Disputed Statements

Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 1400

Svatmarama's own working dates are unrecorded. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton's Roots of Yoga places the compilation in the fifteenth century on the strength of the earliest surviving manuscript, copied around 1496, but whether the text was assembled early in that century or close to the manuscript's own date is unresolved, since it draws together older hatha material from Matsyendranath's and Gorakhnath's lineages that could have been gathered at any point across the period.

Source Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) tier 1

Hatha Yoga Pradipika, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 1500

Svatmarama's own working dates are unrecorded. James Mallinson and Mark Singleton's Roots of Yoga places the compilation in the fifteenth century on the strength of the earliest surviving manuscript, copied around 1496, but whether the text was assembled early in that century or close to the manuscript's own date is unresolved, since it draws together older hatha material from Matsyendranath's and Gorakhnath's lineages that could have been gathered at any point across the period.

Source Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.) tier 1

Hathor, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Regarded, depending on period and cult center, as daughter of Ra, as wife of Horus at Edfu and Dendera, or, within the Osiris myth cycle, as effectively merged with Isis.

Egyptian tradition holds several genuinely different accounts of Hathor's place in the divine family rather than one consistent genealogy: daughter of Ra in solar theology, wife of Horus at Edfu and Dendera, and elsewhere folded into Isis. The local cults never reconciled these into a single line.

Source The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.) tier 1

Hawaii, States & Territories

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Most often connected to Hawaiki, a homeland name shared across Polynesian oral tradition, and to the legendary navigator Hawaii Loa credited in some accounts with discovering the islands, though the exact derivation is not settled.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Hawk, 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

Hawt (Hha) ሐ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

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

Haya, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States What modest dress requires in practice is answered differently by the legal schools and by regional custom, and the question of face covering in particular is contested among jurists.

The Encyclopaedia of Islam, second edition (Brill, 2005), records that what modest dress, haya, requires in practice is answered differently by the legal schools and by regional custom, and that the question of face covering in particular is contested among jurists examining the same Quranic verses and hadith. The schools differ on whether the face and hands are included in what is to be covered, and the jurists who exclude them and those who include them both argue from the identical texts; regional custom then varies the practice further, so the visible differences between Muslim societies' dress are not evidence that one of them has abandoned the underlying value of haya.

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

He Xiangu, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

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

He Xiangu is counted among the Eight Immortals and placed by tradition in the Tang dynasty. The Encyclopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio Pregadio (2008), the standard modern reference for Taoist persons and practice, records that several localities in southern China each claim her as a local figure, with differing birthplaces, family details and accounts of her ascension, never reconciled into one canonical biography. The method is documentary and folkloric, comparing the surviving local temple records, gazetteers and hagiographic collections against one another rather than against any single authoritative source, since Taoist immortal biography developed regionally rather than from one original text. Because the variation traces to genuinely independent local cults rather than to the corruption of one original account, her historicity as a single identifiable Tang-period person is recorded as unresolved rather than as a case any one local tradition has settled.

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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heathenry, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Heathenry is split, publicly and sometimes bitterly, between a universalist position holding that anyone drawn to the gods may practice regardless of ancestry, and a folkish position holding the religion belongs by right to people of northern European descent. The divide has produced separate organizations: the Asatru Folk Assembly and elements of the Asatru Alliance take the folkish position, while the Troth is organized explicitly around the universalist one. Scholarship on the movement, including Jennifer Snook's ethnographic study, treats the split as a defining and unresolved feature of American Heathenry rather than a fringe disagreement.

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

Hecate, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The origin of the name Hecate is disputed among classicists.

One proposal derives it from the Greek hekatos, the far-worker or far-shooting one, an epithet elsewhere given to Apollo. A rival and increasingly favored reading takes the name as pre-Greek, most likely Carian, in origin, pointing to her especially strong cult presence at Lagina in Caria as supporting evidence. Neither account has settled the question.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Heh ה, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Heh ה, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Heinrich Kramer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1430

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

Source The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Christopher S. Mackay tier 1

Heinrich Kramer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1505

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

Source The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Christopher S. Mackay tier 1

Hekhalot Rabbati, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 300

Gershom Scholem's foundational study read the Hekhalot corpus as preserving a documented history of Jewish mysticism reaching back before medieval Kabbalah, and later scholarship building on his work generally places the core visionary material in the fourth to sixth century CE. The text as it survives carries later layers of magical adjuration added through the eighth to tenth century, and the earliest actual manuscript evidence, Cairo Genizah fragments, dates only to the ninth through twelfth century, so the received text reflects a long redactional history rather than a single date of composition.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1