Open Questions

Open Thelema

Why It Is Open Thelema has no single organisation: its chief initiatory orders keep their own membership rolls, some of it oathbound material, and no outside survey covering the tradition as a whole was found.

What Would Settle It A survey of the major Thelemic orders' own reported membership, or an independent sociological study using a stated, defensible definition of practice, aggregated across the tradition's known organised currents.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism, Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (eds.).

Open New Age

Why It Is Open New Age has no central organisation and no agreed boundary with the wider fields of alternative spirituality and Western esotericism it draws on, and its many independent teachers, retreat centres and publishers each keep at most their own local records.

What Would Settle It A sociological survey using a stated, defensible definition of participation, since belief surveys on individual New Age adjacent claims (reincarnation, astrology, psychic phenomena) measure belief rather than movement participation.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff.

Open Sant Mat

Why It Is Open Sant Mat has no central organization: its many lineages, Radha Soami Satsang Beas among the largest, each keep at most their own membership records, several privately, and no independent source aggregates them into a total for the tradition as a whole.

What Would Settle It A survey methodology that could count across separate, non-communicating religious organizations without relying on each one's own self-reported figures, or a change in disclosure practice by the larger lineages themselves.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in The Radhasoami Tradition: A Critical History of Guru Successorship, David Christopher Lane.

Open Goddess Movement

Why It Is Open The Goddess Movement has no central organisation and no agreed boundary with modern Wicca or the wider Pagan movement, and its component groups, Dianic covens, the Reclaiming tradition and independent Goddess temples, each keep at most their own local records.

What Would Settle It A sociological survey using a stated, defensible definition of participation, aggregated across a representative sample of the movement's known organised currents.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Living in the Lap of the Goddess: The Feminist Spirituality Movement in America, Cynthia Eller.

Open Religion of Humanity

Why It Is Open The Positivist Church of Brazil in Rio de Janeiro is documented as the one organised body still holding services, but no current membership or attendance figure for it was found in the sources checked for this record.

What Would Settle It A current statement from the Positivist Church of Brazil itself, or an independent survey of its membership and attendance.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Britannica (online academic reference), Encyclopaedia Britannica editors.

Open Deism

Why It Is Open Deism has never had a central organisation or membership process, and general religious surveys that ask about belief in God, an afterlife or scripture rarely isolate a specifically deist position from theism or agnosticism more broadly.

What Would Settle It A survey instrument specifically designed to isolate deist belief, of the kind occasionally attempted in general religious surveys, applied consistently enough across countries to support a global estimate.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of World Religions, John Bowker (ed.).

Open Luciferianism

Why It Is Open Luciferianism has no central registering body, no formal congregational structure comparable to most religions, and its practice is conducted largely through self-published books and online communities that keep no membership rolls, so no sociologist of religion has published even a rough estimate.

What Would Settle It A survey instrument capable of identifying self-described Luciferians within broader surveys of religious identity or occult and Left-Hand Path practice, of the kind already used to estimate Wiccan or Satanist populations, applied consistently across at least one national population.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in The Invention of Satanism, Asbjorn Dyrendal, James R. Lewis and Jesper Aa. Petersen.

Open Discordianism

Why It Is Open Discordianism has no central organisation, no membership process and no agreed test for who counts as a practitioner rather than a reader enjoying the joke, so no census or registry exists to consult, and scholars of the tradition treat the boundary question itself as open rather than merely uncounted.

What Would Settle It A sociological survey using a stated, defensible definition of practice, or, short of that, a scholarly argument for why the question is not meaningfully answerable for a tradition of this kind.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in Invented Religions: Imagination, Fiction and Faith, Carole M. Cusack.

Open Theosophy

Why It Is Open The original Theosophical Society split after Blavatsky's death, chiefly into the Adyar based Theosophical Society and the Pasadena based Theosophical Society founded by William Quan Judge, and each rival body keeps and reports its own membership rolls without any shared or independently audited combined count.

What Would Settle It A single count published jointly, or independently compiled from each Society's own reported rolls with a stated methodology and date, across the Adyar, Pasadena and any other surviving Theosophical bodies.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion

Question posed in The Theosophical Enlightenment, Joscelyn Godwin.

Open Mithraism

Why It Is Open The cult left no scripture, no liturgy and no doctrinal statement. The single line usually cited is a damaged painted inscription in the mithraeum under Santa Prisca in Rome, restored by its excavators to read as thanks for having been saved by shed blood; the restoration supplies missing letters, and even as restored it does not say what an initiate was saved from or for. Mithraists left no funerary formulae of the kind other cults of the period left in quantity, so there is nothing independent to test the reading against, and scholars working from the iconography alone have not settled it.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic text of any length: a liturgical papyrus, a doctrinal fragment, or a securely legible inscription stating the cult's teaching, recovered from an excavated mithraeum or from a papyrus collection. A body of Mithraic grave inscriptions would settle it indirectly, by showing what members expected of their own deaths.

Expertise Needed Roman archaeology, Latin and Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in The Roman Cult of Mithras: The God and His Mysteries, Manfred Clauss.

Open The Eleusinian Mysteries

Why It Is Open The prohibition on disclosure held for the whole life of the cult and no initiate left an account in any surviving text. Ancient writers describe the effect of the rite rather than its content. The only reports that claim to give content are by Christian polemicists writing centuries later from outside the cult, with an interest in making it appear either trivial or obscene, and there is nothing independent against which to test them. Excavation gives the hall and the small closed structure at its centre and nothing of what was done there.

What Would Settle It An ancient text by an initiate, or a document from the sanctuary's own administration describing the conduct of the rite, recovered by excavation at Eleusis or identified in a papyrus collection. Inscriptions from the sanctuary already record its finances and its officials, so a procedural record is not an impossible find.

Expertise Needed Classical archaeology, Greek epigraphy, papyrology

Question posed in Greek Religion, Walter Burkert.

Open The Sabians

Why It Is Open The Quran names the Sabians three times and gives no description of them. The two leading identifications, the Mandaeans of southern Iraq and the star-venerating people of Harran, rest on different kinds of evidence and point in different directions, and the Harranian case is complicated by a report that the name was adopted there in order to obtain protected status. The identification has been argued since the ninth century by parties with a legal interest in the answer.

What Would Settle It A securely dated pre-Islamic attestation of the name applied to a specific community, or documentary evidence of self-designation from either candidate group before the Abbasid period, would settle it. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the earliest Quranic commentaries against the Mandaean and Harranian source material could establish which identification the earliest readers actually held.

Expertise Needed Semitic philology, Quranic exegesis and its history, the archaeology and epigraphy of upper Mesopotamia, and Mandaean studies

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open União do Vegetal

Why It Is Open The date is agreed in every account, including the church's own. The place is not. The church describes the founding as taking place in the Amazon forest without naming a settlement, and several accounts place it at a rubber camp near the Bolivian frontier, while widely circulated reference summaries give the town of Porto Velho instead.

What Would Settle It The church's own founding records and the recollections of the first members, read against Brazilian civil registration and land records for the rubber camps of the upper Madeira in 1961.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious history and archival research

Question posed in Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil, Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae (eds.).

Open Barquinha

Why It Is Open The tradition is the least documented of the three Brazilian ayahuasca religions. Santo Daime and the Uniao do Vegetal have been surveyed, counted and litigated over, and the Barquinha has not. Most of what exists is recent Brazilian scholarship, and the atlas has found no figure it is willing to publish for the number of houses or their distribution.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Acre houses and any outside the state, undertaken with the communities rather than from a distance, giving the lines of descent from the founding centre.

Expertise Needed Brazilian religious studies and the anthropology of Amazonian religion

Question posed in Ayahuasca, Ritual and Religion in Brazil, Beatriz Caiuby Labate and Edward MacRae (eds.).

Open San Religion

Why It Is Open There is no answer on record and nobody holds a position, because the evidence to hold one was never gathered. Wilhelm Bleek and Lucy Lloyd recorded /Xam between 1870 and 1884 and their work ended when their narrators went home and no further speakers could be found. The neighbouring communities of the southern and eastern Cape were recorded by no one. Their languages have no speakers and their descendants were absorbed into other communities. The San religion described in the scholarly literature is therefore the religion of the /Xam and of a small number of twentieth-century northern groups, generalised, and the generalisation covers an absence rather than a consensus.

What Would Settle It Recovery of further colonial-era linguistic or missionary material comparable to the Bleek and Lloyd notebooks: unpublished mission-station vocabularies, magistrates' and travellers' notebooks, or word lists held in South African, Dutch, German and British archives that have not been catalogued as linguistic material and so have not been looked for. A systematic archival survey aimed at this specific question has not been carried out. Failing that, the question stays open permanently, which is itself worth recording.

Expertise Needed Historical linguistics of the Khoisan languages; archival research in southern African, Dutch, German and British colonial and mission collections; southern African social history.

Question posed in Specimens of Bushman Folklore, W. H. I. Bleek and L. C. Lloyd.

Open Serer Religion

Why It Is Open This is a gap rather than an argument. The monument fields at Sine-Ngayene, Wanar, Wassu and Kerbatch, inscribed by UNESCO in 2006, were built over a long span and have been partially excavated, but no excavator has been able to attach them to a named present-day people, and no scholar has published a positive attribution to defend. Serer oral tradition, recorded most fully by Henry Gravrand, connects the monuments to Serer forebears and reads the burials as those of ancestors who are now among the pangool. Historians have neither confirmed that reading nor produced a rival one; they have set it aside as unproven and moved on, which leaves the question with no position holding the field.

What Would Settle It A dated burial and ceramic sequence from a securely stratified excavation across several of the monument fields, combined with ancient DNA from the tumuli burials and comparison against present-day Serer, Wolof and Mandinka populations. Radiocarbon coverage of the circles is thin and unevenly published, and no aDNA programme has been directed at the Senegambian monuments. Community consultation with Serer authorities would need to precede any sampling.

Expertise Needed West African archaeology; archaeogenetics; Senegambian oral history and its evaluation as a historical source.

Question posed in Stone Circles of Senegambia, UNESCO World Heritage List, UNESCO World Heritage Committee.

Open Jainism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Jainism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic while its Dharmic peers do. Jain fasting is ascetic rather than curative, and bhaishajya dana, the giving of medicine, is one of the four danas and so is charitable. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not name a Jain practice whose purpose is healing.

What Would Settle It A survey of the Shvetambara and Digambara prescriptive literature and of modern Jain institutional practice for a named healing observance, together with a ruling on whether Jain animal hospitals and the pinjrapole count as a therapeutic practice or as charity.

Expertise Needed Jain studies, South Asian religious history

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Sikhism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Sikhism as carrying no Practice of kind Therapeutic. Sikh medical service, from Bhai Kanhaiya tending the wounded of both sides to gurdwara dispensaries and hospitals, is real and well attested, but it is the ethic of seva applied to medicine rather than a separate named practice. Triage on 2026-07-29 could not decide whether the atlas should record it twice.

What Would Settle It A ruling on the atlas facet boundary between Charitable and Therapeutic, plus evidence from the Rehat Maryada and Sikh institutional history for a named healing observance.

Expertise Needed Sikh studies, history of South Asian medicine

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Norse Paganism

Why It Is Open The facet detector reports Norse Paganism as carrying no MythicalCreature of kind Hybrids while all three Polytheistic peers do. The Norse bestiary the atlas holds is built from outsized single species beasts, serpents, sea monsters and spirits. Whether Sleipnir, Hraesvelgr, the swan maidens and the merfolk are composite creatures or shapeshifters and beasts in another guise is a question about the facet definition as much as about the sources, and triage on 2026-07-29 could not settle it.

What Would Settle It A definition of the Hybrids facet precise enough to sort cases, applied to a full inventory of creatures in the Poetic Edda, the Prose Edda and the fornaldarsogur.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology, comparative mythology

Question posed in Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.

Open Geshtinanna

Why It Is Open Sumerian art rarely labels its figures, and reference studies of Mesopotamian iconography have not been able to isolate a scene or attribute as distinctively Geshtinanna's, unlike her brother Dumuzi or her rival Inanna, both identifiable from repeated attributes across many surviving objects.

What Would Settle It A securely inscribed or otherwise firmly identified image of Geshtinanna, distinguishing her from the generic Mesopotamian goddess type, turning up in excavation or in a museum collection reassessment of unattributed glyptic art.

Expertise Needed Assyriology, Mesopotamian art history and archaeology

Question posed in Gods, Demons and Symbols of Ancient Mesopotamia: An Illustrated Dictionary, Jeremy Black and Anthony Green.