Disputed Statements

Dungur, Sacred Objects & Ritual Items

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States Whether the practices of dozens of separate Siberian peoples belong under the single heading of shamanism is actively disputed; Hutton, Kehoe and Znamenski each argue the category was assembled by outsiders

The dungur is the frame drum used by Tuvan shamanic practitioners in southern Siberia, an instrument and a living practice whose existence Ronald Hutton's Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination (2001) does not treat as in question at all. What Hutton documents as genuinely disputed is the comparative category shamanism itself, the practice of grouping the dungur alongside drums and ritual specialists from unrelated cultures worldwide under one anthropological label originally drawn from the Siberian word saman. One camp holds the comparative category identifies a real cross-cultural pattern of ecstatic religious specialism worth studying together; another holds the category flattens genuinely different traditions into a Western anthropological construct that obscures more than it reveals about any one of them, including the Tuvan practice itself. The method is historiographical, tracing how the term shamanism was built up by Western scholars comparing many societies rather than examining Tuvan practice alone. The dispute concerns the validity of the comparative label, not any fact about Tuvan practitioners or their instrument.

Source Shamans: Siberian Spirituality and the Western Imagination, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Duppy, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Scholars trace "duppy" to a West African source, most often proposed as an Akan or wider Bantu-area root for a spirit or ghost, carried into Jamaican Creole through the transatlantic slave trade rather than coined locally.

According To Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life

Black Roadways records competing African-language derivations for the word and settles on none as certain; the exact source language remains an open question in Caribbean folklore scholarship.

Source Black Roadways: A Study of Jamaican Folk Life, Martha Warren Beckwith tier 1

Dushara, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributes and Iconography

Currently States Represented at Petra chiefly as a betyl, an unshaped or minimally carved standing block of stone, rather than in human form.

Scholars debate how strictly aniconic Nabataean religion actually was: betyls dominate the earlier and more traditionally Nabataean material, but anthropomorphic images of Dushara, some blending Greco-Roman and local styles, appear increasingly as the kingdom's Hellenistic and Roman contacts deepen. Whether this reflects a real shift in how Dushara was imagined, an addition of a Greek-style image alongside a persisting betyl cult rather than a replacement of it, or simply better survival of later material, is not settled.

Source The Religion of the Nabataeans: A Conspectus, John F. Healey tier 1

Dushenna ࡖ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns A Rival System's Attribution

Currently States The script's ancestry is assigned either to a cursive form of Aramaic, the derivation favored by most script historians, or to the Parthian chancery script used in Sasanian era administrative documents.

According To The Mandaic script

Both derivations are held in the literature and neither has displaced the other. The Aramaic cursive camp points to the letterforms' overall resemblance to other late Aramaic cursive scripts of the region, including Nabataean and Syriac; the Parthian chancery camp points to specific letterforms, including certain medial and final forms, that resemble Pahlavi documentary hands more closely than any Aramaic cursive exemplar. No single find has settled the question, and Mandaic paleography treats it as open pending further comparative work.

Source Iranian Scripts for Aramaic Languages: The Origin of the Mandaic Script, Charles G. Haberl tier 1

Dutty Boukman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States What took place at Bois Caïman, and how far the surviving accounts describe Vodou practice rather than a colonist's idea of it.

Kate Ramsey's The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (University of Chicago Press, 2011) traces the Bwa Kayiman ceremony account associated with Dutty Boukman to its earliest sustained source, a report by Antoine Dalmas, a French colonist writing specifically to present the 1791 revolt as an outbreak of barbarous superstition, with later versions adding circumstantial detail unsupported by any independent record. Ramsey's method is source-critical, tracing each later retelling back to Dalmas's original colonial account, and on that basis one camp reads the surviving accounts as preserving a recognisable ceremony despite their hostile origin, while the other reads them as a colonial construction reused for a century and a half, arguing that treating a hostile witness's propaganda as ethnography imports the observer's own assumptions as historical fact.

Source The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti, Kate Ramsey tier 1

Dutty Boukman, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1791

He was captured and killed by French colonial forces within months of the Bois Caiman ceremony of August 1791 that opened the Haitian Revolution, which places his death in 1791; no more exact date survives, since the record comes chiefly from the side that killed him.

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

Dwarka, Cities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Founded

Currently States A coastal town in Gujarat identified with the city tradition assigns to Krishna. Offshore archaeology has been read as supporting the identification and as not supporting it, and the question is not settled

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

Dwight York, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1945

York himself and an FBI report both give June 26, 1945 as his birth date, the account followed here as the more widely repeated of the two. An outside critic examining the same record has instead argued for 1935, a full decade earlier, so the exact year remains disputed rather than settled.

Source The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control, Susan J. Palmer tier 1

Dwight York, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Disputed; his United States birth certificate names Boston, Massachusetts.

York's United States birth certificate records Boston, Massachusetts, and a 1993 FBI report instead names Baltimore, Maryland. York himself, in his own teaching, claimed to have been born in Sudan or in Ghana, a claim that supported the ancient African lineage he taught for his movement. No single account has been established as authoritative, and the same uncertainty that runs through his own stated birth date runs through his stated birthplace.

Source The Nuwaubian Nation: Black Spirituality and State Control, Susan J. Palmer tier 1

Dying, Activities Signified

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Significator

Currently States Sue Tompkins's The Contemporary Astrologer's Handbook (Flare Publications, 2006) records the twentieth century scheme that, following Pluto's 1930 discovery, assigns Pluto alongside Mars as co-ruler of the eighth house's domain of death and transformation, a house William Lilly's seventeenth century practice already gave to death, wills and legacies with Saturn, the greater malefic, as its significator, and which Ptolemy devotes a chapter of his fourth book to; traditional practice does not accept the outer planet rulerships and keeps Saturn and Mars, and both positions are held by working practitioners today.

According To Modern Western astrology

Traditional practice does not accept the outer planet rulerships and keeps Saturn as the significator of endings and Mars as the lord of Scorpio, the assignment Lilly and Ptolemy both worked from; both positions, traditional and the twentieth century Pluto-inclusive scheme, are held by working practitioners today.

Source The Contemporary Astrologer's Handbook, Sue Tompkins tier 2

Dying-and-rising deity, 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 James Frazer's The Golden Bough (1890) gathered Osiris, Attis, Adonis, Tammuz and Dionysus into a single dying-and-rising type. Jonathan Z. Smith dismantled the category by re-examining the primary sources case by case, arguing that most of the alleged cases do not in fact rise, and that where they seem to it is a Christian reading imposed on them; Tryggve Mettinger later accepted a small number of genuine instances while agreeing the general type does not hold. The term now describes the history of that argument more than a class of deities.

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

Dying-and-rising deity, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

The Encyclopedia of Religion (Macmillan Reference, 2005) traces the dying-and-rising deity category to earlier comparative mythology, which framed it as a widespread pattern uniting deities such as Osiris, Dumuzi and Adonis. More recent scholarship, working case by case through the primary myths rather than assuming the pattern first, has challenged how far genuinely dying-and-rising narratives are actually shared across these cases, and the category is no longer applied as freely in the field as it once was.

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

Dzogchen, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Nyingma tradition attributes Dzogchen's transmission to Tibet to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century CE.

Two positions, and both are in print. The Nyingma tradition transmits the eighth century account through Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra. Historians of Tibetan Buddhism date the earliest securely datable texts of the system considerably later and read its early phase against Chan teaching then present in Tibet. The disagreement is over how to read the same surviving corpus, so it is a scholarly argument a reader can go and follow rather than a gap in the record.

Source Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers tier 1

Dzogchen, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 750

Traditional accounts place Dzogchen's origin with events in the second half of the eighth century in Tibet and neighboring Oddiyana, when figures such as Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra are independently documented. Since the 1980s, however, historians studying the earliest Dzogchen literature have argued that much of it, though claiming eighth century translation, is textually a later composition, with the tradition's developed philosophical corpus more securely dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries. This entry names only the tradition's structure and history, never its pointing out instruction or contemplative content.

Source Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, Geoffrey Samuel tier 1

Dzogchen, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1000

Traditional accounts place Dzogchen's origin with events in the second half of the eighth century in Tibet and neighboring Oddiyana, when figures such as Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra are independently documented. Since the 1980s, however, historians studying the earliest Dzogchen literature have argued that much of it, though claiming eighth century translation, is textually a later composition, with the tradition's developed philosophical corpus more securely dated to the tenth and eleventh centuries. This entry names only the tradition's structure and history, never its pointing out instruction or contemplative content.

Source Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies, Geoffrey Samuel tier 1

Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, as the highest teaching, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Its claim that nothing needs to be made is what separates it most sharply from the graduated approaches, and the Gelug tradition has argued against that claim since Tsongkhapa.

Dzogchen, the Great Perfection, stands at the summit of the Nyingma tradition's classification of teachings and holds that the ground of mind is already pure, complete and aware, so that practice is recognition rather than construction; the Bon tradition holds a parallel teaching in its own transmission. John Powers's survey of Tibetan Buddhism records that this claim, that nothing further needs to be made or accomplished, is precisely what the Gelug tradition has argued against since its founder Tsongkhapa in the early fifteenth century, on the ground that a graduated path of accumulated causes is what actually produces realisation, and that a teaching claiming nothing needs to be made risks leaving a practitioner with no way to distinguish real attainment from complacency. Dzogchen's defenders answer that the graduated path itself is only ever a preparation for the same recognition Dzogchen points to directly. The disagreement has not converged because it rests on two different accounts of what enlightenment fundamentally is, sudden recognition of an already-present nature against a produced result of accumulated practice, argued between two living traditions each transmitting its own founding masters' texts.

Source Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers tier 1

E, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 5

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Eagle, 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

Ear, Anglo-Saxon Futhorc Runes

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Old English ear, which in this poem is the grave. Separate Old English words of the same spelling mean earth or gravel, and an ear of corn, and whether the rune-name is one of those or a fourth word is not settled. The stanza is the last in the poem and is about the body in the ground.

Source The Old English Rune Poem: A Critical Edition, Maureen Halsall tier 1

Earth, Elements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Wu xing is better rendered five phases or five agents than five elements. The five are stages in cycles of generation and conquest, not the material constituents the Greek four are; translating them as elements imports a Greek question the Chinese scheme does not ask.

Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Cambridge University Press, 1959, compares the Chinese wu xing scheme against the Greek four-element tradition that the standard English rendering five elements invites readers to equate it with. Needham's method is textual and conceptual comparison: reading the wu xing sources against the Greek physical tradition, he finds the two schemes ask different questions, the Greek scheme asking what physical things are made of, wu xing describing how five phases, wood, fire, earth, metal and water, generate and restrain one another in cyclical relationships, a theory of process rather than of material composition. Both five elements and the more literal five phases remain in scholarly use as translations, and Needham's own study does not choose between them, but his comparison shows that equating the Chinese scheme with the Greek elements misrepresents what it claims.

Source Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Joseph Needham tier 1