Disputed Statements

Maya (Deceit), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Maya as the fourth of the four kashayas in Jain metaphysics, the passion of deceit or guile distinct from the unrelated pan-Indic doctrine of maya as cosmic illusion, is attested through the Tattvartha Sutra, the earliest surviving systematic Jain philosophical text, dated by most scholars to the second through fifth centuries CE. Padmanabh S. Jaini's The Jaina Path of Purification (University of California Press, 1979) is the standard scholarly source for this dating of the Tattvartha Sutra and the kashaya scheme it sets out.

Source The Jaina Path of Purification, Padmanabh S. Jaini tier 1

Mbuti, Pantheons

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Mortals Enter the Pantheon

Currently States No recognised route from mortal to god

Colin Turnbull recorded no ancestor cult among the Mbuti, in contrast with the ancestral observance of their village neighbours. Later ethnographers have argued that Mbuti and village practice cannot be separated that cleanly, so the absence is a reading of the record rather than a settled fact.

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

Me ⲙ, 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

Mechitza, Sacred Architecture

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Proponents trace a precedent to the Second Temple's Court of Women, given a temporary gallery built for the Sukkot water-drawing celebration; the fixed architectural mechitza in ordinary synagogue design developed later, through the medieval and early modern periods.

According To Judaism

Source Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.) tier 1

Medeina, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Some folklore sources trace her name to the Lithuanian word for forest, medis, but this connection is a folk etymology repeated in popular sources rather than a settled reading among specialists in Baltic linguistics, and the atlas records it as a proposed rather than a confirmed origin.

Source Foreword to the Past: A Cultural History of the Baltic People, Endre Bojtar tier 1

Meditation, Disciplines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lineage

Currently States Secular mindfulness meditation descends chiefly from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction, founded 1979.

Secular mindfulness meditation, as taught in clinics and workplaces today, descends chiefly from Jon Kabat-Zinn's Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program, founded at the University of Massachusetts Medical Center in 1979 and drawn from Theravada vipassana instruction. Robert H. Sharf's Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, published in Numen in 1995, examines how the modern rhetoric of meditative experience arose. The method is historical and textual, tracing how the vocabulary of direct, experiential "mindfulness" developed through nineteenth and twentieth century reform movements, in dialogue with Western psychology and against colonial-era pressure to present Buddhism as rational and empirical. Sharf argues this is a significant reworking of Buddhist meditative practice for a new audience, not a direct, unaltered transmission from its originating monastic settings. The atlas records the lineage as adapted rather than unbroken.

Source Buddhist Modernism and the Rhetoric of Meditative Experience, Robert H. Sharf tier 1

Meiyo (Honor), Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Nitobe's codified seven-virtue scheme dates to his 1900 book; whether it reflects a continuous samurai ethic reaching back through Edo-period house codes and texts such as the Hagakure, or is substantially Nitobe's own Meiji-era synthesis for a Western readership, is a genuinely contested question among historians of Japan.

Source Inventing the Way of the Samurai: Nationalism, Internationalism, and Bushido in Modern Japan, Oleg Benesch tier 1

Melqart, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Worship and Practice

Currently States An annual egersis ("awakening") festival at Tyre, understood in Greek and Roman testimony as re-enacting Melqart's death and revival.

The egersis is attested only through outside Greek and Roman description rather than any surviving Phoenician liturgical text of its own, and scholars disagree on how literally to read its "death and resurrection" framing: some treat it as a genuine Phoenician dying-and-rising god pattern later projected onto Herakles by Greek interpreters, others as substantially a Greek reading imposed on a springtime renewal rite whose original Phoenician meaning is now unrecoverable in that much detail.

Source In Search of the Phoenicians, Josephine Quinn tier 1

Mem מ, 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

Mem מ, 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

Memorialism, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Note

Currently States How bare Zwingli's own position was is argued among historians of the Reformation

Two camps work from the same texts. One reads Zwingli's later confessions as a bare memorial in which nothing is given and the congregation only remembers. The other reads the same passages as affirming Christ present to the contemplating faith of the assembly, and treats the bare reading as a caricature inherited from his Lutheran opponents. Neither camp claims the texts settle it.

Source The Christian Tradition: A History of the Development of Doctrine, Jaroslav Pelikan tier 1

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

Whether menstrual restrictions across religious traditions are best read as a single category of taboo grounded in pollution is contested. Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb's edited volume Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (1988) argued against that blanket reading, showing that seclusion and restriction are treated as dangerous in some societies and as a source of power in others, and often as both at once within the same one, citing cases from the Ambubachi Mela at Kamakhya, where the goddess's own menstruation closes the temple and draws one of the largest gatherings in eastern India, to Leviticus's ritual impurity and the Quran's directed abstention. That argument is now the position most specialists hold, but most general reference works still default to the older pollution framing, which is why the standing is recorded as contested rather than settled in either direction.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States The blanket category of menstrual taboo, read as pollution, was argued against by Buckley and Gottlieb in 1988 and is no longer the default reading. It is still the framing most general reference works use.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb's edited volume Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (University of California Press, 1988) surveys scholarly readings of menstrual restriction and taboo across religious traditions, comparing ethnographic case studies against one another, and records these readings as contested, ranging from purity-based explanations rooted in structuralist anthropology to feminist re-readings of the same restrictions as social control instruments rather than religious purity concerns.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1

Mental Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging 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

Mental Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging 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

Mesoamerican Ballgame, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

The Mesoamerican ballgame was played across a very wide area and a very long span of pre-Columbian history, and the archaeological and iconographic record, ball courts, carved relief panels and painted ceramics, shows some depictions clearly associated with sacrificial imagery and others showing no such association at all. David Carrasco's Religions of Mesoamerica, second edition (2013), records that which specific matches, or which classes of match, carried genuine ritual sacrificial stakes as against which were played purely recreationally remains an active area of Mesoamerican scholarship, since the same game form served different societies and periods across its long history. The method is archaeological and iconographic, reading ball court architecture, relief carving and ceramic depictions site by site rather than assuming a single meaning applies uniformly. Because the game's documented range spans societies as different as the Classic Maya and the later Aztec, each with their own use of it, no single answer to which stakes applied where has displaced the others, and the question remains genuinely open across the field.

Source Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, David Carrasco tier 1

Mesoamerican Ballgame, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Human sacrifice is archaeologically attested in connection with some ballgame matches, but scholars caution it was not universal to the game across its full span; recreational and gambling-oriented play is equally well documented

Source Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, David Carrasco tier 1

Metal, 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

Methodius of Thessalonica, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 815

The source gives this birth year as approximate (circa), while the death is dated to a specific day.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik tier 1