Open Questions

Open De Heptarchia Mystica

Why It Is Open The 2026-07-26 discovery and buildout design documents estimated 49 HeptarchicRoyalty rows for this table. Peterson's edition of Sloane MS 3191 and the parallel full text edition on archive.org name only fourteen individuals: the seven Heptarchical Kings and their seven Princes, one pair per day of the week. Each Prince is also described with a retinue of forty two attendant ministers, but the manuscript identifies these by table position or letter rather than by proper name, so seeding them as Name rows would mean inventing names Dee never gave them. c2-esoterica seeded the fourteen verified Kings and Princes on 2026-07-27 and left this gap open rather than closing it with fabricated rows.

What Would Settle It A closer reading of the full Sloane 3191 folios, or a scholarly edition that resolves whether the forty two ministers per prince carry individual names anywhere in Dee's working papers, or whether the 49 estimate instead conflated the Heptarchia with a different Enochian roster (the ninety one Aethyr governors, or the Watchtower angels) that has its own separate naming scheme.

Expertise Needed Early modern manuscript studies / history of Renaissance magic

Question posed in De Heptarchia Mystica (Sloane MS 3191), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, John Dee, edited by Joseph H. Peterson.

Open Basque

Why It Is Open Basque is the last pre-Indo-European language of western Europe and has no demonstrated relative. Proposals linking it to the Caucasian languages, to Iberian and to a wider Vasconic substrate have each been made and none has convinced. R. L. Trask, who assessed them, concluded that none of them meets the standard and that the honest answer is that we do not know, rather than that the relatives are contested. Aquitanian, the ancestor of Basque or its near relative, is attested only in Roman-era personal and divine names on inscriptions and reaches no further back.

What Would Settle It New epigraphic material in Aquitanian or in a neighbouring undeciphered language, long enough to show grammar rather than names alone, would give the comparative method something to work with. A decipherment of Iberian that showed grammatical morphology rather than a shared writing system would settle the Iberian question either way. Failing new text, the answer is likely to stay open, because the comparative method cannot reach the required depth on the evidence that survives.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics, with palaeohispanic epigraphy

Question posed in The History of Basque, R. L. Trask.

Open Sumerian

Why It Is Open Sumerian is recorded in quantity from the late fourth millennium BCE and is the earliest written language anywhere, yet no genetic connection to another language or family has ever been demonstrated to the standard the comparative method requires. Proposals linking it to Dravidian, to Uralic, to the Caucasian families, to Sino-Tibetan and to Basque have each been published and none has been taken up. There is no camp to join and no argument in progress, which is what separates this from a contested classification: the absence is of an answer, not of agreement.

What Would Settle It A set of regular sound correspondences between Sumerian and another attested language or reconstructed proto-language, covering basic vocabulary and grammatical morphology rather than isolated look-alikes, and surviving the usual controls for borrowing and for chance resemblance. Failing that, a substantial text in a related language recovered from the same region and period would give the comparison something to work from. At present Sumerian's nearest neighbours in the record are Akkadian, which is Semitic and demonstrably unrelated, and Elamite, which is itself an isolate.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics; Assyriology; comparative philology

Question posed in The Sumerian Language: An Introduction to Its History and Grammatical Structure, Marie-Louise Thomsen.

Open Gurmukhi

Why It Is Open Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad with the script, while historians of Indic writing hold that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Landa hands. Both accounts are argued from the same thin evidence, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than settling it. What neither account establishes for this pass is whether the specific ordering of the thirty-five, including the placement of Sassa and Haha ahead of the five series, predates the Gurus or was fixed by them.

What Would Settle It Dated Landa or proto-Gurmukhi material with an explicit letter sequence, whether a scribal exercise, an account book heading or an inscription, from before the middle of the sixteenth century. A published palaeographic study of the ordering itself, as distinct from the letterforms, would also close it.

Expertise Needed Indic palaeography and the history of writing in the Punjab

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

Open Splendor Solis

Why It Is Open Splendor Solis is attributed to Salomon Trismosin, described in the alchemical literature as the teacher of Paracelsus. Nothing outside that literature attests him. Paracelsus, who names many of his sources and quarrels with most of them, never mentions such a teacher. The name itself reads as constructed, joining Solomon to a Hermetic epithet, which is a common pattern in alchemical pseudonymity.

What Would Settle It An archival trace independent of the alchemical corpus, such as a matriculation record, a guild or civic register, a will, or a correspondence naming him, or conversely a manuscript study showing the attribution was added to an already circulating text at a datable point.

Expertise Needed Early modern German archival history and the philology of the alchemical manuscript tradition.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open The Book of Abramelin

Why It Is Open The Book of Abramelin is narrated by a Jewish traveller of Worms who writes for his son. The narrative frame is circumstantial enough to look autobiographical and conventional enough to be a device. Proposals identifying him with a known figure of the period have been made and none has carried the field, and the surviving German and Hebrew witnesses do not agree closely enough to settle whether the persona belongs to the earliest layer of the text.

What Would Settle It A stemmatic study establishing the relationship of the German and Hebrew witnesses and which of them carries the frame narrative first, or an archival identification of a Jewish traveller of Worms matching the biography the text gives.

Expertise Needed Yiddish and Hebrew manuscript studies, with the social history of Ashkenazi Jewry in the late medieval Rhineland.

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Picatrix (Ghayat al-Hakim)

Why It Is Open The Picatrix has long circulated under the name of Maslama al-Majriti, the Andalusi mathematician and astronomer who died in the early eleventh century. The ascription has been challenged in favour of Maslama ibn Qasim al-Qurtubi, a different Andalusi scholar of overlapping name and period with a documented interest in the occult sciences. The atlas records the attribution as it circulates and does not treat either identification as settled.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of the Arabic Ghayat against the securely attributed works of each candidate, on vocabulary, sources cited and technical practice, or a manuscript colophon earlier than the ones currently known.

Expertise Needed Classical Arabic philology and the history of science in al-Andalus.

Question posed in Picatrix: A Medieval Treatise on Astral Magic, Dan Attrell and David Porreca (trans.).

Open Presentism

Why It Is Open Essentialism, Interactionism and Nominalism, the three sibling metaphysical positions filled in the same pass, each name one historical figure as principal proponent directly in their own text (Aristotle, Descartes, Ockham). Presentism's own text sets out the position and its objections in the same style but names nobody as having first defended or best defended it.

What Would Settle It A citable history-of-philosophy source identifying the position's clearest or earliest defender, whether an ancient or medieval figure arguing from ordinary intuition about the reality of the present, or a modern one such as the logicians who built formal tense logic specifically to defend it.

Expertise Needed History of philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.).

Open Telepathy

Why It Is Open The original series reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance, but no other laboratory reproduced the effect, and the series itself was never repeated at a comparable scale. Irvin Child argued in 1985 that the result was dismissed rather than evaluated, which is a claim about how the field responded rather than a claim that anyone has since run the missing replication.

What Would Settle It A preregistered, multi-night sleep laboratory replication with automated target selection, blind judging of dream transcripts against a randomized image pool, and a sample size and analysis plan fixed in advance.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; experimental psychology; meta-analytic methodology

Question posed in Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan.

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 Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

Open The Pearce-Pratt Distance Series

Why It Is Open C. E. M. Hansel examined the buildings in the 1960s and argued that a route existed by which the subject, unobserved in the library, could have reached a position from which the cards were visible. Rhine and Pratt disputed the sightlines, the timing, and whether such an absence would have gone unnoticed. Neither side conceded, and the buildings have since been altered, so the question can no longer be settled by inspection.

What Would Settle It Original architectural plans of the Social Sciences building and the campus library as they stood in 1933 and 1934, together with any contemporaneous record of Pearce's whereabouts during the sessions.

Expertise Needed History of science; architectural history; archival research at Duke University

Question posed in ESP: A Scientific Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel.

Open Archaeochemistry

Why It Is Open Chemical analysis of archaeological material goes back to the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot's survey of about 150 Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts in the late nineteenth century, and continued through Earle Caley's American work from the late 1930s onward, but nobody appears to have fixed a single moment when the practice became a named field rather than a recurring collaboration between two older disciplines. Caley's own retrospective papers describe a history rather than announce a founding.

What Would Settle It A dedicated historiographic study of archaeological chemistry's own institutional history, comparable to the histories that exist for archaeometry (dated to the 1958 founding of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) or radiocarbon dating (dated to Willard Libby's 1949 paper). No such study of archaeochemistry specifically has been identified; one would need to trace when practitioners first identified as archaeochemists rather than as chemists who occasionally worked on archaeological material.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry and history of archaeology, tracing when chemical analysis of archaeological material stopped being an occasional collaboration and became a named, self-identified subfield.

Question posed in The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967), Earle R. Caley.

Open The Autoganzfeld Series

Why It Is Open Hyman and Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would look like. No series run since has been accepted by both sides as meeting it. Two later meta-analyses, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions on differently defined study pools, so the accumulated literature cannot settle it either.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered adversarial collaboration with laboratories on both sides of the dispute, an analysis plan agreed and lodged before data collection, and a commitment from all parties to publish whatever results.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology; meta-analysis; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy, Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton.

Open The Identity of the Breastplate Leshem

Why It Is Open This investigation set out to identify the ninth breastplate stone and stopped without a conclusion, because every avenue it examined turned out to be inferential. The ancient versions disagree and none of them is independent of the others; comparison with neighbouring stone lists establishes what was available rather than what was meant; and etymology alone has not narrowed the four candidates. Nobody holds a defended position that a specialist could go and read against a rival one, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement.

What Would Settle It A securely dated use of leshem outside the two Exodus lists, in a Hebrew or closely related Northwest Semitic text, in a context that identifies a physical object. Failing that, a labelled or securely provenanced stone from a Second Temple period priestly context, or a decisive argument from Semitic cognates. Absent one of those, the honest answer is that the question may not be decidable on present evidence, and establishing that would itself be a result.

Expertise Needed Northwest Semitic philology, biblical archaeology and historical gemology

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

Open The Huei Tzompantli Excavation

Why It Is Open The structure runs under standing colonial buildings on Calle Guatemala in the Centro Historico of Mexico City, and only the portion reachable around them has been exposed. Every published count is a count of that partial exposure and has risen with each season of work. No scholar has proposed a total, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement. The sixteenth-century figures are narrative rather than counts and cannot stand in for one.

What Would Settle It Full exposure of the structure, which would require access beneath the buildings above it, together with a minimum-number-of-individuals count taken across the complete assemblage rather than across the reachable part. Short of that, a defensible estimate would need the geometry of the excavated portion projected onto the full plan of the rack, published with its assumptions.

Expertise Needed Archaeology and bioarchaeology, with urban heritage engineering for access beneath protected colonial buildings.

Question posed in Programa de Arqueologia Urbana: the Huei Tzompantli excavations at the Templo Mayor, Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia.

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 The Global Consciousness Project

Why It Is Open The network and its archive are not in dispute, but three analytic decisions are made by people with access to the data: which events count as globally attended, where each analysis window begins and ends, and which statistic to compute. The central criticism is that this freedom is sufficient to generate the reported result from structureless data, and it cannot be tested from the published analyses alone.

What Would Settle It An outside party defining a list of events and window boundaries in advance, lodging it, and the project running the analysis once against that list without modification.

Expertise Needed Statistics; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in The Global Consciousness Project, Roger D. Nelson (Global Consciousness Project).

Open The Maimonides Dream Telepathy Studies

Why It Is Open The original series ran on early electroencephalography and ended when the laboratory's funding did. Attempts elsewhere were smaller and did not reproduce the effect. This atlas could not establish whether any well-powered modern attempt exists, and the literature it consulted names none.

What Would Settle It A systematic search of sleep-research and parapsychology journals from 1975 onward for free-response dream studies using polysomnography and blind judging, and a count of their sample sizes.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; systematic review

Question posed in Psychology and Anomalous Observations: The Question of ESP in Dreams, Irvin L. Child.

Open Feeling the Future

Why It Is Open Bem, Tressoldi, Rabeyron and Duggan report a small overall effect across ninety experiments and argue that bias-correction methods do not remove it. Critics answer that the correction methods available cannot distinguish a genuine small effect from a literature filtered by what got written up, particularly where many of the constituent studies were not pre-registered. The dispute is about the adequacy of the statistical tools, and it is live in the wider methodology literature and not only in parapsychology.

What Would Settle It A registered-report replication series of adequate power, with the analysis plan lodged in advance and a commitment to publish, run by laboratories on both sides.

Expertise Needed Meta-analytic methodology; statistics; experimental psychology

Question posed in Feeling the Future: A Meta-Analysis of 90 Experiments on the Anomalous Anticipation of Random Future Events, Daryl J. Bem, Patrizio Tressoldi, Thomas Rabeyron and Michael Duggan.