accounts that name a place do not name the same one, they are all late, northern and secondary, and no site has ever been identified on the ground. Nobody defends a location, so this is a gap in the record rather than an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An inscription naming the assembly, or the excavation of a monastic complex in Kashmir or the north-west of the subcontinent large enough to house it and carrying Sarvastivada Abhidharma material of the right date.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology and epigraphy, working with Buddhist studies

Question posed in History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era, Etienne Lamotte, translated by Sara Webb-Boin.

Open Skoptsy

Why It Is Open The sect produced no systematic theology. It left its teaching in hymns sung from memory and in the answers its members gave under interrogation, and almost everything recorded about that teaching passed through police, consistory and missionary hands. Those witnesses were prosecuting or refuting the sect and had every reason to record it at its most extreme, so the necessity claim may belong to the sect or to the men writing it down. The surviving hymn corpus has never been edited critically, and it has not been read against the depositions district by district and decade by decade.

What Would Settle It A critical edition of the Skoptsy hymn corpus and of the community manuscript books held in Russian archives, collated against the interrogation depositions from the same districts and dates, would show whether the necessity claim is the sect's own language or the language of the officials recording it.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the history of Russian religious dissent, with archival access to imperial police and consistory files

Question posed in Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale, Laura Engelstein, The state's files on the sect and the problem of reading a doctrine out of them.

Open Kimbanguist Church

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas holds on this church is Marie-Louise Martin's 1975 study and Bengt Sundkler's earlier comparative work on prophet movements, which argue opposite readings of the founder's status but both predate the church's later doctrinal development by decades. The atlas has no source of its own for what the church's leadership has taught since, so the debated relation it carries is written from the two twentieth century camps only.

What Would Settle It A current Kimbanguist catechetical or confessional document, or a recent peer-reviewed study of the church's twenty-first century teaching, either of which would let the debated relation be dated and scoped properly instead of resting on sources fifty years old.

Expertise Needed African church history; the study of African Initiated Churches; Congolese religious studies

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

Open Zi Wei Dou Shu

Why It Is Open The system is traditionally ascribed to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan, c. 871-989, but the attribution cannot be verified against any surviving text from his lifetime, and the earliest manuscripts describing the method postdate him by centuries.

What Would Settle It A textual historical study tracing the earliest surviving Zi Wei Dou Shu manuscripts and comparing their content and terminology against securely dated Chen Tuan texts.

Expertise Needed Sinology; history of Chinese astrology; textual criticism

Question posed in Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars, Ho Peng Yoke.

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 Geomancy

Why It Is Open The same structure of sixteen four position figures appears across West Africa, Madagascar, North Africa and medieval Europe. Some scholars read the African systems as local developments of Islamic geomancy carried across the Sahara; others argue for substantially independent development. Neither position rests on datable evidence from the relevant period.

What Would Settle It Datable material evidence from before the earliest surviving testimony: excavated divining apparatus, or a dated text describing the practice, from either side of the Sahara. Comparative linguistic work on the figure names across the four traditions would also constrain the answer.

Expertise Needed History of religions; archaeology of West and North Africa; historical linguistics

Question posed in Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, William Bascom.

Open Ifa Divination

Why It Is Open The sixteen are learned in an order treated as one of seniority, but published sequences do not agree in every particular, and agreement is weakest past the first few positions. Bascom treated the order of the figures as a subject needing its own study rather than a fact he could simply report.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey recording the ordering taught in a range of identified lineages and localities, with the informants and dates named, so that variation can be mapped rather than averaged.

Expertise Needed Ethnography of West African divination; Yoruba studies

Question posed in Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, William Bascom.

Open Diloggun

Why It Is Open The two are the same oracle by descent, and most of the sixteen parent names carry across, but the earliest substantial documentation of Cuban practice dates from the twentieth century, long after the transatlantic crossing. Everything between is inferred from the state of the two traditions when they were finally recorded.

What Would Settle It Earlier documentary evidence of Cuban practice: colonial administrative or ecclesiastical records describing cowrie divination, or dated libretas from the nineteenth century with a secure provenance.

Expertise Needed History of Afro-Cuban religion; archival history of colonial Cuba

Question posed in Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, William Bascom.

Open Diloggun

Why It Is Open Lucumi houses transmit liturgy and divinatory material in handwritten notebooks copied between godparent and godchild. They were never intended for publication, they vary by lineage, and no census of them exists. The published record is therefore of unknown completeness against a body of text nobody has counted.

What Would Settle It A provenanced survey of surviving libretas in institutional and family holdings, undertaken with the consent of the houses concerned, establishing dates, lines of copying and the extent of overlap between them.

Expertise Needed Afro-Cuban religious studies; manuscript studies; archival ethnography

Question posed in Sixteen Cowries: Yoruba Divination from Africa to the New World, William Bascom.

Open Mithraism

Why It Is Open The cult left no scripture, no liturgy and no doctrinal statement. The single line usually cited is a damaged painted inscription in the mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome, restored by its excavators to read as thanks for having been saved by shed blood; the restoration supplies missing letters, and even as restored it does not say what an initiate was saved from or for. Mithraists left no funerary formulae of the kind other cults of the period left in quantity, so there is nothing independent to test the reading against, and scholars working from the iconography alone have not settled it.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic text of any length: a liturgical papyrus, a doctrinal fragment, or a securely legible inscription stating the cult's teaching, recovered from an excavated mithraeum or from a papyrus collection. A body of Mithraic grave inscriptions would settle it indirectly, by showing what members expected of their own deaths.

Expertise Needed Roman archaeology, Latin and Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, Manfred Clauss.

Open The Eleusinian Mysteries

Why It Is Open The prohibition on disclosure held for the whole life of the cult and no initiate left an account in any surviving text. Ancient writers describe the effect of the rite rather than its content. The only reports that claim to give content are by Christian polemicists writing centuries later from outside the cult, with an interest in making it appear either trivial or obscene, and there is nothing independent against which to test them. Excavation gives the hall and the small closed structure at its centre and nothing of what was done there.

What Would Settle It An ancient text by an initiate, or a document from the sanctuary's own administration describing the conduct of the rite, recovered by excavation at Eleusis or identified in a papyrus collection. Inscriptions from the sanctuary already record its finances and its officials, so a procedural record is not an impossible find.

Expertise Needed Classical archaeology, Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in Greek Religion, Walter Burkert.

Open The Sabians

Why It Is Open The Quran names the Sabians three times and gives no description of them. The two leading identifications, the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and the star-venerating people of Harran, rest on different kinds of evidence and point in different directions, and the Harranian case is complicated by a report that the name was adopted there in order to obtain protected status. The identification has been argued since the ninth century by parties with a legal interest in the answer.

What Would Settle It A securely dated pre-Islamic attestation of the name applied to a specific community, or documentary evidence of self-designation from either candidate group before the Abbasid period, would settle it. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the earliest Quranic commentaries against the Mandaean and Harranian source material could establish which identification the earliest readers actually held.

Expertise Needed Semitic philology, Quranic exegesis and its history, the archaeology and epigraphy of upper Mesopotamia, and Mandaean studies

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

Open Western Astrology

Why It Is Open The table reaches us as a table. Vettius Valens transmits it in the Anthology and Claudius Ptolemy records it in the Tetrabiblos, and Ptolemy is himself the source of the complaint: he objects that the Egyptian writers set out no proof and no ordering principle for the boundaries they give, which is his stated reason for offering a set of his own. Nothing in the surviving sources states the rule that produced the sequence of rulers or the width of each of the sixty stretches. Modern scholarship has not established one either. This is not a disagreement between camps with positions a reader could go and weigh; it is a gap nobody has filled, which is why the atlas records the sixty figures as transmitted and supplies no rationale behind them.

What Would Settle It A Greek or demotic astrological papyrus that gives the bounds together with any statement of how they were arrived at would settle it directly. Failing that, a securely dated table earlier than Valens showing the boundaries in an intermediate state would show whether they were computed or inherited. A third route is arithmetical rather than documentary: the five planetary totals in this table are Venus 82, Jupiter 79, Mercury 76, Mars 66 and Saturn 57, summing to exactly 360, and a systematic comparison of those figures and of the individual widths against the planetary period numbers used in Babylonian and Hellenistic astronomy would show whether the table is derived from them or independent of them.

Expertise Needed History of ancient astronomy and astrology; Greek and demotic papyrology; Babylonian mathematical astronomy

Question posed in Tetrabiblos, Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I.

Open I Ching

Why It Is Open Every commentary batch in this workstream carries a header naming James Legge 1882 as its source and stating that Wilhelm and Baynes was not used. The batch that wrote the first sentence of all 384 line descriptions carries no header and names no translator, so the provenance of that layer is genuinely undeclared. The vocabulary is mixed rather than uniform: the descriptions read goat and hedge at King Wen 34, ridgepole at King Wen 28, and cords and ropes at King Wen 29, all of which belong to the Wilhelm and Baynes English, while the articles written over them read ram, fence and beam, which belong to Legge. Recording either translation as the source of the description layer would be an assertion nobody has tested.

What Would Settle It A line by line collation of the 384 descriptions against Legge, The Sacred Books of the East volume XVI (1882), and against the Wilhelm and Baynes Bollingen English (1950), beginning with hexagrams 28, 29 and 34, where the two translations diverge on a single concrete noun and the divergence is already visible in the data. The collation would also have to say whether any description is close enough to the 1950 English to raise a rights question.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically Yijing translation history, together with a copyright reading on the Wilhelm and Baynes English of 1950.

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

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 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 The Alhambra Decree

Why It Is Open The decree of 31 March 1492 ordered a permanent exclusion, and no repealing act is catalogued in this atlas. That a formal revocation took place in the twentieth century is very widely repeated in general accounts, and none of them that the atlas has been able to check cites the repealing instrument. Spain has acted concretely to reverse the decree's effects, most recently through Ley 12/2015, which offered Spanish nationality to Sephardim of Spanish origin and frames itself in its preamble as a redress of the expulsion, but that law does not purport to repeal the decree and does not refer to any earlier act that did.

What Would Settle It A citation to the Boletin Oficial del Estado, or to a scholarly account working from it, identifying the repealing instrument, its date and its scope. A negative finding would be equally useful: if the decree was left standing and simply became inoperative, that is a fact about how spent instruments die and belongs in the record.

Expertise Needed Spanish legal history; Sephardic studies; archival research in the Boletin Oficial del Estado

Question posed in Ley 12/2015, de 24 de junio, en materia de concesion de la nacionalidad espanola a los sefardies originarios de Espana, Cortes Generales de Espana.