Disputed Statements

Slavic, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Structure of the Pantheon

Currently States Local and lineage cults gathered under one name, with no single frame

Everything written about the shape of the Slavic pantheon is a reconstruction from Christian chroniclers who were hostile to it, and scholars differ sharply on how much structure the sources will carry.

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

Slavic, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Divine Headship

Currently States A single sovereign god rules the others

No Slavic people left a written mythology of their own, so the case for Perun as sovereign head of the pantheon rests on external witnesses: the Rus-Byzantine treaties of 907 and 945, in which warriors swear by Perun and Volos, and the Kievan Primary Chronicle's account of the idols Vladimir raised in Kiev in 980 with Perun given pride of place, then destroyed in 988 at Vladimir's own conversion. The Encyclopedia of Religion (Eliade, ed.; Jones, ed., 2nd ed., 2005) reads this as good evidence for one prince's state cult at one moment rather than settled proof of a pan-Slavic religious hierarchy, since much of what is popularly presented as Slavic mythology beyond that record is reconstruction from later folklore.

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

Slavs, Cultures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States How much of pre-Christian Slavic religion can be recovered from the surviving sources is debated

The structuralist school of Vyacheslav Ivanov and Vladimir Toporov reconstructed a central storm myth of Perun against Veles from chronicle fragments and folklore. Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel (Slavic Gods and Heroes, 2019) argue the chronicle pantheons are largely literary constructions and that little about actual cult can be known. Both positions are live in current scholarship.

Source Slavic Gods and Heroes, Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel tier 1

Sloth (Acedia), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Rooted in Evagrius Ponticus's eight tempting thoughts, set out from the Egyptian desert monastic settlements of Nitria, Kellia and Scetis around the late fourth century CE, and carried west by John Cassian. Gregory the Great reduced the eight to the familiar seven, sloth among them, in his Moralia in Job around 590 CE.

Source The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature, Morton W. Bloomfield tier 1

Slovakia, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States A 2000 treaty with the Holy See and parallel agreements with eighteen registered churches govern state funding and religious instruction; a registration threshold requiring fifty thousand adult adherents, among the highest in Europe, effectively bars new communities.

Slovakia's church-state relationship rests on a 2000 treaty with the Holy See and parallel agreements with eighteen other registered churches, governing state funding and religious instruction in public schools for the churches covered. A registration threshold requiring a religious community to demonstrate fifty thousand adult adherents before it can register at all, among the highest such thresholds in Europe, effectively bars smaller communities and new movements from registering and therefore from accessing the funding and instruction arrangements available to the eighteen already-registered churches. The State Department's report records the threshold as current law without indicating that Slovakia has lowered it. The dispute is between the state's position that a high threshold prevents registration from becoming a nominal formality, and excluded communities' position that fifty thousand adherents functions as a durable barrier protecting the eighteen already-registered churches from new competition rather than as a genuine test of a community's seriousness.

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

Slovo Ⱄ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The name stands in the clause ritsi slovo tvrido, say the word firmly, formed by the names of the letters around it. Whether the first twenty names were chosen so that the alphabet would read as connected speech, or read that way only in retrospect, is contested.

According To The Glagolitic alphabet of Old Church Slavonic

Both positions are held. One holds that the names were chosen so that reciting the alphabet would itself be an utterance, a piece of design in keeping with an alphabet made for the reading of scripture. The other holds that the names are largely inherited mnemonic words, that the connected sense is a reading imposed later, and that the case is settled against composition by the names ceasing to mean anything from the twenty-third letter onward. Recorded as debated rather than unknown because both readings are argued in print. The open question on this page names the evidence that would bear on it.

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

Smohalla, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1815

No documentary birth record survives for Smohalla. Ethnographic and historical accounts of the Wanapum prophet, including James Mooney's study of the Ghost Dance movements his teaching influenced, place his birth around 1815, decades before he began preaching the Washani religion near Priest Rapids around 1850, but the year is an estimate rather than a fixed date drawn from any register.

Source The Ghost-Dance Religion and the Sioux Outbreak of 1890, James Mooney tier 2

Snake, 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

Snaptun Stone (Moesgaard Museum, near Aarhus), Sacred Art & Iconography

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Depicted Subject

Currently States Most accounts read the stitched lips as identifying the carved face as Loki, matching the tale in Skaldskaparmal where the sons of the dwarf Ivaldi sew his mouth shut; the stitching is the only feature offered in support of that reading, however, and some specialists in Viking Age art argue the carving could equally be an entangled beast or another ambiguous face of a kind common in Scandinavian art of the period, with no specific tie to any one myth. The Loki reading is the most widely repeated and fits the stone's function as a smithing hearth tied by legend to Loki's own punishment, but it remains an interpretation rather than a settled identification.

Source Snaptun Stone (Wikipedia) tier 3

Sobek, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Sobek's name is debated among Egyptologists: one reading connects it to an Egyptian verb meaning "to impregnate," tying the god to virility, while another connects it to a verb meaning "to bring together," matching his mythic role gathering the scattered body of Osiris. Both readings are current in the literature and neither has settled the question.

Source The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson tier 2

Sodhi family of Kartarpur, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Public Access

Currently States Restricted Access

The Sodhi family of Kartarpur, Pakistan, holds the Kartarpur Bir, a Sikh scriptural manuscript tradition associates with an early, possibly original, compilation of the Guru Granth Sahib. The family's own record of its custodianship states that it permits only occasional supervised viewing of the manuscript to invited scholars and has consistently declined requests for unrestricted examination or physical dating techniques such as radiocarbon analysis or detailed paper and ink testing. This access restriction is itself the centre of the scholarly debate over the manuscript, since the questions scholars would need direct physical and codicological access to answer, its precise age, its relationship to other early Sikh manuscripts, and whether it is the specific original attributed to it, cannot be independently tested without exactly the access the family has declined to grant. The method scholars are limited to is restricted observational study during the occasional supervised viewings permitted, rather than the physical testing a firm dating would normally require. Because the family's decision itself constrains what evidence can be gathered, the manuscript's status remains debated for want of access rather than disagreement over evidence in hand.

Source Sodhi family of Kartarpur (private holder record) tier 2

Sodom, Cities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Whether Sodom was a real city is unsettled. Excavators at Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley argue for the identification; other archaeologists dispute both the identification and the chronology on which it rests.

Two named camps. Steven Collins, the excavator of Tall el-Hammam, argues from the site's size, its position in the plain and the geography of Genesis 13 that it is Sodom, and has published the case at book length. His critics hold that the site's destruction does not line up with the biblical period as usually reckoned, that the geographic argument admits of other readings, and that no inscription names the site. No text found at any candidate site names Sodom, which is what would settle it.

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

Sodom, Cities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Claimed Location

Currently States Steven Collins and Latayne C. Scott's Discovering the City of Sodom (Howard Books, 2013) sets out Collins's case as the excavator of Tall el-Hammam in the southern Jordan Valley: he identifies that site with Sodom on the strength of its unusually large size for the region and period, its position within the circle of the Jordan the way Genesis 13 describes Lot's chosen territory, and a destruction layer, an identification argued from the excavator's own project rather than confirmed by independent survey of the wider plain.

Cited to the proponent's own statement of the case, published by his own excavation's popular account rather than in independent peer review, so that the camp is represented in its own words rather than through its critics. The atlas takes no position on whether Tall el-Hammam is the site Genesis names.

Source Discovering the City of Sodom: The Fascinating, True Account of the Discovery of the Old Testament's Most Infamous City, Steven Collins and Latayne C. Scott tier 3

Sodom, Cities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founded

Currently States The Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference, 2024) records that Sodom, the city of Genesis 18 and 19 destroyed with Gomorrah by fire from heaven, has not been identified on the ground; Genesis places it in the plain near the Dead Sea, and several excavated sites in that region, among them Tall el-Hammam, have been proposed by their own excavators, but no proposed identification commands agreement among archaeologists working the wider plain.

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

Soka Gakkai, Denominations

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States Forbes reported in 2004 that a Japanese parliamentarian had, about a decade earlier, put the value of Soka Gakkai founder-honorary-president Daisaku Ikeda's organizational empire at 100 billion dollars, a figure Soka Gakkai called wrong while otherwise declining to discuss its finances with the magazine. The same article gave Forbes' own conservative estimate of at least 1.5 billion dollars a year in the organization's top-line revenue, drawn from its membership, tithing demands and commercial activities including funeral plots, religious goods and a newspaper with 5.5 million subscribers, and reported that the affiliated Soka University of America, a separate US nonprofit corporation, told the Internal Revenue Service its own assets exceeded 740 million dollars. No later independently audited figure for the organization as a whole was located in this pass.

Source Sensei's World (Forbes, 2004) tier 2

Sokushin Jobutsu (Buddhahood in This Very Body), Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Which warrant for the claim is the sounder, the esoteric argument that practitioner and Mahavairocana are not separate to begin with, or the Tendai appeal to the Lotus Sutra. The two schools argued the question from the ninth century without reaching agreement.

Source The Weaving of Mantra: Kukai and the Construction of Esoteric Buddhist Discourse, Ryuichi Abe tier 1

Sol, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States The archaic Roman sun god Sol, sometimes called Sol Indiges, held an ancient shrine on the Quirinal Hill and a yearly festival, but had become a minor figure in mainstream Republican religion well before the emperor Aurelian established the far more prominent state cult of Sol Invictus in the third century AD. Historians of Roman religion disagree about how directly the earlier cult relates to the later imperial one: some treat Sol Invictus as substantially a new cult drawing on eastern solar traditions, others argue for meaningful continuity in name, iconography and ritual, and the fragmentary evidence has not settled the question either way.

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

Sol Invictus, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Textual Note

Currently States Scholars have long debated whether Aurelian's state cult of Sol Invictus directly influenced the later Christian church's choice of the twenty fifth of December, the traditional date of Sol's principal festival, as the date for celebrating Christmas, though the evidence for a direct causal link remains contested rather than settled.

Scholars who once treated the coincidence of dates as settled evidence of direct borrowing have increasingly questioned it, noting the earliest clear references linking Christmas to the twenty fifth of December are not demonstrably dependent on Aurelian's solar festival, so the direction and reality of any influence remains an open scholarly question rather than a fixed fact.

Source The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning, Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens tier 1

Sol Invictus, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Mythic Association

Currently States Sol Invictus's recorded birthday of the twenty-fifth of December is why his cult is named in every discussion of the date of Christmas, though whether one influenced the other is unresolved.

The Chronography of 354 records a birthday of the Unconquered Sun on the twenty-fifth of December, which is why Sol Invictus's cult is named in every discussion of the date of Christmas. Whether the Christian feast was set against this date or the two arose independently is a live scholarly disagreement the atlas does not settle.

Source The Oxford Companion to the Year: An Exploration of Calendar Customs and Time-Reckoning, Bonnie Blackburn and Leofranc Holford-Strevens tier 1

Sola Busca, Tarot Decks

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Artist

Currently States Debated. Arthur Mayger Hind, in his 1935 Early Italian Engravings, argued from the deck's own imagery, its references to the Republic of Venice, that it was made for a Venetian client and proposed the engraver Mattia Serrati da Cosandola on that basis. A separate theory instead names the painter Nicola di Maestro Antonio. Neither identification commands scholarly consensus.

Source A History of the Occult Tarot, Ronald Decker and Michael Dummett tier 1