Disputed Statements

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

Sad ص, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States One of the fourteen letters that stand disjoined at the head of a sura

According To The disjoined letters of the Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) surveys the classical and modern commentary tradition on the disjoined letters that open certain suras and reports no consensus reached across fourteen centuries of that commentary. The positions it records include that the meaning is known to God alone, that the letters abbreviate divine names or attributes, that they function as an oath, that they present ordinary letters of the language as a rhetorical challenge, and that some began as scribal or collectors' marks later treated as scripture. Comparing the internal textual evidence, which letters occur and in which suras, against the range of proposed readings, the commentary confirms which letters appear where while confirming that none of the proposed meanings has displaced the others.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief) tier 1

Saday (Tsa) ጸ, 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

Saffron, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Whether "saffron robes" (the ochre-to-maroon monastic dress of Buddhist and some Hindu renunciates) were ever actually dyed with true saffron is disputed; scholar-monk Shravasti Dhammika argues saffron's cost and poor colorfastness rule it out as the historical dye source

Popular usage calls Buddhist and Hindu renunciate robes "saffron robes" by colour name; true Crocus sativus saffron is cited by at least one Buddhist scholar-monk as never actually used to dye them, on grounds of expense and poor colorfastness, with turmeric, jackfruit-wood and other dyes proposed instead. This is recorded as a live popular/scholarly disagreement, not a settled fact either way.

Source The Color of Saffron (Dhammika), Shravasti Dhammika tier 3

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Native nations object to smoke cleansing sold as a consumer product

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Also object to commercial harvesting of white sage stands

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Incense

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States A current position of living communities, not history

Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality, Continuum, 2008, documents the specific objection Indigenous communities have raised to the commercial sale of the sage-burning ceremony by people outside those communities. Owen's method is sociological and documentary, reading the commercial New Age market for the practice against the communities' own public statements, and it identifies the objection precisely: not that outsiders find the practice meaningful, but that ceremony is being sold as a commodity by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the commercial trade depletes the plant stands those communities themselves rely on. The atlas follows Owen in recording that the practice exists and that this objection is made, without setting out any procedure, words or transmission of the ceremony itself.

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

Sage, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Native nations and Native scholars object to the sale of smoke cleansing as a consumer product and to commercial harvesting of the white sage stands their communities gather from. This is a current position of living communities.

The objection is not to outsiders finding the practice meaningful. It is that ceremony is being sold by people outside the communities it belongs to, and that the trade takes the plant from the stands those communities use. Describing Salvia apiana as though it were an ancient European herb, or as though its ceremonial use were freely available, gets both the botany and the provenance wrong.

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