Disputed Statements

Ryukyuan Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1429

Ryukyuan religion is documented as autochthonous to Okinawa with no recorded founding point of its own. 1429, when Sho Hashi unified the Ryukyu Islands under the first Ryukyu Kingdom, is recorded as the point from which the noro priesthood is documented as a state-appointed office within a centralized royal ritual structure; the religion's own household and community-level practice is understood to predate this political unification, undocumented.

Source Okinawan Religion: Belief, Ritual, and Social Structure (Lebra, 1966), William P. Lebra tier 1

S, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 3

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

S2, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Sound

Currently States Debated. Most likely an additional sibilant close to samekh in shape and function, but its precise phonetic value is not settled; some specialists treat it chiefly as a device for spelling words of foreign origin rather than a distinct native sound.

Ugaritic epigraphers remain divided on the thirtieth sign of the abjad, conventionally labelled s2, known only from the alphabetic cuneiform tablets excavated at Ras Shamra, ancient Ugarit, and dated to the Late Bronze Age. Daniels and Bright's The World's Writing Systems (Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the dispute: the sign closely resembles samekh in shape and sits near it functionally, but it occurs too rarely, and too often in words of apparent foreign origin, for specialists to agree whether it records a genuine extra native sibilant or served instead as a scribal device for spelling loanwords. Comparing its distribution across the tablet corpus against samekh's own has not settled the question, which is why it remains open rather than resolved.

Source The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.) tier 1

Sabarimala, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The temple's stated ground for the restriction is that the deity here is a naishtika brahmachari, a lifelong celibate, so that it follows from the character of this shrine and is not a general rule about women. The petitioners argued the practice was not an essential religious practice, and the Court agreed by four to one.

The atlas states the ground each side argued from and takes no position on which is right.

Source Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala (Sabarimala), Supreme Court of India tier 1

Sabarimala, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 2018 judgment permitting entry to women of menstruating age stands and has not been overturned, but the question is not settled. The 2018 ruling was four judges to one, with Justice Indu Malhotra dissenting; review petitions followed, and in November 2019 a five-judge bench referred the wider constitutional questions to a larger bench while keeping the reviews themselves pending. A nine-judge Constitution Bench headed by Chief Justice of India Surya Kant took up that reference, heard sixteen days of argument between 7 and 22 April 2026 on denominational autonomy, temple entry and the scope of the essential religious practices doctrine, and reserved its verdict on 14 May 2026. No judgment had been delivered as of this reading, and no delivery date has been announced.

What is settled: the 2018 judgment is in force today and Sabarimala has not been permitted to reinstate the exclusion. What is not settled: the constitutional reasoning behind it, since the 2019 referral put the underlying questions, the scope of the essential religious practices doctrine chief among them, before a larger bench, and that bench, now constituted at nine judges, has heard full argument and reserved judgment without yet deciding. The reference is also tagged to related questions on Muslim women entering mosques, a Parsi woman's temple rights after marrying outside the faith, and Dawoodi Bohra female genital cutting, so whatever the nine-judge bench decides is expected to reach beyond this one site.

Source Supreme Court Observer, "Sabarimala Reference: Day 16, Supreme Court Reserves Judgement" (14 May 2026), Supreme Court Observer editorial staff tier 1

Sabarimala, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Today

Currently States Control of or access to the site is contested

The 2018 judgment stands, and in November 2019 a five-judge bench referred the wider questions raised by the review petitions to a larger bench, where they remain pending. Devotees and the temple board on one side and the petitioners on the other both continue to press their case. The Supreme Court of India held in 2018 that excluding women of menstruating age was unconstitutional; the judgment was met with mass protest and review petitions referred to a larger bench remain undecided.

Source Indian Young Lawyers Association v State of Kerala (Sabarimala), Supreme Court of India tier 1

Sacral, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Its date is given as 1526 in some reckonings and 1577 in others

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Sacral, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Sat-Cakra-Nirupana is the sixth chapter of his Sri-tattva-cintamani

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Sacral, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Purnananda, a sixteenth-century Bengali tantric author

According To Sat-Cakra-Nirupana (1577)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016) traces the composition date of Purnananda Yati's Sri-tattva-cintamani, the Sanskrit source text behind the seven-chakra system as it reached the West, and finds two dates still in circulation among catalogers and translators, converted from the Hindu Saka calendar: Saka 1448 (1526 CE) and Saka 1499 (1577 CE). Leland compares the manuscript colophons and the catalogue entries recording each date and reports neither has driven out the other in the secondary literature, which is why this atlas's own separate article on the text gives 1577 as a working date while this property records the dispute rather than silently picking one figure.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Sacral, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1919

According To The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (Ibis Press, 2016) dates the London publisher Luzac and Co.'s first printing of Arthur Avalon's (John Woodroffe's) The Serpent Power, the work that fixed the seven-chakra scheme for Western readers, to 1919, based on the publisher's own catalogue record; some other library catalogues, and the Chakra 1 article elsewhere in this collection, instead give 1918. Leland does not adjudicate the one-year gap, which most likely reflects the ordinary difference between a book's printing date and its public release date, a common source of catalogue disagreement for this period. The atlas records 1919 as the publisher-attributed year and flags the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Sacral, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1919

According To The Western chakra system, from Blavatsky to Brennan

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body (Ibis Press, 2016) dates the London publisher Luzac and Co.'s first printing of Arthur Avalon's (John Woodroffe's) The Serpent Power, the work that fixed the seven-chakra scheme for Western readers, to 1919, based on the publisher's own catalogue record; some other library catalogues, and the Chakra 1 article elsewhere in this collection, instead give 1918. Leland does not adjudicate the one-year gap, which most likely reflects the ordinary difference between a book's printing date and its public release date, a common source of catalogue disagreement for this period. The atlas records 1919 as the publisher-attributed year and flags the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Sacre Rappresentazioni, Performance Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Year

Currently States 1440

One scholarly account credits the genre's founding to a deliberate initiative in 1440s Florence associated with Cosimo de Medici the Elder and Archbishop Antoninus Pierozzi, while another traces its roots to the thirteenth century lauda dramatica tradition of Umbria, the sung devotional poetry associated with Jacopone da Todi that gradually took on dialogue and dramatic form well before Florence adopted it; scholars including Mario Apollonio have argued the two forms are meaningfully distinct, the lauda aimed at religious edification and the sacra rappresentazione unashamedly also aimed at spectacle, so the dating disagreement reflects a real question about which tradition should count as the genre's true beginning.

Source Sacra Rappresentazione (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Sacred kingship, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that Frazer's divine-king thesis, in which the king embodies the fertility of the land and is ritually killed when his powers fail, has been rejected by the field on renewed examination of the ethnographic cases Frazer generalized from. The term survives as a description of particular polities, Egyptian, Mesopotamian and Japanese, where the ruler's sacred standing is actually documented in the historical record, rather than as a universal institution Frazer took it to be.

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

Sacred kingship, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that earlier comparative religion treated sacred kingship, including a king's vigor being bound to the land's fertility, as a widespread pattern across many cultures; specialists working case by case through the individual polities now hold the evidence for that specific mechanism is thin outside a small number of documented cases, and the category is applied more cautiously today than when Frazer first proposed it.

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

Sacred Prostitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States What survives the demolition is argued. Budin and Assante reject the institution outright; others hold that some form of cultic sexual practice remains the best explanation of parts of the Mesopotamian evidence.

Stephanie Lynn Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (2008) sets out two camps on what survives the demolition of the general institution, and records the disagreement as narrower than it looks: neither defends the composite institution as commonly stated. One camp, examining the underlying Akkadian terminology directly, holds that the whole category should go and that the terms mean something else entirely; the other holds that specific cultic practices in specific places may still be behind parts of the evidence, without a general institution. Budin identifies a residue analysis or an unambiguous administrative text from a temple archive as what would move the question further.

Source The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Stephanie Lynn Budin tier 1

Sacred Prostitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Stephanie Lynn Budin's The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity (2008) records that camps exist and both publish: this is a live disagreement among Assyriologists and classicists about how to read the same cuneiform and classical corpus, examined philologically term by term, rather than an unfilled gap in the evidence.

Source The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Stephanie Lynn Budin tier 1

Sacred Prostitution, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States The existence of institutional sacred prostitution in the ancient Near East is rejected by Assante and Budin and defended in modified forms by others. The category as commonly stated is supported by no ancient text.

Source The Myth of Sacred Prostitution in Antiquity, Stephanie Lynn Budin tier 1

Sacred time and sacred space, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that Eliade's categories of sacred time and sacred space remain in wide scholarly use because they are useful, and are criticised for the same reason as the rest of his comparative method: they describe a pattern abstracted from the individual histories that produced it, and then treat the abstraction itself as the reality being studied, rather than as a tool for studying it.

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

Sacred time and sacred space, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) records that Eliade's account of sacred time as cyclical and reversible, set against ordinary linear time, has been influential in the study of religion but is contested by scholars who, examining the specific traditions Eliade drew on more closely, hold that he generalizes too far beyond what those traditions themselves support.

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

Sacred Tooth Relic of Kandy, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Date Attributed

Currently States Brought to Sri Lanka in the 4th century CE (reign of Kirti Sri Meghavarna)

The Sri Dalada Maligawa, the Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic's own official history (2024 access), dates the relic's arrival in Sri Lanka to the fourth century CE, smuggled from Kalinga in the hair of a princess according to the traditional chronicle account. The temple's own method is traditional chronicle history rather than independent forensic examination, and the relic's earliest arrival and its physical nature have not been independently documented or examined outside that chronicle tradition, which the temple itself maintains as authoritative.

Source Sri Dalada Maligawa, The Temple of the Sacred Tooth Relic (official site), Sri Dalada Maligawa tier 1