Disputed Statements

Chamomile, 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

Channelling, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No controlled study has identified channelled information the channeller could not plausibly have known, and no channelled entity has provided independently verified information unknown to the channeller in advance.

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

Cherubim, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Celestial Hierarchy, which sets out the ninefold order of angels including this choir, circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul named at Acts 17:34. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) traces how this ascription gave the work the standing of a companion of the apostles.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Cherubim, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Renaissance scholars established that the ascription could not be genuine: the place of origin recorded elsewhere on this page places the work's actual composition in Greek, in Syria, around the year 500, some four centuries after Dionysius the Areopagite would have lived. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) treats the ascription's rejection as settled since the Renaissance.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Cherubim, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The true author's identity has never been recovered. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) is among the scholarship that refers to him only as Pseudo-Dionysius, a name that records the unmasking of the Areopagite ascription rather than identifying who he actually was.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Chervil, 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

Chervil, 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

Chickweed, 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

Chickweed, 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

Christian Rosenkreuz, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

Frances A. Yates's The Rosicrucian Enlightenment (Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972) traces Christian Rosenkreuz's claimed dates and the 1614 discovery of his intact tomb, filled with symbolic objects and a prophecy of the order's future revelation, to the two Rosicrucian manifestos published in Kassel and Frankfurt in 1614 and 1615. Yates's method is textual and historical: reading the manifestos themselves as the sole source for the tomb story, set against the complete absence of any independent record of Rosenkreuz's life, she treats the account as a literary and allegorical device constructed to launch the Rosicrucian movement rather than as the record of a historical person's actual tomb, which is why the atlas records his supplied dates as those the manifestos assert rather than as documented biography.

Source The Rosicrucian Enlightenment, Frances A. Yates tier 1

Christopher, Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Text

Currently States Medieval hagiography's best known account has him carrying a child across a river who proves to be Christ himself, bearing the weight of the world, a story with no reliable historical basis behind it.

Source The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church, 3rd revised edition, F. L. Cross and E. A. Livingstone (eds.) tier 1

Chrysoberyl, 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

Chrysoberyl, 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

Chrysoberyl Cats Eye, 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

Chrysoberyl Cats Eye, 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

Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Organizations

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States That ordinances banning ritual animal killing, while exempting kosher slaughter, commercial slaughter, hunting, pest control and the feeding of live rabbits to greyhounds, were neutral laws of general application.

Rejected by a unanimous Supreme Court. The pattern of exemptions was what settled it: the ordinances fell on the religious killing of animals and on almost nothing else, so they were neither neutral nor generally applicable and had to survive the strictest scrutiny, which they did not. The city's stated interests in public health and animal welfare could have been served by rules far short of a flat prohibition.

Source Church of the Lukumi Babalu Aye, Inc. v. City of Hialeah, 508 U.S. 520, Supreme Court of the United States tier 1

Citrine, 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

Citrine, 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

Clairaudience, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No experiment has isolated clairaudience as a distinct testable claim; its evidentiary record is inherited from the broader and unreplicated study of mediumship.

Clairaudience was coined alongside clairvoyance in French mesmerist practice and carried into English-language spiritualism by the 1860s as a name for mediums who reported hearing spirit voices rather than seeing spirit forms. Ruth Brandon's The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (1983) records that, unlike telepathy, clairvoyance or precognition, no dedicated controlled laboratory study of clairaudience specifically has ever been conducted. The method available for assessment is therefore not a direct experimental test but an extension from the general mediumship and extrasensory perception literature, whose recording, shielding and cold-reading problems are documented across the wider nineteenth and twentieth century spiritualist record Brandon surveys. Because no purpose-built controlled test of the specific claim exists to either pass or fail, the replication status rests on that extended general record rather than on any dedicated experiment of its own, which is why the atlas records the claim as debunked by extension rather than by a direct test.

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

Clairvoyance, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No clairvoyance protocol from the Rhine era has been reproduced by independent laboratories under matched conditions; the research line was largely superseded by remote viewing testing after 1970.

Clairvoyance descends from the "clear seeing" reported by artificially somnambulised subjects in French mesmerist circles descended from Puysegur's animal-magnetism experiments of the 1780s, and entered laboratory parapsychology through J. Gaither Pratt's Pearce-Pratt series, run under J. B. Rhine at Duke University in the 1930s. Terence Hines's Pseudoscience and the Paranormal (2003) documents the recording and shielding weaknesses of the Pearce-Pratt and related Rhine-era clairvoyance trials, including sightline and timing problems later inspection of the Duke buildings raised. The method critics apply is a documentary and procedural re-examination of the original trial conditions rather than a new experiment, since no controlled clairvoyance result from that era has been independently reproduced under conditions ruling out these weaknesses. Because the trials most often cited in clairvoyance's favour carry these documented procedural problems and no comparable result has replicated cleanly since, mainstream psychology treats clairvoyance as an unsupported claim.

Source Pseudoscience and the Paranormal, Terence Hines tier 1