Open Questions

Open The Great Year

Why It Is Open This pass seeded only the four tropical-sign ages with genuine independent literature discussing them individually (Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius), plus the Great Year concept row that frames the whole twelve-part cycle. Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn were left out rather than written thin from the same general astrological-history sources already cited for the other four.

What Would Settle It A literature review of each remaining sign's astrological-age material, checking whether it has been discussed with comparable depth and citable sourcing to Nicholas Campion's treatment of Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius in A History of Western Astrology, before writing per-age entries rather than a single thin placeholder for all eight.

Expertise Needed History of astrology / esoteric studies

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

Open Tibetan

Why It Is Open The script is plainly Brahmi-derived, but the candidates within that family are several and the letter forms have been argued both towards Gupta Brahmi transmitted through the Indian northwest and towards the scripts of Khotan and the Central Asian oasis towns. The traditional answer, a single minister trained in India, is first recorded four hundred years after the fact and cannot be tested against any imperial-period source.

What Would Settle It Dated inscriptions or manuscripts from the first century of Tibetan writing, compared letter by letter against securely dated Indic and Central Asian exemplars of the same decades. A palaeographic study of the earliest Tibetan hands against the Khotanese and northwest Indian corpora would narrow the model even if it never names a designer.

Expertise Needed Palaeography of the Brahmi-derived scripts, Old Tibetan philology, and Central Asian manuscript studies

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

Open The Army, Line 5

Why It Is Open King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 contain the same two character phrase in the received Chinese text, the one usually rendered as carrying corpses in the wagon. The atlas keeps the image at line 3, whose description reads that the army may carry corpses in its wagons, and drops it at line 5, whose description reads only that disorder follows even a just cause. One phrase is therefore represented twice in two incompatible registers, and nothing on either page tells a reader that the underlying text is the same. Whether this was a deliberate reading or an accident of two passes is not recorded.

What Would Settle It Checking the received text of King Wen 7 lines 3 and 5 against a critical edition, then deciding one way for both lines: either the concrete image is kept in both, or the reason for treating the two occurrences differently is stated on the page. Any correction touches a line description and is owner gated.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically the textual history of the Zhou Yi.

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

Open Khai ϧ

Why It Is Open Six of the seven Egyptian additions to the Coptic alphabet are taken from Demotic and their sources are not in dispute. Khai is the exception. It appears in Bohairic and not in Sahidic, which has thirty-one letters where Bohairic has thirty-two, and accounts of where its shape came from differ. This atlas states the letter, its dialect distribution and its sound, and does not state a derivation.

What Would Settle It Forms collected from dated Old Coptic and early Bohairic manuscripts and compared against the Demotic sign repertoire, with the dialect distribution of the letter mapped alongside. A published palaeographic study of that comparison would settle it or would establish that the evidence does not.

Expertise Needed Coptology and Egyptian palaeography

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

Open The Words of Institution

Why It Is Open A group of early witnesses gives a shorter text of Luke 22 that stops after the first mention of the cup, and the longer text, printed in most modern critical editions, gives the bread and a second cup. The two readings shape the passage differently and the argument has run for more than a century. This run recorded the dispute on this page but did not establish where the weight of current textual scholarship sits.

What Would Settle It A current survey of the manuscript evidence and of the argument over the Western non-interpolations, with the editorial reasoning of the major critical editions set side by side.

Expertise Needed New Testament textual criticism

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

Open Chatat (The Purification Offering)

Why It Is Open The two readings derive the noun from different senses of the same verb stem, and the biblical text supports each in different passages. The offering is required where no wrong has been done, which favours the purification reading, but the same chapters use the ordinary language of forgiveness, which does not.

What Would Settle It This is a question of interpretation rather than of missing evidence, and it will not be closed by a discovery. What would advance it is a full account of the class that explains the childbirth and discharge cases and the forgiveness formulae together, rather than treating either group as residual.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, Priestly source criticism

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open The Scapegoat Rite of Yom Kippur

Why It Is Open Mishnah tractate Yoma names a site east of Jerusalem and describes a cliff, a measured route and a series of stations along it, but the name is spelled differently across the manuscript traditions and no identification on the ground has been established. No candidate site has a scholarly case mounted for it, so this is an unfilled gap rather than a contested identification.

What Would Settle It A survey along the plausible routes east of Jerusalem for a cliff matching the described distance, together with the remains of the staged booths, could produce a candidate. A firmer reading of the place name from the better manuscript traditions would narrow the search before any fieldwork.

Expertise Needed Historical geography of Judaea, rabbinic manuscript studies, field archaeology

Question posed in The Mishnah, Anonymous (rabbinic compilers), Yoma.

Open Thysia (Greek Animal Sacrifice)

Why It Is Open Three positions are held simultaneously by serious scholars and none has displaced the others: the rite as the preserved structure of a hunting kill with its attendant guilt, the rite as a system of cooking and distribution that fixes the human place between gods and beasts, and a critique arguing that the tidy opposition between sacrifice eaten and sacrifice burned entire is a modern schematisation the evidence of hero cult does not support.

What Would Settle It This is not a question a single find will close. What moves it is the accumulation of excavated faunal assemblages from sanctuary deposits, which record what was actually burned and what was butchered and eaten, tested against the literary schema rather than read through it.

Expertise Needed Greek religion, zooarchaeology of sanctuary deposits

Question posed in Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker.

Open Scorpio 27

Why It Is Open The neighbouring degrees carry pictures, a mole at Scorpio 26 and a crouching tiger at Scorpio 28, but this entry opens straight into the reading with no image set. Two independent transcriptions agree, and the second preserves Charubel's picture-less lines elsewhere, so the gap belongs to the printing rather than to a damaged scan. Whether an image was ever set for the degree is not settled by the copies consulted.

What Would Settle It Collation of this degree against a copy of the 1898 first printing, and against the serialisation Charubel published in Alan Leo's Astrologer's Magazine from December 1890, either of which would show whether an image line was ever set and later dropped.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; analytical bibliography of Victorian occult printing

Question posed in The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Scorpio 27.

Open Janja ϫ

Why It Is Open Both were taken from Demotic to write affricates that Greek could not, and both carry no numeral value, which is settled. Their phonetic values are not. Reconstructions differ between scholars and between the Coptic dialects, and the evidence is indirect, resting on transcriptions of Coptic words into other scripts and on comparison with earlier stages of Egyptian.

What Would Settle It A systematic collection of Coptic words transcribed into Greek and into Arabic, set against the dialect distribution of the two letters and against the Demotic signs they descend from. Camps exist on this question, so what would resolve it is evidence that discriminates between them rather than a further reading of the same material.

Expertise Needed Coptic phonology and Egyptian historical linguistics

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

Open Intinction

Why It Is Open Churches suspended the common cup during the influenza pandemic of 1918 and again in the epidemics of the following century, and intinction and individual glasses spread as a result. This run deliberately made no claim about transmission risk because it could not verify one, and the relationship between what has been measured and what churches actually decided is not established here.

What Would Settle It A review of the published microbiological and epidemiological studies of the shared chalice, paired with the actual decisions of church authorities, to establish whether the evidence drove the practice or followed it.

Expertise Needed Epidemiology; liturgical studies

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

Open Asham (The Reparation Offering)

Why It Is Open No ancient source states the distinction in terms that decide the cases where both appear. The reparation offering covers both sanctuary property and private fraud compounded by a false oath, and no single principle proposed so far accounts for that pairing without strain.

What Would Settle It A comparative study of reparation terminology in the wider ancient Near Eastern legal and cultic corpora, set against the Priestly cases, would test whether the pairing is a Priestly innovation or an inherited category.

Expertise Needed Hebrew Bible philology, comparative ancient Near Eastern law

Question posed in Leviticus 1-16: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary, Jacob Milgrom.

Open Tamid (The Daily Offering)

Why It Is Open The tractate narrates the daily service circumstantially, from the priests rising to the completion of the offering, and that circumstantiality is exactly what makes its status hard to judge: a literary reconstruction written to be persuasive would look the same. It was redacted long after the last offering was made, and no pre-70 source describes the sequence in comparable detail.

What Would Settle It A point-by-point comparison of the tractate against Josephus, Philo, the Temple Scroll and the Qumran calendrical material, separating items with independent support from items attested only there, would show how much of the sequence is anchored. Priestly course inscriptions and any further Temple-period administrative material would add anchor points.

Expertise Needed Rabbinics, Second Temple history, Dead Sea Scrolls studies

Question posed in From the Maccabees to the Mishnah, Shaye J. D. Cohen.

Open Pisces 24

Why It Is Open Where every neighbouring degree carries a picture, this one carries a row of stars in the printed source, and the reading that follows opens by saying the degree is not capable of being described in words. Whether the stars are Charubel's own mark for something he would not put into a picture, or a compositor's rule standing in for matter that never reached the page, is not decided by the printing itself, and the two transcriptions consulted here render the mark differently from each other.

What Would Settle It Collation against a copy of the 1898 first printing and against the serialisation in Alan Leo's Astrologer's Magazine from December 1890, together with any surviving correspondence or editorial note that explains the mark.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; analytical bibliography of Victorian occult printing

Question posed in The Degrees of the Zodiac Symbolised, Charubel (John Thomas), 1826-1908, Pisces 24.

Open Theban

Why It Is Open The whole case for a medieval Theban script is one sentence in the Polygraphia, and that sentence has been tested. The passage Trithemius cites is not in the works of Pietro d'Abano, and the one manuscript of the Sworn Book of Honorius that carries the alphabet says it took the characters from Agrippa, who was Trithemius's own pupil, so the script travels outward from 1518 rather than into it. What that leaves is an absence: nobody has named who cut the letters, and nobody argues for a rival origin, so this is a gap in the record rather than a dispute between camps. It is one question about one script, which is why it is asked here once rather than twenty six times over the letters.

What Would Settle It A witness to the letterforms from before 1518, in the Solomonic, ars notoria or alchemical manuscript traditions, or a systematic survey of those traditions returning nothing, which would be a real answer and not a failure. Failing either, work on Trithemius's own papers establishing whether he devised the script himself.

Expertise Needed History of Renaissance occultism; codicology of late medieval Latin magical manuscripts; history of cryptography

Question posed in The Sworn Book of Honorius (Liber Iuratus Honorii), Joseph H. Peterson's edition, Honorius of Thebes; Joseph H. Peterson (ed. and trans.).

Open Seraphim of Sarov

Why It Is Open Nilus published the text in 1903 from papers he said reached him from Motovilov's widow, roughly seventy years after the conversation it describes. The manuscript he worked from has not been available for examination. Nobody holds a position on the proportions, because there is nothing to hold one against: this is an absence of evidence rather than a disagreement between readings.

What Would Settle It The recovery of Motovilov's original papers, or of any independent copy predating Nilus, and a textual comparison against the printed version. Failing that, a stylometric study of the printed text against Nilus's other known writing would narrow the question without closing it.

Expertise Needed Russian church history; textual criticism

Question posed in Spiritual Elders: Charisma and Tradition in Russian Orthodoxy, Irina Paert, On the Motovilov material.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open Accounts of a 2007 decision of the Audiencia Nacional are consistent with one another but every readable one traces back either to the organisation's own publications or to aggregators repeating them. The judgment itself was not obtained during this run, so the claim was kept out of the entry rather than asserted on that footing.

What Would Settle It The text of the judgment from the Spanish judicial documentation service, or the registry entry from the Ministry of Justice, either of which would fix the court, the date and what was actually ordered.

Expertise Needed Law (Spanish administrative and ecclesiastical law)

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

Open Slavic

Why It Is Open Every surviving description of Slavic religion was written by Christian outsiders recording what they intended to destroy, and none of them records a cosmogony. The dualist earth-diver story usually printed as the Slavic creation myth is attested only in folklore collected after a thousand years of Christianity, in a form shared with Finno-Ugric and Turkic neighbours. Attempts to recover a pre-Christian original from it have produced competing reconstructions and no agreement, and most specialists have stopped trying.

What Would Settle It A pre-Christian Slavic text of any length would settle it, and none is known to exist. Short of that, an inscribed or iconographic find from a pagan-period sanctuary that depicts a creation sequence, of the kind Arkona or Zbrucz might still yield, would give the reconstruction something outside the folklore to stand on.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the archaeology of pagan-period sanctuaries in the western Slavic lands

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

Open Etruscan

Why It Is Open The Etruscan language is read only in short, largely formulaic texts, and the longest survivals, the Zagreb mummy wrappings and the Capua tile, are ritual calendars rather than narrative. What Roman writers preserved of the Etrusca disciplina is the part that interested them, the reading of lightning and livers, and it does not include a cosmogony. Nobody holds a position on what the Etruscan account was, because there is nothing to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A long Etruscan narrative text would settle it. The known corpus is almost entirely epigraphic and funerary, so the realistic route is a new find of the length of the Zagreb wrappings that is narrative rather than calendrical.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, with epigraphy and the archaeology of Etruscan sanctuary sites

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

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The Old Phrygian corpus is short and largely dedicatory, and the Greek and Roman writers who describe the cult of the Mother report its rites and the story of Attis without any account of origins. It is not that two readings compete; it is that the material has never yielded one, and the question has effectively been set down rather than argued over.

What Would Settle It A longer Old or New Phrygian text of narrative character, or a securely Phrygian iconographic sequence depicting origins, from the highland monuments or a sanctuary excavation.

Expertise Needed Anatolian epigraphy and Phrygian philology, with the archaeology of the Phrygian highlands

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