Open Questions

Open Nine worlds

Why It Is Open The Eddas refer to nine worlds without ever enumerating them in one place. The lists that circulate today are modern reconstructions assembled from names scattered across the Poetic and Prose Eddas, not a set any medieval text sets out as such.

What Would Settle It A systematic philological collation of every Old Norse cosmological realm named in the Poetic Edda (Voluspa, Grimnismal, Vafthrudnismal among them) and the Prose Edda, checked for internal consistency, by an Old Norse philologist.

Expertise Needed Old Norse philology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), art. Germanic Religion.

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 Chet, Avon and Pesha

Why It Is Open The three terms stand together in Leviticus 16 and Exodus 34 without any definition attached, and the graded reading is supplied by rabbinic literature centuries afterwards. Whether biblical Hebrew already distinguishes the three roots this way, or whether the distinction is a rabbinic construction laid over a rhetorical triplet, is a question of lexical semantics that this entry did not attempt to settle.

What Would Settle It A corpus study of every occurrence of the three roots in the Hebrew Bible, read alongside the Northwest Semitic epigraphic material, testing whether the intention grading holds independently of the rabbinic gloss.

Expertise Needed Biblical Hebrew lexicography; Northwest Semitic philology

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

Open Kaba'ir and Sagha'ir

Why It Is Open The manual is standardly cited under the name of Shams al-Din al-Dhahabi and is one of the most reproduced texts on the subject, but the attribution has been questioned, and this entry could not settle it from the sources available to it. The entry therefore describes the work without asserting authorship.

What Would Settle It A manuscript study of the earliest surviving copies and their transmission chains, compared against al-Dhahabi's securely attributed writings for method, vocabulary and the authorities he cites.

Expertise Needed Arabic manuscript studies; Islamic intellectual history

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

Open Sin as Illness in Orthodox Theology

Why It Is Open Twentieth century Orthodox theology drew the contrast strongly and rested a great deal of it on the reading of a single clause of Romans 5:12. Other scholars hold the difference is overdrawn, and that Greek writers do at times speak of an inherited culpability. Both positions are held now, and the atlas carries the fact as debated rather than choosing between them.

What Would Settle It A systematic survey of the Greek patristic corpus for language of inherited culpability, conducted independently of the Romans 5:12 reading, with the Latin material read on the same terms and by the same criteria.

Expertise Needed Patristics; historical theology

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

Open Lag BaOmer

Why It Is Open The rabbinic sources report the deaths of Akiva's students as a plague and do not connect them to the revolt. A reading that treats the plague as a veiled account of wartime losses is in circulation, and the counter-reading takes the sources at their word. This pass found no source it could verify on either side, so it wrote no relation between the holiday and the revolt.

What Would Settle It A study of the talmudic and geonic witnesses to the Akiva tradition set against the documentary and archaeological record of the revolt, establishing whether the connection is ancient or a later harmonisation.

Expertise Needed Rabbinic literature; Roman-period Jewish history

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

Open Axion Estin

Why It Is Open Athonite monastic tradition credits the text to a tenth century revelation to a monk at Karyes, but that account is devotional legend, not a documented event, and no independent manuscript or historical source establishes the hymns actual date or author.

What Would Settle It A dated manuscript witness to the text earlier than, or independent of, the Athonite legend, or a specialist study of Byzantine Marian hymnography that traces the hymns transmission history on textual rather than legendary grounds.

Expertise Needed Byzantine liturgical history; hymnography

Question posed in The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.).

Open Ginans

Why It Is Open Ginans are attributed to named pirs of the Satpanth mission, but the surviving Khojki manuscripts are considerably later than the men they name, the corpus went on growing after those men had died, and an attribution in this tradition asserts lineage and authority as well as composition. Scholars therefore treat the ascriptions as traditional rather than as established, without being able to say which texts are early.

What Would Settle It Systematic dating of the Khojki manuscript collections, and linguistic analysis of the corpus against securely dated South Asian texts of the fourteenth to sixteenth centuries, would let the earlier strata be separated from the later. The manuscripts were catalogued only in the twentieth century and much of that comparative work has not been done.

Expertise Needed Manuscript studies, South Asian historical linguistics and Ismaili studies

Question posed in Songs of Wisdom and Circles of Dance: Hymns of the Satpanth Ismaili Muslim Saint, Pir Shams, Tazim R. Kassam.

Open Armenian Chant (Sharakan)

Why It Is Open Khaz signs were written above Armenian chant texts from about the ninth century and grew steadily more elaborate, but they did not fix pitch and appear to have cued gestures a singer already knew. When that oral knowledge lapsed the signs stopped being readable. Komitas Vardapet worked on the problem for years without reaching a reading, and Robert At'ayan's systematic study did not produce an agreed decipherment. There is no camp to argue against; the work simply stopped.

What Would Settle It A manuscript pairing khaz with a notation whose values are known, or a securely dated source setting Armenian signs beside Byzantine ones for the same melody, would give the system the external check it has never had. Comparative work on the earliest strata, before the signs multiplied, may also be able to fix a small core of them.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Armenian palaeography

Question posed in The Armenian Neume System of Notation, Robert At'ayan.

Open Georgian Chant

Why It Is Open Georgian hymn books of the tenth century carry chant signs, but nobody can say what they instruct. Comparison against Byzantine notation has not produced a reading and the Georgian signs do not map onto it cleanly. The consequence is severe for the tradition: no medieval Georgian melody can be recovered, and everything sung today descends from transcriptions made from living singers nine hundred years later. Nobody holds a rival decipherment; the question has simply been left where it was.

What Would Settle It A Georgian manuscript giving the same chant in both neumes and a notation of known values, or a bilingual source setting Georgian signs beside Byzantine ones, would supply the external control the system lacks. Systematic comparison of the neume repertory across the surviving tenth century books may also isolate a small core of signs whose behaviour is regular enough to test.

Expertise Needed Musicology and Georgian palaeography

Question posed in The Transcription and Transmission of Georgian Liturgical Chant, John A. Graham.

Open Soma Sacrifice

Why It Is Open The Rig Veda describes soma's habitat, preparation and effects, but the living tradition lost the plant before the late Vedic period, when the ritual texts already prescribe substitutes. Two centuries of proposals (ephedra, fly agaric, Syrian rue, and others, including Wasson's 1968 book-length fly agaric case) each fit some verses and fail others, and no candidate has won consensus.

What Would Settle It Archaeobotanical residue analysis from an early Vedic or BMAC-context ritual vessel with identifiable plant remains, or a decisive phytochemical match between the full Rigvedic description and a candidate species in its Indo-Iranian range.

Expertise Needed Archaeobotany and Vedic philology

Question posed in The Rigveda: The Earliest Religious Poetry of India, Stephanie W. Jamison and Joel P. Brereton, Introduction, on soma and its identification.

Open Senet

Why It Is Open No complete ancient rule text survives. Play is reconstructed from board layouts, marked squares and the partial instructions in late funerary compositions, and competing reconstructions disagree on movement and on how the marked squares functioned.

What Would Settle It A papyrus or ostracon setting out the rules of play in full, from a securely dated context, or a securely dated board with an inscribed sequence complete enough to fix movement independently of the later funerary texts.

Expertise Needed Egyptology; the archaeology of games

Question posed in In Search of the Meaning of Senet, in Archaeology 33, Peter A. Piccione.

Open Shwedagon Pagoda

Why It Is Open Gold-tonnage claims for the pagoda circulating in travel journalism range roughly tenfold, six to over sixty tons, and a widely repeated three billion dollar figure for the gem-crowned finial traces to no identifiable primary source or methodology.

What Would Settle It A published inventory or valuation from the Board of Trustees of Shwedagon Pagoda itself, or an independent appraisal by a body with access to weigh and assess the gold and gems in place.

Expertise Needed Cultural heritage appraisal and Myanmar religious-trust administration, and financial journalism with primary-source access.

Question posed in Cash Donations Rising for Myanmar Pagodas: Religion Minister (The Irrawaddy).

Open Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha

Why It Is Open No source, credible or otherwise, attempts a monetary figure for the statue or the temple building specifically. Only the far broader Crown Property Bureau, of which the temple is one holding among many, has drawn outside estimates, and those cannot be read back onto the temple itself.

What Would Settle It A statement from the Bureau of the Royal Household or Crown Property Bureau isolating a value or insurance figure for the Emerald Buddha or Wat Phra Kaew specifically, apart from aggregate crown-property estimates.

Expertise Needed Thai royal and crown-property administration, and cultural heritage appraisal.

Question posed in Temple of the Emerald Buddha (Google Arts & Culture).

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 Trinity Lavra of St Sergius

Why It Is Open The monastery is well documented as historically one of Russias wealthiest landowners through the 19th century, but no source addressing its finances since its 1945 reopening to the Church was located.

What Would Settle It A published statement from the Lavra administration or the Moscow Patriarchate naming any income, endowment or budget figure, or scholarly research into post-Soviet Russian Orthodox monastic finances.

Expertise Needed Russian Orthodox Church administration and post-Soviet religious economics.

Question posed in Trinity St. Sergius Monastery (David B. Miller, Encyclopedia of Russian History, via Encyclopedia.com), David B. Miller.

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 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.

Open The Sovereign Military Order of Malta

Why It Is Open A 1.5 billion euro annual budget figure circulates in press coverage of the Order with no cited source or methodology. As a sovereign entity the Order is not subject to any national financial regulator, and no public consolidated financial statement was located.

What Would Settle It A published consolidated financial statement from the Order itself, for example through its Receiver of the Common Treasure, or independent reporting that traces the 1.5 billion euro figure to a primary source.

Expertise Needed International sovereignty studies and nonprofit or humanitarian-sector financial journalism.

Question posed in Sovereign Military Order of Malta, Distinct From Malta Itself, Assists Worlds Poor, Larry Luxner.

Open Holy See

Why It Is Open The Vatican's most valuable holdings, Saint Peter's Basilica, the Sistine Chapel and the Vatican Museums' collections, are inalienable and never appraised for sale, so there is nothing to price against a market the way an ordinary asset is valued. The Holy See's own financial disclosures (APSA's patrimony report, the Secretariat for the Economy's consolidated statement, the IOR's own report) each cover a defined administrative scope and none of them attempts a valuation of the art or the buildings themselves.

What Would Settle It There is no method that would settle this honestly, since a genuine market valuation would require a willingness to sell that the Holy See has never expressed and that the objects' religious and cultural status makes very unlikely ever to exist. What would change the picture is not a single figure but a named methodology the Holy See itself adopted and published for insurance or heritage purposes, stating clearly that it is not a sale value.

Expertise Needed Cultural heritage economics and museum insurance valuation practice, in dialogue with the Holy See's own financial administration.

Question posed in How Much Money Does the Catholic Church Have?.