Disputed Statements

Elder, 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

Elder, 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

Elder (Ruis), 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 Blood and Mistletoe: The History of the Druids in Britain, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Electronic Voice Phenomena, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Key Experiment

Currently States Imants Baruss's 2001 controlled replication attempt, published in the Journal of Scientific Exploration, used blank-tape and radio-screened recording conditions to rule out stray broadcasts and equipment artifacts as an explanation, and produced no voices attributable to a paranormal source.

Baruss ran a two-year attempt to reproduce EVP recordings under conditions that excluded ordinary radio interference, the leading mundane explanation for the reported voices; finding none supports the mundane account over the paranormal one. This is the controlled test its own description already dates to 2001. An earlier version of this fact instead cited Raudive's own 1971 book Breakthrough, a source that argues for the phenomenon and records no screened failure of his own, for an event Raudive could not have taken part in as described: he died in 1974, twenty seven years before 2001.

Source Failure to Replicate Electronic Voice Phenomena, Imants Baruss tier 1

Electronic Voice Phenomena, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States A controlled replication attempt using radio-screened recording conditions found no anomalous voices; mainstream science attributes reported EVP to auditory pareidolia and radio-frequency interference.

Source Failure to Replicate Electronic Voice Phenomena, Imants Baruss tier 1

Emerald, 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

Emerald, 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

Emperor Wu of Liang, Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Mythic Association

Currently States The exchange with Bodhidharma in which the monk tells him his monasteries have earned no merit whatsoever

According To Zen

John R. McRae's Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism (University of California Press, 2003) traces the famous dialogue between Bodhidharma and Emperor Wu of Liang through the textual record. McRae's method is source-critical, and he finds the earliest biography of Bodhidharma, in a seventh century collection of eminent monks, knows of no meeting with the emperor at all; the dialogue itself first appears only in Chan lineage texts of the eighth century and grows in elaboration across later collections until it reaches its familiar form in the eleventh century. McRae treats the episode as a retrospective composition made while the Chan school was constructing its own genealogy of transmission, and records that no scholarly camp argues for the meeting's historicity, which is why this fact is recorded as debunked rather than debated.

Source Seeing Through Zen: Encounter, Transformation, and Genealogy in Chinese Chan Buddhism, John R. McRae tier 1

Eye of Providence, Religious Symbols

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The documentary record of the Great Seal traces the eye to the seal committees and the stock of European religious art they drew on, not to Masonic or Illuminati design. The conspiracy literature attached to the emblem is a later genre with its own traceable history.

The cited documentary history of the seal establishes the committee record. What is set aside is an attribution about where the design came from, settled from archives rather than by any test.

Source The Eagle and the Shield: A History of the Great Seal of the United States, Richard S. Patterson and Richardson Dougall tier 1

Feeling the Future, Studies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States Three failed direct replications reported by Ritchie, Wiseman and French in 2012, seven more plus a null meta-analysis by Galak and colleagues in the same year, and no accepted independent confirmation since

Daryl Bem's 2011 paper Feeling the Future reported nine experiments using standard priming, habituation and recall paradigms with the time order reversed, so the event supposed to cause a change in behaviour occurred after the behaviour it was said to influence. Stuart Ritchie, Richard Wiseman and Christopher French, in Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect (2012), ran three independent replications of one of Bem's nine experiments using his own published procedure and found no effect in any of them. Bem and collaborators later published a 2015 meta-analysis pooling ninety attempted replications and reported a small positive effect across the pool. The method throughout is direct experimental replication, and critics of the 2015 meta-analysis attribute its pooled result to publication bias and analytic flexibility rather than a real retrocausal effect. Because the specific, pre-registered replications failed even as the pooled analysis reported a small effect, the replication status is recorded as debunked on the direct replications while the pooled-analysis dispute continues in its own right.

Source Failing the Future: Three Unsuccessful Attempts to Replicate Bem's Retroactive Facilitation of Recall Effect, Stuart J. Ritchie, Richard Wiseman, Christopher C. French tier 1

Fennel, 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

Fennel, 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

Feverfew, 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

Feverfew, 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

Fire Agate, 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

Fire Agate, 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

Fly Agaric, Plants

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States A modern folk theory holds that Santa Claus derives from Siberian shamans who ate fly agaric and were pulled on reindeer sledges; historian Ronald Hutton traces the documented lineage through Saint Nicholas of Myra, Dutch Sinterklaas and Thomas Nast's nineteenth century cartoons, and finds no evidence connecting the mushroom to Santa's origin. The correction is documentary history, not a study.

Corrected by documentary history rather than by experiment, so no study is linked here, and none should be.

Source The Stations of the Sun: A History of the Ritual Year in Britain, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Friedrich Max Muller, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns How Its Legacy Is Contested

Currently States His theory that myth arises from a disease of language, and that most Indo-European gods are solar, was rejected in his own lifetime and is not defended today.

Friedrich Max Muller's comparative mythology, most fully set out across his own scholarly corpus including the philological method he applied in works such as his Dhammapada translation (Sacred Books of the East, Clarendon Press, 1881), argued that myths arose from a disease of language, figurative solar and natural descriptions later misread as literal narratives about gods and heroes. Later comparative mythologists and, especially, ethnographic fieldworkers among the living oral traditions Muller's theory claimed to explain tested the solar-mythology framework against actual recorded myth-making and found it did not hold up: myths recorded directly from their tellers did not show the linguistic-decay pattern the theory predicted. The comparative philological discipline Muller helped found survived the abandonment of that specific theory.

Source The Dhammapada (Sacred Books of the East, vol. 10, part 1), F. Max Muller tier 2

Fumitory, 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

Fumitory, 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