Disputed Statements

Asteya (Non-Theft), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally attributed to Patanjali, the compiler of the Yoga Sutras. Scholarship debates whether this is the same Patanjali credited with the Sanskrit grammatical treatise of that name, and whether the text as it stands is the work of a single author or an edited compilation of older material.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant tier 1

Asteya (Non-Theft), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Dated by scholars anywhere from the second century BCE, on older assumptions of a single ancient author, to as late as the fourth or fifth century CE, on newer philological readings that treat the text as a later compilation. There is no scholarly consensus on a single date for the Yoga Sutras.

Source The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali: A New Edition, Translation, and Commentary, Edwin F. Bryant tier 1

Astraea, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Classical sources disagree on her parentage: some make her a Titan, daughter of Astraeus, lord of the dusk, and Eos, the dawn, while later poets instead identify her with Dike, daughter of Zeus and Themis, the personification of justice herself.

Source Metamorphoses, Ovid tier 1

Astral Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Astral Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Astrolabium Planum, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The degree images are attributed within the book to Pietro d'Abano rather than claimed by its compiler. How much of the material is his, and where he had it from in turn, is unresolved.

The Astrolabium Planum, printed by Erhard Ratdolt in 1488 and carrying an image for each of the 360 degrees of the zodiac, credits the fourteenth century physician and astrologer Pietro d'Abano as the source of its decan and degree imagery. The 1488 printed edition is the primary text cited here. The method available is textual and art-historical comparison: reading the book's own framing language, which presents the images as received and credits d'Abano without specifying which images he originated and which he passed on from an earlier tradition, against what independent evidence survives of d'Abano's own writing and of earlier degree-image traditions circulating before 1488. Because no manuscript or text earlier than the printed book itself has been identified that would show which specific images are d'Abano's own contribution and which he inherited, the book's self-presentation as compiling received material under his name cannot be verified or disproved from the surviving record, and the question of what belongs to him personally stays open.

Source Astrolabium Planum, Johannes Angelus (Johann Engel) tier 2

Astronomy, Scholarly Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Emerged As Named Discipline

Currently States 1687

Astronomy's own description already records that it "diverged as separate disciplines [from astrology] in the early modern period"; historians place the split at different marks depending on which kind of separation is meant: Copernicus's 1543 De Revolutionibus (the mathematical break with geocentrism), Kepler and Galileo's telescopic observation in the early 1600s (the empirical break), or Newton's 1687 Principia Mathematica (the point at which celestial mechanics became a fully mathematical, non-astrological physical science, the value recorded here). No single year commands consensus; this is a real scholarly disagreement with named positions, not an unanswered question.

Source Astronomy, Andrew Fraknoi, David Morrison, and Sidney C. Wolff (OpenStax) tier 1

Asz ࡑ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

At ࡕ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

Atemoztli, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Late November into mid December

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Aten, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Monotheistic: one God

Whether Akhenaten's Atenism was a true monotheism, denying that other gods existed at all, or a monolatry or henotheism that elevated one god to sole worship without denying the others' existence, is argued from the same evidence: the Aten displaced every other cult for about seventeen years, the name of Amun was chiselled from monuments across Egypt, and the god was given a form, a disc with rays ending in hands, no other Egyptian god had ever taken. Erik Hornung's Akhenaten and the Religion of Light (2001) is the standard modern study of the reform's theology, treating the reform's suddenness and its total collapse within a generation of Akhenaten's death as evidence of how unlike anything else in Egyptian religion it was, without treating the monotheism question itself as closed.

Source Akhenaten and the Religion of Light, Erik Hornung (translated by David Lorton) tier 1

Athanasian Creed, Creeds & Confessions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States J. N. D. Kelly's The Athanasian Creed (Adam and Charles Black, 1964), the standard scholarly study of the text, argues for southern Gaul as the creed's place of origin on the evidence of its Latin vocabulary, which parallels writers of that region, and its early liturgical use within the circle of Caesarius of Arles, since the creed itself, known from its opening words as the Quicunque Vult, names no author, no place and no occasion for its own composition.

Other placings and dates have been proposed since the text names no author, no place and no occasion for its own composition, and Kelly's case for southern Gaul around the year 500 rests on argument from vocabulary and later liturgical use rather than on any internal statement.

Source The Athanasian Creed, J. N. D. Kelly tier 1

Atlcahualo, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Early to late February, in this reconstruction

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Att ࡈ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

Attis, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Ancient sources disagree about Attis's relationship to Cybele. One strand of myth makes her his mother, through the story in which the nymph Nana conceives him from an almond that grew from Agdistis's severed member, while cult practice and other tellings instead cast him as her divine consort or lover, a slippage between a filial and an erotic role that ancient and modern commentators alike have found troubling.

Source Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult, Maarten J. Vermaseren tier 1

Attis, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Early comparative mythologists, following James Frazer, grouped Attis with other dying and rising gods as evidence of a shared pattern behind resurrection narratives including the Christian one. Later scholars, notably Jonathan Z. Smith, argued the parallel is overstated, noting that clear evidence for an actual restoration of Attis in the Roman era, rather than mourning followed by consolation, is thin and largely postdates Christianity itself. The comparison remains actively disputed.

Source Cybele and Attis: The Myth and the Cult, Maarten J. Vermaseren tier 1

Augur, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The word augur is itself of disputed derivation, connected by different ancient and modern authorities to avis, bird, or to other roots; Cicero already discussed rival explanations in his own writing on divination.

Ancient and modern authorities disagree about the word's derivation.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History, Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price tier 1

Auraicept na nEces, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Traditionally attributed to Cenn Faelad mac Ailella.

The Auraicept na nEces, the medieval Irish grammatical tract that transmits the ogham letter lists, the Briatharogaim word-oghams and the elaborate alternative ogham schemes, carries a traditional framing narrative crediting its origin to legendary early grammarians, but that framing is the text's own claim about itself rather than an independently documented fact. George Calder's edition and translation, Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' Primer (John Grant, 1917), is the primary text cited here. The method is textual and codicological: reading the surviving manuscript witnesses, which differ from each other in content and arrangement, for the layers of commentary, gloss and later addition built up around an older core, since a text compiled and re-glossed across several centuries by successive scholastic hands does not answer to a single author or moment of composition. Because the manuscript tradition shows this layered growth rather than a stable single text, the traditional attribution is treated as the tract's own literary self-presentation rather than settled authorship.

Source Auraicept na n-Eces: The Scholars' Primer, George Calder (ed.) tier 1

Aurangzeb, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Aurangzeb, who took the Mughal throne by imprisoning his father Shah Jahan and killing his brothers and ruled for forty nine years, is read in Indian public argument either as the pious ruler or as the destroyer of temples; the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2nd and 3rd editions, Bearman et al., eds., Brill, 2005) notes that both readings select heavily from a reign of half a century rather than accounting for the whole of it.

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editions, P. Bearman et al. (eds.) tier 1

Auto Sacramental, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1504

Gil Vicente's Auto de San Martin, performed at the Corpus Christi procession in Lisbon in 1504, is the work most commonly cited as the first auto sacramental, but specialists note that it has no allegorical characters and does not itself dramatize the Eucharist, so its standing as the genre's true origin point is disputed rather than settled; the genre's own roots reach back further still, to plain devotional tableaux documented in Spain from the thirteenth century, long before any surviving text gives the form the allegorical, Eucharist centered shape that later came to define it.

Source Autos Sacramentales (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3