Disputed Statements

Orkney, Regions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Principal Religious Traditions

Currently States A Neolithic ritual landscape whose beliefs can only be inferred from its monuments and their alignments; then Norse religion and Norse Christianity after the islands were settled from Scandinavia; and the Church of Scotland since the Reformation.

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

Orthodox Christian Funeral, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Timothy Ware's The Orthodox Church (Kallistos Ware, Penguin Books, 1993) records that Orthodox practice, centred on the Order for the Burial of the Dead with its refusal to soften the fact of bodily dissolution, has generally not permitted cremation, reserving burial as proper to a faith built on bodily resurrection; several jurisdictions hold that position strictly and refuse funeral rites where cremation has occurred, while others have made pastoral provision for a family with no burial alternative available to it.

According To Eastern Orthodoxy

Source The Orthodox Church, Timothy Ware (Kallistos Ware) tier 2

Orthodox Christian Funeral, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 725

The service is built from a set of hymns ascribed to John of Damascus, who lived roughly 675 to 749, its own text says, but it uses the word ascribed rather than a firmer claim: how much of the funeral service as sung today reflects his own eighth century composition against later Byzantine compilation attributed to his name is not settled.

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

Oscar Ichazo, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States In Interviews with Oscar Ichazo (Arica Institute Press, 1982), Ichazo himself disputed the popularized psychological Enneagram his former student Claudio Naranjo carried into wider circulation from the early 1970s onward, holding it a divergence from the fuller Enneagram of personality he taught within the Arica School.

Source Interviews with Oscar Ichazo, Oscar Ichazo tier 3

Osei Tutu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1660

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

Source Osei Kofi Tutu I (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Osei Tutu, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1717

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

Source Osei Kofi Tutu I (Wikipedia), Wikipedia contributors tier 3

Osun-Osogbo Festival, Holidays & Festivals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Peter Probst's Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money (Indiana University Press, 2011) follows what changed after the sacred grove where the festival closes, entered on the UNESCO World Heritage List in 2005, began drawing state investment and international visitors alongside the Arugba's traditional procession: Probst reads the heritage economy and the cult of Osun as entangled rather than opposed, while other observers within Osogbo itself describe the same tourism as an intrusion on a devotional calendar that predates any listing.

Probst reads the heritage economy and the cult as entangled rather than opposed; other observers in Osogbo treat the tourism as an intrusion, and no settled position exists between the two readings in the scholarly literature or locally.

Source Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: Monuments, Deities, and Money, Peter Probst tier 1

Other-emptiness (shentong): ultimate reality is empty of what is other than itself, Beliefs & Restrictions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States Proponents hold that a purely negative emptiness cannot account for what the tantras say is realised; opponents hold that the position smuggles a permanent self back in under another name.

Other-emptiness, shentong, the distinctive teaching of the Jonang tradition and read in comparable terms by the Karma Kagyu after the Third Karmapa, holds that ultimate reality, the buddha nature spoken of in the third turning of the wheel of teaching, is empty of the adventitious defilements that are other than it, but is not itself empty of its own luminous nature. Cyrus Stearns's study of the Jonang master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, who gave the teaching its most developed form in the fourteenth century, records that proponents hold a purely negative account of emptiness cannot explain what the tantras describe as actually realised in meditation, while opponents, chiefly the Gelug tradition, hold that positing a nature not itself empty smuggles a permanent self back into the teaching under another name. The dispute was severe enough that the teaching and its textual tradition were suppressed in central Tibet for centuries, with the Jonang lineage surviving at a distance from the center of Tibetan religious authority. The disagreement remains unresolved because it concerns how to read the same third-turning scriptures both sides accept as authoritative, and neither side's reading has been shown to be textually impossible.

Source The Buddha from Dolpo: A Study of the Life and Thought of the Tibetan Master Dolpopa Sherab Gyaltsen, Cyrus Stearns tier 1

Otter, 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

Ottoman Empire, Empires & Polities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Associated Religion

Currently States Islam, with the sultans claiming the caliphate. The account that the last Cairo Abbasid formally transferred the office to Selim I in 1517 is treated by most historians as a later legitimating construction, though the sultans plainly exercised caliphal functions and the claim was politically central under Abdulhamid II

The transfer narrative and the modern scholarly reading of it as an eighteenth-century construction are the two positions; Hassan and the standard Ottoman histories set out the second.

Source Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History, Mona Hassan tier 1

Ou ⲟ, 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

Ovid, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 17

The source gives this death year as approximate (about), while the birth year is dated without qualification.

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

Owl, 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

Ox, 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

P, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Chaldean Letter Value

Currently States 8

According To Modern planetary numerology, the scheme called Chaldean

The values recorded here follow Cheiro's Book of Numbers (Cheiro, the pen name of William John Warner, published by Herbert Jenkins, London, 1926), the most widely reproduced version of the so-called Chaldean numerology table. Cheiro's own text names no ancient Chaldean source for the letter values it assigns, and comparing it against other published numerology tables from the same and later periods finds no agreement between them on several letters; no Mesopotamian or Chaldean text has ever been produced that contains a comparable letter-number correspondence. That comparison is why historians of the modern occult treat "Chaldean" as a nineteenth and twentieth century marketing label rather than a checkable lineage claim. The value recorded here is Cheiro's published reading, not a settled fact.

Source Cheiro's Book of Numbers, Cheiro (William John Warner) tier 3

Pachakuti: The Andean Doctrine of World-Turning, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within the tradition

The colonial era chroniclers who record Andean world age doctrine, Guaman Poma among them, differ from one another on the exact number and length of the ages and on the details of the king lists attached to them. The core doctrine, that history divides into ages ended by a cataclysmic pachakuti, is not in dispute; the specific numerology varies by chronicler and is not settled to one canonical count.

Source El Primer Nueva Coronica y Buen Gobierno (Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala, 1615, Royal Danish Library Digital Edition), Felipe Guaman Poma de Ayala tier 1

Palestine, Countries

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Legal Status

Currently States The political and territorial status of Jerusalem and the wider Palestinian territories remains internationally contested; Hamas has governed Gaza as an Islamist movement since 2007, while the Palestinian Authority administers parts of the West Bank under interim arrangements.

The political and territorial status of the Palestinian territories, the West Bank and Gaza, and specifically of Jerusalem, is among the most disputed and long-running questions in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, disputed between the state of Israel, the Palestinian Authority, Hamas and the wider international community, with no permanent settlement reached since the conflict's modern phase began in the twentieth century. Hamas, an Islamist movement, has governed the Gaza Strip since winning Gaza in intra-Palestinian fighting in 2007, while the Palestinian Authority, a secular nationalist body originating in the Oslo Accords, administers parts of the West Bank under interim arrangements never intended to be permanent when negotiated in the 1990s. The religious dimension recorded here is that Hamas's governance of Gaza is explicitly Islamist in ideology and self-description, in contrast to the Palestinian Authority's largely secular nationalist framing. Whether and how Palestinian statehood and the two territories' governance are ultimately resolved depends on a wider political settlement not yet reached despite decades of intermittent negotiation.

Source Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Palladium of Troy and Rome, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Attributed To

Currently States Pallas Athena / Minerva

Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry Palladium (Greek religion) examines the tradition that a heaven-fallen wooden image of Pallas Athena, the palladium, protected first Troy and later Rome. Britannica's method is source-critical, checking the tradition against the archaeological and literary record, and finds the image is legendary throughout its ancient sources and that no object answering the description has ever survived or been recovered, which is why its origin and its very physical existence remain matters of ancient legend rather than attested history.

Source Palladium (Greek religion), Encyclopaedia Britannica, Encyclopaedia Britannica tier 2

Palmyrene Religion, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 32

Palmyra's religious life almost certainly predates its surviving monuments, since the city was already a caravan center for generations before its great temples were built, but no text or excavation fixes an earlier point with any confidence. The dedication of the Temple of Bel in AD 32 is the earliest firmly dated act of organized cult on record, so it stands in as the origin point here rather than an unrecorded earlier date. Organized Palmyrene religious life ended with the city's destruction by Rome in 273 CE after Zenobia's revolt.

Source The Religious Life of Palmyra: A Study of the Social Patterns of Worship in the Roman Period, Ted Kaizer tier 1

Pamsukula, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Rita Langer's Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and Its Origins (Routledge, 2007) addresses the doctrinal tension pamsukula exposes: the strict Theravada reading of karma holds that the results of an action belong only to the one who performed it, which sits awkwardly against a rite whose water-pouring ceremony exists expressly to transfer merit to the dead. Langer sets out how the commentarial tradition resolves it, through the dead person's own approval of the gift and their place of rebirth.

According To Theravada

Source Buddhist Rituals of Death and Rebirth: Contemporary Sri Lankan Practice and Its Origins, Rita Langer tier 1