Disputed Statements

Macro-Psychokinesis, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Notable Exposure

Currently States Uri Geller's spoon-bending demonstrations were reproduced using ordinary sleight of hand by magician James Randi, who showed the effect disappeared once utensils were kept from Geller's hands until the moment of demonstration.

Source The Truth About Uri Geller, James Randi tier 2

Macro-Psychokinesis, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States Macro-psychokinesis claims, table levitation, metal bending and large-scale object movement, are in principle easy to verify since the effect either happens under controlled conditions or it does not, which has made them a favourite target of conjurors and sceptical investigators. James Randi's The Truth About Uri Geller (Prometheus Books, 1982) documents the most cited case, reproducing Geller's spoon-bending demonstrations through ordinary sleight of hand and showing the effect disappeared once utensils were kept from Geller's hands until the moment of demonstration; every closely investigated historical macro-PK case has either failed under conditions ruling out ordinary physical explanations or been shown to rely on one.

Source The Truth About Uri Geller, James Randi tier 2

Malachite, 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

Malachite, 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

Margaret Murray, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Whether early modern witch trial defendants belonged to a real surviving pre-Christian fertility religion

Norman Cohn's Europe's Inner Demons (1975) and Ronald Hutton's The Triumph of the Moon (Oxford University Press, 1999) independently examined Margaret Murray's witch-cult thesis against the same early modern trial confessions she had used to build it, and both found the thesis constructed by selectively quoting those confessions while setting aside the material within the same testimony, accounts of flight, shapeshifting and supernatural encounter, that could not have been literally true and that Murray's own selective method required her to ignore. Cohn and Hutton's shared method was close comparative reading of the trial records themselves against Murray's published quotations from them, and on that basis no specialist in early modern witch trials defends Murray's organised pre-Christian pagan-cult thesis today.

Source The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft, Ronald Hutton tier 1

Marigold, 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

Marigold, 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

Marjoram, 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

Marjoram, 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

Mark Hofmann, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts's Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders (Signature Books, 1988) documents how Mark Hofmann's document corpus, led by the Salamander Letter sold as evidence complicating the official account of Mormon origins, was established as forged, first through forensic examination of ink and paper that could not have existed at the documents' claimed dates, and then confirmed by Hofmann's own 1987 confessions, made after his fabrications were exposed by the pipe bomb murders he committed in Salt Lake City to prevent that exposure.

Source Salamander: The Story of the Mormon Forgery Murders, Linda Sillitoe and Allen D. Roberts tier 1

Mary Magdalene, Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States Pope Gregory the Great's Homily 33 conflated her with the unnamed sinful woman of Luke 7 and with Mary of Bethany, a merged reading that shaped centuries of Western art and devotion until the Roman Catholic Church formally set it aside in the 1969 reform of the liturgical calendar.

Source Homily 33 on the Gospels, Gregory the Great tier 1

Materialization, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Replication Status

Currently States No materialization claim has been produced under conditions combining full physical restraint of the medium, full room search, and independent identification of the figure sufficient to rule out impersonation.

Source Researches in the Phenomena of Spiritualism, William Crookes tier 2

Materialization, Psi Phenomena

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Notable Exposure

Currently States Ruth Brandon's The Spiritualists: The Passion for the Occult in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1983) records that at a December 1873 seance, before chemist William Crookes began his own sustained investigation of the medium Florence Cook the following year, a sitter named William Volckman seized the materialized spirit form calling herself Katie King mid seance and found her build indistinguishable from Cook's own, an exposure attempt that predates and stands in tension with Crookes's later published account describing controls he believed ruled out fraud.

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

Matthew Hopkins, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Manner of Death

Currently States Executed

Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy (John Murray, 2005) checked the later legend that Matthew Hopkins was himself killed as a witch against the contemporary documentary record. Gaskill's method is archival: John Stearne, who worked directly beside Hopkins throughout his witch-finding campaign and had every reason to know the true circumstances, recorded an ordinary death by illness in his own contemporary account, and Hopkins's burial at Mistley in 1647 is separately recorded in the parish register. Gaskill treats the poetic-justice legend, which has no contemporary support at all, as worth stating as false explicitly rather than simply omitting, precisely because it survives as a satisfying story despite the documented record contradicting it.

Source Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Malcolm Gaskill tier 1

Matthew Hopkins, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Office Held

Currently States Witchfinder General.

Malcolm Gaskill's Witchfinders (John Murray, 2005) examined the seventeenth century English legal and ecclesiastical record for any office corresponding to Hopkins's self-applied title Witchfinder General and found none: no commission, no judicial appointment and no ecclesiastical position of that name existed in English law at the time. Gaskill's method is documentary, checking parliamentary, judicial and church records against Hopkins's own self-description, and finds he was in practice a private individual selling investigative services to parish authorities on a fee basis. Because the title is repeated so widely in popular history, Gaskill treats its absence from any official record as worth stating plainly rather than leaving unaddressed.

Source Witchfinders: A Seventeenth-Century English Tragedy, Malcolm Gaskill tier 1

Maya Codex of Mexico, Artifacts & Relics

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Prior Status

Currently States Suspected 20th-century forgery until 2018

The Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia's 2018 report The Maya Codex of Mexico: authentication of the former Grolier Codex examined the manuscript, previously suspected of being a modern forgery, through radiocarbon dating of its bark paper and chemical analysis of its Maya blue pigment. The Institute's method combined physical science with comparative codicology against the three other Maya codices accepted as genuine, and on that combined evidence the forgery hypothesis is now rejected, the radiocarbon and Maya blue results together establishing the codex as an authentic pre-Columbian Maya document rather than a twentieth century fabrication.

Source The Maya Codex of Mexico: authentication of the former Grolier Codex (INAH, 2018), Instituto Nacional de Antropologia e Historia tier 1

Maya Long Count, Calendars

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The completion of the thirteenth baktun on 21 December 2012 was widely presented as a Maya prophecy of the end of the world. The inscriptions record no such prophecy, Maya texts project dates well beyond it, and the claim is traceable to twentieth-century Western writing rather than to Maya sources. Maya organisations in Guatemala objected to it publicly

The completion of the thirteenth baktun on 21 December 2012 was widely presented as a Maya prophecy of the end of the world. The inscriptions record no such prophecy, Maya texts project dates well beyond 2012, and the apocalyptic claim is traceable to twentieth-century Western writing, not to Maya sources; Maya organisations in Guatemala objected to it publicly.

Source 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari tier 1

Mayan Astrology, Disciplines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Popular New Age "Mayan astrology," including Jose Arguelles's Dreamspell count, departs from the traditional Maya calendar and its day-keeping.

Popular New Age "Mayan astrology," most visibly Jose Arguelles's Dreamspell count launched in the 1980s, presents itself as Maya calendrical knowledge but departs from the tzolk'in day count still kept by Maya day-keepers in the Guatemalan highlands today. Matthew Restall and Amara Solari's 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse (Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), a history by scholars of colonial Mesoamerica, traces how a Western apocalyptic framework, absent from Maya sources, was projected onto the Maya Long Count; the atlas cites it as the corpus's only Tier 1 authority on this reception and appropriation. The method is historical, comparing the documented history of Dreamspell and related systems against the Long Count and tzolk'in as Maya communities and colonial-era sources record them. Because Dreamspell's day count, extra day and numbering do not correspond to the historical or living Maya system, the atlas records the New Age system as a departure, without describing the living day-keeping tradition's own ceremonial content.

Source 2012 and the End of the World: The Western Roots of the Maya Apocalypse, Matthew Restall and Amara Solari tier 1

Mentalism, Hermetic Principles

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Named for Hermes Trismegistus; scheme absent from ancient Hermetica

Brian P. Copenhaver's Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, Cambridge University Press, 1992, is a critical translation of the actual surviving ancient Hermetic texts, against which the Kybalion's claimed seven Hermetic Principles, Mentalism among them, can be directly checked. Copenhaver's edition establishes exactly what the ancient Greek Corpus Hermeticum and Latin Asclepius contain, and the seven-principle scheme, first published as the Kybalion in 1908, appears in neither. That direct textual comparison is the method and the finding together: a work presenting itself as ancient wisdom descending from Hermes Trismegistus does not appear in the ancient corpus it claims to descend from, which is why the atlas treats the descent claim as false while still recording the principle as a real feature of the modern text.

Source Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, Brian P. Copenhaver tier 1

Mentalism, Hermetic Principles

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States Not in the Corpus Hermeticum or the Asclepius

Brian P. Copenhaver's Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, Cambridge University Press, 1992, is a critical translation of the actual surviving ancient Hermetic texts, against which the Kybalion's claimed seven Hermetic Principles, Mentalism among them, can be directly checked. Copenhaver's edition establishes exactly what the ancient Greek Corpus Hermeticum and Latin Asclepius contain, and the seven-principle scheme, first published as the Kybalion in 1908, appears in neither. That direct textual comparison is the method and the finding together: a work presenting itself as ancient wisdom descending from Hermes Trismegistus does not appear in the ancient corpus it claims to descend from, which is why the atlas treats the descent claim as false while still recording the principle as a real feature of the modern text.

Source Hermetica: The Greek Corpus Hermeticum and the Latin Asclepius, Brian P. Copenhaver tier 1