Divinity Atlas
Ten Open Questions Wait on the Same Kind of Archive
Ten open questions in this atlas carry a live tie to one discipline, archival research, the third ranked discipline behind history of the book and codicology, whose own top clusters overlap the Theban material this atlas has already used twice. Archival research's own ten do not overlap either one: they range from a chemist's private joke to an unresolved death toll.
Names, Dates, and a Private Joke
Four of the ten wait on a single missing document each. The iridology question asks whether Ignatz von Peczely really originated the practice after observing an injured owl; the story is repeated in nearly every account of iridology's founding but traces only to later iridological literature, not to anything Peczely himself wrote, and has the shape of a foundation legend rather than a witnessed event. The gallium question asks whether Lecoq de Boisbaudran named the element for France alone or knowingly also for himself, since gallus is Latin for a rooster and Lecoq is French for the same word, a coincidence pointed out at once and repeated ever since; the discoverer's own announcement gives only the patriotic reason, and whether the second reading was intended, quietly enjoyed, or only ever imagined by other people cannot be settled from it. A parapsychology question asks simply what became of Hubert Pearce, the subject of Duke University's Pearce-Pratt distance series, after the experiments ended, birth and death dates included. And an astrology question asks whether Marc Edmund Jones ever registered his 1953 Sabian Symbols book for copyright and whether that registration was renewed, a fact that would settle who may reprint his original wording for each of the 360 degrees today.
A Drowning, a Seance, and a Death Toll
The other three concern events with real weight. The Society for Psychical Research's own historian Frank Podmore drowned near Malvern in August 1910; the inquest could not establish how he entered the water and returned no verdict of intent, and later suggestions of suicide, tied to the risk of a scandal over his private life, have circulated among historians without ever being substantiated. The chemist William Crookes tested the medium Florence Cook's materialisations and vouched for them; writers since the 1960s have argued he either knew she produced them herself or was personally involved with her, which would explain a rigor he showed in no other setting, but the argument rests on circumstantial reading of his published accounts rather than surviving correspondence. And the commonly cited toll of about 778 dead at Kanungu in 2000, at the church and several satellite grave sites tied to the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God, is assembled from site counts rather than an identified register; the leaders were sought and never produced, and no comprehensive identification of the remains was carried out, so both the total and what became of them stay open rather than merely disputed.