Disputed Statements

Lizard, Animals & Totems

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice.

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.

Source The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Suzanne Owen tier 1

Lobha (Greed), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Lobha's Hindu registration, the third of the arishadvarga, is attested in the composite dharmashastra and epic corpus by the early centuries CE, a broad range rather than a fixed date on P. V. Kane's standard scholarly reckoning. Its Jain registration, as one of the four kashayas, carries the separate dating of the Tattvartha Sutra, placed by most scholars in the second through fifth centuries CE.

Source History of Dharmasastra, Volume V, P. V. Kane tier 1

Loki, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Pantheon Family

Currently States Aesir

Loki's parents in the Eddic sources are the jotunn Farbauti and, in most accounts, Laufey, making him a jotunn by blood who nonetheless lives among the Aesir in Asgard. John Lindow's Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs (2001) records that Snorri Sturluson's thirteenth-century Prose Edda counts Loki among the Aesir in its formal listing, but that modern scholars of Old Norse religion, working from the same corpus of Eddic poetry alongside Snorri's prose, are divided on whether that listing reflects a genuine mythological status as a tribe member or Snorri's own systematizing of a figure the older poetic sources treat more ambiguously, an outsider admitted into Aesir company rather than one of them by nature. The method is philological, comparing Snorri's thirteenth-century systematization against the older Poetic Edda verses it draws on. Because the Poetic Edda itself never states Loki's tribal status as plainly as Snorri's prose does, the classification remains a matter of scholarly judgment rather than a point the sources settle outright.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow tier 1

Longinus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Manner of Death

Currently States Martyred

Jacobus de Voragine's Legenda Aurea, The Golden Legend, compiled around 1260 and read here in its 1993 Princeton University Press translation, records Longinus's martyrdom as part of his hagiographical narrative. Historians of hagiography, examining the Legenda Aurea's own thirteenth century compilation date against the absence of any earlier martyrdom account, treat the episode as hagiographical legend composed centuries after any historical event it might describe, not as attested history.

Source Legenda Aurea (The Golden Legend), Jacobus de Voragine tier 1

Longinus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) traces how the unnamed soldier of the Gospel of John (19:34), who pierces the crucified Jesus's side with a lance, acquired the name Longinus first in the apocryphal Acts of Pilate, probably formed from the Greek lonche, lance. That same apocryphal text merges him with the separately unnamed centurion of the Synoptic Gospels who confesses truly this was the Son of God, and the further legend of a convert healed of failing sight by the blood, baptised and martyred, grows out of that later merging of two originally distinct, unnamed figures under an invented name, rather than out of any historical record of a soldier called Longinus.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Lot, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Lester L. Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2007) treats Lot, like the wider patriarchal narrative cycle he belongs to, as a question genuinely open between historical memory and later theological narrative rather than settled either way, on the same absence of extra-biblical evidence and the same difficulty securely placing the patriarchal narratives in any specific second-millennium BCE setting that Grabbe finds throughout the cycle.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Lourdes Water, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns What Consuming It Is Said to Confer

Currently States Claims of cure are examined by the medical bureau at Lourdes and an international medical committee, and only a bishop of the claimant's own diocese may declare one miraculous; the declarations are very few relative to the claims

According To Roman Catholicism

Water from the spring at the Lourdes grotto in France, associated with the Marian apparitions reported there in 1858, is sought by pilgrims for its reputed healing power. The Catholic Encyclopedia (1913) records that the Church itself makes no doctrinal claim that the water possesses any inherent supernatural power, and that the Lourdes Medical Bureau applies a formal evaluative process specifically designed to filter out any reported cure with a plausible medical explanation before a healing can even be considered, a small number of cases having been formally recognised as inexplicable by that process across more than a century. Critics of the process note the Church itself administers the very bureau assessing claims about a shrine the Church has an institutional interest in, a structural tension in any institution auditing its own phenomenon. Popular pilgrim practice, separately from either position, attributes considerably more direct healing power to the water than the sanctuary's own official teaching does. The method is documentary, comparing the Bureau's published criteria, the critics' objection and ethnographic evidence of popular belief as three distinct positions.

Source The Catholic Encyclopedia, Charles George Herbermann et al. (eds.) tier 2

Lü Dongbin, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

The most widely worshipped of the Eight Immortals is generally accepted, per the Encyclopedia of Taoism (Fabrizio Pregadio, ed., 2008), to be built on a real Tang dynasty figure of that name, but everything that makes him recognisable today, the failed examination, the dream at Zhongli Quan's inn that shows him a whole ruined official career in the time it takes millet to cook, the tests and the eventual transcendence, is legendary material layered onto that figure long after his lifetime, and the datings proposed for the historical man vary widely across the sources that try to fix him. That gap between an accepted historical kernel and an extensively legendary biography is why the status is recorded as legendary rather than as attested.

Source The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.) tier 1

Lü Dongbin, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity Detail

Currently States Fabrizio Pregadio's Encyclopedia of Taoism (Routledge, 2008) records that scholarship generally accepts a Tang dynasty figure named Lu Dongbin lies behind the cult of the most widely worshipped of the Eight Immortals, but the biography attached to him, a failed examination candidate shown in a dream by Zhongli Quan the ruin awaiting a successful official career and waking before his cooking millet had finished, is legendary rather than documentary, and the datings different sources offer for his life vary widely rather than converging on one period.

Source The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.) tier 1

Lucifer, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The identification of Lucifer with Satan rests on a patristic reading of Isaiah 14's taunt against a fallen Babylonian king as a veiled account of a rebel angel's fall, an interpretation the prophetic text itself does not make explicit.

Isaiah 14 names no angel and describes the fall of an earthly Babylonian king in mocking poetic terms; early Christian writers, reading Luke 10:18's image of Satan falling like lightning alongside this passage, fused the two into a single narrative of a rebel angel's fall, a reading many modern biblical scholars regard as a later theological overlay rather than the text's own plain sense.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Luo, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Divine Headship

Currently States A supreme creator who withdrew from active rule and receives little direct cult

Okot p'Bitek argued that describing Luo religion as headed by a supreme high god owes more to missionary translation than to the tradition itself. The ethnographic accounts that do describe Nyasaye that way remain in print, and the two readings have not been reconciled.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Lust (Luxuria), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Rooted in Evagrius Ponticus's eight tempting thoughts, set out from the Egyptian desert monastic settlements of Nitria, Kellia and Scetis around the late fourth century CE, and carried west by John Cassian. Gregory the Great reduced the eight to the familiar seven, lust among them, in his Moralia in Job around 590 CE.

Source The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature, Morton W. Bloomfield tier 1

Lutheranism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Adherents Today Minimum

Currently States 78000000.000000

The Lutheran World Federation's own count of its member churches' baptized membership stands at just over 78 million, the more conservative, directly-counted bound. Broader estimates of everyone belonging to the worldwide Lutheran tradition, including church bodies outside the LWF such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, run as high as 90-95 million.

Source More Than 78 Million Lutherans in LWF Member Churches (Lutheran World Federation), The Lutheran World Federation tier 2

Lutheranism, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Adherents Today Maximum

Currently States 95000000.000000

The Lutheran World Federation's own count of its member churches' baptized membership stands at just over 78 million, the more conservative, directly-counted bound. Broader estimates of everyone belonging to the worldwide Lutheran tradition, including church bodies outside the LWF such as the Lutheran Church-Missouri Synod, run as high as 90-95 million.

Source More Than 78 Million Lutherans in LWF Member Churches (Lutheran World Federation), The Lutheran World Federation tier 2

M, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 4

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Machig Labdron, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1055

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Machig Labdron, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1149

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Mada (Pride), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Mada as the fifth of the arishadvarga, the six enemies of the self, grouped by the Bhagavad Gita among the qualities of the demonic nature, asuri sampad, is attested in the dharmashastra and epic literature by the early centuries CE. P. V. Kane's History of Dharmasastra, Volume V (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1958), the standard reference for dating this literature, treats the precise dating of individual dharmashastra texts as a matter of ongoing scholarly reconstruction rather than settled chronology, so the scheme's origin period is bounded only broadly.

Source History of Dharmasastra, Volume V, P. V. Kane tier 1

Madhyamaka, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Defining Doctrinal Position

Currently States Rangtong: emptiness of self-nature

Both the rangtong and the shentong readings of Madhyamaka claim Nagarjuna, and the Tibetan schools divide over which of them the texts support. The atlas records the division rather than resolving it.

Source Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers tier 1

Madhyamaka, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 150

Nagarjuna founded Madhyamaka, dated here to the second or third century CE, but no contemporary record fixes the date more closely. Paul Williams's Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations (Routledge, 1989), a scholarly survey of Mahayana thought's doctrinal history, treats Nagarjuna's traditional biography as surviving only in hagiographic tradition compiled well after his death rather than by a contemporary. The method is historical, reading the philosophical content and citation pattern of texts attributed to him against the developing Mahayana corpus to bracket a plausible working date, since no independent inscription or dated document names him directly. Because the evidence brackets a span rather than fixing a year, the atlas records the start of that span, around 150 CE, as debated rather than settled.

Source Mahayana Buddhism: The Doctrinal Foundations, Paul Williams tier 1