Open Questions

Open Naturopathy

Why It Is Open Regulation differs sharply by state, province and country, and the licensing picture changes. Summary figures circulate but could not be verified against primary regulatory sources at the time of writing.

What Would Settle It A jurisdiction-by-jurisdiction check against the regulators themselves, with the date of the check recorded, since the answer decays.

Expertise Needed Health policy and comparative regulatory law.

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

Open Turkey

Why It Is Open Turkish national censuses do not ask about sectarian or Alevi religious identity, so no official count of the Alevi population exists. Published estimates commonly range from about 10 to 20 percent of the population, a spread wide enough to reflect the absence of a count rather than disagreement over one.

What Would Settle It A nationally representative census or independently conducted survey that specifically asks about Alevi self-identification, which the Turkish state census currently does not do.

Expertise Needed Demography, religious studies

Question posed in Religious Composition of the World, 2010-2020, Pew Research Center.

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 Younger Futhark

Why It Is Open The atlas holds three Aett rows and all three are Elder Futhark. The division of the sixteen rune Younger Futhark into three families is structurally real: cipher rune inscriptions encode a rune as a family number plus a position within that family, which cannot work without an agreed division of the row. The live rune ordering here fits the partition usually reported, six, five and five, because Hagall stands at position 7 and Tyr at position 12, exactly where the second and third families would begin. The naming is what could not be established. A pass on 2026-07-27 found only popular and unsourced material, which does not agree with itself: the same three names are given over groups of eight, four and four, of six, six and four, of six, five and five, and of eight, eight and eight, and none of it carried a locator that could be checked. Deriving the rows from the rune ordering alone was refused as inference presented as attestation, so nothing was seeded.

What Would Settle It A reading of the standard runological literature on cryptic or cipher runes, for example Michael Barnes, Runes: A Handbook, 2012, or Klaus Duwel, Runenkunde, 2008, both already held as sources here, settling two things. First, whether the medieval evidence for the ordering of the families in cipher runes, which counts them in reverse so that the Tyr family is numbered first, is reported with family names attached or only with numbers. Second, whether the names Freyr, Hagall and Tyr for the Younger Futhark families occur in any Old Norse or Icelandic manuscript witness, or whether they enter print only in the modern revival, applied backwards from the Elder Futhark. A dated witness naming any one of the three would settle it and the rows could be seeded citing it. A demonstration that none exists would settle it the other way, and the division would stay a structural fact about cipher runes rather than three named entities.

Expertise Needed Runology; Old Norse philology; palaeography of Icelandic runic manuscripts

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

Open Amarnath Cave

Why It Is Open The cave is named in the Nilamata Purana and in Kalhana's Rajatarangini, but neither text's date of composition is settled, so their references cannot fix how far back the site's veneration actually runs.

What Would Settle It A codicological or paleographic dating study of the manuscript traditions of the Nilamata Purana and the Rajatarangini, or an independently dated inscription or record naming the cave before the nineteenth century.

Expertise Needed Indology, manuscript studies, Sanskrit philology

Question posed in Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.).

Open Imperial Regalia of Japan

Why It Is Open Shinto religious practice keeps all three objects permanently unshown. Atsuta Shrine, Ise Grand Shrine and the Imperial Household Agency have never permitted an outside examination, so nobody outside the shrines and the Agency has verified the objects present or their condition in the modern era.

What Would Settle It A supervised non-invasive examination, such as imaging conducted by the custodial shrines or the Imperial Household Agency themselves, since no outside access has ever been permitted.

Expertise Needed Shinto studies, archaeometry

Question posed in The Imperial Regalia: Japan's Three Sacred Treasures (Nippon.com), Nippon.com.

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 Parshvanatha

Why It Is Open Critical scholarship accepts Parshvanatha and Mahavira as historical figures. Jain tradition holds all twenty four to be historical teachers. For the remaining twenty two there is no independent attestation, so a single answer applied across the group would misdescribe most of it in one direction or the other.

What Would Settle It Independent attestation for any individual Tirthankara beyond the two, whether inscriptional, textual from outside the tradition, or archaeological.

Expertise Needed Indology, Jain studies, and South Asian archaeology.

Question posed in The Jains, Paul Dundas, Second edition, page 19.

Open Order of Nine Angles

Why It Is Open The identification most often made in print, with David Myatt, is denied by Myatt himself, and no independent documentary or forensic evidence establishes who wrote under the name. The order's early history is documented mainly through its own publications.

What Would Settle It A stylometric comparison of the earliest Anton Long texts against Myatt's other pseudonymous and signed writing, or documentary evidence such as publisher correspondence or internal order papers naming the author, would settle it.

Expertise Needed Textual and stylometric analysis; history of new religious movements

Question posed in Satanism: A Social History, Massimo Introvigne.

Open Apparitions and Crisis Apparitions

Why It Is Open The 1889-1894 Census of Hallucinations argued that apparitions coinciding with a real death occurred more often than chance, but the finding rests entirely on retrospective self report gathered by volunteers approaching people they knew, against a chance baseline its own authors had to construct. No prospective, controlled test of crisis apparitions has been conducted since.

What Would Settle It A prospectively registered study defining in advance what counts as a qualifying apparition and a chance baseline independent of the reporting population, run forward in time rather than reconstructed from memory.

Expertise Needed Statistics; survey methodology; history of psychical research

Question posed in Report on the Census of Hallucinations, Henry Sidgwick, Eleanor Sidgwick, Frederic W. H. Myers, Frank Podmore, Alice Johnson.

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 Radiocarbon Dating of the Sudarium of Oviedo

Why It Is Open The published assay came with the laboratory's own caveat that oils absorbed over centuries of veneration could distort the measured age, and that caveat was never tested. No scholar holds a position on what a clean measurement would show, so this is a gap rather than a disagreement: the work was started, it reached no conclusion, and nobody resumed it.

What Would Settle It A repeat assay on material cleaned by a published decontamination protocol, run blind across more than one laboratory, with the sampling location on the cloth recorded. Independent characterisation of the absorbed organic contaminants would show how large a shift they are capable of producing, which is the part the original caveat left unquantified.

Expertise Needed Radiocarbon dating and archaeometry, with textile conservation science for the decontamination protocol.

Question posed in The Oviedo Cloth, Mark Guscin.

Open Dzogchen

Why It Is Open The Nyingma tradition attributes Dzogchen's transmission to Padmasambhava and Vimalamitra in the eighth century CE, but the earliest securely datable Dzogchen texts are placed later by scholars, and the surviving Dunhuang manuscripts leave the relationship between early Dzogchen and Chan Buddhist teaching in Tibet unresolved.

What Would Settle It Further codicological dating and textual comparison of the Dunhuang Dzogchen and Chan manuscripts against securely dated Chan sources, by scholars working directly with the manuscript corpus.

Expertise Needed Tibetology; Buddhist studies; manuscript studies

Question posed in Introduction to Tibetan Buddhism, John Powers.

Open Organisation of Islamic Cooperation

Why It Is Open The OIC's own website refused every direct connection attempt on every domain tried, and no news coverage located quoted a specific total budget figure with a URL that could be confirmed by reading it directly.

What Would Settle It The full text of an OIC Council of Foreign Ministers Administrative and Financial Affairs resolution, or a communique stating the approved General Secretariat budget total.

Open International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance

Why It Is Open IHRA's own website refused every direct connection attempt, including its Annual Report pages, and a German Federal Foreign Office page describing one member state's contribution could not be reached to confirm either.

What Would Settle It Successfully reading IHRA's own Annual Report PDF, or a Permanent Office financial statement aggregating all member dues.

Open Taliban

Why It Is Open World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor reports are understood to publish domestic revenue collection figures for the Interim Taliban Administration, but every PDF fetched in research on this returned only encoded binary content, not readable text, and a VOA News article summarizing a report 403 blocked on fetch (queued, BlockedFetchId 26); no figure is recorded here on a search-summary alone.

What Would Settle It A text-extractable copy of a World Bank Afghanistan Economic Monitor or Development Update, or a corroborating IMF Article IV or UN Sanctions Monitoring Team report, actually read rather than summarized.

Expertise Needed Development economics, public finance

Question posed in History of the Academy, Academie des sciences, Academie des sciences.

Open French Academy of Sciences

Why It Is Open The Cour des comptes has published reports covering the Institut de France and its five academies collectively (2015, and a July 2021 synthesis), but no academy-specific total for the Academie des sciences alone was extractable: both PDFs returned only encoded binary content, not readable text, on repeated fetch attempts.

What Would Settle It A text-extractable copy of a Cour des comptes report on the Institut de France giving a per-academy breakdown, or the Institut de France's own published annual accounts disaggregated by academy.

Expertise Needed Public finance, institutional history

Question posed in History of the Academy, Academie des sciences, Academie des sciences.

Open Second Crusade

Why It Is Open The Second Crusade was fought as three largely separate campaigns under one crusading call, the failed siege of Damascus in the Levant, the Wendish Crusade in the Baltic, and the successful siege of Lisbon in Iberia, and the scholarship treats each on its own terms rather than as one war with one casualty count.

What Would Settle It A historian's synthesis totaling documented losses across all three theaters, or separate, clearly bounded figures for each campaign presented together rather than as isolated episodes.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, medieval military history.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Fifth Crusade

Why It Is Open The Fifth Crusade's losses are recorded in narrative form, the long siege of Damietta and the crusader army's destruction during its retreat up the flooded Nile, but no historian has converted those narratives into a bounded casualty estimate for the campaign.

What Would Settle It A military historian's accounting of losses at Damietta and during the Nile retreat combined into one campaign total, or a demographic study of Ayyubid Egypt's war losses in the period.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, medieval military history.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.

Open Sixth Crusade

Why It Is Open The Sixth Crusade is remembered as a diplomatic success, Jerusalem recovered by treaty rather than conquest, and the scholarship reflects that emphasis: the campaign's limited fighting is described in narrative terms with no casualty figures attached, let alone a combined total.

What Would Settle It A military historian's accounting of the skirmishes and garrison actions that did occur during Frederick II's campaign, however small the resulting figure.

Expertise Needed Crusading history, medieval military history.

Question posed in God's War: A New History of the Crusades, Christopher Tyerman.