Open Questions

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 Great Year

Why It Is Open This pass seeded only the four tropical-sign ages with genuine independent literature discussing them individually (Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius), plus the Great Year concept row that frames the whole twelve-part cycle. Gemini, Cancer, Leo, Virgo, Libra, Scorpio, Sagittarius and Capricorn were left out rather than written thin from the same general astrological-history sources already cited for the other four.

What Would Settle It A literature review of each remaining sign's astrological-age material, checking whether it has been discussed with comparable depth and citable sourcing to Nicholas Campion's treatment of Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius in A History of Western Astrology, before writing per-age entries rather than a single thin placeholder for all eight.

Expertise Needed History of astrology / esoteric studies

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

Open Uncle

Why It Is Open Lilly's catalogue of the sixth house names uncles and aunts on the father's side directly, and turning the chart from the fourth produces the same answer independently, but which of the two came first is not established here. The step may be a Hellenistic inheritance, an Arabic development, or a Latin systematisation, and the atlas has found no study that settles it. The answer matters because every derived reading of an extended relative inherits whatever assignment the parent's house is given.

What Would Settle It A textual comparison across the Hellenistic, Arabic and Latin house literature, identifying the earliest passage that derives a collateral relative from a parent house rather than simply listing that relative among a house catalogue, and dating the transmission of that step.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; Arabic and Latin manuscript studies; history of the exact sciences

Question posed in A History of Horoscopic Astrology, James Herschel Holden.

Open Americas

Why It Is Open Ptolemy's four quarters divide only the oikoumene, the inhabited world known in the second century, and the western hemisphere lies wholly outside it. No quarter, triplicity or planetary co-ruler was ever assigned to the Americas by the tradition that built the scheme, and nothing proposed since has acquired comparable standing. This is not a lost passage or a disputed reading; it is an absence created by the geographic horizon of the source.

What Would Settle It A survey of the mundane astrological literature from the sixteenth century onward, when the Americas entered European awareness, establishing whether any author extended the chorography to the new hemisphere, on what reasoning, and whether the extension was taken up by anyone else. A negative result would settle the entry as firmly as a positive one, and either way the entry ceases to be an open absence.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; early modern intellectual history; history of geographic knowledge

Question posed in A History of Western Astrology, Nicholas Campion.

Open Johannes Angelus

Why It Is Open The degree images printed under the name of Johannes Angelus in 1488 are generally traced to earlier material circulating in manuscript and associated with the name of Pietro d'Abano, but the atlas has no citable study collating those manuscripts against the incunable. Without one, a statement that a particular degree image originates in this book cannot be checked, and the printed edition risks being treated as a source when it may only be a witness.

What Would Settle It A collation of the surviving manuscript witnesses of the degree image material against the 1488 Augsburg printing, establishing the recension the editor worked from and the extent of editorial change.

Expertise Needed History of astrology; incunable and manuscript studies; textual criticism

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

Open Sarmoung Brotherhood

Why It Is Open The whole account descends from Gurdjieff's own writing and from what he told pupils. The Armenian manuscript he names has not been produced or identified, no location has been established, and no independent traveller, official or scholarly record of such a body has been found for a region that was heavily travelled and reported on. Positions divide between a traceable synthesis of available currents, a real but unnamed Sufi lineage, and a deliberate literary device, and no evidence has been produced for any of the three.

What Would Settle It Identification of the Armenian source named in the account, or of any manuscript using the name; archival work in Russian, Ottoman and British records of Central Asian travel for the relevant years; and comparative study of the movements against documented Sufi and Central Asian practice by scholars with access to both.

Expertise Needed History of Central Asian Sufism; Armenian manuscript studies; the academic study of Western esotericism

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

Open Archaeochemistry

Why It Is Open Chemical analysis of archaeological material goes back to the French chemist Marcelin Berthelot's survey of about 150 Egyptian and Near Eastern artifacts in the late nineteenth century, and continued through Earle Caley's American work from the late 1930s onward, but nobody appears to have fixed a single moment when the practice became a named field rather than a recurring collaboration between two older disciplines. Caley's own retrospective papers describe a history rather than announce a founding.

What Would Settle It A dedicated historiographic study of archaeological chemistry's own institutional history, comparable to the histories that exist for archaeometry (dated to the 1958 founding of the Oxford Research Laboratory for Archaeology and the History of Art) or radiocarbon dating (dated to Willard Libby's 1949 paper). No such study of archaeochemistry specifically has been identified; one would need to trace when practitioners first identified as archaeochemists rather than as chemists who occasionally worked on archaeological material.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry and history of archaeology, tracing when chemical analysis of archaeological material stopped being an occasional collaboration and became a named, self-identified subfield.

Question posed in The Early History of Chemistry in the Service of Archaeology (Caley, Journal of Chemical Education, 1967), Earle R. Caley.

Open Gallium

Why It Is Open The discoverer gave the patriotic reason, that he had named the element for Gallia, the Latin name for France. The coincidence that gallus is Latin for a rooster, and that his own surname, Lecoq, is French for the rooster, was pointed out at once and has been repeated ever since. Whether the second reading was intended, quietly enjoyed, or only ever imagined by other people cannot be settled from the naming announcement, which offers the patriotic reason alone.

What Would Settle It A statement of intent in Lecoq de Boisbaudran's own correspondence or working papers. Failing that, the question concerns a private intention and may simply not be answerable.

Expertise Needed History of chemistry, and French archival work on the Lecoq de Boisbaudran papers.

Question posed in Periodic Table: Gallium, Royal Society of Chemistry, History section of the gallium entry.

Open Zhang Sanfeng

Why It Is Open No contemporary record confirms Zhang Sanfeng lived at all. Regional gazettes give a traditional birth in 1247 and report him still being sought as late as 1464, a span of more than two hundred years that scholarship reads as evidence of a composite legendary figure rather than a single dateable life, while competing traditions place his birth as early as 960 or as late as 1279.

What Would Settle It A contemporary Yuan or early Ming record independent of later Wudang cult tradition and imperial search-party accounts, confirming a single historical individual existed and naming his actual dates.

Expertise Needed History of Daoism, Chinese religious history

Question posed in Daoism Handbook, Livia Kohn (ed.).

Open Fatima of Nishapur

Why It Is Open Fatima of Nishapur is dated to the ninth century only through her documented circle, her marriage to Ahmad ibn Khadrawayh and her correspondence with Bayazid Bistami and Dhu'l-Nun al-Misri, both of whom rated her spiritual standing above any man they had known. No contemporary source records her actual birth or death year; her fullest biography, Attar's Tadhkirat al-Awliya, was compiled some three centuries after she lived.

What Would Settle It A datable document or independent biographical notice about Fatima of Nishapur contemporary with her own life, rather than only the later hagiographical tradition and the death dates of the male contemporaries she corresponded with.

Expertise Needed History of early Sufism, Islamic studies

Question posed in Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editions, P. Bearman et al. (eds.).

Open Euclid

Why It Is Open Euclid is known almost entirely through his mathematical works and a handful of later, largely legendary anecdotes; no ancient source states where he was born, and even his activity at Alexandria is inferred from the school he founded there rather than from a personal record.

What Would Settle It A Hellenistic record naming his origin, which no papyrus or inscription recovered so far supplies.

Expertise Needed History of Hellenistic mathematics; classical scholarship; papyrology

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

Open Matsyendranath

Why It Is Open No source records when Matsyendranath died. He is known only through Nath and Kaula textual tradition and through ongoing worship in the Kathmandu Valley as the rain-bringing deity Machindranath, celebrated annually rather than commemorated as deceased, which supplies no death tradition an ordinary biography could draw on.

What Would Settle It An external documentary or epigraphic record independent of Nath, Kaula and Newar devotional tradition naming an end to Matsyendranath's activity.

Expertise Needed History of Hinduism, Nath and Newar religious studies

Question posed in The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, David Gordon White.

Open Gorakhnath

Why It Is Open No chronicle, inscription or hagiography records an actual death for Gorakhnath. The scholarship that debates his period treats it as a span of activity rather than as separated birth and death years, and Nath tradition itself holds he attained a deathless, perfected state through hatha yoga rather than dying an ordinary death, so no source within the tradition he founded proposes a death date either.

What Would Settle It A dated inscription, monastic record or textual notice external to Nath hagiography naming an end to Gorakhnath's activity or a named successor's own dated era.

Expertise Needed History of Hinduism, Nath Sampradaya studies

Question posed in The Alchemical Body: Siddha Traditions in Medieval India, David Gordon White.

Open Hamzah Fansuri

Why It Is Open Syed Muhammad Naquib al-Attas, whose 1970 study did the most sustained work reconstructing Hamzah Fansuri's biography, could not establish a birth year from his poems and early European accounts of him. Vladimir Braginsky's later study, framed around the question of when Hamzah lived at all, likewise reached only a floruit rather than a birth date.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript or an independent early European account naming Hamzah Fansuri's age or birth, distinct from the internal, undated evidence of his own poems that al-Attas and Braginsky each worked from.

Expertise Needed History of Malay literature, history of Southeast Asian Sufism

Question posed in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, 2nd edition, P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (eds.).

Open 57

Why It Is Open The anecdote is very widely told and 57 is called the Grothendieck prime because of it. Its literal veracity is disputed within mathematical folklore, and the tellings do not agree on the setting or the wording.

What Would Settle It A first-hand account from someone present, or a contemporary written record of the exchange.

Expertise Needed History of mathematics, and oral history of the Grothendieck circle.

Question posed in Comme Appele du Neant, As If Summoned from the Void: The Life of Alexandre Grothendieck, Allyn Jackson, Part 2, page 1196.

Open Wellcome Collection

Why It Is Open The Wellcome holds a large collection on the history of medicine, magic and belief, much of it digitised. Specific correspondences to items already held here were not established.

What Would Settle It Catalogue identifiers from the Wellcome's own openly available catalogue.

Expertise Needed History of medicine and catalogue research.

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

Open Iridology

Why It Is Open The owl story is repeated in nearly every account of iridology's origin and is presented as its founding moment, but the accounts trace to later iridological literature rather than to anything Peczely wrote. It has the shape of a foundation legend.

What Would Settle It A statement by Peczely himself, or a contemporary account, describing the observation. Absent that, the earliest attestation of the story would at least date the legend.

Expertise Needed History of medicine, and Hungarian-language archival sources.

Question posed in Ignaz von Peczely, Inventor of Iridology, Edzard Ernst, Chapter 19, abstract.

Open Saint

Why It Is Open The Consulta Medica is asked whether a recovery is explicable by the medicine of the day, and the medicine of the day changes. No public record shows whether findings have been revisited as diagnostic categories moved, and the acts of individual causes are not generally published in full.

What Would Settle It Access to the medical dossiers of closed causes, or a published retrospective by the Congregation itself, examined by clinicians against current diagnostic criteria.

Expertise Needed History of medicine; canon law

Question posed in Making Saints: How the Catholic Church Determines Who Becomes a Saint, Who Doesn't, and Why, Kenneth L. Woodward, Chapters on the medical consultors.

Open Bahya ibn Paquda

Why It Is Open The Encyclopaedia Judaica records only that Bahya ibn Paquda was active as a rabbinic judge in Zaragoza in the second half of the eleventh century. His one surviving work carries no colophon date, and no later medieval chronicle independent of it fixes a death year, the same gap already recorded under his lifespan-start-year.

What Would Settle It A dated document from Muslim Iberia or a later medieval Jewish chronicle naming Bahya ibn Paquda's death, distinct from the undated internal evidence of his one surviving work.

Expertise Needed History of medieval Iberian Jewry, history of Jewish ethical literature

Question posed in Encyclopaedia Judaica, 2nd edition, Michael Berenbaum and Fred Skolnik (eds.).

Open Presentism

Why It Is Open Essentialism, Interactionism and Nominalism, the three sibling metaphysical positions filled in the same pass, each name one historical figure as principal proponent directly in their own text (Aristotle, Descartes, Ockham). Presentism's own text sets out the position and its objections in the same style but names nobody as having first defended or best defended it.

What Would Settle It A citable history-of-philosophy source identifying the position's clearest or earliest defender, whether an ancient or medieval figure arguing from ordinary intuition about the reality of the present, or a modern one such as the logicians who built formal tense logic specifically to defend it.

Expertise Needed History of philosophy

Question posed in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.).