Open Questions

Open DNA Barcoding of Commercial Myrrh

Why It Is Open The result stands for the modern trade and does not reach the ancient question. No securely dated archaeological myrrh from any trade period has been analysed the same way.

What Would Settle It Genetic or chemical analysis of securely dated archaeological myrrh residue from a known trade-period context, compared against the modern reference barcodes.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany; archaeological science

Question posed in Deciphering Insights into Commercial Myrrh Species Authenticity from the psbA-trnH Genetic Region, Changhong Cao, Wenting Zhong, Feng Gao, Ying Zhang, Zhiguo Ma, Hui Cao and Menghua Wu.

Open The Identification of Biblical Hyssop

Why It Is Open The identification is reached by inference from later regional usage rather than from an ancient botanical description, and no archaeobotanical remains from a ritual context have been identified to species.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical remains recovered from a securely dated ritual context and identified to species, or an ancient description precise enough to fix the referent independently of later regional usage.

Expertise Needed Biblical philology; archaeobotany

Question posed in Identification of Biblical Hyssop and Origin of the Traditional Use of Oregano-Group Herbs in the Mediterranean Region, Alexander Fleisher and Zhenia Fleisher.

Open The Eridu Temple Sequence

Why It Is Open The excavation belongs to the 1940s and its final report appeared decades later; the site has not been re-excavated with modern stratigraphic recording, and there is no published radiocarbon series running through the sequence.

What Would Settle It A new season of stratigraphic excavation at Tell Abu Shahrain, recorded to modern standards, with a published radiocarbon series tying the temple sequence to absolute dates.

Expertise Needed Near Eastern archaeology; archaeological science (radiocarbon dating)

Question posed in Eridu, Fuad Safar, Mohammad Ali Mustafa and Seton Lloyd.

Open The Attribution of the Theban Alphabet to Honorius of Thebes

Why It Is Open The investigation established that the citation Trithemius gave cannot be traced in the works of Pietro d'Abano, and that the one Sworn Book manuscript carrying the alphabet took it from Agrippa, who had it from Trithemius. That closes the route by which the script was said to be medieval. It does not close the possibility that a witness survives somewhere unexamined, and it names nobody as the maker, so the origin of the letterforms is still an absence rather than a settled sixteenth century invention.

What Would Settle It A pre-1518 manuscript carrying the letterforms, found in the Solomonic, ars notoria or alchemical manuscript traditions, or a systematic survey of those traditions returning nothing, which would be a real answer rather than a failure. Failing either, a study of Trithemius's own working 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 The Ergot Hypothesis of the Eleusinian Kykeon

Why It Is Open The proposal was made in 1978 and has been argued over since without anything being settled, because the argument runs from the reported effect back to a cause that would produce it rather than from evidence of the cause. Nothing ancient describes the drink as intoxicating, and the delicate preparation the chemistry requires is nowhere recorded. The initiates kept the oath for roughly two thousand years, so the documentary route may simply be closed.

What Would Settle It Residue analysis for ergot alkaloids on a vessel securely associated with the rite, from the sanctuary itself rather than from the wider site. Failing that, a text describing the preparation. If neither is ever available the honest answer is that the question is undecidable, and saying so is a real finding rather than a failure.

Expertise Needed Classics; ancient history; archaeochemistry; mycology

Question posed in The Road to Eleusis: Unveiling the Secret of the Mysteries, R. Gordon Wasson, Albert Hofmann and Carl A. P. Ruck.

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 Moinuddin Chishti

Why It Is Open The narrative in circulation comes from Chishti biographical collections compiled in the fourteenth century and later, and from malfuzat attributed to the early masters, several of which specialists regard as fifteenth century compositions back-dated to their subjects. The birth date and birthplace, the itinerary and the account of his arrival in India all rest on that later material.

What Would Settle It Identification of documents contemporary with him, whether Persian administrative records, waqf deeds for the Ajmer site, or attestations in works datable to the thirteenth century, examined independently of the order's own literature.

Expertise Needed South Asian history; Persian manuscript studies

Question posed in Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence, Chapters on the early Chishti sources.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open Two dates circulate for the same event, September 2007 and November 2007, and the sources carrying them are the organisation's own material and secondary summaries. The registration number quoted in those accounts was not checked against the Portuguese register.

What Would Settle It The entry in the Portuguese register of collective religious entities, or the United States Department of State International Religious Freedom report for Portugal read in full rather than in summary.

Expertise Needed Law (Portuguese religious registration under the 2001 Religious Freedom Act)

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

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 Manasara

Why It Is Open Scholarly estimates for the date spread across the middle centuries of the first millennium CE, and the region of composition is not established either. The text is the most comprehensive surviving shilpa shastra treatise, so the answer would anchor the dating of the tradition around it, and at present the atlas can only record the spread.

What Would Settle It A dated inscription or a dated building whose plan, proportions or terminology can be matched to the Manasara's prescriptions specifically rather than to the shared vocabulary of the shilpa shastras. A critical edition establishing the relationship between the recensions would narrow the region.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, temple archaeology and epigraphy

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

Open Chitrasutra of the Vishnudharmottara Purana

Why It Is Open The date is commonly given as the fifth to seventh centuries and is not the difficulty. The region is: the Chitrasutra is the earliest surviving Indian treatise on painting, so where it was written bears directly on which surviving wall paintings its rules were written for or against, and the atlas records the region as not established rather than assigning one.

What Would Settle It A regional attribution argued from the text itself, from its language, its named places, its ritual assumptions or its relationship to a datable local recension, rather than inferred backward from whichever painting tradition a reader wishes to connect it to.

Expertise Needed Indology, Sanskrit textual criticism, history of Indian art

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

Open Tibetan Na Ro ◌ོ

Why It Is Open Three of the four Tibetan vowel signs carry names that the grammatical tradition glosses transparently: gi gu, zhabs kyu and greng bu can all be read against ordinary words. Na ro is the exception. Readings are offered in the grammars and they do not agree, and this pass found no basis on which to prefer one, so the atlas states the sign and declines to gloss the name.

What Would Settle It A study tracing the term through the earliest Tibetan grammatical treatises and their commentaries, establishing when it first appears and whether an early commentator glosses it, rather than a further proposal built on the modern form of the words.

Expertise Needed Tibetan philology and the history of the indigenous grammatical tradition

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

Open Saint

Why It Is Open The Consulta Medica is asked whether a recovery is explicable by the medicine of the day, and the medicine of the day changes. No public record shows whether findings have been revisited as diagnostic categories moved, and the acts of individual causes are not generally published in full.

What Would Settle It Access to the medical dossiers of closed causes, or a published retrospective by the Congregation itself, examined by clinicians against current diagnostic criteria.

Expertise Needed History of medicine; canon law

Question posed in Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why, Kenneth L. Woodward, Chapters on the medical consultors.

Open John Chrysostom

Why It Is Open The texts, their dating and their later use in antisemitic polemic are all documented and not in dispute. What is unsettled is what follows. Historians locate them in a local Antiochene quarrel and in the conventions of ancient invective; others hold that the framing does not answer for the use made of them. Churches that venerate him have acknowledged harm without any agreed consequence for the liturgical texts or the calendar.

What Would Settle It This is not resolvable by evidence. It would be settled, if at all, by a deliberate judgement of the churches concerned, taken publicly and with reasons, in the way other reception questions have been handled.

Expertise Needed Patristics; Jewish-Christian relations; ecclesiology

Question posed in Golden Mouth: The Story of John Chrysostom, Ascetic, Preacher, Bishop, J. N. D. Kelly, Chapters on the Antiochene preaching.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open The closing agreement was not published by the agency and its reasoning has never been set out on the public record. Reporting in 1997 raised the question of how the reversal came about without settling it, and the agreement's own terms were reported rather than officially released.

What Would Settle It Release of the agency's internal deliberative record, or a completed freedom of information action producing the file behind the decision rather than the agreement alone.

Expertise Needed Tax law and administrative history

Question posed in Scientologists' Deal With IRS: $12.5 Million, The Seattle Times.

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 Marabout

Why It Is Open Colonial officials applied the word to a very wide range of Muslim religious figures, and the ethnography written under that administration is the channel through which most of the outside literature received it. Historians of the archive and specialists on the orders read the evidence differently and both readings are current.

What Would Settle It A systematic comparison of pre-colonial Arabic-language sources from the Maghreb and the western Sahel against the colonial administrative record, to establish the indigenous range of the term independently of the reporting.

Expertise Needed History of West and North Africa; Arabic manuscript studies

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham, Chapters on the orders in North and West Africa.

Open Church of Scientology

Why It Is Open The announcement was made at federal level and concerned listing as a standalone nationwide intelligence target. Several German states ran their own observation from 1997 and their current position was not established by this run.

What Would Settle It The current annual reports of the state offices for the protection of the constitution, in particular those states that began observation in 1997, or a statement from the interior ministries of those states.

Expertise Needed Law and public administration (Germany)

Question posed in Germany Ends Decades-Long Surveillance of the Church of Scientology, KTLA.

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 Rowan (Luis)

Why It Is Open Graves built the thirteen sign sequence in The White Goddess, 1948, by pairing his own reading of the Beth-Luis-Nion tree names to a thirteen month lunar calendar he reconstructed himself. That the wider tree calendar is his modern invention rather than an attested ancient system is not in dispute, and the tree names match because he took them from Ogham. What nobody has examined is the step after that: whether placing a given tree at a given calendar position reflects anything in the surviving Ogham material, or only his argument. No Celtic studies scholar has tested his month by month assignments either way, which is why this is an unfilled gap rather than a disagreement between camps. One question covers all thirteen signs, because the pairing is one act rather than thirteen.

What Would Settle It A philological comparison of Graves's month-by-month tree assignments against the Ogham letter-name glosses preserved in the Auraicept na nEces and the Briatharogam tracts, by a scholar of medieval Irish, to establish whether any assignment beyond the shared name is supportable.

Expertise Needed Celtic studies, medieval Irish philology

Question posed in A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus.