Disputed Statements

Folkish and Universalist Heathenry, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Who may practise. The dispute is doctrinal and not merely political, because it turns on what the ancestors are and what a relationship with them is understood to require. At the far end of the folkish spectrum are explicitly racist groups whose use of Heathen symbols has attached a reputation to the whole movement that most Heathens spend considerable effort repudiating.

Source American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religion Movement, Jennifer Snook tier 1

Fólkvangr, Realms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Structure

Currently States Sessrumnir, seat-room, is also the name given to a ship in the Prose Edda's own list of ship names in Skaldskaparmal; the philologist Rudolf Simek has proposed the hall and the ship uses may both trace to one underlying idea of a roomy, many-seated space rather than being genuinely separate traditions that happen to share a word.

Source The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson tier 1

Fortitude, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Spans several centuries. Named among the four virtues in Plato's Republic in the fourth century BCE, taken up by Aristotle and the Stoics, and given the name cardinal only later, by Ambrose of Milan in the late fourth century CE. Its classical scholastic treatment follows later still, in Aquinas's thirteenth century Summa Theologiae.

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

Forty-Nine Day Rites, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014) records that the forty nine day memorial cycle rests on the antarabhava, or bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth accepted in Tibetan Buddhism, where it is described at length in texts such as the Bardo Thodol, and in much East Asian Buddhism, but rejected in Theravada Buddhism, whose doctrine holds that rebirth follows death immediately with no intervening state for a forty nine day rite to address.

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

Fox, 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

Frances Yates, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The "Yates thesis" linking Hermeticism to the rise of early modern science has been challenged by later historians of science on the strength of its causal claims, though her role in founding the field of Western esotericism studies is unchallenged

Source Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates tier 1

Francisco de Ávila, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States How far he directed the content of the Huarochirí Manuscript.

Terence N. D'Altroy's The Incas, second edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) sets out two readings of the Huarochiri Manuscript, compiled under the extirpation campaign Francisco de Avila directed. One reading holds Avila commissioned and steered the compilation as intelligence gathering for the campaign against the very religious practices it records, making it a document shaped by an interrogator's purpose. Another holds an educated Andean assistant collected local tradition with considerable independent latitude, pointing to the text's pointed local detail and its notable absence of the Christian moralising framework a document built purely as extirpation evidence might be expected to carry. D'Altroy's comparative reading finds the text itself carries fingerprints consistent with both processes at once, which is why neither reading has displaced the other.

Source The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy tier 1

Francisco de Ávila, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1573

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

Source The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy tier 1

Francisco de Ávila, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1647

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

Source The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy tier 1

Frank Podmore, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1855

Biographical accounts of Podmore consistently place his birth in 1855, in Elstree, Hertfordshire, though no single primary record fixes the year with the same certainty as his death by drowning in a pond at Malvern in 1910, which an inquest was unable to explain.

Source Our History, Society for Psychical Research tier 2

Fravarane, Creeds & Confessions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -1500

Zoroaster's own dates are among the most contested in religious history. Traditional Zoroastrian chronology places him in the sixth century BCE, contemporary with Cyrus the Great, while linguistic analysis of the Gathas leads many scholars to date him far earlier, from roughly 1200 to 1700 BCE. This atlas already records Zoroastrianism's own origin under the same dispute; the Fravarane declaration is recorded here on the same terms rather than assigning it a separate, arbitrarily different resolution.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1

Frederic W. H. Myers, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Notable Publication

Currently States Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, published posthumously in 1903

Frederic W. H. Myers's Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death (Longmans, Green and Co., 1903) argued from a large collection of case testimony for a subliminal region of mind extending beyond ordinary waking consciousness and capable of surviving bodily death. The book's evidential claims for survival, built on Victorian standards of witness testimony that later psychical research came to regard as methodologically weak, are not read today as demonstrating what Myers argued they demonstrated; what has lasted from the book, and is still read for it, is its theoretical framework of a subliminal self, an idea later psychology developed independently of the survival argument it was originally built to support.

Source Human Personality and Its Survival of Bodily Death, Frederic W. H. Myers tier 1

French Wars of Religion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 2000000.000000

Robert Knecht's survey puts total war dead, from violence, famine and disease over the eight wars, at 2 to 4 million, roughly a tenth to a sixth of France's pre-war population. Other historians have specifically challenged this figure as difficult to verify against the surviving parish and military records, so it is recorded here as the widely cited estimate rather than a settled count.

Source The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1598, Robert J. Knecht tier 1

French Wars of Religion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 4000000.000000

See death-toll-min.

Source The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1598, Robert J. Knecht tier 1

French Wars of Religion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Assessment

Currently States Robert Knecht's survey figure of 2 to 4 million dead across the eight wars, from violence, famine and disease over three decades, is the widely cited estimate rather than a settled count, challenged by other historians as difficult to verify against the surviving parish and military records. The wars' own religious character is comparatively less contested than in some other conflicts on this axis, fought openly between Catholic and Huguenot factions and settled by the Edict of Nantes in 1598, though political rivalry among noble houses, the Guise, Bourbon and Montmorency-Chatillon, ran through the confessional lines throughout.

Source The French Wars of Religion, 1562-1598, Robert J. Knecht tier 1

Freyr, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States The eleventh century chronicler Adam of Bremen describes an idol of Freyr, under the name Fricco, at the temple of Uppsala, portrayed with an exaggerated phallus and said to be invoked with sacrifices at weddings to secure peace and fertility. Historians of Norse religion have long debated how reliably this account reflects genuine pre-Christian practice, since Adam wrote generations after the events he describes, drew on secondhand report, and had a clear polemical interest in portraying Nordic paganism as depraved to justify Christian mission; some scholars treat the description as broadly credible in outline, others as substantially a rhetorical construction, and no consensus has settled the question.

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

Frog, 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

Frumentius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 300

Ancient sources give no exact birth year for Frumentius. Rufinus of Aquileia's account, the earliest record of his life, places his shipwreck and captivity at the Aksumite court as a youth in the early fourth century, and standard reference works derive circa 300 as the birth year consistent with that timeline and with his consecration as bishop around 328.

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

Frumentius, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 380

No ancient source records an exact death year for Frumentius. Standard reference works place his death around 380, toward the end of the fourth century, based on the span of his documented episcopate at Aksum following his consecration by Athanasius around 328 and the absence of any later record of his activity.

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

Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founder

Currently States No single founder; the modern fundamentalist movement traces itself to Lorin C. Woolley and the priesthood council he organized after The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' 1890 Manifesto against plural marriage, with the present-day church formally organized in the 1950s.

Woolley's own account of a 1929 priesthood commission is not independently corroborated, and historians of Mormon fundamentalism differ on how much institutional continuity really runs from Woolley's circle to the church as it exists today, so this is recorded as the movement's own founding account rather than as a settled historical fact.

Source The Oxford Handbook of Mormonism, Terryl L. Givens and Philip L. Barlow (eds.) tier 1