Disputed Statements

Mithra, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Theology

Currently States Dualist: two opposed cosmic principles

Mithra is honoured within Zoroastrianism as a great yazata subordinate to Ahura Mazda, guardian of the sworn word against the lie, but the same dualist framework that sets Ahura Mazda against Angra Mainyu extends to every being in the Zoroastrian cosmos, so his theology is recorded as dualist for the same reason and on the same source, Mary Boyce's A History of Zoroastrianism (1989). A separate question, not settled here, is the relation of this Iranian Mithra to the distinct Roman mystery cult of Mithras, which Boyce and others treat as historically connected but theologically apart.

Source A History of Zoroastrianism, Mary Boyce tier 1

Mithras, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Scholars disagree over what the tauroctony actually depicts. David Ulansey and others read the scene as a star chart, casting Mithras as the constellation Perseus overturning the cosmic order marked by the astrological Age of Taurus, while most specialists, including Roger Beck in a more cautious form, treat the astral reading as suggestive rather than proven and favour older readings tied to sacrifice, salvation and seasonal renewal. No consensus exists on which interpretation is correct.

Source The Religion of the Mithras Cult in the Roman Empire, Roger Beck tier 1

Mizuko Kuyo, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Tradition

Currently States Performed at Japanese Buddhist temples; its commercial promotion is debated within Japanese Buddhism

According To Japanese Buddhism

Mizuko kuyo is a Japanese Buddhist memorial rite for miscarried, stillborn or aborted fetuses, addressed to the mizuko, water child. Helen Hardacre's Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997), a study of the rite's modern commercial and pastoral dimensions, documents that some temples and scholars defend it as genuine pastoral care answering real parental grief, while Hardacre's own critical account, and other scholars following it, document temples marketing the rite by invoking fear of tatari, fetal spirit retribution, a fear Hardacre argues has little basis in older Buddhist doctrine and functions commercially to generate fee-paying business. The method is documentary and ethnographic, comparing temple advertising material, pastoral counselling practice and doctrinal history against each other rather than assuming either function excludes the other. Because both the pastoral and the commercial uses are independently documented within Japanese Buddhism, sometimes at the same temple, the atlas records both positions as held within the tradition and takes no side.

Source Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, Helen Hardacre tier 1

Mizuko Kuyo, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

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

According To Japan

Mizuko kuyo's standing as a subject of serious scholarship is itself divided between two readings of the same practice. Helen Hardacre's Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (1997) treats the rite chiefly as a modern commercial phenomenon, tracing how postwar Japanese temples developed and marketed it using fear of fetal spirit retribution, tatari, a critical account grounded in doctrinal and historical analysis showing the rite's modern form has little precedent in older Buddhist practice. Other scholars of Japanese religion, working from ethnographic interviews with grieving parents rather than temple marketing material, read the same rite more sympathetically as a genuine and valuable pastoral response to reproductive loss regardless of its commercial packaging. The method distinguishing the two readings is which evidence base each foregrounds, doctrinal and historical analysis on one side, ethnographic attention to lived grief on the other, applied to the same rite. Because both readings appear in serious peer-reviewed scholarship, the atlas states both rather than adjudicating between them.

Source Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, Helen Hardacre tier 1

Mizuko Kuyo, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Current Status

Currently States Helen Hardacre's Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (University of California Press, 1997), the standard academic study of the rite's modern history, documents that mizuko kuyo, the memorial service for children lost to miscarriage, stillbirth or abortion that spread rapidly in prominence from the 1970s, is today widely offered and widely criticised within Japanese Buddhism itself: Hardacre traces how some temples promote the rite by invoking fear of tatari, spirit retribution from an unappeased mizuko, a practice other clergy and scholars single out as exploiting grief.

According To Japanese Buddhism

Source Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, Helen Hardacre tier 1

Mizuko Kuyo, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Helen Hardacre's Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan (University of California Press, 1997) is itself the central document in the scholarly debate over whether mizuko kuyo's rapid rise in prominence from the 1970s reflects sincere pastoral care for grief that has few other public outlets in Japan, commercial promotion by temples that market the rite by invoking fear of tatari, spirit retribution from an unappeased mizuko, or some combination of both, a debate Hardacre's own study helped establish rather than settled.

According To Japan

Source Marketing the Menacing Fetus in Japan, Helen Hardacre tier 1

Moana (2016 Film), Screen Works

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Subject Matter

Currently States Centers on Maui, a demigod of Polynesian oral tradition credited across the Pacific with pulling up islands, slowing the sun and gifting fire, here written as a boastful, comic figure who partners with the teenage Moana rather than the female deity he shares the sea voyage with in many tellings. Disney formed the Oceanic Story Trust, Pacific anthropologists, historians, fishermen and linguists who reviewed every draft across nine story versions over five years of development, and cast several voice actors of Polynesian descent.

Teresia Teaiwa, Senior Lecturer in Pacific Studies at Victoria University of Wellington, criticized Maui as written into a "buffoon" and called his costume "macabre," likening it to the historical collection of tattooed skin from deceased Pacific people. Marama Fox, co-leader of New Zealand's Maori Party, called the depiction "a little bit of cultural misappropriation." Separately, when Disney sold a children's Halloween costume replicating Maui's brown skinned, tattooed body, Chelsie Haunani Fairchild, a Native Hawaiian critic, called it "polyface" and compared it to blackface, and Tevita O. Kaili, an Oceanic anthropologist, described the underlying pattern as a dominant group taking on a marginalized culture's symbols; Disney pulled the costume from sale. None of these critics disputed that the Oceanic Story Trust consultation happened, only whether it was enough to prevent these specific choices.

Source Associated Press, "Disney's New Movie Hit Moana Criticised for Depiction of Polynesia People," 2016 tier 2

Modern Paganism, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1954

Ronald Hutton's research, cited in this atlas's own description of the movement, established that Wicca and its sibling traditions are twentieth century constructions, but scholars date Modern Paganism's own beginning differently depending on whether they count eighteenth and nineteenth century Druidic and Romantic revivalism as its root or start with the movements that actually called themselves Pagan. 1954, when Gerald Gardner's Witchcraft Today brought Wicca into public view, is recorded as the point most historians treat as the effective start of Modern Paganism as a lived movement.

Source The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Moha (Delusion), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Moha, a single Sanskrit and Pali term catalogued once across two traditions on the same principle the atlas applies to Karma, Dharma and Samsara, has two separate origin periods depending on which list it is read from: on the Buddhist side, as the deepest of the three root kleshas, it is attested in the earliest Pali Canon strata; on the Hindu side, as one of the six enemies of the arishadvarga, its framing is attested only later, in dharmashastra and epic literature by the early centuries CE. P. V. Kane's History of Dharmasastra, Volume V (Bhandarkar Oriental Research Institute, 1958) is the source for the later Hindu dating specifically.

Source History of Dharmasastra, Volume V, P. V. Kane tier 1

Moha (Delusion), Vices

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Place of Origin

Currently States Two places at once: ancient India generally, within the earliest Pali Canon strata, for the Buddhist reading as one of the three root kleshas; and India's composite, multi-regional dharmashastra and epic corpus, which fixes no single narrower place, for the later Hindu arishadvarga reading.

Source The Foundations of Buddhism, Rupert Gethin tier 1

Moinuddin Chishti, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historicity debated

Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence's Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002) examine the early biography of Moinuddin Chishti through the malfuzat, the recorded-sayings literature attributed to the order's early masters. Their historical method finds several of the best known malfuzat collections are of doubtful authenticity and were produced in the fifteenth century or later, generations after Chishti's own lifetime, and that historians of the order accordingly treat the early biography as hagiographic construction serving the Ajmer shrine's authority, while devotional tradition continues to transmit the same material as biography. Nothing about Chishti's life before his arrival at Ajmer has been established from sources contemporary with him.

Source Sufi Martyrs of Love: The Chishti Order in South Asia and Beyond, Carl W. Ernst and Bruce B. Lawrence tier 1

Mokhukhu, Sacred Dances

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States Reading the uniform and the stamping as a reclaiming of the migrant labourer's dress is a scholarly interpretation rather than the church's own statement of what it is doing.

Comaroff argues that Zionist practice turns an emblem of subordination into one of belonging. Anderson and others hold that treating these churches mainly as a reaction to political conditions understates how much of their worship is a positive choice about how Christians should pray. Both readings are current.

Source Body of Power, Spirit of Resistance: The Culture and History of a South African People, Jean Comaroff tier 1

Mokosh, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Relic

Currently States Some scholars argue that veneration of Mokosh survived syncretically into later Slavic Orthodox popular devotion to Saint Paraskeva Pyatnitsa, whose feast day and folk cult inherited associations with spinning, wool, and women's domestic labor. This proposed continuity, argued in detail by scholars such as Boris Rybakov, rests on shared domestic and textile associations and overlapping folk customs rather than on any direct textual statement equating the two figures; other scholars regard the parallel as an appealing but unproven inference that risks projecting a pagan substrate onto what may be an independently developed Christian folk cult, so the continuity is treated as a debated hypothesis rather than an established fact.

Source Slavic Gods and Heroes, Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel tier 1

Mol, Haab Months

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States Usually glossed as water, and sometimes as gathering or collecting, two readings that are not easily decided between.

Both glosses come through the same colonial Yucatec transmission and neither has been settled by a glyphic decipherment that would decide between them. The Haab carried no leap-day correction, so this month drifted slowly against the true solar year over the calendar's working life, which is part of why an agricultural sense such as gathering cannot be checked against a fixed season.

Source Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa tier 2

Monkey, 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

Mooncake, Sacred Foods

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historical Origin

Currently States A widely repeated story ties mooncakes to hidden messages passed during a fourteenth century uprising against Yuan dynasty rule

According To Chinese Folk Religion

The atlas cannot settle whether this is genuine history or a later legend attached to an already existing festival food, and records it as the tradition's own popular story rather than as verified history.

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

Moplah (Malabar) Rebellion, Wars & Conflicts

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Religious Dimension

Currently States The rebellion's religious character is itself the disputed question. Panikkar reads Islamic idiom, including the language of jihad used by some rebel leaders, as the vocabulary through which an underlying peasant grievance against a colonial land settlement and Hindu landlordism found expression, with religion as medium rather than cause. Wood's archival reconstruction gives comparatively greater weight to the rebellion's religious and communal dimension, documenting in detail the killings and forced conversions directed at Hindus once the movement's Khilafat and Non-Cooperation leadership lost control of it under British suppression, while still situating that violence within the wider agrarian and anti-colonial context both historians describe. Both agree the uprising began under the organizational and religious banner of the Khilafat movement, the pan-Islamic campaign against the dismantling of the Ottoman caliphate, joined that year to Gandhi's Non-Cooperation campaign; they differ on how much explanatory weight that religious mobilization carries against the land-tenure grievance both also document.

This is a live historiographical disagreement about causation and relative weight, not a dispute over what happened; the documentary record of the violence itself, communal and otherwise, is not contested between Panikkar and Wood.

Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States A minority position within the tradition

According To Christianity

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) sets out the camps on Peter Abelard's moral influence theory of the atonement. Critics hold that if the change effected by the cross happens entirely in the observer's heart, then nothing is objectively accomplished for those who do not respond to it, that a demonstration of love does not require a crucifixion to make its point, and that the theory explains the cross's effect away rather than accounting for it. Defenders, examining Abelard's own twelfth century commentary on Romans directly, hold that the exemplarist label was fixed on him by his opponents and does not match his actual commentary, that he retained the New Testament's redemption language throughout, and that every atonement theory has some moral influence dimension whether or not it is named as such.

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

Moral Influence Theory of the Atonement, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Doctrinal Status Detail

Currently States The moral influence theory, argued by Peter Abelard in an excursus in his commentary on Romans in the twelfth century, locates the power of the cross in its effect on those who see it: rather than answering why an innocent death should be required before an already merciful God can forgive, Abelard held that the love displayed at the cross draws out love in return and frees a person bound by fear. Held today mainly within liberal and some Protestant theological currents, and taken up later by Horace Bushnell and Hastings Rashdall, it has been persistently charged, beginning with Bernard of Clairvaux in Abelard's own century, with reducing the cross to an example rather than an event that accomplishes anything objective; Abelard's defenders answer that he retained the language of redemption and did not treat the cross as merely instructive.

According To Christianity

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

Morana, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Mythic Association

Currently States Whether the surviving folk rite of the burned or drowned effigy preserves an authentic pre-Christian goddess or produced the modern idea of one after the fact is a question scholars have never fully settled.

Source Slavic Gods and Heroes, Judith Kalik and Alexander Uchitel tier 1