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This atlas's own essay on where its arguments concentrate already named the single most argued entries: the seven chakras, the James Ossuary and Zarathustra. One tier below them, tied at five debated or debunked facts each, sit two more entries this atlas has not yet named together: a disputed ancient institution and a proven modern forgery.

A Category Modern Scholarship Assembled, Then Contested Itself

Sacred Prostitution's own record traces the whole idea to Herodotus, who reports that every Babylonian woman had once in her life to sit in the precinct of Mylitta and go with the first stranger who threw a coin in her lap, and to a handful of later Greek and Latin writers saying similar things of Cyprus, Corinth and Comana. From the nineteenth century these passages were welded into a single institution and read back into Sumerian and Akkadian sources that do not describe it. The atlas's own record holds two live scholarly camps rather than a settled question: Julia Assante has argued that the cuneiform terms behind the reading do not mean prostitute at all, and Stephanie Budin that no ancient text describes the institution as the modern category defines it, the Greek reports read as hostile ethnography about foreigners rather than description of cult; others hold that some form of cultic sexual practice remains the best explanation of parts of the evidence. By the atlas's own account the question is open rather than closed, and neither camp defends the composite institution as it is commonly stated.

A Forgery Proven by the Document Itself

The Salamander Letter carries no such open question; it is the one of the two entries this atlas records as flatly debunked rather than debated. Fabricated by Mark Hofmann around 1984 and presented as an 1830 letter by the early Mormon witness Martin Harris, its sensational content, describing Joseph Smith being led to the golden plates by a white salamander rather than an angel, briefly unsettled Latter-day Saint history before it, and Hofmann's wider output, were proven forgeries in the wake of his 1985 murders, established by forensic document examination during the 1985 to 1987 investigation. The atlas records it as a debunked object rather than an open one; the physical letter still exists, kept now as evidence of the fraud rather than as the witness document it claimed to be. Five facts each, the same count as the least argued entry among the chakras, and neither one has anything to do with a chakra, an ossuary, or a prophet's birth year.

Where To Read More

• Sacred ProstitutionThe Study of ReligionA disputed ancient institution, five debated facts, open rather than closed by the atlas's own account
• Salamander LetterManuscriptsA proven modern forgery, five debunked facts, the one of the two closed rather than open