Disputed Statements

Sola Busca, Tarot Decks

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Creator / Originator

Currently States Debated, and considerably less settled than the engraver identification recorded under artist. No historical record names who conceived or commissioned the deck outright; the same two rival theories proposed for its engraver, a Venetian client served by Mattia Serrati da Cosandola, or the painter Nicola di Maestro Antonio, are the only candidates ever put forward, and neither commands scholarly consensus as the deck's originator any more than as its maker.

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

Solar Plexus, 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

Solar Plexus, 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

Solar Plexus, 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

Solar Plexus, 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

Solar Plexus, 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

Solomon, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Lester L. Grabbe's Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It? (2007) examines the biblical claims for Solomon's building programme and empire against the excavated tenth century BCE remains at Jerusalem. Grabbe's method is archaeological, comparing the scale of construction 1 Kings describes with what excavation at the City of David has actually recovered, and finds no extra-biblical text names Solomon and the excavated tenth century Jerusalem will not support the building programme and empire the text describes. Judaism, Christianity and Islam hold him to be a historical king regardless.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Solomon, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States -970

The source calls this a traditional chronology, not an independently fixed date.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Solomon, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States -931

The source calls this a traditional chronology, not an independently fixed date.

Source Ancient Israel: What Do We Know and How Do We Know It?, Lester L. Grabbe tier 1

Soma, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Botanical Identification

Currently States Fly agaric, Amanita muscaria

R. Gordon Wasson, an ethnomycologist, proposed in Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality (1968) that soma was the fly agaric mushroom, Amanita muscaria, arguing from the Rigveda's own physical description of the plant, which mentions stalks and shoots but never root, leaf, flower, seed or fruit, a description Wasson read as suiting a mushroom's form far better than any flowering plant. Wasson further read certain Rigvedic passages as describing the drinking of urine, which he connected to documented Siberian shamanic practice of recycling the mushroom's psychoactive compound, which passes through the human body largely unchanged, allowing a second person to experience the effect. Against the identification, the fly agaric grows in association with birch and pine woodland rather than on the open plains where the Rigveda was composed, and its pharmacological action is heavy and sedative rather than matching the stimulating exaltation the hymns describe. The method is ethnomycological and philological, comparing the mushroom's documented ecology, chemistry and cross-cultural use against the Rigveda's own description of soma.

Source Soma: Divine Mushroom of Immortality, R. Gordon Wasson tier 3

Soma, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Botanical Identification

Currently States Ephedra

Soma is the sacred plant pressed for its juice in Vedic ritual and personified as a deity across many Rigvedic hymns, and its botanical identity has been argued over since Vedic philology began comparing the hymns' physical description against candidate species. David Flattery and Martin Schwartz's Haoma and Harmaline (1989) argues for ephedra on the strength of the living Zoroastrian Yasna ceremony, which presses ephedra for haoma, the Avestan cognate of soma described in closely parallel terms, an unbroken ritual practice rather than a modern reconstruction, and on the plant's ecology, since ephedra grows in the upland terrain the hymns describe. Against the identification, ephedra is chemically a stimulant and bronchodilator rather than a visionary substance, sitting awkwardly beside the exalted state the hymns describe, and continuity of the pressing rite in Zoroastrian practice does not by itself establish continuity of which species was pressed across the centuries and distance separating the two traditions. The method is comparative philology and ethnobotany, weighing the hymns' physical and experiential description against each candidate plant's documented properties.

Source Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore, David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz tier 3

Soma, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Botanical Identification

Currently States Syrian rue, Peganum harmala

David Flattery and Martin Schwartz, in Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore (1989), proposed Peganum harmala, Syrian rue, as an alternative candidate for soma alongside their own primary ephedra identification, on the strength of the plant's seeds carrying harmine and harmaline, beta-carboline alkaloids that are genuinely psychoactive unlike ephedra's stimulant profile, and on the plant being native to the Iranian and Central Asian range where the Indo-Iranian tradition places itself. Against the identification, Flattery and Schwartz themselves note that across that entire range the plant is traditionally burned as a fumigant rather than pressed for its juice, while pressing the plant for its juice is the one procedural detail the Vedic and Avestan texts are consistent about describing for soma and haoma, a direct mismatch between the candidate plant's traditional use and the ritual procedure the ancient texts require. The method is ethnobotanical and philological, comparing each candidate plant's traditional use against the specific ritual procedure the hymns describe.

Source Haoma and Harmaline: The Botanical Identity of the Indo-Iranian Sacred Hallucinogen and Its Legacy in Religion, Language, and Middle Eastern Folklore, David Stophlet Flattery and Martin Schwartz tier 3

Somnath Temple, Sacred Sites

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Institutional Wealth or Finances

Currently States A separate 2016 profile of the Trust cited an annual budget of roughly Rs 132 crore, substantially higher than the approximately Rs 31 crore in 2014-15 revenue reported elsewhere in the same source, with no explanation given for the larger figures basis.

Genuine unresolved discrepancy within the same secondary source between an audited-style revenue figure and a much larger budget claim; recorded as debated rather than resolved by picking one number.

Source Somnath Temple: Trust and Tradition, KBS Sidhu tier 2

Sonderbund War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 93.000000

Swiss military records tally ninety three dead in action across both sides, sixty federal soldiers and thirty three Sonderbund defenders, the figure the Historical Dictionary of Switzerland gives for combat deaths during the twenty six days of fighting.

Source A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847, Joachim Remak tier 1

Sonderbund War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 128.000000

General histories of the war round the toll upward to allow for wounded soldiers, several hundred on each side, who later died of their injuries after the fighting itself had ended, a figure Remak's account also treats as the more complete one.

Source A Very Civil War: The Swiss Sonderbund War of 1847, Joachim Remak tier 1

Songtsen Gampo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 605

Tibetan and Chinese sources for the early Yarlung dynasty do not agree closely enough to fix Songtsen Gampo's birth precisely, and historians cite years across a range in the early seventh century. Around 605 is among the commonly cited estimates rather than a settled date.

Source Tibet: A History, Sam van Schaik tier 1

Sophia, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Formally condemned by this tradition

Whether Sophia is best read as a poetic personification of Wisdom, a divine attribute, or a distinct hypostasis is answered differently by every tradition that inherited her, from Proverbs' street-preaching figure through the Gnostic aeon whose fall produces the material world to Orthodox Christianity's identification of Holy Wisdom with Christ. The condemned status recorded here belongs to the strongest of these readings: the Russian sophiology of Vladimir Solovyov and Sergei Bulgakov, which pressed Sophia toward a fourth hypostasis alongside the Trinity, was formally condemned by church authorities in 1935. The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh) is the earliest source behind the personification itself, in Proverbs 8, where Wisdom calls in the street and says she stood beside God at the world's founding; the 1935 condemnation is a later doctrinal ruling on how far that personification can be pressed, not a rejection of the personification.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Sophia, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States Whether Sophia is a poetic personification, a divine attribute or a distinct person has been answered differently by each tradition that received her, and the Russian sophiology that pressed the last answer was condemned by church authorities in 1935.

Source The Hebrew Bible (Tanakh), Anonymous (multiple authors) tier 1

Sou ⲋ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Greek letters wrote Egyptian from about the first century CE, settled by the fourth

According To The Coptic alphabet of Christian Egypt

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) surveys the small corpus of Old Coptic texts, pre-Christian magical and astrological papyri in which Egyptian was first written out using Greek letters plus a few signs borrowed from Demotic, against the standardised Coptic used in Christian scripture translation from around the third century CE onward. Comparing the two corpora, its contributors find the evidence thin enough to support two readings: that the Old Coptic magical texts already fixed the practice of writing Egyptian in Greek-based letters, or that the Christian translation project, needing a stable and teachable orthography for scripture, was the decisive act that standardised the script that survives. Because both readings draw on the same handful of surviving texts and no source describes an official act of decision, the volume treats the question as open rather than favouring either camp.

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

South Africa, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 1996 constitution guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis; the CRL Rights Commission has proposed regulating religious practitioners, which the churches have resisted.

South Africa's 1996 constitution, adopted after the end of apartheid, guarantees freedom of religion with no established church and permits religious observance at state institutions on an equitable basis available to all recognised traditions. The Commission for the Promotion and Protection of the Rights of Cultural, Religious and Linguistic Communities, a body created under the same constitution, has separately proposed regulating religious practitioners, following public concern over reported abuses by some independent churches and self-styled prophets, including cases of congregants made to eat grass, drink petrol or undergo other harmful practices presented as acts of faith. Established churches and religious bodies have resisted the proposed regulation, arguing that state licensing of religious leaders risks the state deciding which religious claims are legitimate, a role the constitution's own religious freedom guarantee is meant to keep the state out of. Whether existing criminal law against the specific harmful acts is the more appropriate remedy had not been legislatively resolved as of the report.

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