Open Questions

Open The Great Magical Papyrus of Paris

Why It Is Open The Theban Magical Library is a modern name for a group of papyri that share a period, a range of contents and a supplier. No excavation record exists for any of them. The attribution to Thebes and the assumption that they formed one collection both rest on the accounts of the dealer who sold them, and no scholar has been able either to confirm or to refute this from documentary evidence. It is an unresolved gap rather than a dispute between rival positions.

What Would Settle It A systematic reading of Anastasy's surviving correspondence and sale records against the acquisition registers and accession dates of the Bibliotheque nationale, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden in Leiden, the British Museum and the Berlin collections. These archives have never been examined together for this question. Failing that, a securely excavated magical papyrus from a recorded Theban context would give the attribution an independent anchor.

Expertise Needed Papyrology, and the archival history of nineteenth century antiquities collecting

Question posed in Magic, Witchcraft, and Ghosts in the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Sourcebook, Daniel Ogden.

Open The Mithras Liturgy

Why It Is Open Dieterich identified it as a Mithraic initiation script in 1903 and Cumont rejected the identification, and no evidence has appeared since that settles it either way. The text carries a Mithraic name and solar imagery; it carries none of the iconographic programme that defines Mithraism in its archaeology, and it carries the Graeco-Egyptian magical vocabulary that Mithraic material does not.

What Would Settle It A Mithraic ritual text of independent provenance, from a Mithraeum or another controlled context, against which the passage could be compared. No such text is currently known, which is why the passage was treated as decisive in the first place.

Expertise Needed History of ancient religion, Mithraic studies, papyrology

Question posed in The Mithras Liturgy: Text, Translation, and Commentary, Hans Dieter Betz.

Open The Nine Herbs Charm

Why It Is Open Old English plant names do not correspond one to one with modern species, and the medical manuscripts are not consistent with each other. Mucgwyrt, wegbrade, fille and finule can be identified with reasonable confidence. Maegde and attorlathe have proposals that have not been accepted. Stune and wergulu have no identification that anyone defends, and nobody holds a position on them, so the question is an unfilled gap rather than a live argument. Every attempt to read the charm as pharmacology stops here.

What Would Settle It A glossary witness pairing one of the unidentified Old English names with a Latin plant name, which is how the secure identifications were made. Failing that, archaeobotanical evidence from a securely dated Anglo-Saxon medical or monastic context, where the plant assemblage could be compared against the list. A systematic re-search of the Old English glossaries and of the English place-name corpus for the elements stune and wergulu, using material catalogued since the standard identifications were made, is the concrete next step.

Expertise Needed Old English lexicography, historical botany and archaeobotany

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open Æcerbot

Why It Is Open The word occurs once in the surviving Old English corpus. It is addressed, it is given the epithet mother of earth, and it stands where a name would stand. It has been read as a lost goddess name, as a title, as a loanword, as a corruption of another word, and as an exclamatory particle that is not a name at all. None of these has been accepted, and the reason is not that scholars are divided between defended positions but that a single occurrence gives nothing to test a proposal against. Work on it was begun and could not be concluded.

What Would Settle It A second attestation of the word in any Old English or related source: a charm, a gloss, a place name or a personal name element, showing it in a context that constrains its meaning. Old English glossaries and the English place-name survey have been searched, and re-running that search against material catalogued since, including manuscript fragments and minor place-name collections, is the practical task. A continental Germanic cognate in a comparable ritual context would serve equally well.

Expertise Needed Old English philology, Germanic comparative linguistics and English place-name study

Question posed in Leechdoms, Wortcunning and Starcraft of Early England, Oswald Cockayne.

Open The Recorded Corpus of Hoodoo Conjure

Why It Is Open Hyatt recorded thousands of interviews in the Jim Crow South as a white clergyman paying Black practitioners to describe a practice that had been criminalised and ridiculed. The transcripts record what was said. They cannot record what was not said, what was simplified for a paying outsider, or what was offered in place of something withheld. Every quantitative claim drawn from the collection, about regional distribution, about the frequency of a given practice, about what conjure was for, inherits this and it is rarely stated.

What Would Settle It Comparison of Hyatt's material against independently gathered testimony from the same communities and period, including Hurston's, the Federal Writers' Project narratives, and community-held family records, looking systematically for what appears in one and not the other. Oral history with descendants of identified informants, where the identification can be made, would test it directly. The question is answerable in principle and has not been pursued at scale.

Expertise Needed African American folklore studies, oral history and the historiography of ethnographic fieldwork

Question posed in Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition, Yvonne P. Chireau.

Open The Braucherei Charm Tradition

Why It Is Open Braucherei was carried to Pennsylvania by German-speaking migrants and was then given a printed form by Hohman in 1820 and by the collections that followed. Practitioners distinguish sharply between a charm received from a person and one read in a book, but the two streams have been running alongside each other for two centuries and the printed texts drew on oral material to begin with. Which direction any particular charm travelled is not generally recoverable from what has been recorded.

What Would Settle It Systematic comparison of the Pennsylvania repertoire against continental German charm collections of the same and earlier periods, in particular the Palatine and Rhineland material from which the migration came, tracing individual charm types rather than the collections as wholes. Manuscript charm books held privately in Pennsylvania German families, where access can be negotiated on the families' terms, would be the decisive evidence.

Expertise Needed German folklore studies, Pennsylvania German studies and comparative charm scholarship

Question posed in Powwowing among the Pennsylvania Dutch: A Traditional Medical Practice in the Modern World, David W. Kriebel.

Open The Sethian Curse Tablets of Rome

Why It Is Open The atlas records this page's language as Latin, which renders as a language chip. The standard scholarly description of the group Wunsch published in 1898, the tablets from a columbarium on the Via Appia, reports it as largely Greek, with the charioteers, horses and factions carrying Latin names. The two statements cannot both be right, and no page-level citation for either has been located yet. The neighbouring British tablets, Bath and Uley, are correctly Latin, which is probably how the value arrived here.

What Would Settle It A language census of the tablets in Richard Wunsch, Sethianische Verfluchungstafeln aus Rom, Leipzig 1898, counting the edited texts by script and noting any Latin written in Greek letters. The edition is public domain and already catalogued in this atlas. R. S. Conway reviewed it in the Classical Review 13.4, May 1899, pages 224 to 226. Audollent, Defixionum Tabellae, 1904, also catalogued here, carries further tablets of the class and would corroborate. If the group is genuinely bilingual, the finding is not a corrected language value but that a single recorded language cannot describe this page, and that is the more useful result.

Expertise Needed Epigraphy and the papyrology of the Greek magical corpus

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

Open West African

Why It Is Open The grouping gathers deities from at least four distinct traditions: Ala, Amadioha and Chukwu are Igbo, Nyame, Asaase Yaa and Ananse are Akan, Amma and Nommo are Dogon, Roog is Serer, and Mami Wata is pan-regional rather than belonging to any of them. A pantheon in this atlas is tied to a single tradition, so naming one tradition for this grouping would assert that all of these deities belong to it, which is false. Vodun (West African) is already catalogued as a tradition in its own right, and the Fon pantheon points at it, so the umbrella is not simply a missing tradition.

What Would Settle It A scholarly judgment on whether a region can stand as a pantheon at all, or whether a pantheon must belong to a single tradition. If it must, the grouping splits into Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer pantheons and each deity is reassigned to the tradition that holds it. If it need not, the comparative grounds for treating West Africa as one pantheon need stating, and each deity still needs its own tradition recorded alongside the regional grouping.

Expertise Needed West African religious studies; Igbo, Akan, Dogon and Serer ethnography

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

Open Mexican Folk

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Santa Muerte, and this atlas has no entry yet for Mexican folk Catholicism or for any tradition that would hold her. The gap is a missing tradition, not a missing link, so no connection can be recorded today.

What Would Settle It A decision on whether folk Catholicism should be catalogued as its own tradition or as a denomination of Catholicism, then the entry itself. The atlas already treats syncretic Afro-Caribbean traditions as their own traditions, which is the nearest precedent.

Expertise Needed Latin American religious studies; anthropology of folk Catholicism

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

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds Cybele and Attis and this atlas has no entry yet for Phrygian religion or for the Roman cult of Magna Mater that carried it westward. Several neighbouring ancient traditions already have their own entries, Hittite Religion, Etruscan Religion and Canaanite Religion among them, so the absence looks like a gap rather than a decision.

What Would Settle It An entry for Phrygian religion, or a decision that the cult belongs under an existing tradition such as Roman Religion, in which case the deities need reassigning rather than the pantheon relinking.

Expertise Needed Anatolian archaeology; Greco-Roman religion

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

Open Maasai

Why It Is Open The pantheon holds one deity, Engai, and this atlas has no entry yet for Maasai traditional religion. Comparable East and Southern African traditions already have their own entries, Zulu Traditional Religion and Shona Traditional Religion among them, so the absence is a gap in coverage rather than a considered position.

What Would Settle It An entry for Maasai traditional religion, written to the same standard as the Zulu and Shona entries, after which the pantheon links with no further decision.

Expertise Needed East African ethnography; Maasai religious studies

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

Open Slavic

Why It Is Open Every surviving description of Slavic religion was written by Christian outsiders recording what they intended to destroy, and none of them records a cosmogony. The dualist earth-diver story usually printed as the Slavic creation myth is attested only in folklore collected after a thousand years of Christianity, in a form shared with Finno-Ugric and Turkic neighbours. Attempts to recover a pre-Christian original from it have produced competing reconstructions and no agreement, and most specialists have stopped trying.

What Would Settle It A pre-Christian Slavic text of any length would settle it, and none is known to exist. Short of that, an inscribed or iconographic find from a pagan-period sanctuary that depicts a creation sequence, of the kind Arkona or Zbrucz might still yield, would give the reconstruction something outside the folklore to stand on.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the archaeology of pagan-period sanctuaries in the western Slavic lands

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Etruscan

Why It Is Open The Etruscan language is read only in short, largely formulaic texts, and the longest survivals, the Zagreb mummy wrappings and the Capua tile, are ritual calendars rather than narrative. What Roman writers preserved of the Etrusca disciplina is the part that interested them, the reading of lightning and livers, and it does not include a cosmogony. Nobody holds a position on what the Etruscan account was, because there is nothing to hold a position about.

What Would Settle It A long Etruscan narrative text would settle it. The known corpus is almost entirely epigraphic and funerary, so the realistic route is a new find of the length of the Zagreb wrappings that is narrative rather than calendrical.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, with epigraphy and the archaeology of Etruscan sanctuary sites

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Phrygian

Why It Is Open The Old Phrygian corpus is short and largely dedicatory, and the Greek and Roman writers who describe the cult of the Mother report its rites and the story of Attis without any account of origins. It is not that two readings compete; it is that the material has never yielded one, and the question has effectively been set down rather than argued over.

What Would Settle It A longer Old or New Phrygian text of narrative character, or a securely Phrygian iconographic sequence depicting origins, from the highland monuments or a sanctuary excavation.

Expertise Needed Anatolian epigraphy and Phrygian philology, with the archaeology of the Phrygian highlands

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.).

Open Trappists (Cistercians of the Strict Observance)

Why It Is Open Every US Trappist abbey checked (New Melleray, Gethsemani, Mepkin, Holy Cross Berryville, New Clairvaux, Genesee, and both Assumption abbeys) is IRS-recognized as a church and files no public Form 990; only occasional unrelated-business-income Form 990-T filings exist, with no extracted figures, and the worldwide order publishes nothing consolidated.

What Would Settle It A voluntarily published audited annual statement from a named abbey, or a Form 990 from a separately incorporated commercial arm such as Trappist Caskets or Gethsemani Farms, if one is filed apart from the church-exempt abbey corporation.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit financial research and Catholic religious-institute administration.

Question posed in Corporation of New Melleray, Nonprofit Explorer (ProPublica).

Open Redemptorists (Congregation of the Most Holy Redeemer)

Why It Is Open US Redemptorist provinces are IRS church-exempt and file no public Form 990, the worldwide Congregation publishes no consolidated accounts, and the only Redemptorist-founded US filer located, the Redemptorist Social Services Center in Kansas City, is a single local agency, today describing itself as nonsectarian, whose figures do not represent the order.

What Would Settle It A province-level voluntarily published audited statement, or a disclosure regime covering the finances of Catholic religious congregations.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit financial research and Catholic religious-institute administration.

Question posed in Redemptorist Social Services Center, Nonprofit Explorer (ProPublica).

Open Sisters of Mercy

Why It Is Open The Institute of the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas is IRS church-exempt with no institute-level Form 990, its investment arm Mercy Investment Services surfaces no public filing, and only individual sponsored ministries file their own returns, none of which represents the institute as a whole.

What Would Settle It An institute-level voluntarily published audited statement, or a consolidated disclosure covering the sponsored ministries of the Sisters of Mercy.

Expertise Needed Nonprofit financial research and Catholic religious-institute administration.

Question posed in Sisters of Mercy Urgent Care Inc, Nonprofit Explorer (ProPublica).

Open Vatican Apostolic Library

Why It Is Open The Holy See's most recent consolidated budget and balance sheet disclosure (2020) states an overall Roman Curia patrimony of about four billion euros, naming the Vatican Museums and the Vatican bank as contributors, but no source found in this pass breaks the total down by individual Curia institution, so a wealth value cannot be attested for the Vatican Apostolic Library or the Vatican Observatory specifically.

What Would Settle It A future Holy See financial disclosure, or independent Vatican-finance reporting, that itemizes the consolidated patrimony by institution rather than reporting one aggregate figure.

Expertise Needed Vatican finance / canon law administration

Question posed in Vatican Releases Budget, Balance Sheet Amid Financial Scandal (Associated Press via Al Jazeera, 2020), The Associated Press, Article body, on the Vatican's 2020 consolidated patrimony figure and what it aggregates.

Open Vatican Apostolic Library

Why It Is Open The library plainly holds material relevant to this atlas, and popular accounts make expansive claims about it. Specific holdings could not be verified well enough to assert a custody relation for any individual work, and asserting one without evidence would be exactly the kind of confident claim the atlas exists to avoid.

What Would Settle It Shelfmarks from the library's own catalogue, which is partly published, for specific works already in this atlas.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies and catalogue research; Latin and Italian.

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

Open The Mardin Fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya

Why It Is Open Ibn Taymiyya's own lifetime, 1263 to 1328, and Mongol rule over Mardin are both well documented, but no source pins the fatwa itself to a specific year within that span.

What Would Settle It A securely dated manuscript of the fatwa, or a documented occasion, such as a specific delegation from Mardin, that the text can be tied to.

Expertise Needed Islamic legal history

Question posed in Ibn Taymiyya (Makers of the Muslim World), Jon Hoover.