Disputed Statements

741 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1917

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

741 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1975

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Nothing here is medical advice or a treatment for any condition

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States These tones are sold and streamed with claims of physical and psychological benefit

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The atlas records that the claims are made within a modern therapeutic movement and attributes them to it; it does not record them as facts

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The name is taken from solfeggio, the European system of singing syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which Guido of Arezzo drew in the eleventh century from the opening syllables of successive lines of the hymn Ut queant laxis. Guido's syllables name positions within a hexachord. They are relative pitch and carry no frequency.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds., 2nd edition, Macmillan, 2001) documents Guido of Arezzo's eleventh-century solmisation system, the evidence offered for the claim that the Solfeggio set preserves the tuning of medieval chant. Guido's system assigns a syllable, ut, re, mi and so on, to a position within a hexachord, a relative relationship between notes, not a number of vibrations per second; a singer using it began wherever their voice was comfortable, with no fixed reference pitch at all. Comparing that documented medieval practice against the modern claim, nothing in Guido's system fixes any syllable to any frequency, and the hertz itself is a unit defined in the nineteenth century and named after the physicist Heinrich Hertz, born in 1857, centuries after Guido. The name trades on a real medieval system's prestige without carrying forward anything it actually specified.

Source The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.) tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1917

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

852 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1975

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States The atlas records that the claims are made within a modern therapeutic movement and attributes them to it; it does not record them as facts

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States These tones are sold and streamed with claims of physical and psychological benefit

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Contested or Appropriated Modern Use

Currently States Nothing here is medical advice or a treatment for any condition

Olav Hammer's Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age (Brill, 2001) examines the claim, common to Solfeggio tone marketing, that listening to a stated frequency repairs DNA. No study demonstrates this mechanism, and Hammer's analysis of how modern esoteric movements build authority identifies the borrowing of scientific-sounding vocabulary, frequency, hertz, resonance, DNA, as a documented rhetorical strategy for lending a teaching the appearance of scientific support rather than a real finding about sound. That a listener finds a given tone calming is a separate, subjective claim the atlas does not dispute; the DNA-repair mechanism specifically is what this property records as unsupported.

Source Claiming Knowledge: Strategies of Epistemology from Theosophy to the New Age, Olav Hammer tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin of the Name

Currently States The name is taken from solfeggio, the European system of singing syllables, ut, re, mi, fa, sol, la, which Guido of Arezzo drew in the eleventh century from the opening syllables of successive lines of the hymn Ut queant laxis. Guido's syllables name positions within a hexachord. They are relative pitch and carry no frequency.

The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell, eds., 2nd edition, Macmillan, 2001) documents Guido of Arezzo's eleventh-century solmisation system, the evidence offered for the claim that the Solfeggio set preserves the tuning of medieval chant. Guido's system assigns a syllable, ut, re, mi and so on, to a position within a hexachord, a relative relationship between notes, not a number of vibrations per second; a singer using it began wherever their voice was comfortable, with no fixed reference pitch at all. Comparing that documented medieval practice against the modern claim, nothing in Guido's system fixes any syllable to any frequency, and the hertz itself is a unit defined in the nineteenth century and named after the physicist Heinrich Hertz, born in 1857, centuries after Guido. The name trades on a real medieval system's prestige without carrying forward anything it actually specified.

Source The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2nd edition, Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell (eds.) tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period Start Year

Currently States 1917

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

963 Hz, Frequencies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period End Year

Currently States 1975

According To Modern sound healing: the Solfeggio frequencies

ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard Tuning Frequency (Standard Musical Pitch) (International Organization for Standardization, 1975) is the international standard that fixed concert A at 440 Hz, the first globally agreed reference pitch in the instrument's history. Before that kind of agreement existed, documented historical tuning practice put concert A anywhere from about 415 Hz to over 460 Hz depending on period, region and instrument maker. Comparing that documented range against the eleventh century, when Guido of Arezzo's chant tradition is set, the standard shows no reference pitch existed then against which to measure any tone, so a chant of that period cannot be assigned a hertz value such as 528 Hz at all. The claimed date is set aside because the unit it is expressed in did not yet have a fixed meaning.

Source ISO 16:1975, Acoustics, Standard tuning frequency (Standard musical pitch), International Organization for Standardization tier 1

Abgar of Edessa, Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Status Within the Tradition

Currently States The letters attributed to Abgar and Jesus are not authentic

The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church (2005) examines the tradition of a correspondence between King Abgar of Edessa and Jesus. The dictionary's method is manuscript history, and it finds no text of the correspondence exists before the fourth century church historian Eusebius first quotes it, that nothing outside Edessa knows of it independently, and that the Decretum Gelasianum's list of rejected writings names the letter of Jesus to Abgar specifically among books not to be received into scripture. The scholarly reading is that the letters were composed at Edessa, most probably in the third century, to give the city an apostolic foundation; their inauthenticity is treated as a settled finding rather than an open argument, and what remains discussed is only the more precise date and purpose of that later composition.

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

Active Intelligence, Seven Rays

Standing Popular myth - corrected

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 tier 1

Active Intelligence, Seven Rays

Standing Popular myth - corrected

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 tier 1

Age of Aquarius, Ages

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Tradition

Currently States Some popular ages literature cites Luke 22:10, in which Jesus tells two disciples that on entering the city they will be met by "a man carrying a jar of water" who will lead them to the house where the Passover meal is to be prepared, as scriptural support for a coming Age of Aquarius, the water bearer. Read in its own narrative context the detail is a practical identifying sign: carrying water was ordinarily a woman's task in that setting, so a man doing it would be unusual and easy to pick out in a crowd, exactly the kind of unambiguous marker useful for arranging a secret meeting place before Jesus's arrest. Nothing in the passage or its immediate context concerns the zodiac, the precession of the equinoxes, or any future age; the astrological reading is a retrospective one, applied many centuries after the text was written, not a claim the text or its author makes about itself.

Source The Aquarius Code Hidden in the Passover, Luis B. Vega tier 3

Alder (Fearn), 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 A Guide to Ogam, Damian McManus tier 1

Amethyst, 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