Divinity Atlas
Things this atlas does not know. Each entry is a question that specialists
have posed and not settled, recorded with what would actually resolve it and which
expertise the answer needs.
These are kept deliberately, rather than quietly omitted. An atlas that shows
only what it is sure of implies a confidence it has not earned, and the gaps are often where
the interesting work is. Several sit exactly where two fields fail to meet: identifying the
hyssop of the Hebrew Bible needs a botanist and a philologist of Biblical Hebrew, and neither
one settles it alone.
You can send evidence on some of these. A pilot is open on 55 questions in one field, Palaeography. Each says what would resolve it; send something that meets that bar, with a source anybody can check, and an editor will weigh it. Sending evidence does not guarantee the question will be resolved, and it does not have to be your field to read what is being asked. See what is open.
Grouped by the part of the atlas the question sits in. Start here if you know the territory better than the technique.
Filter By Specialty 99 fields
Showing 241 to 260 of 610 open questions, page 13 of 31.
People & Practitioners 121
Russ Hudson
Where was Russ Hudson born?
Open Russ Hudson
Why It Is Open He is extensively documented as a teacher and author, but no interview, profile or biographical page found states his birthplace or hometown.
What Would Settle It An interview or biographical profile from the Enneagram Institute or elsewhere naming his birthplace.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Deborah Blake
Where was Deborah Blake born?
Open Deborah Blake
Why It Is Open Her Llewellyn author page and her own official site describe only her current residence in upstate New York, not where she was born or grew up.
What Would Settle It An interview or profile of Deborah Blake naming her birthplace or hometown.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Deborah Blake (Llewellyn author page), Llewellyn.
J. R. Rivera
Where was J. R. Rivera born?
Open J. R. Rivera
Why It Is Open His public bios across retailers and his own blog focus entirely on his tarot practice and interests, not personal geography.
What Would Settle It An interview or profile of J. R. Rivera naming his birthplace or hometown.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Jasmine Becket-Griffith
Where was Jasmine Becket-Griffith born?
Open Jasmine Becket-Griffith
Why It Is Open Secondary summaries claiming Kansas or Kansas City, Missouri, trace only to a conflation with her university location, not to any statement by her; her own site and Wikipedia give her birth date only, with no place.
What Would Settle It A statement from Jasmine Becket-Griffith herself, or a primary record, naming her actual birthplace.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Michelle A. Motuzas
Where was Michelle A. Motuzas born?
Open Michelle A. Motuzas
Why It Is Open Her official site describes her only as a "native New Englander," with no specific city, state or hometown named.
What Would Settle It An interview or profile of Michelle A. Motuzas naming her specific birthplace or hometown.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Michelle A. Motuzas (official site), Michelle A. Motuzas.
Michelle Buchanan
Where was Michelle Buchanan born?
Open Michelle Buchanan
Why It Is Open She is a fairly public figure with a known birth name and date, but no source found states where she was born or grew up.
What Would Settle It An interview or profile of Michelle Buchanan naming her birthplace or hometown.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Radleigh Valentine
Where was Radleigh Valentine born?
Open Radleigh Valentine
Why It Is Open He is candid in interviews about his career change and formative spiritual experiences, but no source found states where he was born or grew up.
What Would Settle It An interview or profile of Radleigh Valentine naming his birthplace or hometown.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Radleigh Valentine (Hay House U profile), Hay House.
Theresa Reed
Where was Theresa Reed born?
Open Theresa Reed
Why It Is Open She writes and speaks extensively and personally about her family and upbringing across many interviews and podcasts, yet no specific hometown or birthplace has surfaced in any of them; her own site names only her current base in Milwaukee.
What Would Settle It A statement from Theresa Reed herself naming her actual birthplace or hometown, which her extensive interviews so far have not covered.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Yoshi Yoshitani
Where was Yoshi Yoshitani born?
Open Yoshi Yoshitani
Why It Is Open A commonly repeated line describes her as born in California and raised in numerous locations, but no primary source could be found actually saying this; interviews specifically about her mixed race, multi location upbringing discuss moving frequently without ever naming a place.
What Would Settle It A statement from Yoshi Yoshitani herself, or a primary record, naming her actual birthplace.
Expertise Needed Biographical research
Question posed in
Yoshi Yoshitani (official site), Yoshi Yoshitani.
Robert Wang
When and where was Robert Wang born?
Open Robert Wang
Why It Is Open Wang's own published autobiography, and every other source located, describe his career as an artist and esoteric scholar, from his occult studies at seventeen through his collaboration with Israel Regardie on the Golden Dawn Tarot, in real detail, but none states a birth year or birthplace.
What Would Settle It A statement from Wang himself, or a publisher's biographical note, or public records research naming his birth year and place.
Expertise Needed Biography; history of modern tarot and Western esotericism
Question posed in
Autobiography of Robert Wang, Creator of the Jungian Tarot Deck (Zero Equals Two!), Robert Wang.
Thomas Rudd
What were Thomas Rudd's birth and death years?
Open Thomas Rudd
Why It Is Open The Harley, Sloane and Wellcome manuscripts attributed to Rudd carry no colophon naming his birth or death, and the attribution of the pairing scheme to him is itself questioned; nothing in the catalogued source establishes his life dates.
What Would Settle It A parish register, will, or dated professional record, a military engineering commission or a mathematical publication, identifying this Thomas Rudd distinctly from others of the same name, or a codicological study dating the Harley and Sloane manuscripts against a known biography.
Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, seventeenth century English biography
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Ibn Mujahid
What were Ibn Mujahid's birth and death years?
Open Ibn Mujahid
Why It Is Open The modern study of Ibn Mujahid's selection of the seven readers works from his writing and its later citation; it does not supply his own birth or death year, and no other catalogued source does either.
What Would Settle It A biographical dictionary entry from the classical Islamic biographical literature giving his dates, checked against the Kitab al-Sab'a's own internal dating to the early fourth century AH.
Expertise Needed Islamic intellectual history, Arabic biographical literature
Question posed in
Divinity Atlas Open Questions Register, First Edition.
Johann Kaspar Hechtel
What was Johann Kaspar Hechtel's birth year?
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.
Vatican Apostolic Library
Does the Holy See ever publish an institution-by-institution breakdown of its consolidated patrimony figure?
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.
Rama Prasad
When was Rama Prasad born and when did he die, and what else did he write?
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.
Sunan Kalijaga
When did Sunan Kalijaga live, and does any record contemporary with him exist?
Open Sunan Kalijaga
Why It Is Open Everything told about him comes from Javanese babad and hagiographic literature composed two to four centuries after the period it describes, mostly at the courts of Surakarta and Yogyakarta. No dated inscription, no sixteenth-century Portuguese or Malay report, and no archival document has been securely connected to him. The result is not a disagreement between scholars but an absence: no defended set of dates exists to disagree about.
What Would Settle It A dated epigraphic find at Kadilangu or at the Demak mosque naming him would give the cycle a fixed point. So would an early European or Malay archival mention independent of the babad tradition. Failing either, a systematic codicological dating of the earliest babad manuscripts would at least establish when the figure took his present shape, which is a smaller but answerable question.
Expertise Needed Javanese philology and codicology; Islamic epigraphy of Java; early modern archival history of the Indonesian archipelago
Question posed in
Gamelan: Cultural Interaction and Musical Development in Central Java, Sumarsam.
Diego de Landa
How many Maya hieroglyphic books existed before 1562, and how many were destroyed at Maní?
Open Diego de Landa
Why It Is Open Four Maya codices survive in the world. Landa records twenty seven books burned at Maní, but the Relación survives only as a shortened copy of a lost original, so his own figure cannot be verified against what he wrote. No census of the pre conquest manuscript corpus was ever made, and Maní was not the only burning. Nobody holds a position on the size of the corpus, which makes this an unfilled gap rather than a scholarly disagreement.
What Would Settle It A recovered fuller copy of the Relación would establish what Landa actually claimed. An archaeological find of interred or cached bark paper manuscripts, of the kind that has produced fragmentary codices in Maya burials, would begin to establish the scale of production. Systematic study of codex fragments already excavated but too degraded to read may become possible with improved imaging.
Expertise Needed Maya epigraphy and archaeology; colonial Spanish archival history; conservation imaging
Question posed in
Relacion de las cosas de Yucatan, Diego de Landa.
Dutty Boukman
Where was Dutty Boukman born, and how did he come to Saint-Domingue?
Open Dutty Boukman
Why It Is Open He is one of the most consequential individuals in Caribbean history and no document has been produced that establishes his origin. The suggestion of an anglophone Caribbean birth rests on a reading of his name and has never been tested against a record. Because he was enslaved, the paperwork that would ordinarily answer this, if it ever existed, was made by people with no interest in his identity.
What Would Settle It A plantation inventory, notarial act, baptismal entry or ship manifest naming him, from the archives of Saint-Domingue, Jamaica or the French colonial administration. Much of the relevant colonial notarial material survives in France and in Haiti and has not been searched systematically for this purpose.
Expertise Needed Caribbean archival history; Atlantic slave trade record linkage; onomastics
Question posed in
Voodoo in Haiti, Alfred Metraux.
Juan Chocne
What became of Juan Chocne after his forced abjuration at Cuzco?
Open Juan Chocne
Why It Is Open The records of Cristóbal de Albornoz carry the suppression of Taki Onqoy and the abjuration of its leaders, and then stop. No later document naming Chocne has been produced. He was not tried by the Inquisition, which did not hold jurisdiction over indigenous people, so the usual sentencing paperwork does not exist for him. The gap has never been the subject of a dedicated study, so this is an absence rather than a scholarly disagreement.
What Would Settle It A search of the Cuzco ecclesiastical and notarial archives, and of the Albornoz probanzas de méritos in Seville, for any later mention of the name. Parish registers of the reducciones in the Huamanga region for the 1570s would be the other place to look.
Expertise Needed Andean colonial archival history; Quechua palaeography
Question posed in
The Incas, 2nd edition, Terence N. D'Altroy.
Martín Ocelotl
What became of Martín Ocelotl after he was shipped to Spain in 1537?
Open Martín Ocelotl
Why It Is Open The trial file ends at the sentence of confiscation and perpetual exile. No arrival record, prison register or burial entry in Spain has been shown to name him, and no later Mexican document mentions him. The story that the ship carrying him was lost at sea circulates in secondary accounts without a document behind it. Nobody has taken a position on his fate, because there is nothing to take a position on.
What Would Settle It A search of the Casa de la Contratación records in Seville for the sailing that carried him, and of the registers of the religious houses and prisons to which exiled offenders of the period were sent. The relevant Seville material is catalogued and has not been searched for this purpose.
Expertise Needed Spanish colonial archival history; Nahuatl palaeography
Question posed in
Zumárraga and the Mexican Inquisition, 1536-1543, Richard E. Greenleaf.