Disputed Statements

Amethyst, 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

Ancestor Veneration, Doctrines

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States Largely abandoned as a comparative category

Herbert Spencer's The Principles of Sociology, Volume I (Williams and Norgate, 1876) proposed ancestor worship as the single evolutionary origin from which all other religion developed, building the claim from a comparative survey of reported practices across many societies without fieldwork of his own. That evolutionary scheme, its single-origin assumption and its evidential base, resting on secondhand travellers' reports rather than direct observation, have all been abandoned by anthropologists and historians of religion working from twentieth century fieldwork; the phrase Spencer coined outlived the theory that produced it, which is the reason the terminology itself is still treated as a problem rather than a neutral label.

Source The Principles of Sociology, Volume I, Herbert Spencer tier 2

Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, Secret Societies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States AMORC is a twentieth-century American body

According To Modern Western esotericism

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008, compares AMORC's own founding narrative, that it descends from the mystery schools of ancient Egypt and from an initiation its founder Harvey Spencer Lewis said he received in France in 1909, against the independently verifiable organisational record, which shows AMORC was actually organised as an American body in 1915. Goodrick-Clarke's historical documentary method finds no independent evidence connecting AMORC's ritual or organisational structure to ancient Egyptian institutions or to any documented European Rosicrucian body predating its own 1915 founding, and situates the claimed Egyptian and French antecedents within the wider pattern of nineteenth and twentieth century Western esoteric orders constructing legitimising genealogies for themselves. The Egyptian descent is therefore treated as the modern order's own claim rather than as a documented transmission.

Source The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke tier 1

Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, Secret Societies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The Egyptian descent is a claim of the modern order, not a documented transmission

According To Modern Western esotericism

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008, compares AMORC's own founding narrative, that it descends from the mystery schools of ancient Egypt and from an initiation its founder Harvey Spencer Lewis said he received in France in 1909, against the independently verifiable organisational record, which shows AMORC was actually organised as an American body in 1915. Goodrick-Clarke's historical documentary method finds no independent evidence connecting AMORC's ritual or organisational structure to ancient Egyptian institutions or to any documented European Rosicrucian body predating its own 1915 founding, and situates the claimed Egyptian and French antecedents within the wider pattern of nineteenth and twentieth century Western esoteric orders constructing legitimising genealogies for themselves. The Egyptian descent is therefore treated as the modern order's own claim rather than as a documented transmission.

Source The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke tier 1

Ancient and Mystical Order Rosae Crucis, Secret Societies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Origin Period

Currently States The order traces itself to the mystery schools of ancient Egypt and to an initiation received in France in 1909

According To Modern Western esotericism

Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke's The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Oxford University Press, 2008, compares AMORC's own founding narrative, that it descends from the mystery schools of ancient Egypt and from an initiation its founder Harvey Spencer Lewis said he received in France in 1909, against the independently verifiable organisational record, which shows AMORC was actually organised as an American body in 1915. Goodrick-Clarke's historical documentary method finds no independent evidence connecting AMORC's ritual or organisational structure to ancient Egyptian institutions or to any documented European Rosicrucian body predating its own 1915 founding, and situates the claimed Egyptian and French antecedents within the wider pattern of nineteenth and twentieth century Western esoteric orders constructing legitimising genealogies for themselves. The Egyptian descent is therefore treated as the modern order's own claim rather than as a documented transmission.

Source The Western Esoteric Traditions: A Historical Introduction, Nicholas Goodrick-Clarke tier 1

Angels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Celestial Hierarchy, which sets out the ninefold order of angels including this choir, circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul named at Acts 17:34. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) traces how this ascription gave the work the standing of a companion of the apostles.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Angels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Renaissance scholars established that the ascription could not be genuine: the place of origin recorded elsewhere on this page places the work's actual composition in Greek, in Syria, around the year 500, some four centuries after Dionysius the Areopagite would have lived. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) treats the ascription's rejection as settled since the Renaissance.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Angels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The true author's identity has never been recovered. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) is among the scholarship that refers to him only as Pseudo-Dionysius, a name that records the unmasking of the Areopagite ascription rather than identifying who he actually was.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Animal Magnetism, Subtle Energies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Tested By

Currently States The Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King of France with the Examination of Animal Magnetism (Royal Academy of Sciences, Paris, 1784), the commission's own published findings, records that Louis XVI convened the body in 1784 to examine Franz Anton Mesmer's claimed invisible fluid, treating patients in group sessions around a baquet of iron filings and rods; commissioners including Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier and Jean Sylvain Bailly devised blinded experiments in which subjects were magnetized, or told they were, without being able to see which was actually happening.

The Franklin and Lavoisier commission's own 1784 report is regarded by historians of science as among the first controlled, blinded trials in the history of science, since it was designed specifically to separate the effect of the claimed magnetic fluid from the effect of the patient's own belief that they were being treated.

Source Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King of France with the Examination of Animal Magnetism, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Jean Sylvain Bailly and others (Royal Commission) tier 1

Animal Magnetism, Subtle Energies

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Test Result

Currently States The Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King of France with the Examination of Animal Magnetism (Royal Academy of Sciences, Paris, 1784) concludes, on the evidence of Franklin, Lavoisier and Bailly's own blinded experiments, that no physical magnetic fluid could be detected in Mesmer's baquet sessions and that the convulsive crises and other dramatic reactions patients displayed were produced by the patient's own imagination and expectation alone, entirely independent of whether any actual magnetizing had taken place.

Jean Sylvain Bailly, the commission's head, summarized the finding in his own separate secret report to the king as no more than an old falsehood, treating imagination without physical cause as a sufficient and complete explanation for everything the commission had observed.

Source Report of the Commissioners Charged by the King of France with the Examination of Animal Magnetism, Benjamin Franklin, Antoine Lavoisier, Jean Sylvain Bailly and others (Royal Commission) tier 1

Antoine Court de Gebelin, Historical Figures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Standing as a Comparative Category

Currently States His claim that the tarot preserves an ancient Egyptian Book of Thoth

Michael Dummett's The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City (Duckworth, 1980) traces the documentary record of playing cards through the fifteenth century Italian courts where the tarot demonstrably originated as a game, and checks that record against Antoine Court de Gebelin's 1781 claim that the deck encodes lost ancient Egyptian wisdom. Dummett's method is documentary history: assembling the surviving card decks, account-book references and game manuals from Ferrara, Milan and Bologna, he finds no Egyptian connection at any point in the deck's traceable history, and no source earlier than Court de Gebelin's own essay makes the claim. Dummett's study is treated as the standard demonstration that the Egyptian origin is a late-eighteenth-century invention rather than a rediscovered tradition.

Source The Game of Tarot: From Ferrara to Salt Lake City, Michael Dummett tier 1

Anunnaki, Mythical Creatures

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Point in Dispute

Currently States That the Anunnaki were extraterrestrial visitors from a planet Nibiru who engineered humanity as a labour force, as argued by Zecharia Sitchin in 1976

Assyriology rejects the readings the claim rests on. Nibiru in the astronomical texts is a crossing point in the sky, applied most often to Jupiter, not a distant planet; the Anunnaki are gods in every text that names them; and the making of humanity in Atrahasis is an act of divine making from clay and a slain god's blood, not an operation on an existing species.

Source The 12th Planet, Zecharia Sitchin tier 3

Apostles' Creed, Creeds & Confessions

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Medieval tradition assigns the creed's twelve clauses one each to the twelve apostles, meeting after Pentecost. J. N. D. Kelly's Early Christian Creeds (3rd edition, Longman, 1972) traces the creed's actual descent from the Old Roman Symbol to its developed wording in Gaul, and notes that Greek delegates at the Council of Florence, presented with the legend, replied that the Eastern churches had never heard of such a meeting or such a text; no source earlier than the medieval legend itself names an apostolic committee.

J. N. D. Kelly's Early Christian Creeds (3rd edition, Longman, 1972) traced the medieval legend that assigns the creed's twelve clauses one each to the twelve apostles, meeting together after Pentecost, against the documentary record. He finds the creed's actual descent runs from the Old Roman Symbol to its developed wording in Gaul, with no source earlier than the medieval legend itself naming an apostolic committee, and cites the fifteenth century Council of Florence, where Greek delegates presented with the legend replied that the Eastern churches had never heard of any such meeting or such a text, as evidence the story was not part of the earliest shared record.

Source Early Christian Creeds, 3rd edition, J. N. D. Kelly tier 1

Apple, 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

Apple, 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

Aquamarine, 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

Aquamarine, 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

Archangels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The Celestial Hierarchy, which sets out the ninefold order of angels including this choir, circulated under the name of Dionysius the Areopagite, the Athenian convert of Paul named at Acts 17:34. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) traces how this ascription gave the work the standing of a companion of the apostles.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Archangels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States Renaissance scholars established that the ascription could not be genuine: the place of origin recorded elsewhere on this page places the work's actual composition in Greek, in Syria, around the year 500, some four centuries after Dionysius the Areopagite would have lived. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) treats the ascription's rejection as settled since the Renaissance.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1

Archangels, Angelic Choirs

Standing Popular myth - corrected

Concerns Attributed Author / Compiler

Currently States The true author's identity has never been recovered. Bernard McGinn's The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century (Crossroad, 1991) is among the scholarship that refers to him only as Pseudo-Dionysius, a name that records the unmasking of the Areopagite ascription rather than identifying who he actually was.

Source The Foundations of Mysticism: Origins to the Fifth Century, Bernard McGinn tier 1