Open Questions

Open Extispicy and Haruspicy

Why It Is Open No book of the Etruscan discipline survives in any language. The Piacenza liver assigns divine names to regions of the organ and says nothing about method, and the Roman authors who describe haruspicy were writing from outside the tradition, often centuries later, and were not attempting to transmit a procedure. Nobody has proposed and defended a reconstruction of the method, so what is missing is evidence rather than agreement.

What Would Settle It An Etruscan haruspical text of any length would settle it, and a bilingual would settle it decisively. Failing that, a systematic comparison of the Piacenza liver against the far better documented Mesopotamian liver models and their accompanying omen compendia would at least establish whether the two systems share a method, which would constrain the possibilities.

Expertise Needed Etruscology, Etruscan epigraphy, Assyriology

Question posed in The Religion of the Etruscans, Nancy Thomson de Grummond and Erika Simon (eds.).

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 The Persinger God Helmet Experiments

Why It Is Open The founding series reported the effect and a double-blind replication at Uppsala in 2005 did not, finding that measured suggestibility predicted the reported experience while exposure to the field did not. Persinger held that the Swedish exposure protocol differed materially from his own. Neither side withdrew, no further trial has been run under a protocol both would accept, and the God helmet continues to be cited in popular accounts of the neuroscience of religion as though the matter were settled in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered, multi-site, double-blind trial using the field parameters and exposure durations of the original series, with suggestibility measured and entered as a covariate rather than offered as a rival explanation after the fact, and with the analysis plan fixed before data collection.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology and cognitive neuroscience, working with the psychology of religion

Question posed in Sensed Presence and Mystical Experiences Are Predicted by Suggestibility, Not by the Application of Transcranial Weak Complex Magnetic Fields, Pehr Granqvist, Mats Fredrikson, Patrik Unge, Andrea Hagenfeldt, Sven Valind, Dan Larhammar and Marcus Larsson.

Open The Autoganzfeld Series

Why It Is Open Hyman and Honorton wrote down, jointly and in advance, what a decisive ganzfeld study would look like. No series run since has been accepted by both sides as meeting it. Two later meta-analyses, Milton and Wiseman in 1999 and Storm, Tressoldi and Di Risio in 2010, reach opposite conclusions on differently defined study pools, so the accumulated literature cannot settle it either.

What Would Settle It A pre-registered adversarial collaboration with laboratories on both sides of the dispute, an analysis plan agreed and lodged before data collection, and a commitment from all parties to publish whatever results.

Expertise Needed Experimental psychology; meta-analysis; pre-registration methodology

Question posed in A Joint Communique: The Psi Ganzfeld Controversy, Ray Hyman, Charles Honorton.

Open Barna Group

Why It Is Open Barna Group is a privately held for-profit research company with no filing obligation and no voluntary financial disclosure; third-party revenue estimates circulate from company-data aggregators but rest on no disclosed figure and no stated methodology.

What Would Settle It A voluntary disclosure by the company itself, an annual report or a press statement carrying real figures.

Expertise Needed Financial journalism with primary-source access to the company.

Question posed in New Barna Research Debuts (CBA, The Association for Christian Retail).

Open The Sampo

Why It Is Open The runes are not consistent about what the object is, and the Kalevala is a compilation that Elias Lonnrot arranged heavily, with the Sampo cycle among the parts he shaped most. Readings offered include a mill of plenty, the world pillar with the many-coloured lid as the sky vault, a coin die or treasury reflecting Byzantine trade contact, and a shamanic drum. None has been established and the singers may not have agreed either.

What Would Settle It Systematic analysis of the unedited rune collections in the Finnish Literature Society archive against Lonnrot's editorial drafts, to establish what the singers themselves said before the compilation; comparative work with Karelian, Ingrian and Sami material; and lexical study of the word sampo and its cognates.

Expertise Needed Finnish and Karelian folkloristics; historical linguistics; archival study of the Lonnrot papers

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

Open Ladin Mythology

Why It Is Open The Ladin legend cycle of the Dolomite valleys was gathered into literary form only in the early twentieth century, and no formal pantheon, priesthood or earlier textual trace survives to say how old the material already was when it was collected.

What Would Settle It An earlier manuscript, inscription or outside traveler's account referencing specific Ladin mountain-spirit legends before their twentieth century literary collection would establish a real floor for the material's age.

Expertise Needed folklore studies and historical linguistics

Question posed in Dolomitensagen (Wolff), Karl Felix Wolff.

Open Second Sight

Why It Is Open The entire evidentiary record for second sight is testimonial, collected by folklorists across three centuries of Highland tradition. No experimental or quasi-experimental protocol comparing a claimed seer's forewarnings to ordinary hit or miss chance has ever been devised, so there is no data from which any verdict could be drawn either way.

What Would Settle It A prospective, blinded elicitation study: predictions attributed to second sight logged in advance, scored against subsequent events by an independent judge, and compared to a stated chance baseline.

Expertise Needed Folklore studies; parapsychology; statistics

Question posed in The Secret Commonwealth of Elves, Fauns and Fairies, Robert Kirk.

Open Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God

Why It Is Open The commonly cited figure of about 778 dead is assembled from counts taken at the Kanungu church and several satellite grave sites, not from an identified register, and the victims at the satellite sites were killed over a period of months before the fire. Credonia Mwerinde and Joseph Kibwetere were sought and never produced. The Ugandan investigation was not completed, the remains were never comprehensively examined, and no identification exercise was carried out, so the total and the fate of the leadership are both unresolved rather than disputed.

What Would Settle It Forensic examination and DNA identification of the remains recovered from the Kanungu site and the satellite graves, matched against surviving relatives, together with release of the Ugandan police investigation file and the 2000 post-mortem records.

Expertise Needed Forensic anthropology and forensic genetics; Ugandan criminal records and archival research; history of religion in East Africa.

Question posed in World Religions and Spirituality Project, David G. Bromley (founding director) and the profile authors of record.

Open The Rohingya Genocide

Why It Is Open Access to Rakhine State was tightly restricted during and after the 2017 clearance operations, and the UN Fact-Finding Mission's own report states it could not establish a verified total; independent estimates published since range widely with no consensus figure.

What Would Settle It Independent forensic and demographic investigation inside Rakhine State, which Myanmar's government has not permitted at the scale required.

Expertise Needed Forensic demography and human rights investigation

Question posed in Report of the Independent International Fact-Finding Mission on Myanmar (A/HRC/39/64), United Nations Human Rights Council.

Open Thulium

Why It Is Open Published crustal abundance estimates put both at roughly half a part per million, and the two sit within the uncertainty of each other. Sources disagree about which is lower, and several simply assert one without stating a figure.

What Would Settle It A modern determination of both abundances by the same method with stated uncertainties, so the comparison is like for like.

Expertise Needed Geochemistry, specifically crustal abundance measurement.

Question posed in Rare Earth Elements: Critical Resources for High Technology, Gordon B. Haxel, James B. Hedrick and Greta J. Orris, Pages 2 and 4.

Open Georgian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open A named-author 2021 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace policy report on the Georgian Orthodox Church's political and financial position documents its state funding channels in real detail, annual budget transfers, land, buildings and vehicles from the Georgian government and local municipalities, and never once addresses ordinary parishioner or member giving. Two bands on this axis have now searched specifically for a Georgian Orthodox tithe, due or stewardship norm (the 2002 state concordat, general Orthodox stewardship literature, Georgian-language donation terminology) and found nothing that names the Church's own practice.

What Would Settle It A primary Georgian Orthodox Church source (a parish or diocesan stewardship statement, a Patriarchate financial policy) or a scholarly study of Georgian parish-level finance specifically, stating whether an ordinary member is expected to give a set amount or percentage.

Expertise Needed Georgian religious studies, primary source review of Georgian Orthodox Church financial governance

Question posed in The Orthodox Church in Georgia's Changing Society, Archil Gegeshidze and Mikheil Mirziashvili.

Open Johann Kaspar Hechtel

Why It Is Open The source that documents Hechtel's 1799 death and the game's publication gives no birth year, and no other catalogued source supplies one.

What Would Settle It A Nuremberg civic or guild record identifying Hechtel's baptism or birth, of the kind that has dated other Nuremberg engravers and publishers of the period.

Expertise Needed German book and print history

Question posed in A Wicked Pack of Cards: The Origins of the Occult Tarot, Ronald Decker, Thierry Depaulis and Michael Dummett.

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 Jehovah's Witnesses

Why It Is Open Jehovah's Witnesses' UK and Canadian branches file public charity returns, and US Brooklyn real estate sales are documented property records, but Germany imposes no comparable financial disclosure requirement, and a German media report on a ZDF documentary investigation records the German headquarters declining to state its annual donation income when asked directly.

What Would Settle It A German regulatory filing requirement reaching the Jehovah's Witnesses' public-law corporation, a leaked or court-disclosed internal financial statement, or the organization's own voluntary disclosure of a figure it has so far declined to give.

Expertise Needed German religious law (Körperschaftsrecht) and the sociology and investigative journalism of new religious movements' finances.

Question posed in ZDF-Reportage Zu Den Spenden Bei Den Zeugen Jehovas (pro Medienmagazin, 2023), Jorn Schumacher.

Open Eucleides of Athens

Why It Is Open Eucleides is known to history by a single administrative act, his archonship of 403/402 BCE and the alphabet reform decreed under it. Almost nothing else about his life, including a birth year, is recorded anywhere.

What Would Settle It An inscription or documentary source naming Eucleides outside his single archon year, giving any biographical anchor beyond that office.

Expertise Needed Greek epigraphy, Athenian political history

Question posed in The World's Writing Systems, Peter T. Daniels and William Bright (eds.).

Open Mount Athos

Why It Is Open Documented figures cover only external Greek government and EU support to the peninsula as a whole. None of the twenty self-governing monasteries, nor the Holy Community that coordinates them, was found to publish its own financial statement.

What Would Settle It A published account from the Holy Community of Mount Athos or an individual monastery naming its own income, endowment or treasury, or an independent scholarly economic study of the monastic republic.

Expertise Needed Greek Orthodox monastic administration and the economics of self-governing religious communities.

Question posed in PM Mitsotakis Pledges 100 million euros for Mount Athos.

Open Thysia (Greek Animal Sacrifice)

Why It Is Open Three positions are held simultaneously by serious scholars and none has displaced the others: the rite as the preserved structure of a hunting kill with its attendant guilt, the rite as a system of cooking and distribution that fixes the human place between gods and beasts, and a critique arguing that the tidy opposition between sacrifice eaten and sacrifice burned entire is a modern schematisation the evidence of hero cult does not support.

What Would Settle It This is not a question a single find will close. What moves it is the accumulation of excavated faunal assemblages from sanctuary deposits, which record what was actually burned and what was butchered and eaten, tested against the literary schema rather than read through it.

Expertise Needed Greek religion, zooarchaeology of sanctuary deposits

Question posed in Miasma: Pollution and Purification in Early Greek Religion, Robert Parker.

Open Dwarkadhish Temple, Dwarka

Why It Is Open The temples own Wikipedia article and the Devbhumi Dwarka district government tourism page both give no administering body and no financial information. Searches repeatedly surface unrelated organisations sharing similar names, a diaspora temple in Parlin, New Jersey among them, which risk misattribution if not held apart.

What Would Settle It Identification of the current legal trust or committee administering the Dwarka temple, ideally via a Gujarat state devasthan or trust-registration record naming it directly.

Expertise Needed Gujarat temple-trust and charity-law administration.

Question posed in Dwarkadhish Temple (District Devbhumi Dwarka, Government of Gujarat).

Open Council of Islamic Endowments Affairs (Bahrain)

Why It Is Open Bahrain's Sunni and Jaafari waqf endowments, now regulated jointly by the Council of Islamic Endowments Affairs created in 2026, publish no total asset valuation, and the United States Department of State reporting that appears to be the original source for a commonly quoted annual government allocation figure could not be reached directly by this axis's tooling across five separate attempts.

What Would Settle It A published financial statement from the Council of Islamic Endowments Affairs or either endowment administration, or direct access to the United States Department of State's religious freedom reporting for Bahrain.

Expertise Needed Gulf public-sector financial disclosure practice and the comparative study of Sunni and Shia waqf administration.

Question posed in Bahrain Establishes Unified Council Of Islamic Endowments To Oversee Sunni And Jaafari Waqf Affairs (Gulf News, 2026).