Open Questions

Open Blessed Mantle of the Prophet

Why It Is Open Identification rests on tradition and unbroken custody. The textile has never been radiocarbon dated or otherwise scientifically tested.

What Would Settle It Radiocarbon dating and textile fiber analysis of the cloak, if the Topkapi Palace Museum ever permitted sampling.

Expertise Needed Textile archaeometry, Islamic studies

Question posed in Chamber of the Sacred Relics, Topkapi Palace Museum, Istanbul.

Open Order of Nine Angles

Why It Is Open The identification most often made in print, with David Myatt, is denied by Myatt himself, and no independent documentary or forensic evidence establishes who wrote under the name. The order's early history is documented mainly through its own publications.

What Would Settle It A stylometric comparison of the earliest Anton Long texts against Myatt's other pseudonymous and signed writing, or documentary evidence such as publisher correspondence or internal order papers naming the author, would settle it.

Expertise Needed Textual and stylometric analysis; history of new religious movements

Question posed in Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne.

Open Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha

Why It Is Open No source, credible or otherwise, attempts a monetary figure for the statue or the temple building specifically. Only the far broader Crown Property Bureau, of which the temple is one holding among many, has drawn outside estimates, and those cannot be read back onto the temple itself.

What Would Settle It A statement from the Bureau of the Royal Household or Crown Property Bureau isolating a value or insurance figure for the Emerald Buddha or Wat Phra Kaew specifically, apart from aggregate crown-property estimates.

Expertise Needed Thai royal and crown-property administration, and cultural heritage appraisal.

Question posed in Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Google Arts & Culture).

Open Karma Lingpa

Why It Is Open No source independent of Nyingma tulku-lineage tradition records when Karma Lingpa was born or died. The commonly repeated dates of 1326 and 1386 come from later biographical and lineage compilations rather than from any record contemporary with him.

What Would Settle It A Tibetan document contemporary with Karma Lingpa, distinct from the later tulku-lineage biographies that supply his conventional dates, naming a year for his birth or death.

Expertise Needed Tibetan Buddhist studies, history of the Nyingma tertön tradition

Question posed in The Hidden History of the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Bryan J. Cuevas.

Open Thonmi Sambhota

Why It Is Open The earliest accounts of Thonmi Sambhota's life were written some four centuries after the events they describe, and even his traditional mission date of 632 is not agreed among them; no source, early or late, gives a birth year, and some scholars question whether a single historical minister stands behind the tradition at all.

What Would Settle It A source contemporary with Songtsen Gampo's seventh century reign naming Thonmi Sambhota and a birth year, which no presently known Tibetan or external record supplies.

Expertise Needed Tibetan history, history of the Tibetan script

Question posed in Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik.

Open Thonmi Sambhota

Why It Is Open No source contemporary with Thonmi Sambhota records when he died. His entire biography comes from Tibetan histories composed from about the eleventh century onward, several centuries after the events they describe, and modern scholarship treats the man himself as an uncertain figure whose attributed grammatical treatises cannot be independently dated to the seventh century.

What Would Settle It A Tibetan imperial-period inscription or document contemporary with Songtsen Gampo's reign, distinct from the eleventh-century-and-later histories that supply Thonmi Sambhota's conventional biography, naming him or fixing a year for his death.

Expertise Needed Tibetan history, history of the Tibetan script and early Tibetan grammar

Question posed in Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik.

Open Tibetan Na Ro ◌ོ

Why It Is Open Three of the four Tibetan vowel signs carry names that the grammatical tradition glosses transparently: gi gu, zhabs kyu and greng bu can all be read against ordinary words. Na ro is the exception. Readings are offered in the grammars and they do not agree, and this pass found no basis on which to prefer one, so the atlas states the sign and declines to gloss the name.

What Would Settle It A study tracing the term through the earliest Tibetan grammatical treatises and their commentaries, establishing when it first appears and whether an early commentator glosses it, rather than a further proposal built on the modern form of the words.

Expertise Needed Tibetan philology and the history of the indigenous grammatical tradition

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

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 Dammar

Why It Is Open No specific dated textual or archaeological reference for dammar's early use has been confirmed against available scholarship.

What Would Settle It A study of Southeast Asian trade records or an archaeobotanical residue analysis naming dammar specifically, rather than resin generally.

Expertise Needed Trade history, archaeobotany

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

Open S2

Why It Is Open The sign appears at the tail of the longer Ugaritic school abecedaries, written a second time after the twenty-ninth sign, and its shape is conventionally described as samekh-like. No Ugaritic source names it, and specialists disagree on its basic function: some read it as an additional native sibilant the ordinary twenty-nine signs did not distinguish, others treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin. No other script modelled in this atlas offers even an approximate cognate to compare it against, unlike Ugaritic's other five signs unique among its Northwest Semitic peers, all five of which correspond cleanly to a preserved Arabic letter.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of every attested occurrence of the sign in the Ugaritic textual corpus, not only the abecedaries, checked for whether it clusters in loanwords or foreign personal and place names, which would support the spelling-device reading, against whether it appears in ordinary native vocabulary in a way the standard twenty-nine signs could not otherwise write, which would support a distinct native phoneme.

Expertise Needed Ugaritology; Northwest Semitic historical phonology

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Westminster Abbey

Why It Is Open Westminster Abbey, as a Royal Peculiar, is exempt from registering with the Charity Commission for England and Wales the way Canterbury Cathedral and other great English churches with registered charity status are, so no audited public accounts for it exist on the Commission's register. It self-publishes an annual report stating only an aggregate running cost, not a total income figure broken down by source, and this pass could not extract one from the report's own document.

What Would Settle It A direct, text-readable reading of Westminster Abbey's own annual report and accounts, which the Abbey publishes as a PDF each year, isolating a total income or total funds figure and its breakdown by source.

Expertise Needed UK ecclesiastical and charity law, and nonprofit financial reporting.

Question posed in Support Us (Westminster Abbey Official Website).

Open The Way International

Why It Is Open The Way International is registered as a church under US tax law and is therefore exempt from filing the Form 990 annual return that discloses a tax-exempt organization's finances; ProPublica's Nonprofit Explorer confirms none is on record. A private data aggregator's revenue estimate circulates but names no methodology or analyst, so no reliable total was found.

What Would Settle It A voluntary published financial statement from The Way International itself, or investigative journalism that obtains and verifies its actual revenue or asset figures despite the church exemption.

Expertise Needed US nonprofit and religious organization tax law, and investigative journalism covering new religious movements.

Question posed in Way International, Organization Profile (ProPublica Nonprofit Explorer).

Open Saint Peter's Basilica and the Vatican Necropolis

Why It Is Open The Holy See has released whole-institution budget and balance sheet figures since October 2020, but the Fabbrica di San Pietro, the historic office administering Saint Peter's Basilica since the sixteenth century, has never published a figure isolated to the Basilica's own income, offerings, or the Fabbrica's own maintenance and construction fund.

What Would Settle It A future Vatican financial disclosure that itemizes the Fabbrica di San Pietro's own accounts separately from the Holy See's consolidated statement, or a leaked or independently audited figure for the Basilica's own finances.

Expertise Needed Vatican financial administration and canon law, and investigative or financial journalism covering the Holy See.

Question posed in Vatican Releases Budget, Balance Sheet Amid Financial Scandal (Associated Press via Al Jazeera, 2020), The Associated Press.

Open The Ashwini Kumaras

Why It Is Open The two twilights, the morning and evening star, the sun and the moon, day and night, and a pair of stars have all been proposed. The disagreement predates modern scholarship: Indian commentators were already recording rival opinions. No proposal has carried the field, and the hymns describe the twins by what they do rather than by what they are.

What Would Settle It Comparative evidence from the wider Indo-European divine twin material strong enough to fix a referent rather than a shared narrative pattern, or a Vedic passage that identifies the twins with a phenomenon rather than merely associating them with the dawn.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-European religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Diti

Why It Is Open Diti is named only a handful of times in the Rigveda, always in formulaic proximity to Aditi, with no hymn, no epithet and no story of her own. A figure of that antiquity with that little attached to her is unusual, and her full career begins only when the Puranic genealogists need two mothers.

What Would Settle It Comparative Indo-Iranian evidence for an independent figure behind the abstract noun, or a demonstration that the Vedic occurrences are all secondary to the divine name Aditi.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Martanda

Why It Is Open The line brings him back for birth and for death, and both readings fit. The solar reading is supported by later usage, where Martanda is an epithet of the sun. The mortal reading stays closer to what the hymn says. Neither has displaced the other and the hymn offers no gloss.

What Would Settle It A close comparison of how the commentarial traditions read the passage, set side by side rather than cited singly. No new evidence is expected; what is missing is the comparison itself.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and the history of Sanskrit commentary

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open The Vishvadevas

Why It Is Open The hymns addressed to the all-gods invoke Indra, Agni, Mitra and Varuna by name in the same breath, which is difficult on the totality reading and unremarkable on the class reading. The ritual tradition then gives the Vishvadevas a portion of their own in the domestic and ancestral rites, which favours a class, but ritual is capable of serving a formula a plate.

What Would Settle It A systematic account of what the hymns addressed to the Vishvadevas actually say about them, set against the hymns addressed to named collectives such as the Adityas and the Rudras, to establish whether the group has a describable collective character or only a name.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and the study of Vedic ritual

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Cao Đài

Why It Is Open English language sources on Cao Dai describe devotional ritual offerings, incense, fruit, flowers, tea and alcohol, at daily temple ceremonies, but none states a fixed due, a percentage of income or an enforcement consequence for not giving, the shape every other body on the atlas's member giving expectations axis carries.

What Would Settle It A direct reading of the Tan Luat (Cao Dai's New Canonical Law) or the Phap Chanh Truyen (Religious Constitution), or a scholarly ethnography of Tay Ninh Holy See temple finance, stating whether registered Cao Dai members owe a fixed contribution and what follows if they do not pay it.

Expertise Needed Vietnamese religious studies, primary source review of Cao Dai canonical texts

Question posed in Cao Dai (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors.

Open Thor's Hammer Pendant

Why It Is Open Effectively the entire corpus of around a thousand pendants falls in the ninth to eleventh centuries. That is also the conversion period, so the distribution is compatible both with an old practice becoming archaeologically visible and with a practice that begins as a response to Christian cross-wearing. No securely dated earlier example has been published, and no positive account of an earlier phase exists, so this is an evidential gap rather than a contest between established positions.

What Would Settle It A hammer pendant, or a mould for one, recovered from a securely dated context earlier than the ninth century, or a systematic re-examination and re-dating of the existing corpus establishing that no such context exists.

Expertise Needed Viking Age and Migration Period archaeology, with finds dating and metalwork typology

Question posed in Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow.

Open Serer Religion

Why It Is Open This is a gap rather than an argument. The monument fields at Sine-Ngayene, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, were built over a long span and have been partially excavated, but no excavator has been able to attach them to a named present-day people, and no scholar has published a positive attribution to defend. Serer oral tradition, recorded most fully by Henry Gravrand, connects the monuments to Serer forebears and reads the burials as those of ancestors who are now among the pangool. Historians have neither confirmed that reading nor produced a rival one; they have set it aside as unproven and moved on, which leaves the question with no position holding the field.

What Would Settle It A dated burial and ceramic sequence from a securely stratified excavation across several of the monument fields, combined with ancient DNA from the tumuli burials and comparison against present-day Serer, Wolof and Mandinka populations. Radiocarbon coverage of the circles is thin and unevenly published, and no aDNA programme has been directed at the Senegambian monuments. Community consultation with Serer authorities would need to precede any sampling.

Expertise Needed West African archaeology; archaeogenetics; Senegambian oral history and its evaluation as a historical source.

Question posed in Stone Circles of Senegambia, UNESCO World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Committee.