Open Questions

Open Reflexology

Why It Is Open The Sixth Dynasty relief at Saqqara is very widely cited by reflexology sources as evidence of ancient Egyptian practice. Egyptological readings of the same scene as ordinary manicure, pedicure or medical care exist. Engy El-Kilany has published a survey of foot care scenes in Egyptian tombs which secondary reports quote as calling the nature of the therapy depicted still debated, but that paper could not be obtained, and no Egyptological analysis settling the question either way has been found.

What Would Settle It A published Egyptological analysis of the Ankhmahor relief addressing the reflexology claim directly, either way.

Expertise Needed Egyptology and the history of medicine.

Question posed in Reflexology: Panacea or Placebo?, Hylton B. Menz, Paragraph on the tomb of Ankhmahor.

Open Naturopathy

Why It Is Open Regulation differs sharply by state, province and country, and the licensing picture changes. Summary figures circulate but could not be verified against primary regulatory sources at the time of writing.

What Would Settle It A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction check against the regulators themselves, with the date of the check recorded, since the answer decays.

Expertise Needed Health policy and comparative regulatory law.

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

Open Iridology

Why It Is Open The owl story is repeated in nearly every account of iridology's origin and is presented as its founding moment, but the accounts trace to later iridological literature rather than to anything Peczely wrote. It has the shape of a foundation legend.

What Would Settle It A statement by Peczely himself, or a contemporary account, describing the observation. Absent that, the earliest attestation of the story would at least date the legend.

Expertise Needed History of medicine, and Hungarian-language archival sources.

Question posed in Ignaz von Peczely, Inventor of Iridology, Edzard Ernst, Chapter 19, abstract.

Open Vatican Apostolic Library

Why It Is Open The library plainly holds material relevant to this atlas, and popular accounts make expansive claims about it. Specific holdings could not be verified well enough to assert a custody relation for any individual work, and asserting one without evidence would be exactly the kind of confident claim the atlas exists to avoid.

What Would Settle It Shelfmarks from the library's own catalogue, which is partly published, for specific works already in this atlas.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and catalogue research; Latin and Italian.

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

Open Bodleian Library

Why It Is Open The Bodleian holds significant alchemical and occult manuscript collections, including Ashmole material, but specific holdings for the works in this atlas were not verified to the point where a custody relation could be cited.

What Would Settle It Shelfmarks from the Bodleian's catalogue for named works, which is largely searchable.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and catalogue research.

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

Open Wellcome Collection

Why It Is Open The Wellcome holds a large collection on the history of medicine, magic and belief, much of it digitised. Specific correspondences to items already held here were not established.

What Would Settle It Catalogue identifiers from the Wellcome's own openly available catalogue.

Expertise Needed History of medicine and catalogue research.

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

Open The Kotel Pilgrimage

Why It Is Open The atlas holds no catalogued source establishing the present division of the plaza, which forms of prayer are conducted where, or where authority over those decisions rests. The arrangements have changed more than once and are the subject of continuing public and legal argument in Israel, so a description taken from a general history would very likely be out of date and would risk asserting one party's position as settled.

What Would Settle It Cataloguing the governing Israeli instruments and any current court decisions, together with the published positions of the parties to the dispute, so that the entry can describe the arrangement and the disagreement about it from documents rather than from report.

Expertise Needed Israeli religious law and public administration, and contemporary Jewish religious sociology

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

Open Ayahuasca Vine

Why It Is Open Two unrelated plants, out of the tens of thousands in the Amazon, must be combined for either to have any effect, and nothing about the appearance, taste or separate action of either suggests the other. Explanations range from very long systematic experimentation to the answer the traditions give, which is that the plants communicated it. The record is oral and the practice is old.

What Would Settle It Probably nothing can settle it. What would help is comparative work on how many other plant pairings are known in Amazonian practice, since a tradition with many such combinations implies a method, while a single one implies an accident or a transmission.

Expertise Needed Ethnobotany, Amazonian anthropology, ethnopharmacology

Question posed in Vegetalismo: Shamanism among the Mestizo Population of the Peruvian Amazon, Luis Eduardo Luna.

Open Theban J J

Why It Is Open J was not a separate letter of the Latin alphabet Trithemius was ciphering in 1518, and the earliest Theban sets carry no sign for it: the sign for I served for both. The Theban J in circulation today is a later supplement, usually described as adapted from the I, but nobody has identified the chart or edition in which it first appears, or the hand that made it. The modern twenty six letter Theban set therefore contains one letter with no traceable origin at all.

What Would Settle It A bibliographic collation of printed Theban charts in sequence, from Polygraphiae in 1518 and Agrippa's De occulta philosophia in 1533, through the eighteenth and nineteenth century grimoire reprints, to the twentieth century witchcraft revival, to locate the earliest surviving witness of the supplementary sign and to name the edition that introduced it.

Expertise Needed History of the printed book, analytical bibliography of occult literature

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Section on letters: the modern characters J and U are not represented and are often transliterated using the Theban characters for I and V..

Open Theban U U

Why It Is Open U and V were one letter in the Latin alphabet Trithemius was ciphering in 1518, and the original Theban set has a single sign covering both. The separate Theban U now in general use is a later supplement, conventionally taken over from the V, but the chart in which it first appears has not been identified and neither has whoever added it. The sign is used daily in modern practice with no known first witness behind it.

What Would Settle It A bibliographic collation of printed Theban charts in sequence, from Polygraphiae in 1518 and Agrippa's De occulta philosophia in 1533, through the eighteenth and nineteenth century grimoire reprints, to the twentieth century witchcraft revival, to locate the earliest surviving witness of the supplementary sign and to name the edition that introduced it.

Expertise Needed History of the printed book, analytical bibliography of occult literature

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Section on letters: the modern characters J and U are not represented and are often transliterated using the Theban characters for I and V..

Open Theban W W

Why It Is Open W is the awkward letter of the set. It was not a letter of the Latin alphabet the cipher was built on, and in the original chart it stands after Z rather than in alphabetical position, as a recent addition. Later copyists appear to have misread that presentation, and the printed sign for W differs between sources. Which of the circulating forms is faithful to the 1518 chart has never been established, so the atlas cannot say which sign for W it is showing.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving copies and early impressions of Polygraphiae against the Theban charts in Agrippa's De occulta philosophia and the later grimoire reprints, reading the 1518 sign for W from the earliest surviving impressions directly rather than from any redrawing, and tracing where the divergent forms enter the tradition.

Expertise Needed Analytical bibliography and description of early printed books, palaeography

Question posed in Theban alphabet (reference article), Wikipedia contributors, Sections on letters and on the original chart: in the original chart by Trithemius the letter W comes after Z, as it was a recent addition to the Latin alphabet..

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 The Great Table of the Watchtowers

Why It Is Open Governor sigils are documented as letter-by-letter traces of each governor's name through the Great Table Watchtowers, revealed to Dee and Kelley. Reproducing one accurately needs the Watchtower grid content plus each governor's starting square and reading direction, or a faithful trace of the published sigil image. Neither has been obtained: the standard reference article on the governors and their sigils could not be reached, and no digitized coordinate table has surfaced elsewhere. Recreating the Watchtower grid from memory and presenting it as verified would be fabrication.

What Would Settle It Either a clean digitized source giving Watchtower grid coordinates per governor name, or visual access good enough to trace the published sigil images faithfully, checked against at least one other published rendering for agreement.

Expertise Needed Enochian Magic

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

Open The Recorded Corpus of Hoodoo Conjure

Why It Is Open Hyatt recorded thousands of interviews in the Jim Crow South as a white clergyman paying Black practitioners to describe a practice that had been criminalised and ridiculed. The transcripts record what was said. They cannot record what was not said, what was simplified for a paying outsider, or what was offered in place of something withheld. Every quantitative claim drawn from the collection, about regional distribution, about the frequency of a given practice, about what conjure was for, inherits this and it is rarely stated.

What Would Settle It Comparison of Hyatt's material against independently gathered testimony from the same communities and period, including Hurston's, the Federal Writers' Project narratives, and community-held family records, looking systematically for what appears in one and not the other. Oral history with descendants of identified informants, where the identification can be made, would test it directly. The question is answerable in principle and has not been pursued at scale.

Expertise Needed African American folklore studies, oral history and the historiography of ethnographic fieldwork

Question posed in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne P. Chireau.

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 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 Younger Futhark

Why It Is Open The atlas holds three Aett rows and all three are Elder Futhark. The division of the sixteen rune Younger Futhark into three families is structurally real: cipher rune inscriptions encode a rune as a family number plus a position within that family, which cannot work without an agreed division of the row. The live rune ordering here fits the partition usually reported, six, five and five, because Hagall stands at position 7 and Tyr at position 12, exactly where the second and third families would begin. The naming is what could not be established. A pass on 2026-07-27 found only popular and unsourced material, which does not agree with itself: the same three names are given over groups of eight, four and four, of six, six and four, of six, five and five, and of eight, eight and eight, and none of it carried a locator that could be checked. Deriving the rows from the rune ordering alone was refused as inference presented as attestation, so nothing was seeded.

What Would Settle It A reading of the standard runological literature on cryptic or cipher runes, for example Michael Barnes, Runes: A Handbook, 2012, or Klaus Duwel, Runenkunde, 2008, both already held as sources here, settling two things. First, whether the medieval evidence for the ordering of the families in cipher runes, which counts them in reverse so that the Tyr family is numbered first, is reported with family names attached or only with numbers. Second, whether the names Freyr, Hagall and Tyr for the Younger Futhark families occur in any Old Norse or Icelandic manuscript witness, or whether they enter print only in the modern revival, applied backwards from the Elder Futhark. A dated witness naming any one of the three would settle it and the rows could be seeded citing it. A demonstration that none exists would settle it the other way, and the division would stay a structural fact about cipher runes rather than three named entities.

Expertise Needed Runology; Old Norse philology; palaeography of Icelandic runic manuscripts

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

Open Lucia dos Santos

Why It Is Open Her three biographical facts that depend on events after 2000, lifespan, manner of death and canonization, have not yet been recorded because the only Fatima sources this atlas holds are The Message of Fatima (2000) and the 2017 canonisation homily for her cousins. Neither can document a death in 2005 or a cause opened afterwards, and citing one of them anyway would be a fabricated citation. The facts are not disputed by anybody; they are simply not yet sourced. This is a sourcing gap, not a scholarly one.

What Would Settle It Any published record postdating February 2005: the Holy See's own announcement of her death, the Carmel of Coimbra's record, or the decrees of her cause as published in the Acta Apostolicae Sedis. Adding one such source to the catalogue would let all three facts be recorded and this question closed.

Expertise Needed Church history; Catholic canon law

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

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 Musaylima

Why It Is Open Every reported revelation of his survives only as quotation inside the writings of the tradition that defeated him, presented in order to be ridiculed, and no manuscript, inscription or non-Muslim notice offers a control. This is a gap rather than a dispute: no scholar holds a position on the content of his teaching, because there is nothing independent to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A documentary or epigraphic find from al-Yamama independent of the Islamic historiographical tradition, or an early non-Muslim notice of the Hanifa movement of the 630s.

Expertise Needed Arabian epigraphy and early Islamic historiography

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).