Disputed Statements

Do Ut Des: I Give So That You May Give, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

Do ut des, I give so that you may give, names the reciprocal, contractual logic scholars use to describe Roman prayer and offering, most visible in the vow, votum, where a specific future offering was promised contingent on the god delivering a specific outcome first. Beard, North and Price's standard academic history of Roman religion documents the legalistic precision of surviving Roman prayer formulas, specifying exactly what was requested and exactly what would be given, which Romans treated as necessary to the exchange's validity. How fully this transactional model describes the actual religious feeling behind Roman practice, rather than only its outward legal form, is debated among historians of religion: some hold that the contractual language was the whole of the relationship as Romans experienced it, while others hold that formal, contractual language coexisted with sincere devotion the sources do not record as directly, since inscriptions and legal formulas are not designed to capture interior feeling. Because the surviving evidence is disproportionately formal and legal in character, the question of what lay behind the formula is argued from silence on the informal side and has not been settled.

Source Religions of Rome, Volume 1: A History, Mary Beard, John North and Simon Price tier 1

Dog, 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

Dog, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States In the manual ascribed to Ibn Sirin the dog is read variously: a faithful but lowly companion

According To Islamic oneiromancy (attributed to Ibn Sirin)

The reading given here is drawn from Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam, the dream-interpretation manual that circulates under the name of the early Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Sirin, who died in 728 CE. Comparing the manuscript history against Ibn Sirin's own lifetime, the received compilation is instead ascribed to al-Dari, working around the fifteenth century, more than seven hundred years after Ibn Sirin's death, which is why his authorship is treated as a traditional attribution carried by the text's popularity rather than a historical fact the manuscript record supports. The specific dream-symbol reading is recorded as this manual's content, not as Ibn Sirin's own words.

Source Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam (attributed to Ibn Sirin), Attributed to Muhammad Ibn Sirin (d. 728 CE); the received compilation is later, ascribed to al-Dari (15th c.) tier 3

Dog, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States In other contexts an enemy or a base and hostile man

According To Islamic oneiromancy (attributed to Ibn Sirin)

The reading given here is drawn from Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam, the dream-interpretation manual that circulates under the name of the early Islamic scholar Muhammad Ibn Sirin, who died in 728 CE. Comparing the manuscript history against Ibn Sirin's own lifetime, the received compilation is instead ascribed to al-Dari, working around the fifteenth century, more than seven hundred years after Ibn Sirin's death, which is why his authorship is treated as a traditional attribution carried by the text's popularity rather than a historical fact the manuscript record supports. The specific dream-symbol reading is recorded as this manual's content, not as Ibn Sirin's own words.

Source Muntakhab al-Kalam fi Tafsir al-Ahlam (attributed to Ibn Sirin), Attributed to Muhammad Ibn Sirin (d. 728 CE); the received compilation is later, ascribed to al-Dari (15th c.) tier 3

Dolphin, 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

Dominic de Guzman, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1170

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

Source The Catholic Encyclopedia, Charles George Herbermann et al. (eds.) tier 2

Dominican Republic, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States A concordat signed with the Holy See in 1954 and still in force grants the Catholic Church public funding, tax exemption and a role in state education that no other body holds, while the constitution guarantees freedom of conscience and worship.

The Dominican Republic's 1954 concordat with the Holy See, signed under the Trujillo government and still in force, grants the Catholic Church public funding, tax exemption and a role in state education that no other religious body in the country holds, a relationship that predates and sits alongside the country's constitutional guarantee of freedom of conscience and worship to all residents. The State Department's report records both provisions as currently operative without indicating that the concordat has been renegotiated since 1954 despite the government that signed it having since fallen. The tension is between a general constitutional guarantee of equal religious freedom and a specific, older treaty-level arrangement privileging one church, a structure common to several Latin American and Southern European states with historical Catholic establishment, and it persists here because ending or renegotiating a concordat is a matter of international treaty relations with the Holy See rather than a domestic law any government can amend unilaterally.

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

Domovoi, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States The domovoi is sometimes said to be the spirit of a deceased head of the household or an ancestor, though other accounts treat him as a nature spirit with no human origin at all, a point folklorists have long disagreed on.

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

Donatus Magnus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Roman North Africa. The identification with Donatus of Casae Nigrae in Numidia is not secure.

W. H. C. Frend's The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa (Clarendon Press, 1952) works through the fourth century North African ecclesiastical record to establish Donatus's career, and finds that record itself conflates him with a separate Numidian bishop of the same name active in the same controversy. Frend's method is documentary and prosopographical, tracing which acts and writings belong to which Donatus across the conciliar and polemical sources, and because the ancient sources themselves are not always careful to distinguish the two men, some modern accounts merge Donatus of Carthage with the Numidian bishop while others, following Frend's closer reading, keep them apart.

Source The Donatist Church: A Movement of Protest in Roman North Africa, W. H. C. Frend tier 1

Donatus Magnus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 355

Sources place Donatus's birth around 270 CE in Theveste, and his death, in exile, around 355 CE; neither date is precise.

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

Donatus Magnus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 270

Sources place Donatus's birth around 270 CE in Theveste, and his death, in exile, around 355 CE; neither date is precise.

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

Donmeh, New Religious Movements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1950

After the 1921 to 1922 Greco-Turkish War the central community relocated from Salonica to Istanbul, and communal institutions broke down under growing assimilation; most accounts treat the community as having ceased to exist as an organised, identifiable group by the mid twentieth century, though a small non-assimilated remnant is estimated to persist informally today, so no single settled end year is recorded.

Source Sabbatai Sevi: The Mystical Messiah, 1626 to 1676, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Donn, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Scholars disagree about how much of Donn is an authentic pre-Christian death god rather than a euhemerized ancestor figure. Medieval genealogical tradition frames him as one of the mortal sons of Mil who drowned while the Milesians were invading Ireland, yet the belief that the dead gather at his dwelling before departing for the Otherworld reads to many scholars as a genuinely older mythological role dressed in later pseudo-historical clothing.

Source A Dictionary of Celtic Mythology, James MacKillop tier 2

Doreen Virtue, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Her 2017 renunciation of the angel and oracle work she spent two decades building, including the Angel Tarot Cards, Fairy Tarot Cards and Guardian Angel Tarot Cards co-created with Radleigh Valentine, divided the community that had used her work.

The same two camps named on Radleigh Valentine's own page: Doreen Virtue's own post-conversion position that the practice is spiritually dangerous and that former readers should stop using the decks she made, against the American Tarot Association's public criticism that her repudiation undermines the beliefs of the many readers still using the decks she built. Not a modern scholarly dispute, a live disagreement inside the tarot community itself.

Source "Doreen Virtue's Conversion to Christianity Sparks Debate" (The Wild Hunt), The Wild Hunt staff tier 2

Dov Ber of Mezeritch, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1704

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

Source The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Gershon David Hundert (ed.) tier 1

Dov Ber of Mezeritch, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1772

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

Source The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe, Gershon David Hundert (ed.) tier 1

Dragonfly, 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

Dravidian, Language Families

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Homeland Hypothesis

Currently States Somewhere in South Asia, but where is disputed. One account places the family in the Indus valley and takes the language of the Harappan cities to have been Dravidian; the other keeps the homeland in peninsular India and reads the northern outliers as later movement.

Both camps are live, and they weigh the same three pieces of evidence differently. Brahui, spoken in Balochistan far to the northwest of every other Dravidian language, is a relic of an older northern range on one reading and a later migration on the other. Asko Parpola has argued at length for the Harappan identification, which rests on a script nobody has read and cannot be confirmed from it. The reconstructed vocabulary of Proto-Dravidian, which is what the opposing case works from, points to a subtropical environment rather than to the Indus. Nothing recovered so far decides between them.

Source The Dravidian Languages, Bhadriraju Krishnamurti tier 1

Duke of Zhou, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Confucius takes the Duke of Zhou, regent for his young nephew King Cheng after King Wu's death, as the model of the minister who holds power and gives it back. The Cambridge History of Ancient China (Loewe and Shaughnessy, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1999) treats how much of the ritual and musical order later ascribed to him is genuinely his own as not recoverable from the sources.

Source The Cambridge History of Ancient China: From the Origins of Civilization to 221 B.C., Michael Loewe and Edward L. Shaughnessy (eds.) tier 1

Dungan Revolt (1862 to 1877), Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Historians differ on how far to read the revolt as a religious war. General reference accounts commonly describe it as a Hui Muslim uprising against Qing rule, and its most prominent local leaders, including Ma Hualong, held recognized standing within the Sufi menhuan networks active among Gansu's Hui communities, which Qing officials themselves treated with suspicion as a source of organized resistance, per Dillon's study of Hui religious organization. Chu's narrower military and political study instead emphasizes the immediate trigger of Han-Hui communal violence in Shaanxi in 1862 and the failures of Qing provincial governance that let local friction escalate into full rebellion, situating religious identity as one organizing factor rather than as the revolt's cause.

Source The Moslem Rebellion in Northwest China, 1862 to 1878: A Study of Government Minority Policy, Wen-djang Chu tier 1