Open Questions

Open Kashyapa

Why It Is Open The identification is old and attractive, because the tortoise is a creation figure elsewhere in the same literature and a progenitor who is also a tortoise would join two strands neatly. The two may equally be homonyms, and a resemblance that suits a later theology is the kind of thing a later theology can produce.

What Would Settle It Comparative evidence from cognate Indo-Iranian vocabulary, or a demonstration that the tortoise sense is attested for the name before the Prajapati tortoise material that makes it attractive.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit etymology and comparative Indo-Iranian linguistics

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Vishvarupa

Why It Is Open Both are the ordinary Sanskrit compound meaning having all forms, and the atlas holds them as separate subjects sharing a word. Whether the epithet was ever felt to carry any of the older figure, or whether the coincidence is nothing more than a common adjective doing two jobs, has not been settled.

What Would Settle It A survey of the epithet in epic and Puranic usage checking for any passage that plays the two senses against each other, which would show the connection was felt, or its absence across the corpus, which would show it was not.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit literature and the history of Vaishnava epithets

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

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 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 The Vasus

Why It Is Open The class has a fixed size and an unfixed roll. The surviving lists agree that the eight cover the elements and the abodes and differ on which names fill the slots and in what order. No version has the standing to correct the others, and the Mahabharata story fixed the membership in practice without settling the textual question.

What Would Settle It A comparative collation of the lists across the Brahmana, epic and Puranic sources establishing whether one order is prior and the others derive from it, or whether the variation goes back as far as the class does.

Expertise Needed Sanskrit textual criticism

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Aja Ekapada

Why It Is Open He has no hymn, no described act, no attribute and no epithet, and appears almost only inside enumerations of gods. Aja is either a goat or, read as a-ja, the unborn, and ekapada is one-footed or having one support. Readings were proposed in the nineteenth century and nobody has defended any of them at length since, because there is no passage anywhere against which one could be tested. This is a gap rather than a disagreement. He appears only in enumerations, almost always beside Ahi Budhnya, so no domain can be read off the surviving text either.

What Would Settle It A passage from outside the Rigveda that describes rather than merely names him, whether in the Brahmana literature, the Atharvaveda or a comparative Indo-Iranian source; or a demonstration that the formulaic pairing with Ahi Budhnya is itself the whole content of the name, which would close the question by showing there is nothing behind it. A comparative Indo-European study connecting the name to a documented mythic role would serve equally.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Ahir Budhnya

Why It Is Open Budhna means bottom, base or root, and three readings are in use: the lower atmosphere, the floor of the sea, and the foundation of the world. The atmospheric reading rests on the company he keeps in the enumerations rather than on anything said about him, and the enumerations are formulaic.

What Would Settle It A Vedic or Brahmana passage that places him rather than merely lists him, or comparative evidence from Iranian material for a serpent of the deep whose location is specified.

Expertise Needed Vedic philology and comparative Indo-Iranian religion

Question posed in Vedic Mythology, Arthur Anthony Macdonell.

Open Western Astrology

Why It Is Open The table reaches us as a table. Vettius Valens transmits it in the Anthology and Claudius Ptolemy records it in the Tetrabiblos, and Ptolemy is himself the source of the complaint: he objects that the Egyptian writers set out no proof and no ordering principle for the boundaries they give, which is his stated reason for offering a set of his own. Nothing in the surviving sources states the rule that produced the sequence of rulers or the width of each of the sixty stretches. Modern scholarship has not established one either. This is not a disagreement between camps with positions a reader could go and weigh; it is a gap nobody has filled, which is why the atlas records the sixty figures as transmitted and supplies no rationale behind them.

What Would Settle It A Greek or demotic astrological papyrus that gives the bounds together with any statement of how they were arrived at would settle it directly. Failing that, a securely dated table earlier than Valens showing the boundaries in an intermediate state would show whether they were computed or inherited. A third route is arithmetical rather than documentary: the five planetary totals in this table are Venus 82, Jupiter 79, Mercury 76, Mars 66 and Saturn 57, summing to exactly 360, and a systematic comparison of those figures and of the individual widths against the planetary period numbers used in Babylonian and Hellenistic astronomy would show whether the table is derived from them or independent of them.

Expertise Needed History of ancient astronomy and astrology; Greek and demotic papyrology; Babylonian mathematical astronomy

Question posed in Tetrabiblos, Claudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos, Book I.

Open The Bahir (Book of Illumination)

Why It Is Open Scholem argued that the Bahir is an edited compilation rather than a single composition, and that some of its material is older than its Provencal setting and eastern in origin. He could not reconstruct what that material was or how it travelled, and neither has anyone since. The manuscript tradition begins after the book was already circulating in Languedoc, so there is no witness to the stage before editing.

What Would Settle It A manuscript or a citation predating the Provencal circulation, or a securely dated eastern text sharing the Bahir's distinctive images and its fragmentary form. Comparative work on the Gnostic and Merkavah parallels Scholem noted, done against dated witnesses rather than against reconstructions, would narrow it even without a new manuscript.

Expertise Needed Medieval Jewish intellectual history, Hebrew and Aramaic codicology, and the study of late antique Jewish esoteric literature

Question posed in Origins of the Kabbalah, Gershom Scholem, translated by Allan Arkush.

Open The Heptameron (Elementa Magica)

Why It Is Open The ascription to Pietro d'Abano is rejected on chronological grounds, which removes an author without supplying one. The text first appears in print in 1559 appended to the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book, and no manuscript witness earlier than the sixteenth century has been identified for it. Its angelic hours and weekday conjurations resemble material circulating in fifteenth-century ritual manuscripts, but resemblance is not descent.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript of the text or of a recognisable portion of it from before 1559, or a securely dated source that the printed text can be shown to be copying. Collation of the Heptameron against the surviving fifteenth-century angel magic manuscripts, done systematically rather than by impression, would establish whether it is compiled from them.

Expertise Needed History of the book and early printing, Latin palaeography, and the study of late medieval ritual magic manuscripts

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

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 Rama Prasad

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas cites treats him as a conduit for the tattvas rather than as a subject, and gives his publications without giving his life. No source consulted here supplies birth or death years, and the atlas has therefore recorded a period of activity in place of a lifespan rather than quote a date it cannot support.

What Would Settle It Theosophical Society membership registers and the Adyar archives, which record members' details, together with contemporary Indian periodical indexes, would establish the dates and probably the rest of the bibliography.

Expertise Needed History of the Theosophical movement, and archival work in Indian colonial-period periodicals

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

Open Sunan Kalijaga

Why It Is Open Everything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.

What Would Settle It A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.

Expertise Needed Javanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelago

Question posed in Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.

Open Diego de Landa

Why It Is Open Four Maya codices survive in the world. Landa records twenty seven books burned at Maní, but the Relación survives only as a shortened copy of a lost original, so his own figure cannot be verified against what he wrote. No census of the pre conquest manuscript corpus was ever made, and Maní was not the only burning. Nobody holds a position on the size of the corpus, which makes this an unfilled gap rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A recovered fuller copy of the Relación would establish what Landa actually claimed. An archaeological find of interred or cached bark paper manuscripts, of the kind that has produced fragmentary codices in Maya burials, would begin to establish the scale of production. Systematic study of codex fragments already excavated but too degraded to read may become possible with improved imaging.

Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy and archaeology; colonial Spanish archival history; conservation imaging

Question posed in Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa.

Open Dutty Boukman

Why It Is Open He is one of the most consequential individuals in Caribbean history and no document has been produced that establishes his origin. The suggestion of an anglophone Caribbean birth rests on a reading of his name and has never been tested against a record. Because he was enslaved, the paperwork that would ordinarily answer this, if it ever existed, was made by people with no interest in his identity.

What Would Settle It A plantation inventory, notarial act, baptismal entry or ship manifest naming him, from the archives of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica or the French colonial administration. Much of the relevant colonial notarial material survives in France and in Haiti and has not been searched systematically for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history; Atlantic slave trade record linkage; onomastics

Question posed in Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Metraux.

Open Juan Chocne

Why It Is Open The records of Cristóbal de Albornoz carry the suppression of Taki Onqoy and the abjuration of its leaders, and then stop. No later document naming Chocne has been produced. He was not tried by the Inquisition, which did not hold jurisdiction over indigenous people, so the usual sentencing paperwork does not exist for him. The gap has never been the subject of a dedicated study, so this is an absence rather than a scholarly disagreement.

What Would Settle It A search of the Cuzco ecclesiastical and notarial archives, and of the Albornoz probanzas de méritos in Seville, for any later mention of the name. Parish registers of the reducciones in the Huamanga region for the 1570s would be the other place to look.

Expertise Needed Andean colonial archival history; Quechua palaeography

Question posed in The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy.

Open Martín Ocelotl

Why It Is Open The trial file ends at the sentence of confiscation and perpetual exile. No arrival record, prison register or burial entry in Spain has been shown to name him, and no later Mexican document mentions him. The story that the ship carrying him was lost at sea circulates in secondary accounts without a document behind it. Nobody has taken a position on his fate, because there is nothing to take a position on.

What Would Settle It A search of the Casa de la Contratación records in Seville for the sailing that carried him, and of the registers of the religious houses and prisons to which exiled offenders of the period were sent. The relevant Seville material is catalogued and has not been searched for this purpose.

Expertise Needed Spanish colonial archival history; Nahuatl palaeography

Question posed in Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543, Richard E. Greenleaf.

Open Ahmad Yasavi

Why It Is Open No birth year is recorded anywhere, and the received death year rests on hagiographical sources written centuries after the life. Nobody argues for a particular birth year, because there is no evidence to argue from; the reference literature simply omits it.

What Would Settle It A twelfth or thirteenth century document, endowment record or inscription from Yasi, Sayram or Bukhara that names him with a date.

Expertise Needed Central Asian documentary history and Persian hagiography

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

Open Dhu Nuwas

Why It Is Open The Sabaic inscriptions of his reign stop at the Aksumite conquest, the Syriac accounts of the killings at Najran do not describe his end, and the story in which he rides his horse into the sea rather than be taken appears only in much later Arabic narrative. The reference literature reports the death as approximate for exactly this reason.

What Would Settle It A dated south Arabian inscription from the period of the Aksumite takeover that names the outcome, or an early Aksumite, Syriac or Byzantine notice of the campaign that reports how the Himyari king was disposed of.

Expertise Needed South Arabian epigraphy, Ethiopic and Syriac historiography

Question posed in The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, G. W. Bowersock.

Open Donatus Magnus

Why It Is Open No source gives a birth year. His exile in 347 is documented in the imperial and conciliar record, but the death is placed around 355 only by later writers arguing against his church, and no burial place is recorded. The standard reference works print both dates as approximations.

What Would Settle It An African or Gallic epigraphic or documentary find naming him with a date, or an unremarked notice in the conciliar and imperial correspondence of the 350s.

Expertise Needed Late Roman prosopography and North African epigraphy

Question posed in The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, W. H. C. Frend.