Open Questions

Open Geomancy

Why It Is Open The same structure of sixteen four position figures appears across West Africa, Madagascar, North Africa and medieval Europe. Some scholars read the African systems as local developments of Islamic geomancy carried across the Sahara; others argue for substantially independent development. Neither position rests on datable evidence from the relevant period.

What Would Settle It Datable material evidence from before the earliest surviving testimony: excavated divining apparatus, or a dated text describing the practice, from either side of the Sahara. Comparative linguistic work on the figure names across the four traditions would also constrain the answer.

Expertise Needed History of religions; archaeology of West and North Africa; historical linguistics

Question posed in Ifa Divination: Communication between Gods and Men in West Africa, William Bascom.

Open Thealogy

Why It Is Open The word is variously credited to different writers of the 1970s and this pass could not establish a first attested use from a source it had checked. Goldenberg's use in 1979 is documented; earlier uses are asserted in secondary literature without a locus.

What Would Settle It A first-attestation search across feminist religious periodicals and conference papers of the 1970s, giving a dated printed occurrence with page reference.

Expertise Needed History of religions; lexicography

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

Open Arbatel de Magia Veterum

Why It Is Open The 1575 Basel edition names no author, and no signed manuscript or contemporary attribution has surfaced. Modern critical editions have examined the question without reaching a settled candidate.

What Would Settle It A documentary link, a printer's record, a contemporary letter or an internal stylistic match tying the Latin text to a named figure in the Basel printing or physicians' circles of the 1570s.

Expertise Needed History of science / early modern book history

Question posed in Arbatel de Magia Veterum (Robert Turner's 1655 translation), Anonymous, first printed Basel 1575; English translation by Robert Turner, 1655.

Open The Pearce-Pratt Distance Series

Why It Is Open C. E. M. Hansel examined the buildings in the 1960s and argued that a route existed by which the subject, unobserved in the library, could have reached a position from which the cards were visible. Rhine and Pratt disputed the sightlines, the timing, and whether such an absence would have gone unnoticed. Neither side conceded, and the buildings have since been altered, so the question can no longer be settled by inspection.

What Would Settle It Original architectural plans of the Social Sciences building and the campus library as they stood in 1933 and 1934, together with any contemporaneous record of Pearce's whereabouts during the sessions.

Expertise Needed History of science; architectural history; archival research at Duke University

Question posed in ESP: A Scientific Evaluation, C. E. M. Hansel.

Open Haji Bektash Veli

Why It Is Open Haji Bektash Veli's life is known only through Bektashi hagiography composed generations after him, and even the commonly repeated 1209 to 1271 dates compete with other traditional accounts that differ by decades on both ends.

What Would Settle It A thirteenth century Anatolian source, inscription or administrative record naming Haji Bektash Veli and a date, independent of the later Bektashi hagiographic tradition that presently supplies the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of Sufism, Ottoman and Anatolian history

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham.

Open Matsyendranath

Why It Is Open Matsyendranath survives only in Nath and Kaula tradition and in Newar devotional practice, and different lineages and modern scholars place him across several centuries with no external, independently datable evidence to settle the question.

What Would Settle It An inscription, manuscript colophon or external record independently naming Matsyendranath and a date, distinct from the devotional and lineage traditions that presently supply the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of tantra and hatha yoga, Nath Sampradaya studies, Newar religious history

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

Open Balim Sultan

Why It Is Open Balim Sultan enters the record only as the organizer who gave the Bektashi Sufi order its lasting institutional form about the beginning of the sixteenth century, roughly two and a half centuries after the order's traditional founding figure Haji Bektash Veli. Nothing in Bektashi tradition or in outside chronicles fixes a birth year for him.

What Would Settle It A dated Ottoman or Bektashi document naming Balim Sultan's age or birth year, distinct from the undated tradition of his organizing career at Dimetoka and later at the Haci Bektas lodge.

Expertise Needed History of the Bektashi order, Ottoman religious history

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham.

Open The Heptameron (Elementa Magica)

Why It Is Open The ascription to Pietro d'Abano is rejected on chronological grounds, which removes an author without supplying one. The text first appears in print in 1559 appended to the pseudo-Agrippan Fourth Book, and no manuscript witness earlier than the sixteenth century has been identified for it. Its angelic hours and weekday conjurations resemble material circulating in fifteenth-century ritual manuscripts, but resemblance is not descent.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript of the text or of a recognisable portion of it from before 1559, or a securely dated source that the printed text can be shown to be copying. Collation of the Heptameron against the surviving fifteenth-century angel magic manuscripts, done systematically rather than by impression, would establish whether it is compiled from them.

Expertise Needed History of the book and early printing, Latin palaeography, and the study of late medieval ritual magic manuscripts

Question posed in Grimoires: A History of Magic Books, Owen Davies.

Open Rama Prasad

Why It Is Open The scholarly literature the atlas cites treats him as a conduit for the tattvas rather than as a subject, and gives his publications without giving his life. No source consulted here supplies birth or death years, and the atlas has therefore recorded a period of activity in place of a lifespan rather than quote a date it cannot support.

What Would Settle It Theosophical Society membership registers and the Adyar archives, which record members' details, together with contemporary Indian periodical indexes, would establish the dates and probably the rest of the bibliography.

Expertise Needed History of the Theosophical movement, and archival work in Indian colonial-period periodicals

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

Open Sultan Sahak

Why It Is Open Sultan Sahak's life is remembered through Yarsani devotional narrative rather than documented biography, and the Kalam-e Saranjam's own Perdiwari texts do not supply datable historical reference points; scholarship's own fifteenth century placement is explicitly provisional, and other readings diverge by centuries.

What Would Settle It An external historical or archaeological record from the Hawraman region independently datable and naming Sultan Sahak, distinct from the devotional Kalam-e Saranjam tradition that presently supplies the only accounts of his life.

Expertise Needed History of the Yarsan/Ahl-e Haqq tradition, Kurdish history

Question posed in The Yaresan: A Sociological, Historical and Religio-Historical Study of a Kurdish Community, M. Reza Hamzeh'ee.

Open Sabian Symbols

Why It Is Open The phrasing in general circulation, including every row stored in this atlas, is Dane Rudhyar's from An Astrological Mandala (1973), verified verbatim against the book for all 360 degrees. Jones published his own text in The Sabian Symbols in Astrology (1953), but no accessible per-degree transcription of it was found. Without it, Jones's contribution cannot be distinguished from Rudhyar's rewriting for any individual degree.

What Would Settle It A copy of Jones 1953, or a scholarly edition collating the two. This would also let the atlas describe the symbols in wording that is not in copyright until 2069.

Expertise Needed History of twentieth century astrology, and archival or library access to a 1953 imprint.

Question posed in An Astrological Mandala, Dane Rudhyar, Page 19.

Open William Crookes

Why It Is Open Writers since the 1960s have argued that Crookes either knew the materialisations were produced by Cook herself or was personally involved with her, and that this explains his willingness to vouch for phenomena he would have tested rigorously in any other setting. The arguments rest on circumstantial reading of his published accounts and on later recollection, and no documentary proof has been produced in either direction.

What Would Settle It Contemporary correspondence between Crookes and Cook, or household records establishing the arrangements at the sittings, if any survive in family or institutional archives.

Expertise Needed History of Victorian science; archival research

Question posed in The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ruth Brandon.

Open Marabout

Why It Is Open Colonial officials applied the word to a very wide range of Muslim religious figures, and the ethnography written under that administration is the channel through which most of the outside literature received it. Historians of the archive and specialists on the orders read the evidence differently and both readings are current.

What Would Settle It A systematic comparison of pre-colonial Arabic-language sources from the Maghreb and the western Sahel against the colonial administrative record, to establish the indigenous range of the term independently of the reporting.

Expertise Needed History of West and North Africa; Arabic manuscript studies

Question posed in The Sufi Orders in Islam, J. Spencer Trimingham, Chapters on the orders in North and West Africa.

Open Svatmarama

Why It Is Open The Hatha Yoga Pradipika names no birthplace for its compiler, and no manuscript tradition or later Natha lineage record fills the gap independently of the text itself.

What Would Settle It A datable manuscript colophon, inscription, or external reference naming Svatmarama's origin, none of which is currently known.

Expertise Needed History of yoga, manuscript studies

Question posed in Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.).

Open Svatmarama

Why It Is Open Svatmarama is known only as the compiler of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika, a text the manuscript evidence places around 1400 CE. No source independent of the text names a birth year, a birthplace or a patron, and even his name may describe a spiritual role rather than record a birth name.

What Would Settle It A manuscript colophon, inscription or independent Natha lineage record naming Svatmarama's birth year, distinct from the composition date of the Hatha Yoga Pradipika itself.

Expertise Needed History of yoga, Sanskrit textual studies

Question posed in Roots of Yoga, James Mallinson and Mark Singleton (trans. and eds.).

Open Mursili II

Why It Is Open What is documented is his parentage (son of Suppiluliuma I and Queen Henti) and his military annals; Hittite royal records name where kings ruled and campaigned but do not record where royal children were born.

What Would Settle It A Hittite administrative or annalistic record naming his birthplace, which none of the surviving Hittite archives supplies.

Expertise Needed Hittitology; ancient Near Eastern history

Question posed in Hittite Prayers, Itamar Singer; Harry A. Hoffner Jr. (ed.).

Open The Persecution of Christians in Nigeria's Middle Belt

Why It Is Open USCIRF and other monitors document individual attacks and community-level deaths from Fulani militant violence against Nigerian Christians in the Middle Belt in detail, but no monitor separates a religiously motivated death toll from Nigeria's wider, overlapping farmer-herder and insurgent violence, so no campaign-wide aggregate isolated to religious persecution exists.

What Would Settle It A researcher or monitoring organization's systematic count of deaths in Middle Belt violence specifically attributable to religious targeting, distinguished from farmer-herder land disputes and from Boko Haram or ISWAP insurgent violence further northeast.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, conflict studies specific to the Nigerian Middle Belt.

Question posed in Nonstate Violators of Religious Freedom in Nigeria: Fulani Militants, United States Commission on International Religious Freedom.

Open The Crackdown on House Churches in China

Why It Is Open Open Doors and ChinaAid document the crackdown on unregistered house churches in detail, raids, fines, arrests, imprisonments and building demolitions, but neither organization nor any other monitor of the campaign publishes a running or aggregate count of deaths tied to it, unlike the detention and demolition statistics both organizations do track case by case.

What Would Settle It A systematic count, by a monitoring organization or researcher, of documented deaths in custody or otherwise directly tied to raids, detention or demolitions against China's unregistered house church movement, comparable to the detention and demolition statistics these organizations already track.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, contemporary Chinese religious policy studies.

Question posed in China, Open Doors World Watch List Country Page, Open Doors research staff.

Open Persecution of Christians in North Korea

Why It Is Open The United Nations Commission of Inquiry and other outside monitors document the North Korean state's treatment of Christians in detail, arrests, detentions, camp imprisonment and collective punishment of family members, but the country's total closure to independent verification means no monitor has ever published a defensible aggregate count of deaths tied specifically to religious persecution, as distinct from the wider political prison camp population.

What Would Settle It Independent access to North Korea's prison camp system, or a systematic accounting by a body with reliable access to defector testimony, that separates deaths attributable to religious persecution from the general political prisoner population, comparable to the disaggregated reporting already possible for detention and camp population estimates.

Expertise Needed Human rights documentation, North Korean studies.

Question posed in Report of the Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea, United Nations Human Rights Council Commission of Inquiry on Human Rights in the Democratic People's Republic of Korea.

Open Ajmer Sharif

Why It Is Open The statutory Dargah Committees own books cover only its own income and fixed deposits. Nazarana offerings collected directly by Khadims through the Anjuman committees sit outside those books, and their scale is the subject of a live 2024-25 dispute: the Ministry of Minority Affairs ordered a CAG audit in March 2024 after allegations of misuse, and the Anjuman challenged the order in Delhi High Court in May 2024, arguing the offerings belong to the Khadims personally.

What Would Settle It Publication of the ordered CAG audit findings, or a court-settled determination of whether Khadim-collected Nazarana falls within the Dargah Committees disclosure duty.

Expertise Needed Indian statutory-trust law, the Ministry of Minority Affairs regulatory process, and investigative journalism.

Question posed in CAG Audit of Ajmer Sharif Dargah Finances: Know the Anjuman Committee Claim.