Open Questions

Open Kapparah

Why It Is Open Scholars of the Hebrew Bible hold opposing readings of the same texts. A strong modern position takes the chatat as purging the sanctuary of accumulated impurity, with the animal never described as punished; older readings take covering as the governing sense of kipper and read a transfer. The answer bears directly on whether the Christian atonement theories may argue from these rites the way several of them do.

What Would Settle It Close philological work on the objects and prepositions the verb kipper takes across the whole priestly corpus, read alongside comparative material from neighbouring ritual systems, rather than through the categories of later theology.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology; the study of priestly ritual; comparative ancient Near Eastern religion

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

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 Arbatel de Magia Veterum

Why It Is Open The 1575 Basel edition names no author, and no signed manuscript or contemporary attribution has surfaced. Modern critical editions have examined the question without reaching a settled candidate.

What Would Settle It A documentary link, a printer's record, a contemporary letter or an internal stylistic match tying the Latin text to a named figure in the Basel printing or physicians' circles of the 1570s.

Expertise Needed History of science / early modern book history

Question posed in Arbatel de Magia Veterum (Robert Turner's 1655 translation), Anonymous, first printed Basel 1575; English translation by Robert Turner, 1655.

Open Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra

Why It Is Open The tradition attributes the text to the Vedic-age sage Parashara, but no surviving manuscript is reliably datable earlier than the medieval period, and the text shows internal evidence of compilation over time rather than single authorship.

What Would Settle It A critical, manuscript-stemma edition comparing the major recensions, dating their strata by internal astronomical references and cross-checking against securely dated citing texts such as the Phaladeepika.

Expertise Needed Indology / history of science (Sanskrit textual criticism)

Question posed in Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra, Sage Parashara (attributed).

Open Vedanga Jyotisha

Why It Is Open No independent record of Lagadha survives outside the text's own attribution. Nothing about his identity, period, or historical existence can be checked against any other source, which is a gap rather than a live scholarly disagreement: no camp holds a documented rival candidate.

What Would Settle It A securely dated independent reference to Lagadha in another Vedic-era or classical Indian text, or manuscript evidence tying a specific historical figure to the Vedanga Jyotisha's composition.

Expertise Needed Indology / history of Vedic literature

Question posed in The Vedanga Jyotisha of Lagadha, in its Rigveda and Yajurveda Recensions, Translated and critically edited by T. S. Kuppanna Sastry.

Open The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris

Why It Is Open The Theban Magical Library is a modern name for a group of papyri that share a period, a range of contents and a supplier. No excavation record exists for any of them. The attribution to Thebes and the assumption that they formed one collection both rest on the accounts of the dealer who sold them, and no scholar has been able either to confirm or to refute this from documentary evidence. It is an unresolved gap rather than a dispute between rival positions.

What Would Settle It A systematic reading of Anastasy's surviving correspondence and sale records against the acquisition registers and accession dates of the Bibliotheque nationale, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the British Museum and the Berlin collections. These archives have never been examined together for this question. Failing that, a securely excavated magical papyrus from a recorded Theban context would give the attribution an independent anchor.

Expertise Needed Papyrology, and the archival history of nineteenth century antiquities collecting

Question posed in Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook, Daniel Ogden.

Open The Mithras Liturgy

Why It Is Open Dieterich identified it as a Mithraic initiation script in 1903 and Cumont rejected the identification, and no evidence has appeared since that settles it either way. The text carries a Mithraic name and solar imagery; it carries none of the iconographic programme that defines Mithraism in its archaeology, and it carries the Graeco-Egyptian magical vocabulary that Mithraic material does not.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic ritual text of independent provenance, from a Mithraeum or another controlled context, against which the passage could be compared. No such text is currently known, which is why the passage was treated as decisive in the first place.

Expertise Needed History of ancient religion, Mithraic studies, papyrology

Question posed in The Mithras Liturgy: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Hans Dieter Betz.

Open The Nine Herbs Charm

Why It Is Open Old English plant names do not correspond one to one with modern species, and the medical manuscripts are not consistent with each other. Mucgwyrt, wegbrade, fille and finule can be identified with reasonable confidence. Maegde and attorlathe have proposals that have not been accepted. Stune and wergulu have no identification that anyone defends, and nobody holds a position on them, so the question is an unfilled gap rather than a live argument. Every attempt to read the charm as pharmacology stops here.

What Would Settle It A glossary witness pairing one of the unidentified Old English names with a Latin plant name, which is how the secure identifications were made. Failing that, archaeobotanical evidence from a securely dated Anglo-Saxon medical or monastic context, where the plant assemblage could be compared against the list. A systematic re-search of the Old English glossaries and of the English place-name corpus for the elements stune and wergulu, using material catalogued since the standard identifications were made, is the concrete next step.

Expertise Needed Old English lexicography, historical botany and archaeobotany

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open Æcerbot

Why It Is Open The word occurs once in the surviving Old English corpus. It is addressed, it is given the epithet mother of earth, and it stands where a name would stand. It has been read as a lost goddess name, as a title, as a loanword, as a corruption of another word, and as an exclamatory particle that is not a name at all. None of these has been accepted, and the reason is not that scholars are divided between defended positions but that a single occurrence gives nothing to test a proposal against. Work on it was begun and could not be concluded.

What Would Settle It A second attestation of the word in any Old English or related source: a charm, a gloss, a place name or a personal name element, showing it in a context that constrains its meaning. Old English glossaries and the English place-name survey have been searched, and re-running that search against material catalogued since, including manuscript fragments and minor place-name collections, is the practical task. A continental Germanic cognate in a comparable ritual context would serve equally well.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, Germanic comparative linguistics and English place-name study

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

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 The Braucherei Charm Tradition

Why It Is Open Braucherei was carried to Pennsylvania by German-speaking migrants and was then given a printed form by Hohman in 1820 and by the collections that followed. Practitioners distinguish sharply between a charm received from a person and one read in a book, but the two streams have been running alongside each other for two centuries and the printed texts drew on oral material to begin with. Which direction any particular charm travelled is not generally recoverable from what has been recorded.

What Would Settle It Systematic comparison of the Pennsylvania repertoire against continental German charm collections of the same and earlier periods, in particular the Palatine and Rhineland material from which the migration came, tracing individual charm types rather than the collections as wholes. Manuscript charm books held privately in Pennsylvania German families, where access can be negotiated on the families' terms, would be the decisive evidence.

Expertise Needed German folklore studies, Pennsylvania German studies and comparative charm scholarship

Question posed in Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World, David W. Kriebel.

Open Aleppo Codex

Why It Is Open The codex was in the Great Synagogue of Aleppo when it burned in the riot of December 1947 and reached Israel in 1958 with about two fifths of its leaves gone. The leaves were never observed to burn, and the surviving pages show no fire damage consistent with the loss. Two leaves have since surfaced from private hands, in 1982 and in 2007, which shows that at least some left Aleppo intact. Beyond that there is no established account. Competing suspicions have been aired, about the community in Aleppo, about those who carried the codex out, and about the institution that received it, and none has been tested to a finding. This is an absence rather than a scholarly dispute: no one holds a position that can be read and argued with.

What Would Settle It Provenance research in the archives of the parties who handled the codex between 1947 and 1958, including the Ben-Zvi Institute's own acquisition file and the Israeli state inquiry papers; and forensic examination of any further leaf that surfaces, since the two recovered so far were identified by matching parchment and hand.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and archival provenance research; Hebrew and Arabic; the modern history of the Syrian Jewish communities.

Question posed in The Aleppo Codex: A True Story of Obsession, Faith, and the Pursuit of an Ancient Bible, Matti Friedman.

Open Mar Saba Letter

Why It Is Open The leaves were removed from their printed volume at the library of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate in Jerusalem after the examination of 1983 and have not been publicly produced since. Nobody has stated where they are. Every argument about the document, on both sides of a fifty-year dispute, therefore rests on two sets of photographs, one black and white from 1958 and one colour from 1983. No ink analysis, no paper analysis and no examination of the writing under magnification by a document examiner with the original in front of them has ever been carried out. This is not a case of scholars disagreeing about evidence; it is a case of the evidence being unavailable.

What Would Settle It Locating the leaves within the Patriarchate library and permitting a standard document examination: ink composition, comparison of the ink against other eighteenth-century writing in the same collection, paper and pen analysis, and assessment of the hand by a forensic document examiner. Any of those would bear directly on whether the writing is of the eighteenth century or the twentieth, which is the question the whole dispute turns on.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and Greek palaeography; forensic document examination and ink chemistry; and the cooperation of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Jerusalem.

Question posed in Mark's Other Gospel: Rethinking Morton Smith's Controversial Discovery, Scott G. Brown.

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 Sappa (Tza) ፀ

Why It Is Open In the received reading tradition of the Ethiopian and Eritrean churches sappa is sounded exactly as saday is, so the classical value is not recoverable from how the script is read today, and it is reconstructed by comparison with the other Semitic languages rather than from any Ethiopian testimony.

What Would Settle It A transcription of Ge'ez words into a contemporary script that did distinguish the sounds, or an Aksumite-period bilingual or transcribed text in which the letter's value can be read off directly.

Expertise Needed Semitic historical linguistics; Ethiopian epigraphy

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

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.

What Would Settle It A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Fritu Ⱇ

Why It Is Open The first twenty letter names of Glagolitic are ordinary Slavonic words and read together as connected sentences, from azu buky vede, I know letters, through ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly. From fritu onwards the names stop meaning anything recoverable, and the reference literature records them as of uncertain or unknown origin without offering a reading. This is an absence rather than a disagreement: no camps hold rival etymologies for these names, and no investigation has settled whether they are corrupted Slavonic words, reflexes of Greek letter names, or labels that never carried a sense. The same gap stands over the corresponding Cyrillic names, which are the same names.

What Would Settle It A systematic etymological study of the full set of Slavic letter names, working from the earliest abecedaria and from the acrostic alphabet poems of the Old Church Slavonic tradition, which arrange the names in verse and may preserve senses the plain lists do not. A demonstration that the names never carried a sense would close the question as firmly as a set of etymologies would.

Expertise Needed Slavic historical linguistics; Old Church Slavonic philology

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