Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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Divinity Atlas

Disputed Statements

Claims this atlas currently marks as unsettled or as tested and found false. A debated fact is one scholars hold competing positions on; a debunked one has been checked against the record and found not to hold. Both are kept in view rather than quietly smoothed over, with the reasoning that put each one where it stands.

3,882 statements.

Garlic, Origin Period End Year1653

Garlic, Plants

Standing

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

Garlic, Origin Period Start Year1653

Garlic, Plants

Standing

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

Garnet, Origin Period Start Year1970

Garnet, Gemstones

Standing

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

Garnet, Origin Period End Year1990

Garnet, Gemstones

Standing

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

Gerald Massey, Standing as a Comparative CategoryNon-scholarly in Egyptology, then and now.

Gerald Massey, Historical Figures

Standing

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Non-scholarly in Egyptology, then and now.

Massey worked entirely outside professional Egyptology, which was itself only becoming a rigorous discipline (Champollion's decipherment of hieroglyphs dates only to 1822) during his own lifetime. His translations and etymological arguments were not accepted by his contemporaries in the field and have no standing in modern Egyptology; no Egyptian text supports the specific Horus biography he constructed. His claims are non-scholarly rather than merely outdated scholarship, since they never held scholarly standing to begin with.

Source Ancient Egypt: The Light of the World (Gerald Massey), Gerald Massey

Golem, Origin PeriodThe specific legend of a golem built in Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew is a nineteenth century story, later by many centuries than the golem concept itself, which the record traces back through the Hasidei Ashkenaz of twelfth and thirteenth century Germany to the Talmudic anecdote of Rava forming a man and sending him to Rabbi Zeira. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study that traces this long prior history and dates the Prague legend specifically to its nineteenth century emergence, separate from and much later than that older tradition.

Golem, Mythical Creatures

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The specific legend of a golem built in Prague by Rabbi Judah Loew is a nineteenth century story, later by many centuries than the golem concept itself, which the record traces back through the Hasidei Ashkenaz of twelfth and thirteenth century Germany to the Talmudic anecdote of Rava forming a man and sending him to Rabbi Zeira. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study that traces this long prior history and dates the Prague legend specifically to its nineteenth century emergence, separate from and much later than that older tradition.

According To The Prague golem legend and its nineteenth-century formation

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel

Golem, Origin PeriodThe golem story's attachment specifically to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague appears in print no earlier than the 1830s, centuries after Loew's own lifetime and long after the golem concept's own origin in the Talmudic Rava and Zeira anecdote and its later ecstatic use among the Hasidei Ashkenaz. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study that dates this specific literary attachment to the 1830s rather than to Loew's own era.

Golem, Mythical Creatures

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The golem story's attachment specifically to Rabbi Judah Loew of Prague appears in print no earlier than the 1830s, centuries after Loew's own lifetime and long after the golem concept's own origin in the Talmudic Rava and Zeira anecdote and its later ecstatic use among the Hasidei Ashkenaz. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study that dates this specific literary attachment to the 1830s rather than to Loew's own era.

According To The Prague golem legend and its nineteenth-century formation

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel

Golem, Origin PeriodThe golem of Prague story's now familiar form, the version most widely known today, was fixed in Yudl Rosenberg's Niflaos Maharal, published in 1909, three centuries after the death of Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, to whom the story is attached. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) identifies Rosenberg's 1909 book as the specific literary source of the story's familiar modern shape.

Golem, Mythical Creatures

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The golem of Prague story's now familiar form, the version most widely known today, was fixed in Yudl Rosenberg's Niflaos Maharal, published in 1909, three centuries after the death of Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, to whom the story is attached. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) identifies Rosenberg's 1909 book as the specific literary source of the story's familiar modern shape.

According To The Prague golem legend and its nineteenth-century formation

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel

Golem, Origin PeriodNo writing by Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, himself, and no source contemporary with his sixteenth century lifetime, records the golem story later attached to his name; the association appears only in print from the 1830s and reaches its familiar modern form only in 1909. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study establishing this absence from the Maharal's own corpus and from his own era's record.

Golem, Mythical Creatures

Standing

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States No writing by Rabbi Judah Loew, the Maharal, himself, and no source contemporary with his sixteenth century lifetime, records the golem story later attached to his name; the association appears only in print from the 1830s and reaches its familiar modern form only in 1909. Moshe Idel's Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid (State University of New York Press, 1990) is the study establishing this absence from the Maharal's own corpus and from his own era's record.

According To The Prague golem legend and its nineteenth-century formation

Source Golem: Jewish Magical and Mystical Traditions on the Artificial Anthropoid, Moshe Idel

Graphology, Replication StatusA meta-analytic review by Gershon Ben-Shakhar and colleagues found graphologists' apparent predictive validity tracked the informational content of what was written rather than the physical form of the handwriting; on neutral, content-free text their accuracy was no better than chance, and no better than untrained laypeople.

Graphology, Disciplines

Standing

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States A meta-analytic review by Gershon Ben-Shakhar and colleagues found graphologists' apparent predictive validity tracked the informational content of what was written rather than the physical form of the handwriting; on neutral, content-free text their accuracy was no better than chance, and no better than untrained laypeople.

Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Maya Bar-Hillel, Yoram Bilu, Edor Ben-Abba and Anat Flug published The Predictive Validity of Graphological Inferences: A Meta-Analytic Approach in Personality and Individual Differences in 1986. The method was meta-analysis, pooling multiple published studies testing graphologists' ability to infer personality traits from handwriting, comparing performance on samples where the writer had copied a fixed, content-free text against samples where the writer had written freely. The review found graphologists' apparent accuracy tracked the informational content of what was written rather than the physical form of the handwriting; on the neutral, content-free text their accuracy was no better than chance, and no better than untrained laypeople. Because the effect disappears exactly when informational content is controlled for, the review treats handwriting form itself as carrying no diagnostic signal.

Source The Predictive Validity of Graphological Inferences: A Meta-Analytic Approach, Gershon Ben-Shakhar, Maya Bar-Hillel, Yoram Bilu, Edor Ben-Abba, Anat Flug

Green Aventurine, Origin Period Start Year1970

Green Aventurine, Gemstones

Standing

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

Green Aventurine, Origin Period End Year1990

Green Aventurine, Gemstones

Standing

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

Green Calcite, Origin Period Start Year1970

Green Calcite, Gemstones

Standing

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

Green Calcite, Origin Period End Year1990

Green Calcite, Gemstones

Standing

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

Green Tourmaline, Origin Period Start Year1970

Green Tourmaline, Gemstones

Standing

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

Green Tourmaline, Origin Period End Year1990

Green Tourmaline, Gemstones

Standing

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

Harmony through Conflict, Origin of the NameA Theosophical coinage. Neither the name nor the scheme is found in any pre-modern tradition; the sevenfold pattern reuses older planetary and cosmological sevens, but the rays, their qualities and their planetary and colour attributions belong to the twentieth-century synthesis

Harmony through Conflict, Seven Rays

Standing

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States A Theosophical coinage. Neither the name nor the scheme is found in any pre-modern tradition; the sevenfold pattern reuses older planetary and cosmological sevens, but the rays, their qualities and their planetary and colour attributions belong to the twentieth-century synthesis

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) traces the Seven Rays teaching, with its qualities and its planetary and colour attributions, to Helena Blavatsky's late nineteenth-century Theosophical writings, later systematised into its fully developed form by Alice Bailey in the early twentieth century. Comparing the Theosophical texts against the older planetary and cosmological sevenfold schemes they draw on, the seven classical planets, the seven-day week, Hammer's study finds the older sevens recombined and reattributed rather than continued, so the rays as taught, their specific qualities, colours and hierarchy, belong to the Blavatsky-to-Bailey synthesis and not to any pre-modern source.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer

Harmony through Conflict, Standing as a Comparative CategoryLargely abandoned as a comparative category

Harmony through Conflict, Seven Rays

Standing

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

This is a historiographical judgement rather than an experimental result: the ray scheme is a metaphysical teaching, not a testable hypothesis, so no laboratory or field study addresses it directly. What Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge (Brill, 2001), a study within the academic field of Western esotericism, examined instead is the claim of ancient descent attached to the rays. Comparing the Theosophical texts' own rhetoric of ancient masters and hidden lineages against the documented publication history running from Blavatsky's writings to Bailey's systematic elaboration, Hammer's analysis reads the appeal to antiquity as one of several recurring strategies esoteric movements use to claim authority for a teaching, rather than as evidence of an actual line of transmission. On that historiographical reading the academic field treats the Seven Rays as a modern Theosophical construction, superseding the movement's own claim of ancient wisdom-tradition origin.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer

Harold Camping's 2011 Dates, Claimed FulfillmentThe Rapture of believers into heaven on May 21, 2011, followed by the physical end of the world on October 21, 2011. Neither the Rapture nor any global catastrophe was reported on either date by any independent news organization, government body or seismic monitoring service anywhere in the world, and Camping himself, in a statement broadcast on Family Radio shortly after October 21 passed without event, acknowledged that the outcome he had predicted did not occur.

Harold Camping's 2011 Dates, Prophecies

Standing

Concerns Claimed Fulfillment

Currently States The Rapture of believers into heaven on May 21, 2011, followed by the physical end of the world on October 21, 2011. Neither the Rapture nor any global catastrophe was reported on either date by any independent news organization, government body or seismic monitoring service anywhere in the world, and Camping himself, in a statement broadcast on Family Radio shortly after October 21 passed without event, acknowledged that the outcome he had predicted did not occur.

Source Time Has an End: A History of the End Times, Harold Camping

Hashshashin, Contested or Appropriated Modern UseMarco Polo's tale of a hidden garden of paradise used to drug and control the order's fida'i is treated by modern scholars as a hostile legend rather than documented practice; surviving Nizari sources describe an austere order.

Hashshashin, Secret Societies

Standing

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Marco Polo's tale of a hidden garden of paradise used to drug and control the order's fida'i is treated by modern scholars as a hostile legend rather than documented practice; surviving Nizari sources describe an austere order.

Source The Ismailis: Their History and Doctrines, 2nd edition, Farhad Daftary