Disputed Statements

Ash (Nion), Celtic Tree Signs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

Ronald Hutton's Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale University Press, 2009) traces the "Celtic tree calendar" and its thirteen tree birth-signs to Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), a work of poetic criticism rather than historical scholarship. Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam (An Sagart, 1991), the standard study of the ogham script, independently confirms that ogham is a twenty-letter alphabet used for short memorial and boundary inscriptions, with no calendrical function recorded anywhere in its documented use. Checking Graves's claim against the surviving corpus, Hutton finds no Irish, Welsh or classical source describing a thirteen-month tree calendar or a tree zodiac; Graves built the scheme himself from the ogham letter-names, which do include tree names, by an interpretive leap the surviving texts do not support. The two studies together set the calendar aside as a modern literary invention rather than an inherited Celtic system.

Source A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus tier 1

Astral Projection, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No test of astral projection's claim to perceive a real, distant, unknown location has exceeded chance under controlled conditions; researchers treat the underlying experience as equivalent to the out-of-body experience studied neurologically.

Source Stimulating Illusory Own-Body Perceptions, Olaf Blanke, Stephanie Ortigue, Theodor Landis, Margitta Seeck tier 1

Athanasian Creed, Creeds & Confessions

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The creed carries the name of Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth century defender of Nicene orthodoxy, but Athanasius wrote in Greek while the text is a Latin composition. J. N. D. Kelly's The Athanasian Creed (Adam and Charles Black, 1964) dates its actual origin to southern Gaul around 500, arguing from its vocabulary and its use in the circle of Caesarius of Arles, and notes the ascription has not been held by scholarship since the seventeenth century even though the traditional name has stuck to the text.

J. N. D. Kelly's The Athanasian Creed (Adam and Charles Black, 1964) examined the traditional ascription of this creed to Athanasius of Alexandria, the fourth century defender of Nicene orthodoxy, against the fact that Athanasius wrote in Greek while the surviving text is a Latin composition. Arguing from the creed's vocabulary and its use within the circle of Caesarius of Arles, he dates its actual origin to southern Gaul around the year 500, and records that the Athanasian ascription has not been held by scholarship since the seventeenth century, even though the traditional name has stuck to the text in ordinary usage.

Source The Athanasian Creed, J. N. D. Kelly tier 1

Athanasius Kircher, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Test Result

Currently States Debunked

Encyclopaedia Britannica's entry on Athanasius Kircher documents how his Oedipus Aegyptiacus (1652 to 1654) read the Egyptian hieroglyphs as a mystical Hermetic script encoding a lost universal wisdom, an interpretive method built on Renaissance Hermetic assumptions about the glyphs' symbolic meaning rather than on any grammar. Jean-Francois Champollion's nineteenth century decipherment of the Rosetta Stone, comparing its parallel Greek, Demotic and hieroglyphic texts to work out the actual phonetic values of the signs, established instead that hieroglyphic writing is a largely phonetic system recording ordinary spoken Egyptian, and subsequent Egyptology built on that method has shown Kircher's symbolic readings do not correspond to what the signs say. Kircher's book is valued today as a document of Renaissance Hermeticism rather than as a source on Egyptian religion.

Source Athanasius Kircher, Encyclopaedia Britannica editors tier 2

Aurum Potabile, Alchemical Substances

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Toxicity

Currently States Genuine dilute gold-salt or colloidal-gold preparations carry limited toxicity in small dose. The broad curative virtue the alchemical literature attributes to drinkable gold has no counterpart in modern pharmacology.

What is set aside here is the alchemical claim of a universal medicine, which is a doctrine rather than a tested hypothesis. The toxicity statement is chemistry, taken from the cited reference work.

Source Nature's Building Blocks: An A-Z Guide to the Elements, John Emsley tier 1

Automatic Writing, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Pearl Curran's "Patience Worth" dictations, beginning on a Ouija board in July 1913 and continuing across more than two decades, generated four published novels and a large body of poetry attributed to a seventeenth-century spirit.

Automatic writing was practiced under that name within spiritualism from the 1850s, where mediums produced written text they attributed to spirit control while their conscious attention was reportedly elsewhere. Pierre Janet and Frederic Myers, working independently in the 1880s and 1890s, established the psychological explanation now generally accepted, that the writing is produced by the writer's own subconscious mind in a state of partial dissociation from ordinary conscious awareness, drawing on memories and associations the writer is not attending to rather than on any external communicating agency. Ruth Brandon's The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983) records that the phenomenon is consequently studied by scholars today chiefly as a major case of dissociated literary composition rather than as verified evidence of spirit communication. The method Janet and Myers applied was clinical and experimental psychological observation of dissociative states generally, which is why the explanation is treated as well-supported rather than as one side's reading of a contested experiment.

Source The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Ruth Brandon tier 1

Aztec Sun Stone, Religious Symbols

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Popularly called the Aztec calendar. It is a carved monument bearing calendrical signs, not a calendar in use, and the identity of the central face, Tonatiuh, or the earth, or another figure, is disputed.

The monument is popularly called the Aztec calendar and it is not one. It is a carved basalt disc bearing calendrical signs, a monument that depicts the calendar, not an instrument used to keep it. The identity of the central face is itself unsettled: Tonatiuh the sun, Tlaltecuhtli the earth, and the face of the fifth era have each been argued.

Source Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.) tier 1

Basil, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Basil, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Bay Laurel, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Bay Laurel, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1653

According To Culpeper, The Complete Herbal

Agnes Arber's Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670 (Cambridge University Press, 1938) surveys the printed herbals of that two-century period and documents how the doctrine of signatures, that a plant's form, colour or habit declares its medicinal use, a yellow flower for the Sun, a perforated leaf for light, a plant of wet ground for the Moon, was applied inconsistently from one compiler to the next. Comparing planetary and use attributions for the same plants across different herbals, Arber finds no agreement between authors, direct evidence the method is a theory of resemblance rather than one of observation or testing. Where a signature plant does have a real effect, as St John's Wort, willow and the poppy do, Arber traces that activity to the plant's chemistry, unconnected to its appearance. The instability she documents between compilers is why this atlas gives no single planetary attribution as settled.

Source Herbals: Their Origin and Evolution: A Chapter in the History of Botany, 1470-1670, Agnes Arber tier 1

Bioplasma, Subtle Energies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Tested By

Currently States Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary (John Wiley & Sons, 2003) records that bioplasma theory, put forward by Soviet biophysicist Victor Inyushin at Kazakh State University from the 1950s and popularised through its association with Kirlian photography, the coronal electrical discharge technique developed by Semyon and Valentina Kirlian in the 1930s, was tested by independent investigation from the 1970s onward asking whether the Kirlian corona actually required a life-specific bioplasmic energy field to explain it.

Source The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, Robert Todd Carroll tier 2

Bioplasma, Subtle Energies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Test Result

Currently States Subsequent controlled investigation, as recorded in Robert Todd Carroll's The Skeptic's Dictionary (John Wiley & Sons, 2003), found that the coronal discharge captured in Kirlian photography, the effect Victor Inyushin's supporters interpreted as a direct image of a bioplasmic energy field surrounding a living thing, is fully explained by ordinary physical variables, the moisture, pressure, electrical grounding and voltage applied to the object photographed, without any need to posit a life-specific bioplasmic field.

Source The Skeptic's Dictionary: A Collection of Strange Beliefs, Amusing Deceptions, and Dangerous Delusions, Robert Todd Carroll tier 2

Birch (Beth), Celtic Tree Signs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

Ronald Hutton's Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain (Yale University Press, 2009) traces the "Celtic tree calendar" and its thirteen tree birth-signs to Robert Graves's The White Goddess (1948), a work of poetic criticism rather than historical scholarship. Damian McManus's A Guide to Ogam (An Sagart, 1991), the standard study of the ogham script, independently confirms that ogham is a twenty-letter alphabet used for short memorial and boundary inscriptions, with no calendrical function recorded anywhere in its documented use. Checking Graves's claim against the surviving corpus, Hutton finds no Irish, Welsh or classical source describing a thirteen-month tree calendar or a tree zodiac; Graves built the scheme himself from the ogham letter-names, which do include tree names, by an interpretive leap the surviving texts do not support. The two studies together set the calendar aside as a modern literary invention rather than an inherited Celtic system.

Source A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus tier 1

Black Obsidian, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1970

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Black Obsidian, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1990

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Black Tourmaline, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1970

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Black Tourmaline, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1990

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Bloodstone, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1970

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1

Bloodstone, Gemstones

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1990

According To Modern crystal healing, from the 1970s

Wouter J. Hanegraaff's New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought (Brill, 1996) traces the specific modern crystal-healing framework, cleansing and charging stones, programming them with intention, correspondence to the chakras, crystal grids, and the accompanying Atlantean and Lemurian origin story, through its twentieth-century New Age sources, and shows the vocabulary and practices appearing and developing within that documented literature rather than being continuous with antiquity. Hanegraaff does not dispute that stones were worn, carved and credited with virtues in ancient societies, a separate and much older practice attested archaeologically, but the specific modern framework's own textual history is what this property records as recent. That the ancient-provenance claim is false is a historical finding about when the current framework appeared, not a judgement on the practice's legitimacy.

Source New Age Religion and Western Culture: Esotericism in the Mirror of Secular Thought, Wouter J. Hanegraaff tier 1