Open Questions

Open I Ching

Why It Is Open Every commentary batch in this workstream carries a header naming James Legge 1882 as its source and stating that Wilhelm and Baynes was not used. The batch that wrote the first sentence of all 384 line descriptions carries no header and names no translator, so the provenance of that layer is genuinely undeclared. The vocabulary is mixed rather than uniform: the descriptions read goat and hedge at King Wen 34, ridgepole at King Wen 28, and cords and ropes at King Wen 29, all of which belong to the Wilhelm and Baynes English, while the articles written over them read ram, fence and beam, which belong to Legge. Recording either translation as the source of the description layer would be an assertion nobody has tested.

What Would Settle It A line by line collation of the 384 descriptions against Legge, The Sacred Books of the East volume XVI (1882), and against the Wilhelm and Baynes Bollingen English (1950), beginning with hexagrams 28, 29 and 34, where the two translations diverge on a single concrete noun and the divergence is already visible in the data. The collation would also have to say whether any description is close enough to the 1950 English to raise a rights question.

Expertise Needed Sinology, specifically Yijing translation history, together with a copyright reading on the Wilhelm and Baynes English of 1950.

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

Open Zi Wei Dou Shu

Why It Is Open The system is traditionally ascribed to the Daoist adept Chen Tuan, c. 871-989, but the attribution cannot be verified against any surviving text from his lifetime, and the earliest manuscripts describing the method postdate him by centuries.

What Would Settle It A textual historical study tracing the earliest surviving Zi Wei Dou Shu manuscripts and comparing their content and terminology against securely dated Chen Tuan texts.

Expertise Needed Sinology; history of Chinese astrology; textual criticism

Question posed in Chinese Mathematical Astrology: Reaching Out to the Stars, Ho Peng Yoke.

Open Chernobog

Why It Is Open Chernobog is attested exactly once, by the twelfth-century German cleric Helmold of Bosau, who names the Black God only to say that Baltic Slavic tribes cursed him at their feasts for bringing misfortune. Helmold describes no idol, image, temple or cult object, and no earlier or independent later source, inscription or archaeological find corroborates or adds to his brief mention.

What Would Settle It An independent contemporary or near-contemporary textual witness describing a Chernobog cult image, or an archaeological find, such as the kind of carved Slavic cult idol recovered elsewhere on the Baltic coast, that can be identified with this god specifically rather than with the pantheon in general.

Expertise Needed Slavic archaeology, medieval Baltic and Wendish history, history of religion

Question posed in The Slavs (Gimbutas), Marija Gimbutas.

Open Ukrainian Orthodox Church

Why It Is Open The Ukrainian Orthodox Church's jurisdiction is genuinely contested (the Orthodox Church of Ukraine under the 2019 Tomos of Autocephaly against the church previously under the Moscow Patriarchate), and no single source found across two bands establishes a giving norm for either reading of it. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA's own institutional announcement of a general stewardship resource promotes giving only in general spiritual terms, "the deep spiritual roots of Orthodox stewardship", with no stated percentage, due or consequence for a member who does not give, distinct from the codified due-with-consequences shape already recorded on this axis for Serbian and Armenian parish practice.

What Would Settle It A primary source from a specific Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdiction (the Orthodox Church of Ukraine, the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of the USA, or the Ukrainian Orthodox Church of Canada) stating a specific dues, pledge or tithe structure and what follows, if anything, when a member does not meet it; or a scholarly study of Ukrainian Orthodox parish finance addressing member giving specifically.

Expertise Needed Slavic Orthodox studies, primary source review of Ukrainian Orthodox jurisdictional finance

Question posed in New Blog: Office of Stewardship.

Open Shta Щ

Why It Is Open The letter is plainly built on sha. Whether the element below it is the letter tverdo, making the letter a Cyrillic ligature, or whether the whole sign was taken from the Glagolitic letter for the same cluster and redrawn to match sha, is argued. Both accounts are current and the shape is compatible with either.

What Would Settle It A close comparison of the earliest attested forms of the letter across the recensions, looking for a period or region in which the two elements are still drawn separately, which would settle the ligature reading, or for early forms too remote from sha and tverdo to be a ligature at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography

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

Open Uk Ѹ

Why It Is Open The manuscript tradition gives 400 to uk. The printed Church Slavonic tables give it to izhitsa. Both usages are attested and they cannot both be right for any one book, so a number in the four hundreds cannot be read without knowing which tradition the source follows. The atlas records the value on both letters for that reason, which is a compromise rather than an answer.

What Would Settle It A survey of dated Slavonic manuscripts and early printed books recording which letter carries 400 in each, by region and by period, which would establish whether the printed usage is an innovation of the printers, an inheritance from one recension, or a correction toward the Greek series.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography and the history of Slavonic printing

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

Open Sha Ш

Why It Is Open Roughly a dozen Early Cyrillic letters have no Greek model. The majority reading derives them from Glagolitic, which is older and already fitted to Slavonic. A second reading compares sha, tsy and zhivete with Hebrew or Samaritan letters, an argument made since the nineteenth century. A third holds that shapes this simple cannot support either claim. No exemplar of either alphabet survives from the ninth century, when the choices were made, so every argument runs on shape comparison against later manuscripts.

What Would Settle It A dated exemplar of either alphabet from the period of composition, or a decisive argument from the internal structure of the two letter sets rather than from resemblance between individual shapes. Failing either, a rigorous statistical treatment of shape similarity that establishes what level of resemblance would count as evidence at all.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography, with Semitic epigraphy for the comparative claims

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open No manuscript survives from the Moravian mission itself. The oldest Glagolitic codices are tenth and eleventh century copies made a century or more after the alphabet was made, and they differ among themselves in which letters they carry and in what order they list them. Scholars do not hold opposing positions on the original inventory, because there is nothing to hold a position against: the question is left open for want of a ninth century witness rather than argued between camps. The letters this atlas records for Glagolitic follow the order and inventory of the surviving tradition as the Unicode Standard arranges it, which is the best available reconstruction and not the ninth century original.

What Would Settle It A ninth century Glagolitic witness, whether a codex, a fragment, a palimpsest under-text or a dated inscription, carrying an abecedary or enough continuous text to establish which letters were in use during the mission itself. Palimpsest recovery by multispectral imaging of the surviving early codices is the most likely route, since several of them are known to overlie earlier writing.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

Question posed in Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik.

Open Pe Ⱊ

Why It Is Open The letter is encoded in the Unicode Standard and appears in the abecedaria, the alphabet lists copied out as exercises or inscriptions, more often than in running text. The reference literature reads it as a form of p without establishing what distinguished it from the ordinary letter for that sound, and different sources place different numeral values in this part of the order. Nobody holds a position on the question, which is why the atlas records the letter with no numeral value rather than choosing among the values on offer. It is an unfilled gap and not an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An attestation of the sign in running text, in a context where the word it writes can be identified, would settle the sound. A survey of every surviving Glagolitic abecedary, recording where this sign falls in the order and whether it is ever given a numeral value in the list, would settle whether it was counted as a letter of the alphabet or carried as a variant.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; codicology; Old Church Slavonic philology

Question posed in The Unicode Standard, The Unicode Consortium.

Open Azu Ⰰ

Why It Is Open Three explanations are held in the literature and none has carried the field. One derives the letters from the Greek minuscule cursive of the ninth century. One looks to Semitic and Caucasian models, among them Hebrew and Samaritan, Coptic, Armenian and Georgian. One holds that Constantine composed the signs from a small set of Christian figures, the cross, the circle and the triangle, so that the alphabet would belong to no existing script and would carry a Christian sense in its shapes. This is a genuine disagreement rather than a gap: camps exist and each can be read. What none of them has is a witness close in date to the alphabet, since the earliest Glagolitic manuscripts are a century or more later than the mission and were produced in a different country.

What Would Settle It A securely dated ninth century Glagolitic witness, or the recovery of one from the under-text of a palimpsest by multispectral imaging, would give the shapes a form early enough to be compared against the proposed models rather than against their tenth and eleventh century descendants. Failing that, a systematic morphological comparison of the whole Glagolitic repertoire against dated Greek minuscule hands and against the Semitic and Caucasian scripts proposed, published with the negative results as well as the positive ones, would establish how much of the resemblance survives measurement.

Expertise Needed Slavic palaeography; Greek palaeography; comparative script studies; multispectral imaging of palimpsests

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

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 Skoptsy

Why It Is Open The sect produced no systematic theology. It left its teaching in hymns sung from memory and in the answers its members gave under interrogation, and almost everything recorded about that teaching passed through police, consistory and missionary hands. Those witnesses were prosecuting or refuting the sect and had every reason to record it at its most extreme, so the necessity claim may belong to the sect or to the men writing it down. The surviving hymn corpus has never been edited critically, and it has not been read against the depositions district by district and decade by decade.

What Would Settle It A critical edition of the Skoptsy hymn corpus and of the community manuscript books held in Russian archives, collated against the interrogation depositions from the same districts and dates, would show whether the necessity claim is the sect's own language or the language of the officials recording it.

Expertise Needed Slavic philology and the history of Russian religious dissent, with archival access to imperial police and consistory files

Question posed in Castration and the Heavenly Kingdom: A Russian Folktale, Laura Engelstein, The state's files on the sect and the problem of reading a doctrine out of them.

Open Telepathy

Why It Is Open The original series reported dream content correlating with a sender's target image above chance, but no other laboratory reproduced the effect, and the series itself was never repeated at a comparable scale. Irvin Child argued in 1985 that the result was dismissed rather than evaluated, which is a claim about how the field responded rather than a claim that anyone has since run the missing replication.

What Would Settle It A preregistered, multi-night sleep laboratory replication with automated target selection, blind judging of dream transcripts against a randomized image pool, and a sample size and analysis plan fixed in advance.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; experimental psychology; meta-analytic methodology

Question posed in Dream Telepathy: Experiments in Nocturnal Extrasensory Perception, Montague Ullman, Stanley Krippner and Alan Vaughan.

Open The Maimonides Dream Telepathy Studies

Why It Is Open The original series ran on early electroencephalography and ended when the laboratory's funding did. Attempts elsewhere were smaller and did not reproduce the effect. This atlas could not establish whether any well-powered modern attempt exists, and the literature it consulted names none.

What Would Settle It A systematic search of sleep-research and parapsychology journals from 1975 onward for free-response dream studies using polysomnography and blind judging, and a count of their sample sizes.

Expertise Needed Sleep research; systematic review

Question posed in Psychology and Anomalous Observations: The Question of ESP in Dreams, Irvin L. Child.

Open The Family International

Why It Is Open The Family International restructured in 2010 into a decentralized, largely non-communal network of individual members and associated organizations across many countries, has historically discouraged outside employment, and by a named scholarly account has never been wealthy as an organization; it has never published a single consolidated financial statement covering that network.

What Would Settle It A consolidated financial statement, investigative accounting or scholarly financial study totaling assets, property and revenue across The Family International's associated national entities and organizations, rather than the qualitative account of financial constraint currently on record.

Expertise Needed Sociology of religion and investigative journalism covering new religious movements' financial structures and cross-border nonprofit networks.

Question posed in Children of God / The Family International (CDAMM, 2021), Eileen Barker and Sarah Harvey.

Open Dhu Nuwas

Why It Is Open The Sabaic inscriptions of his reign stop at the Aksumite conquest, the Syriac accounts of the killings at Najran do not describe his end, and the story in which he rides his horse into the sea rather than be taken appears only in much later Arabic narrative. The reference literature reports the death as approximate for exactly this reason.

What Would Settle It A dated south Arabian inscription from the period of the Aksumite takeover that names the outcome, or an early Aksumite, Syriac or Byzantine notice of the campaign that reports how the Himyari king was disposed of.

Expertise Needed South Arabian epigraphy, Ethiopic and Syriac historiography

Question posed in The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, G. W. Bowersock.

Open Dhu Nuwas

Why It Is Open Dhu Nuwas is known only from the years of his reign, fixed by Sabaic inscriptions issued under his regnal name Yusuf Asar Yathar and by Syriac Christian accounts of the Najran massacre around 523, both windows onto the final years of his rule rather than his early life. No source records a birth year.

What Would Settle It A Himyarite inscription or independent South Arabian record naming Dhu Nuwas, under his own regnal name or his personal name, before the events of his reign that the surviving inscriptions and Syriac accounts already cover.

Expertise Needed South Arabian epigraphy, late antique Himyarite history

Question posed in The Throne of Adulis: Red Sea Wars on the Eve of Islam, G. W. Bowersock.

Open 1915 Sinhalese Muslim Riots

Why It Is Open Reported killed figures range from the twenties into the low hundreds across different secondary sources without a consistent breakdown between rioters, bystanders and those killed restoring order, and the standard academic reconstruction concentrates on the riots' course and the government's martial law response rather than compiling a reconciled total.

What Would Settle It A study working systematically from the colonial government's martial law court records, coroners' inquests and provincial administrative reports for the Central, Western and Sabaragamuwa provinces to build a reconciled count distinguishing rioters, bystanders and those killed or executed by government forces.

Expertise Needed South Asian and Sri Lankan colonial history

Question posed in The Action Phase of the 1915 Riots, Charles S. Blackton.

Open The Fourth Buddhist Council in Kashmir

Why It Is Open The accounts that name a place do not name the same one, they are all late, northern and secondary, and no site has ever been identified on the ground. Nobody defends a location, so this is a gap in the record rather than an argument between camps.

What Would Settle It An inscription naming the assembly, or the excavation of a monastic complex in Kashmir or the north-west of the subcontinent large enough to house it and carrying Sarvastivada Abhidharma material of the right date.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology and epigraphy, working with Buddhist studies

Question posed in History of Indian Buddhism: From the Origins to the Saka Era, Etienne Lamotte, translated by Sara Webb-Boin.

Open Brahmi Old Tamil Llla 𑀵

Why It Is Open The conventional account places the earliest Tamil-Brahmi cave inscriptions of Tamil Nadu several centuries before the common era, on palaeographic grounds and by comparison with the Ashokan material. Excavations at sites in the region have since been read as supporting a considerably earlier beginning, on the basis of stratigraphy and of radiocarbon determinations from associated deposits rather than from the inscribed objects themselves. The two accounts rest on different kinds of evidence and there is no agreed method for weighing one against the other, so this is not a case of two camps reading one body of evidence in opposite ways; it is a case in which the date has not been established.

What Would Settle It Direct dating of the inscribed objects rather than of the deposits around them, together with a published stratigraphic account that ties an inscribed sherd securely to a dated layer, and an independent palaeographic sequence for the southern letters built from the southern material itself rather than calibrated against the northern hands.

Expertise Needed South Asian archaeology, radiocarbon dating and Tamil epigraphy

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