Disputed Statements

Menstruation and the Sacred, Doctrines

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Genuinely disputed within this tradition

Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb's edited volume Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation (University of California Press, 1988) surveys scholarly readings of menstrual restriction and taboo across religious traditions, comparing ethnographic case studies against one another, and records these readings as contested, ranging from purity-based explanations rooted in structuralist anthropology to feminist re-readings of the same restrictions as social control instruments rather than religious purity concerns.

Source Blood Magic: The Anthropology of Menstruation, Thomas Buckley and Alma Gottlieb (editors) tier 1

Mental Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Mental Body, Aura Layers

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1987

According To Seven-layer aura (Barbara Brennan, Hands of Light)

Kurt Leland's Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan (Ibis Press, 2016), which traces the aura and chakra literature through to Brennan, dates Barbara Ann Brennan's Hands of Light, the same book credited elsewhere on this page with fixing the seven named aura layers and their pairing with the seven chakras, to 1987 by its publisher's catalogue record, while some other library catalogues list the same first edition as 1988. Leland notes the one-year discrepancy without resolving it; it most likely reflects the ordinary gap between a book's stated copyright year and its public release the following year, a common source of one-year catalogue disagreements. The atlas's own articles on the aura layers follow 1987, and this property records that year while flagging the alternative rather than asserting either flatly.

Source Rainbow Body: A History of the Western Chakra System from Blavatsky to Brennan, Kurt Leland tier 1

Mesoamerican Ballgame, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Used, but its validity as a comparative category is disputed

The Mesoamerican ballgame was played across a very wide area and a very long span of pre-Columbian history, and the archaeological and iconographic record, ball courts, carved relief panels and painted ceramics, shows some depictions clearly associated with sacrificial imagery and others showing no such association at all. David Carrasco's Religions of Mesoamerica, second edition (2013), records that which specific matches, or which classes of match, carried genuine ritual sacrificial stakes as against which were played purely recreationally remains an active area of Mesoamerican scholarship, since the same game form served different societies and periods across its long history. The method is archaeological and iconographic, reading ball court architecture, relief carving and ceramic depictions site by site rather than assuming a single meaning applies uniformly. Because the game's documented range spans societies as different as the Classic Maya and the later Aztec, each with their own use of it, no single answer to which stakes applied where has displaced the others, and the question remains genuinely open across the field.

Source Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, David Carrasco tier 1

Mesoamerican Ballgame, Rituals

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Human sacrifice is archaeologically attested in connection with some ballgame matches, but scholars caution it was not universal to the game across its full span; recreational and gambling-oriented play is equally well documented

Source Religions of Mesoamerica, 2nd edition, David Carrasco tier 1

Metal, Elements

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Wu xing is better rendered five phases or five agents than five elements. The five are stages in cycles of generation and conquest, not the material constituents the Greek four are; translating them as elements imports a Greek question the Chinese scheme does not ask.

Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Cambridge University Press, 1959, compares the Chinese wu xing scheme against the Greek four-element tradition that the standard English rendering five elements invites readers to equate it with. Needham's method is textual and conceptual comparison: reading the wu xing sources against the Greek physical tradition, he finds the two schemes ask different questions, the Greek scheme asking what physical things are made of, wu xing describing how five phases, wood, fire, earth, metal and water, generate and restrain one another in cyclical relationships, a theory of process rather than of material composition. Both five elements and the more literal five phases remain in scholarly use as translations, and Needham's own study does not choose between them, but his comparison shows that equating the Chinese scheme with the Greek elements misrepresents what it claims.

Source Science and Civilisation in China, Volume 3: Mathematics and the Sciences of the Heavens and the Earth, Joseph Needham tier 1

Methodius of Thessalonica, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 815

The source gives this birth year as approximate (circa), while the death is dated to a specific day.

Source Byzantine Missions Among the Slavs: SS. Constantine-Cyril and Methodius, Francis Dvornik tier 1

Metis, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Scholarly Standing Detail

Currently States Whether the goddess Metis was ever an independently worshipped early deity or is better read as a personification of the abstract quality of cunning intelligence already recognized in Greek thought, a reading Detienne and Vernant's study has encouraged.

Detienne and Vernant's study of metis as a mode of cunning intelligence in Greek culture has led some scholars to read the goddess Metis less as an independently worshipped early deity than as a personification built around an abstract quality already recognized in Greek thought, since she receives no cult of her own and appears in myth chiefly as a genealogical and symbolic figure absorbed into Zeus rather than as an object of worship in her own right.

Source Cunning Intelligence in Greek Culture and Society, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Pierre Vernant, translated by Janet Lloyd tier 1

Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia, Custodians & Museums

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Relevant Holding

Currently States Chalice of Valencia (Santo Caliz), held since 1437 and venerated as the Holy Grail

The Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia holds the Holy Chalice, an agate cup mounted in a medieval gold setting and venerated by tradition as the cup used by Christ at the Last Supper. The cathedral's own published institutional record on the object holds that the agate cup itself is plausibly ancient, consistent in material and workmanship with Mediterranean antiquity, but that its medieval gold mounting and its specific identification as the Last Supper cup rest on tradition rather than on an unbroken documentary chain connecting the object continuously from the first century to its appearance in the historical record centuries later. The method is art-historical and archaeological, dating the agate bowl itself by comparison with other securely dated ancient stone vessels, separately from the later goldwork mounting, which can be dated more precisely by its own medieval decorative style. Because the plausible ancient date of the bowl and the historical identification of that specific bowl as the one used at the Last Supper are two separate claims resting on different evidence, the antiquity is not seriously doubted while the identification remains a matter of tradition rather than documented continuity.

Source Metropolitan Cathedral of Valencia (institutional record) tier 2

Metta, Virtues

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States Taught within the earliest strata of the Pali Canon; the canon's own compilation and dating remain debated among scholars, spanning oral transmission from the Buddha's lifetime through committal to writing centuries later. Its systematic treatment as the first brahmavihara is fixed to Buddhaghosa's fifth century CE Visuddhimagga.

Source Visuddhimagga (The Path of Purification), Buddhaghosa tier 1

Mexicayotl, Religions

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Restoration Claim

Currently States Adherents present Mexicayotl as a direct restoration of Aztec and Nahua religion and philosophy. Mexica-identifying scholars and practitioners writing on mexika.org have documented that the movement foundational texts rely heavily on invented and reinterpreted material rather than a continuous unbroken transmission, since Spanish conquest and colonial evangelization broke institutional continuity with pre-Hispanic religious practice by the sixteenth century.

Adherents present Mexicayotl as a direct restoration; Mexica-identifying critics call the foundational texts pseudohistorical.

Source Mexika.org, "The Pseudohistorical Origins of the Mexicayotl Movement," 2017 tier 2

Michael Cerularius, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit Start Year

Currently States 1000

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Michael Cerularius, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Lifespan or Floruit End Year

Currently States 1059

The source marks this year circa, its own approximate estimate rather than a fixed date.

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

Michael Harner, Historical Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether core shamanism's deliberate separation of technique from specific indigenous cultural and religious context is a legitimate distillation of shared method or an appropriation of sacred material

Michael Harner's The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice (American Ethnologist, 1977) is the scholarly credential behind Harner's later founding of the Foundation for Shamanic Studies and his core shamanism training method, which extracts shamanic technique from the specific cosmologies of the Indigenous traditions Harner studied and teaches it to non-Indigenous students independent of those cosmologies. Some Indigenous practitioners and scholars of religion argue that separating the technique from the belief system that gives it meaning amounts to appropriation of closed cultural material; Harner and the Foundation maintained the two could coexist, arguing that revenue from core-shamanism training helped fund preservation efforts for the traditional practices themselves, a position the two sides have not reconciled.

Source The Ecological Basis for Aztec Sacrifice, Michael Harner tier 3

Micro-Psychokinesis, Psi Phenomena

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States PEAR's random-event-generator trials, run over 28 years, reported small statistical deviations correlated with operator intention.

Robert Jahn and Brenda Dunne founded and ran the Princeton Engineering Anomalies Research laboratory from 1979 to 2007, testing whether a human operator's stated intention could produce a small statistical bias in the output of a hardware random event generator across very large numbers of trials, the claim set out in Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World (1987). The method is statistical, pooling many thousands of binary trials across many sessions and operators to detect a bias too small to see in any single run, which is itself the disputed feature: critics argue that pooling large-scale trial data this way can produce apparent statistical significance from very small mundane biases in the hardware or in trial selection, rather than from any genuine mental effect. No independent replication using the PEAR protocol has reached wide acceptance outside laboratories with an existing commitment to the research programme. Because the dispute concerns the statistical methodology's own vulnerability to small biases at that scale rather than any single dramatic result, micro-psychokinesis remains a debated key experiment rather than a claim either side's reanalysis has closed.

Source Margins of Reality: The Role of Consciousness in the Physical World, Robert G. Jahn, Brenda J. Dunne tier 2

Mielikki, Deities

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Mielikki's name is most often traced to Finnish mieli, "mind" or "mood" or "favor," with a diminutive ending, read as the goddess whose favor a hunter needs to win. An alternative proposal instead connects it to mieltya, "to grow fond of." Neither derivation is settled among Finnish folklorists.

Source Kalevala Mythology, Juha Y. Pentikainen tier 1

Mim م, Alphabet Letters

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Meaning in the Attesting Source

Currently States One of the fourteen letters that stand disjoined at the head of a sura

According To The disjoined letters of the Quran

The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary (Seyyed Hossein Nasr, editor-in-chief, HarperOne, 2015) surveys the classical and modern commentary tradition on the disjoined letters that open certain suras and reports no consensus reached across fourteen centuries of that commentary. The positions it records include that the meaning is known to God alone, that the letters abbreviate divine names or attributes, that they function as an oath, that they present ordinary letters of the language as a rhetorical challenge, and that some began as scribal or collectors' marks later treated as scripture. Comparing the internal textual evidence, which letters occur and in which suras, against the range of proposed readings, the commentary confirms which letters appear where while confirming that none of the proposed meanings has displaced the others.

Source The Study Quran: A New Translation and Commentary, Seyyed Hossein Nasr (editor-in-chief) tier 1

Minaret, Sacred Architecture

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States No minaret is attested in Islam's first century; the earliest surviving examples date to the Umayyad eighth century, and scholars debate whether the form derives from watchtowers, from absorbed church bell towers, or arose independently.

According To Islam

Source Encyclopaedia of Islam (Brill), 2nd and 3rd editions, P. Bearman et al. (eds.) tier 1

Mirabai, Figures

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Historicity

Currently States Historically attested

The Encyclopedia of Hinduism (2008) records Mirabai as a Rajput noblewoman and poet of the sixteenth century, while examining the traditional biography built around her and finding almost every specific detail of it legendary, and that the devotional songs sung under her name accumulated over the centuries following her death rather than deriving entirely from her own hand.

Source Encyclopedia of Hinduism, Denise Cush, Catherine Robinson and Michael York (eds.) tier 1

Miracle of the Sun, Miracles

Standing Scholarly debate

Concerns Skeptical Explanation

Currently States Joe Nickell argues the reported solar movement matches known effects of prolonged sun gazing, including retinal afterimages and involuntary eye movement, and notes observers outside the crowd saw no such motion in the same sun.

Believers hold the crowd witnessed a genuine external sign; skeptics attribute it to optical strain and expectation in a crowd primed by months of anticipation. Both camps agree on what was reported; they disagree on its cause.

Source The Real Secrets of Fatima, Joe Nickell tier 1