Disputed Statements

Crossroads, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Scholars are divided on where the devil imagery in the Robert Johnson legend comes from. Harry M. Hyatt read it as evidence of surviving reference to Papa Legba, the West African and Vodun crossroads spirit, rather than the Christian devil; David Evans disputed that reading, noting blues musicians of the period never named Legba in song and that devil imagery was already thoroughly familiar from Western folklore; Alan Lomax dismissed the legend altogether as an artifact of Christian disapproval of blues performance rather than surviving African religion; and Amiri Baraka and Cornel West have each disputed both the Evans and the Lomax readings in turn.

Source Robert Johnson (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Crown, Chakras

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Bija Mantra

Currently States No seed syllable in the classical description of the six

According To Hindu Tantra

The six centres each carry a bija in the Shat-chakra-nirupana; sahasrara, standing outside the six, is not given one there. Seed syllables assigned to it in modern correspondence tables, including the one this atlas carries, come from later and modern sources rather than from the classical text, and the atlas records the disagreement rather than choosing.

Source The Serpent Power, Sir John Woodroffe (Arthur Avalon) tier 2

Crown, 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

Crown, 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

Crown, 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

Crown, 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

Crown, 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

Crusade, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

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

Giles Constable's The Historiography of the Crusades (2001), a survey chapter examining a century of crusades scholarship, named four competing scholarly definitions of what counts as a crusade. Constable records the disagreement as definitional rather than evidential: historians working from the same charters, papal bulls and chronicles reach different conclusions depending on which definition of crusade they bring to the sources, not because the sources themselves disagree.

Source The Historiography of the Crusades, Giles Constable tier 1

Cuba, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Established Year

Currently States 1902

20 May 1902 (from a US administration) and 10 December 1898 (from Spain) are the dates most commonly cited internationally, per the CIA World Factbook, but the Cuban Government does not acknowledge either as a day of independence, observing 1 January 1959, the Triumph of the Revolution, as its own foundational anniversary instead.

Source The World Factbook (Central Intelligence Agency), Central Intelligence Agency tier 1

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 634

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

Source Life of St Cuthbert (Vita Sancti Cuthberti), Bede tier 1

Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 687

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

Source Life of St Cuthbert (Vita Sancti Cuthberti), Bede tier 1

Cybele, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Ancient sources name Pessinus in Phrygia as the home of the black stone brought to Rome in 204 BCE; some accounts point instead to Pergamon, and the two cannot both be right.

In 204 BCE, during the Second Punic War, Rome brought the black stone of Cybele, the Magna Mater, from Anatolia to the city on the advice of the Sibylline Books. Ancient sources themselves disagree on the stone's point of origin and on the route and ceremony by which it reached Rome, some naming Pessinus in Phrygia and giving differing particulars, and no single ancient account is treated by the others as authoritative. Lynn Roller's In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele (1999), the modern scholarly study of the cult cited here, works by comparing the surviving Roman and Greek literary accounts, principally Livy, against the Anatolian archaeological and epigraphic evidence for the cult's original home. Because the disagreement originates in the ancient testimony itself rather than in any later loss of a record, Roller records the route as genuinely open in modern scholarship rather than as a gap further evidence could still close.

Source In Search of God the Mother: The Cult of Anatolian Cybele, Lynn E. Roller tier 1

Cyprian of Carthage, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 200

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Cyprian of Carthage, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 258

The source gives this year as about, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Cyprus, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The constitution recognises the autocephalous Church of Cyprus alongside the Maronite, Armenian and Latin communities as religious groups with representation, and vests Muslim religious affairs in the Evkaf; the division of the island since 1974 has left sanctuaries on both sides without their communities.

Cyprus's constitution recognises the autocephalous Church of Cyprus alongside the Maronite, Armenian and Latin communities as religious groups with formal representation, and separately vests the religious affairs of the Muslim community in the Evkaf, the historic Ottoman-era religious endowment administration. The island's division since the Turkish invasion and partition of 1974 has left religious sanctuaries, Orthodox churches in the Turkish-controlled north and mosques in the Greek-controlled south chief among them, physically separated from the communities that built and maintained them, with access frequently restricted or requiring special arrangement across the dividing line. The State Department's report documents both the constitutional recognition scheme, which predates the division, and the practical separation of communities from their sanctuaries, without resolving the island's underlying political division, since religious access on Cyprus is a downstream consequence of a territorial dispute the religious freedom framework alone cannot address. Restoring full access would depend on a political settlement of the Cyprus dispute rather than on religious freedom law specifically.

Source International Religious Freedom Report, United States Department of State, Office of International Religious Freedom tier 1

Cyril of Thessalonica, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 826

The source gives this birth year as approximate (circa), while the death is dated to a specific day.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik tier 1

D, 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

Dad ض, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States The value the letter had in early Arabic is reconstructed differently by different scholars

According To Comparative Semitic phonology

Sibawayh describes an articulation at the side of the tongue that later readers have taken to indicate a lateral sound rather than the emphatic d of modern standard pronunciation. The grammatical descriptions, the treatment of loanwords in Spanish, Persian, Turkish, Malay and Hausa, some peripheral Arabian dialects and the recitation manuals do not all point the same way, and reconstructions differ. The camps are real. That the sound changed is not in dispute.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.) tier 1

Ḍadda ਡ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Sikh tradition credits Guru Angad, the second Guru, with giving the script its settled form in the sixteenth century

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

Source The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism, Harbans Singh (editor-in-chief) tier 2

Ḍadda ਡ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Historians of Indic writing place the letterforms earlier, in the Landa mercantile hands already used across the Punjab

According To The Gurmukhi script

Two reference works give incompatible accounts. The Encyclopaedia of Sikhism (Harbans Singh, editor-in-chief, Punjabi University, Patiala, 1998) carries the Sikh tradition that Guru Angad, the second Guru (1504-1552), devised the script. The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996), surveying the paleography of Indic scripts, holds instead that the letterforms were already in mercantile use in the Punjab as one of the Landa scripts descended from Sharada, and that comparing those existing Landa forms against the Gurmukhi letters attested from Guru Angad's era shows a fixing and standardising of a repertoire already in circulation rather than an invention from nothing. Neither side has displaced the other because the two accounts read different kinds of evidence, a community's own historical memory against a comparative script lineage, and the atlas records both without adjudicating.

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