Disputed Statements

Hopi Prophecy, Prophecies

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Claimed Fulfillment

Currently States The "gourd of ashes" sign read as describing nuclear weapons, and roads, wires and colonisation read as describing other listed signs.

These readings are offered by Hopi spokespeople themselves as the meaning of signs framed in general terms; whether the correspondence was intended in advance or fitted afterward to known twentieth century events is not a question this atlas can settle from the published record.

Source Book of the Hopi, Frank Waters, with Oswald "White Bear" Fredericks tier 3

Hori ϩ, 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

Horse, 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

Horse, Dream Symbols

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States The manual ascribed to Ibn Sirin reads the horse as rank, honour and good fortune, and as travel or advancement, a fine mount betokening standing.

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

Horus, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States The Osiris myth cycle itself makes Horus the posthumous son of Isis and Osiris, conceived after Isis's magical revival of her husband's body. An older Heliopolitan tradition instead makes "Horus the Elder" one of the five children of Geb and Nut, a sibling of Osiris, Isis, Set and Nephthys rather than their son; New Kingdom religion increasingly merged the two figures into one Horus.

Ancient Egyptian sources genuinely disagree by tradition rather than telling one story two ways: the Osirian cycle makes Horus the posthumous son of Isis and Osiris, while the earlier Heliopolitan cosmogony names a separate "Horus the Elder" as a child of Geb and Nut. Plutarch records both traditions still current in the Ptolemaic period.

Source The Oxford Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt, Donald B. Redford (ed.) tier 1

Hoy (Ha) ሀ, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Why the script was vocalised in the fourth century CE, after centuries of writing consonants alone, is argued and not settled

According To The Ge'ez script

The World's Writing Systems (Peter T. Daniels and William Bright, eds., Oxford University Press, 1996) reviews the Aksumite inscriptions that first show Ge'ez written with vocalisation, a fourth-century CE innovation that is not in dispute, and canvasses three explanations for why it happened then: an internal development inside the Aksumite royal chancery seeking a more precise script for administration; a response to the newly Christian court's need for scripture translated and taught with unambiguous vowels after Aksum's conversion under King Ezana; and influence carried by vocalised Indian scripts reaching the Aksumite court through Red Sea trade contact. Comparing the timing, the epigraphic evidence and the trade record for each explanation, the volume's contributors find none conclusive, since Aksum's fourth-century contacts touched all three at once; the dating of the change is settled, its cause is not.

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

Hubert Pearce, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States The Pearce-Pratt distance series, in which he called cards being turned in another building on the Duke campus

J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt's A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests (Journal of Parapsychology, 1954) reported card-guessing trials conducted with Hubert Pearce at Duke University in the 1930s, in which Pearce and the experimenter were in separate buildings on campus. Rhine and Pratt's method recorded and scored Pearce's card guesses against a randomised deck sealed with the experimenter, and the reported above-chance results were contested by later critics, notably C. E. M. Hansel, on the grounds that the physical layout of the two buildings involved left open an ordinary sensory or signalling route between experimenter and subject that the original protocol had not ruled out.

Source A Review of the Pearce-Pratt Distance Series of ESP Tests, J. B. Rhine and J. G. Pratt tier 1

Huey Tecuilhuitl, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Late June into mid July

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Huey Tozoztli, Veintenas

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Approximate Gregorian Span

Currently States Early to late April

Scholars have proposed several correlations between the xiuhpohualli year and the Gregorian calendar. The month range given here follows one widely reproduced reconstruction and is offered for relative placement only, not as a settled date: the 365 day count carried no intercalated leap day, so its alignment with the solar year is understood to have drifted across the centuries of its use, and colonial era testimony was recorded decades after the practice had ended.

Source The Aztecs (Smith, 3rd edition), Michael E. Smith tier 1

Huineng, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

The Princeton Dictionary of Buddhism, edited by Robert E. Buswell Jr. and Donald S. Lopez Jr. (Princeton University Press, 2014), records Huineng as a historical figure but examines the account of him in the Platform Sutra against the text's own compilation history, finding it to be a sectarian construction of the later Southern Chan school rather than a reliable record of his life, and the dictionary accordingly does not read the Platform Sutra's narrative as biography.

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

Huldra, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Regional Norwegian and Swedish traditions disagree on how dangerous the huldra fundamentally is, with some legend cycles treating her as a genuinely threatening seducer who leads men to their ruin and others as a lonely, marriageable figure whose humanity a devoted husband can restore; Kvideland and Sehmsdorf's collection preserves both readings from different tellers rather than resolving them into one consistent character.

Huli Jing, Mythical Creatures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Accounts of huli jing range from dangerous seducers who drain a victim's vital essence to benevolent or morally ambiguous figures who reward kindness, and the moral reading shifts considerably by period and text.

Source Chinese Mythology: An Introduction, Anne Birrell tier 1

Human Beings Author Their Own Acts and God Judges Them Justly, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Whether justice is a standard reason can recognise and measure God by, or whether justice is simply whatever God does. Every subsequent position in Islamic theology takes a side on that question.

Divine justice, adl, is a formal principle of faith in Mutazili, Zaydi, Twelver and Ismaili theology, holding that God is just by a standard reason can recognise, that He does not command the impossible or punish what He himself caused, and that human beings must therefore genuinely originate their own acts to be justly judged for them. W. Montgomery Watt's translated selection of classical Islamic creeds, a mid-twentieth-century translation later Islamic studies scholarship has refined on points of detail, sets this position against the competing Ashari position that justice is simply whatever God does, so that reason has no independent standing to measure or constrain divine action. The dispute concerns whether justice is a standard God is bound by or a term that only describes whatever He in fact does, a question that in turn decides whether human free authorship of action is required for divine judgement to be called just at all. Every later position in Islamic theology on free will and predestination takes a side on this question, which is why it has remained a live dividing line rather than a settled premise.

Source Islamic Creeds: A Selection, W. Montgomery Watt tier 1

Humanae Vitae, Religious Legal Instruments

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Challenge

Currently States Several national bishops' conferences issued pastoral statements in 1968 that differ materially on what the teaching requires of a conscience that cannot accept it. Those statements are all official and all still on the record.

Source Turning Point: The Inside Story of the Papal Birth Control Commission, Robert McClory tier 1

Humanist Manifesto I, II and III, Literary Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Reception

Currently States Whether organized humanism's own foundational declarations amount to a religion has been argued on both sides since the United States Supreme Court's 1961 decision in Torcaso v. Watkins, whose majority opinion included a footnote naming Secular Humanism among religions that do not teach belief in a god. Humanist organizations describe that line as non-binding and maintain that a naturalistic, evidence based worldview is not a faith position, while critics have pointed to the word religion's own repeated use across the 1933 Manifesto's text.

Source Torcaso v. Watkins, 367 U.S. 488 (1961), Supreme Court of the United States (Justice Hugo L. Black, writing for the majority) tier 1

Humata, Hukhta, Huvarshta (Good Thoughts, Good Words, Good Deeds), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The Gathas' own date is one of the most contested questions in Iranian studies, with proposals for Zoroaster's lifetime ranging from roughly 1500 BCE on linguistic grounds to closer to 600 BCE on the traditional Zoroastrian chronology; no consensus date is treated as settled.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1

Humility, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The scheme pairing humility against pride has two dates folded into one claim. Its literary ancestor is the Psychomachia of Prudentius, written around 400 CE, where Mens Humilis fights and defeats Superbia in single combat. The formal pairing of a virtue against each of the seven capital sins, humility included, was fixed only later, in medieval catechetical writing with no single author or date.

Source The Seven Deadly Sins: An Introduction to the History of a Religious Concept, with Special Reference to Medieval English Literature, Morton W. Bloomfield tier 1

Hummingbird, 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

Hungary, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The 2011 church law reduced legally recognised churches from several hundred to a few dozen and made full recognition a parliamentary decision; the European Court of Human Rights found the framework in breach of the Convention in 2014 and it has been amended rather than replaced.

Hungary's 2011 church law reduced the number of legally recognised churches from several hundred to a few dozen, and made full legal recognition, with its attendant tax and funding benefits, a matter of parliamentary decision rather than administrative registration. The European Court of Human Rights found this framework in breach of the European Convention on Human Rights in 2014, ruling that subjecting religious recognition to a parliamentary vote gave the ruling political majority effective power to deny recognition to disfavoured communities without adequate judicial safeguard. Hungary has since amended the law rather than replacing the parliamentary-decision framework outright, and the State Department's report records the amended system as still in effect as of 2023, meaning the core mechanism the Court found problematic, political rather than judicial control over recognition, persists in modified form. Whether the amendments bring the law into compliance with the 2014 judgment would require a fresh case before the same court to settle authoritatively.

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

Hurrian Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States -2300

Hurrian speakers and their gods appear in Mesopotamian records from the late third millennium BCE, centuries before the kingdom of Mitanni existed to give the religion a political center. Historians have no single year for when a distinct Hurrian religious tradition began, only a widening span of textual attestation running from that early contact through the Bronze Age collapse around 1200 BCE, when Mitanni and the wider Hittite sphere that had absorbed Hurrian myth both came apart.

Source Religions of Second Millennium Anatolia, Piotr Taracha tier 1