Disputed Statements

He Xiangu, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Legendary: known from narrative tradition, not the historical record

He Xiangu is counted among the Eight Immortals and placed by tradition in the Tang dynasty. The Encyclopedia of Taoism, edited by Fabrizio Pregadio (2008), the standard modern reference for Taoist persons and practice, records that several localities in southern China each claim her as a local figure, with differing birthplaces, family details and accounts of her ascension, never reconciled into one canonical biography. The method is documentary and folkloric, comparing the surviving local temple records, gazetteers and hagiographic collections against one another rather than against any single authoritative source, since Taoist immortal biography developed regionally rather than from one original text. Because the variation traces to genuinely independent local cults rather than to the corruption of one original account, her historicity as a single identifiable Tang-period person is recorded as unresolved rather than as a case any one local tradition has settled.

Source The Encyclopedia of Taoism, Fabrizio Pregadio (ed.) tier 1

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heart, 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

Heathenry, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Heathenry is split, publicly and sometimes bitterly, between a universalist position holding that anyone drawn to the gods may practice regardless of ancestry, and a folkish position holding the religion belongs by right to people of northern European descent. The divide has produced separate organizations: the Asatru Folk Assembly and elements of the Asatru Alliance take the folkish position, while the Troth is organized explicitly around the universalist one. Scholarship on the movement, including Jennifer Snook's ethnographic study, treats the split as a defining and unresolved feature of American Heathenry rather than a fringe disagreement.

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

Hecate, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The origin of the name Hecate is disputed among classicists.

One proposal derives it from the Greek hekatos, the far-worker or far-shooting one, an epithet elsewhere given to Apollo. A rival and increasingly favored reading takes the name as pre-Greek, most likely Carian, in origin, pointing to her especially strong cult presence at Lagina in Caria as supporting evidence. Neither account has settled the question.

Source The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Simon Hornblower, Antony Spawforth and Esther Eidinow (eds.) tier 1

Heh ה, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Scholem places Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth century CE

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Heh ה, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Survives in three recensions that do not agree in detail

According To Sefer Yetzirah: the thirty-two paths and the twenty-two letters

Gershom Scholem's Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism (Schocken Books, New York, 1961) surveys the manuscript recensions of Sefer Yetzirah and finds no single stable text: the surviving copies diverge enough in wording and in the letter-to-planet and letter-to-sign correspondences that quoting "the text" requires naming which recension is meant. Comparing the linguistic style, the doctrinal content and the external references made to the work across centuries of citation, Scholem argues the book could have been composed anywhere from the second to the ninth century CE, a span of roughly a millennium, with later Kabbalistic and Hasidic writers each reading it through their own era's overlay. The atlas follows Scholem's range rather than a narrower guess, and does not print the per-letter planet and sign tables at all, because doing so would silently pick one contested recension over the others.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Heinrich Kramer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1430

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

Source The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Christopher S. Mackay tier 1

Heinrich Kramer, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1505

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

Source The Hammer of Witches: A Complete Translation of the Malleus Maleficarum, Christopher S. Mackay tier 1

Hekhalot Rabbati, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition Start Year

Currently States 300

Gershom Scholem's foundational study read the Hekhalot corpus as preserving a documented history of Jewish mysticism reaching back before medieval Kabbalah, and later scholarship building on his work generally places the core visionary material in the fourth to sixth century CE. The text as it survives carries later layers of magical adjuration added through the eighth to tenth century, and the earliest actual manuscript evidence, Cairo Genizah fragments, dates only to the ninth through twelfth century, so the received text reflects a long redactional history rather than a single date of composition.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Hekhalot Rabbati, Esoteric Texts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Era of Composition End Year

Currently States 900

Gershom Scholem's foundational study read the Hekhalot corpus as preserving a documented history of Jewish mysticism reaching back before medieval Kabbalah, and later scholarship building on his work generally places the core visionary material in the fourth to sixth century CE. The text as it survives carries later layers of magical adjuration added through the eighth to tenth century, and the earliest actual manuscript evidence, Cairo Genizah fragments, dates only to the ninth through twelfth century, so the received text reflects a long redactional history rather than a single date of composition.

Source Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism, Gershom Scholem tier 1

Hel, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Scholars disagree about how much genuine pre-Christian belief stands behind Hel as described in Snorri Sturluson's Prose Edda. Some read her as an authentic goddess of death attested independently in skaldic kennings, while others argue that Snorri, writing two centuries after Christianization, substantially personified the abstract Old Norse noun hel, meaning the grave or the state of death, turning a common noun into a named being for his own systematizing purposes.

Source Norse Mythology: A Guide to the Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs, John Lindow tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States The True Cross relics are the fragments of wood venerated from the fourth century onward as remnants of the cross of the crucifixion, first associated with Helena's journey to Jerusalem by Ambrose of Milan in 395 and, within a generation of that journey, already reported being shown at Jerusalem by Cyril of Jerusalem; Drijvers's Helena Augusta (Brill, 1992) traces how fragments were distributed widely from Jerusalem and became the basis of the feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States Drijvers's Helena Augusta (Brill, 1992) dates the earliest surviving statement of the finding-of-the-cross legend to Ambrose of Milan's funeral oration for the emperor Theodosius in 395, more than sixty years after Helena's own journey to Jerusalem in the 320s and decades after Eusebius's silence on the point, placing the tradition's origin in the late fourth century rather than in Helena's own lifetime.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States Jan Willem Drijvers's Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross (E. J. Brill, 1992) notes that Eusebius of Caesarea, who wrote at length about Helena's pilgrimage to the Holy Land in the 320s and about Constantine's building program there, says nothing at all about her finding a cross, even though he is the fullest contemporary witness to the journey itself.

Source Helena Augusta: The Mother of Constantine the Great and the Legend of Her Finding of the True Cross, Jan Willem Drijvers tier 1

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 246

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

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

Helena, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 330

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

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