Disputed Statements

First Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Historians divide over how central religion was to the war's causes and character. Scopas Poggo, in the dedicated history of this specific war, argues that Khartoum's Arabization and Islamization drives were the turning point: General Ibrahim Abboud's 1958 to 1964 government mandated Arabic instruction and, in March 1964, expelled foreign Christian missionaries from the south, policies that southerners increasingly understood as an assault on their own religious and cultural identity and that hardened a regional revolt into a war fought substantially in religious and ethnic terms. Douglas Johnson, whose history spans both Sudanese civil wars, argues that the war's deeper and more durable cause was the political and economic marginalization of Sudan's peripheries by successive Khartoum governments, a center-periphery dynamic that predates and outlasted any one government's religious policy, so that Arabization and Islamization functioned as a potent trigger and grievance rather than the war's root cause. This atlas records the 1964 missionary expulsion as an attested trigger without adopting either camp's account of how central religious identity was to the war's underlying causes.

Source The First Sudanese Civil War: Africans, Arabs, and Israelis in the Southern Sudan, 1955-1972 (Poggo), Scopas S. Poggo tier 1

First Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 500000.000000

Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold's history of South Sudan states that the First Sudanese Civil War, fought from 1955 to 1972 between the Khartoum government and the southern Anyanya insurgency, killed over 500,000 to 1 million people across its seventeen years. This atlas records their lower bound as its floor. The First War has drawn far less dedicated demographic study than the later Second Sudanese Civil War, so this figure comes from a general history of South Sudan's independence era rather than a study focused on the First War's toll alone, and this atlas has not located a second, independently sourced academic figure specific to the First War that would let it name a genuine second camp.

Source South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence (LeRiche and Arnold), Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold tier 1

First Sudanese Civil War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 1000000.000000

The upper bound of LeRiche and Arnold's own stated range for the First Sudanese Civil War, 1955 to 1972. Widely repeated reference and institutional accounts of the war cite figures within this same 500,000 to 1 million span, but this atlas cites LeRiche and Arnold specifically because their figure traces to a named academic work rather than to an uncredited aggregator, and records their range rather than treating either bound alone as a settled count.

Source South Sudan: From Revolution to Independence (LeRiche and Arnold), Matthew LeRiche and Matthew Arnold tier 1

First World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Minimum

Currently States 15000000.000000

The lower end of the widely cited range for combined military and civilian deaths, built from official government casualty reports across the major combatants, the United States, Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Austria and Russia, and Commonwealth War Graves Commission military death records, roughly nine to eleven million military dead, plus the lower published estimates of a civilian toll driven by famine, disease including the 1918 influenza pandemic, and massacres. Historian Micheal Clodfelter's noncombatant death estimate of 6.5 million sits within this lower range.

Source World War I Casualties (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

First World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Death Toll Maximum

Currently States 22000000.000000

The upper end of the widely cited range, reached when the civilian toll is counted at its higher published estimates, up to about thirteen million, rather than Clodfelter's more conservative 6.5 million figure. No single named historian stands behind either bound as a settled total; both are the range a synthesis of the national reports converges on.

Source World War I Casualties (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

First World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (Low Estimate)

Currently States 10000000.000000

Historian Peter Gatrell's own stated floor: the First World War displaced at least ten million people, either internally or across an international frontier, drawing on named regional counts including 1.85 million refugees in France by September 1918 and up to half a million Serbian civilians under occupation.

Source Refugees (Gatrell, 1914-1918-online), Peter Gatrell tier 1

First World War, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Displaced (High Estimate)

Currently States 12000000.000000

A wider estimate combining the war's own displacement with the immediately preceding Balkan Wars of 1912 to 1913, which some historians treat as one continuous refugee crisis rather than two separate ones, reaching roughly twelve million. This atlas records both bounds rather than adopting one reading of where the crisis begins.

Source Refugees (Gatrell, 1914-1918-online), Peter Gatrell tier 1

Fixed, Sign Modes

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States The bull, lion, eagle and man of the four fixed signs recur as the four living creatures of Ezekiel and Revelation and as the emblems of the four evangelists.

According To Traditional Western astrology

Scholars hold competing positions on the direction of the borrowing: whether the tetramorph derives from the fixed signs, the signs from an older Near Eastern figure set, or both from a common source.

Source A History of Western Astrology, Nicholas Campion tier 1

Flamen, Religious Roles & Titles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The word flamen is itself of disputed origin, though one widely discussed derivation ties it to an old Indo-European root for one who offers a burnt sacrifice, proposed as cognate with the Sanskrit brahman.

Ancient and modern authorities disagree about the word's derivation.

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

Flavius Josephus, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 100

Josephus is last known to be alive early in the reign of the emperor Trajan, who took the throne in 98 CE, but no record fixes his death precisely. Around 100 CE is the commonly cited estimate rather than a documented date.

Source Flavius Josephus between Jerusalem and Rome: His Life, His Works, and Their Importance, Per Bilde tier 1

Florence Cook, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Test Result

Currently States Contested

Trevor H. Hall's The Medium and the Scientist (Prometheus Books, 1984) sets Crookes's own published account of his 1874 investigation of Florence Cook, in which he reported observing the medium and her claimed spirit materialisation Katie King together, against the later Sitwell exposure of a confederate posing as a spirit and Hall's own historical reconstruction of the sittings. Hall's method combines archival research into the exposure with a critical rereading of Crookes's published report, and the two accounts stand on opposite sides: Crookes's report as published defends the phenomena as genuine, while the exposure and Hall's history argue for fraud, with the specific unresolved question being whether the 1874 sittings Crookes personally investigated were themselves compromised or only later, separate sittings were.

Source The Medium and the Scientist: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes, Trevor H. Hall tier 2

Florence Cook, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States Whether a personal relationship between Crookes and Cook compromised his 1874 endorsement

Trevor H. Hall's The Medium and the Scientist: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes (Prometheus Books, 1984) argued from circumstantial biographical evidence, including the pattern of Crookes's personal access to Cook during the sittings, that a romantic relationship between the two explains why Crookes endorsed her mediumship so uncritically. Hall's method is biographical and circumstantial rather than documentary, since no direct evidence of such a relationship survives, and other historians of the Society for Psychical Research have challenged the inferential chain Hall builds his case on as too thin to bear the conclusion, without producing a documented alternative explanation of their own. The atlas records the dispute rather than adopting either side.

Source The Medium and the Scientist: The Story of Florence Cook and William Crookes, Trevor H. Hall tier 2

Fly Agaric, Plants

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Proposed by R. Gordon Wasson in 1968 as the soma of the Rig Veda

Not established and widely rejected. The Vedic hymns never mention the mushroom's white flecks, the species does not grow where the hymns were composed, the urine passage is contested in translation, and the effects described do not match. Ephedra and Peganum harmala are rival candidates. Recorded as a claim, not a fact.

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

Folkish and Universalist Heathenry, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Who may practise. The dispute is doctrinal and not merely political, because it turns on what the ancestors are and what a relationship with them is understood to require. At the far end of the folkish spectrum are explicitly racist groups whose use of Heathen symbols has attached a reputation to the whole movement that most Heathens spend considerable effort repudiating.

Source American Heathens: The Politics of Identity in a Pagan Religion Movement, Jennifer Snook tier 1

Fólkvangr, Realms

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Structure

Currently States Sessrumnir, seat-room, is also the name given to a ship in the Prose Edda's own list of ship names in Skaldskaparmal; the philologist Rudolf Simek has proposed the hall and the ship uses may both trace to one underlying idea of a roomy, many-seated space rather than being genuinely separate traditions that happen to share a word.

Source The Prose Edda, Snorri Sturluson tier 1

Fortitude, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Spans several centuries. Named among the four virtues in Plato's Republic in the fourth century BCE, taken up by Aristotle and the Stoics, and given the name cardinal only later, by Ambrose of Milan in the late fourth century CE. Its classical scholastic treatment follows later still, in Aquinas's thirteenth century Summa Theologiae.

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

Forty-Nine Day Rites, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism (Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr., Princeton University Press, 2014) records that the forty nine day memorial cycle rests on the antarabhava, or bardo, an intermediate state between death and rebirth accepted in Tibetan Buddhism, where it is described at length in texts such as the Bardo Thodol, and in much East Asian Buddhism, but rejected in Theravada Buddhism, whose doctrine holds that rebirth follows death immediately with no intervening state for a forty nine day rite to address.

Source The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. tier 1

Fox, 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

Frances Yates, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States The "Yates thesis" linking Hermeticism to the rise of early modern science has been challenged by later historians of science on the strength of its causal claims, though her role in founding the field of Western esotericism studies is unchallenged

Source Giordano Bruno and the Hermetic Tradition, Frances A. Yates tier 1

Francisco de Ávila, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States How far he directed the content of the Huarochirí Manuscript.

Terence N. D'Altroy's The Incas, second edition (Wiley-Blackwell, 2014) sets out two readings of the Huarochiri Manuscript, compiled under the extirpation campaign Francisco de Avila directed. One reading holds Avila commissioned and steered the compilation as intelligence gathering for the campaign against the very religious practices it records, making it a document shaped by an interrogator's purpose. Another holds an educated Andean assistant collected local tradition with considerable independent latitude, pointing to the text's pointed local detail and its notable absence of the Christian moralising framework a document built purely as extirpation evidence might be expected to carry. D'Altroy's comparative reading finds the text itself carries fingerprints consistent with both processes at once, which is why neither reading has displaced the other.

Source The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy tier 1