Comparative & Scholarly
109 findings, grouped by tradition.
Cross-Tradition52
- The World TreeThe one myth joining these trees is Eliade's, of 1949–51. Linda Schele read the Palenque cross as the central world tree in 1974, after Eric Thompson; with Mary Miller she called it the axis mundi in 1986.
- Images ForbiddenIn 1990 Susan Huntington argued that early Buddhist reliefs long read as aniconic show worship at sacred sites; Vidya Dehejia (1991) called the emblems multivalent.
- The SerpentIn 1983 the biologist Balaji Mundkur traced serpent cults less to diffusion than to a fear 'rooted in the evolution of the primates'.
- Guidebooks for the DeadLepsius named the Egyptian spells Todtenbuch in 1842. Evans-Wentz chose 'Tibetan Book of the Dead' in 1927 and guessed at a prehistoric source common to both.
- Three and the TriadFrom 1938 Georges Dumézil traced many triads to a three-part Indo-European ideology. In 1959 John Brough found the pattern in the Hebrew Bible, suggesting 'bias in the selection of data'.
- Wisdom as a WomanIn the fourth-century Arian dispute Proverbs 8:22, 'The Lord created me', was cited to make Christ, as Wisdom, a creature; Athanasius rebutted it in his second Discourse.
- Leaving the BodyThe 1983 'Gateway' report the CIA released in 2003 is no independent proof: an Army officer assessed a Monroe Institute course he had taken himself, using Itzhak Bentov's models.
- How Meditation Travelled WestGoenka, a Burmese-born layman, held his first course in Bombay in July 1969. Jon Kabat-Zinn founded his stress-reduction clinic at UMass Medical School in 1979.
- Memory as a LibraryAlbert Lord recorded Demail Zogić's song again seventeen years later: remarkably close, though hardly word for word.
- Oracle Bones and Shoulder BladesIn 1957 Omar Khayyam Moore argued that Naskapi scapulimancy was an unbiased randomising device: nobody controlled the cracks, so where to hunt was no one's choice.
- Stones That Fell From HeavenThe Ensisheim stone, which fell in Alsace on 7 November 1492, was kept in the parish church; Sebastian Brant's broadsheets read it as an omen for King Maximilian.
- The Alphabet as Building MaterialIts date is unsettled: most scholars place the Sefer Yetzirah between the second and sixth centuries, but Steven Wasserstrom argued in 1993 for the ninth, in an Islamic milieu.
- The Seven SistersIn 2021 Ray and Barnaby Norris proposed that 'lost Pleiad' stories share one origin: around 100,000 BC Pleione stood farther from Atlas's glare, showing seven stars.
- Tobacco Was the Master PlantWilbert (1991), from about 1,800 sources on nearly 300 societies, judged tobacco use far younger than shamanism: religion shaped the drug's meaning, not the reverse.
- Dream ManualsAchmet's Oneirocriticon, written in tenth-century Byzantium, was put into Latin by Leo Tuscus in 1176. It is no Greek survival: Maria Mavroudi (2002) showed it rests on Islamic Arabic dreambooks adapted for Christian readers.
- Feeding the AncestorsMexico's Day of the Dead falls on All Saints' and All Souls', kept in Europe since the Middle Ages. Elsa Malvido (1941–2011) of the INAH argued that 1930s intellectuals gave these colonial customs a pre-Hispanic meaning.
- NondualityThe idea is older than Śaṅkara: in the Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad (c. 7th–6th century BCE) Yājñavalkya calls the seer 'an ocean', one, 'without any duality'.
- The Near-Death JourneyCarol Zaleski's 1987 comparison found medieval returners met hell and a punishing review of deeds; modern ones rarely meet hell, and their life review teaches rather than judges.
- Microcosm and Macrocosm'As above, so below' is not the Emerald Tablet's wording: Isaac Newton's 1680s–90s English version reads 'That which is below is like that which is above'.
- The Kykeon and the Ergot HypothesisIn 1979, a year after the book, Ruck and Wasson, with Bigwood, Staples and Ott, proposed in print the word 'entheogen', from entheos, 'god within'.
- The Evil EyeThe belief is not universal: the coding of John M. Roberts's 1976 cross-cultural study finds it in 67 of 186 cultures. Dundes called it Indo-European and Semitic.
- The Horned GodThe unbroken cult is Margaret Murray's 1931 inference: naming a Trois-Frères cave figure the earliest known deity, she judged it 'more logical to suppose that the worship continued'.
- How Many Souls a Person HasThe 'free soul' and 'body soul' used to compare them are modern: Ernst Arbman developed the scheme in 1927; Jan Bremmer applied it to early Greece in 1983.
- Karma's Western CareerThe Buddha defined karma as intention (Aṅguttara Nikāya 6.63); Blavatsky's Key to Theosophy (1889) recast it as 'the universal law of retributive justice'.
- The Elixir of ImmortalityAt least five Tang emperors died of elixirs, among them Xianzong in 820 and Wuzong in 846. Joseph Needham and Ho Peng-Yoke matched their recorded symptoms to mercury poisoning.
- The Four DirectionsChina counts five, not four. The Huainanzi, presented at the Han court about 139 BCE, adds a centre, earth, whose god 'controls the four quarters', with a Yellow Dragon as its beast.
- Casting LotsThe story that Hadrian consulted the Virgilian lots comes from the Historia Augusta (Hadrian 2.8). Since Hermann Dessau's study of 1889, most scholars date that work after 395, long after Hadrian.
- Sleeping in the TempleTemple sleep is far older than Greece. Gudea of Lagash (died c. 2124 BCE) records on his building cylinders that he set up his bed near the goddess Gatumdug and later 'lay down for a dream oracle'.
- Syncretism and MaskingHerskovits's Myth of the Negro Past (1941) called the saint–god pairings 'syncretisms', crediting Ortiz and Ramos. Andrew Apter in 1991 found his 'syncretic paradigm' still shaping the field.
- Mirrors and ScryingIn 2021 X-ray fluorescence traced the British Museum's obsidian 'Dee mirror' to Pachuca in Aztec Mexico. Its link to John Dee rests on a label by Horace Walpole, its owner by about 1770.
- Sacrifice and the ScapegoatBurkert's Homo Necans and Girard's La violence et le sacré both appeared in 1972, deriving sacrifice from violence: Burkert from the hunt, Girard from a founding scapegoat murder.
- SigilsSpare's Book of Pleasure (1913) calls sigils 'my invention for making belief organic'; Peter Carroll's Liber Null (1978) carried the method into chaos magic.
- Spirit PossessionBourguignon's 1973 survey of 488 societies found institutionalised trance in 437. Belief in spirit possession, a narrower measure, she later put at 77% of the sample.
- The Descent to the UnderworldOdyssey 11, often listed among descents, has none: Odysseus digs a trench by the stream of Ocean, pours in sheep's blood, and the ghosts come up from Erebus to him. He says he "stayed where I was".
- Reincarnation's Western CareerBlavatsky's Isis Unveiled (1877) called rebirth on the same planet 'not a rule in nature' but an exception; only The Secret Doctrine (1888) taught it fully.
- The Subtle BodyToday's chakra psychology is Theosophical: Samuel and Johnston (2013) trace it to C. W. Leadbeater's The Chakras (1927), which drew on Woodroffe's The Serpent Power (1919).
- Soma and HaomaThe loss is old: Brāhmaṇa texts of about 800 BCE already list substitutes should real soma be unavailable, as Matthew Clark noted in 2019.
- The Labyrinth Across CulturesThe only labyrinth among Linear B tablets is scratched on the back of a Pylos list of goats, baked when the palace burned around 1200 BCE.
- The Dragon and the WyrmFáfnir's crime is told two ways. In Snorri's Skáldskaparmál, written about 1220, Fáfnir and Reginn together kill their father Hreiðmarr for the otter-ransom gold, though Fáfnir then claims the deed. In the later Völsunga saga the story is Regin's own, told to the boy he wants to kill Fáfnir, and Fáfnir alone is the murderer.
- The Making of Modern YogaNorman Sjoman made the case in 1996, fourteen years before Singleton. Setting the Mysore palace's gymnastics manual of 1896 beside the teaching of Krishnamacharya's pupils, he judged the system 'another syncretism drawing heavily on the gymnastic text'. Joseph Alter cited him in 2004, and Singleton draws on him.
- MandrakeThe dog that uproots the mandrake and dies first appears around 75 CE in Josephus, for a glowing root called baaras, not mandrake. Cockayne traced the Old English rite to it in 1864.
- GarlicGarlic is in neither Polidori's The Vampyre (1819) nor Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). Emily Gerard printed the Romanian remedy in 1885; Stoker's Dracula hung it round Lucy's neck in 1897.
- St John's WortIn the Gaelic Hebrides the plant was Columba's, not John's. Carmichael (1900) printed its names as Columba's armpit package, charm and jewel, guessing them pre-Christian with Columba and Mary added.
- MugwortBusschof's gout treatise began European interest in moxa, but he did not know its source herb. His English edition (1676) said it might be called Mater herbarum, a medieval English gloss for mugwort.
- ElderMedieval England knew the elder as the tree Judas hanged himself on. Mandeville's Travels, written in the 1350s, points out the very tree at Jerusalem; Langland's Piers Plowman, revised about 1377, repeats it.
- RosemaryBurials made rosemary a plague commodity. In the plague year 1603, Dekker wrote that rosemary once twelve pence an armful now sold at six shillings a handful.
- YarrowThe Iliad never names its healing herb. The name achilleos comes centuries later, in Dioscorides and Pliny (about 77 CE); Pliny adds that others said Achilles healed Telephus with verdigris.
- NettleThe Grimms' Six Swans of 1812 has no nettles: the sister sews shirts from starflowers, Sternblumen. In Andersen's Wild Swans of 2 October 1838 she gathers churchyard nettles.
- Kola NutThe Igbo rite's nut is not the long-distance trade's. Lovejoy showed in 1980 that Cola nitida carried that trade; ọjị Igbo, which custom requires, is Cola acuminata, mostly traded locally.
- Frankincense and MyrrhHerodotus (c. 430 BCE) called Arabia the only land of frankincense and myrrh. Egypt took myrrh from Punt two millennia earlier: Sahure 80,000 measures, Hatshepsut 31 living trees.
- TheriacPliny, around 77 CE, says Mithridates's own recipe, found by Pompey, was walnuts, figs, rue and salt. Heberden argued in 1745 that the grand compound was merely fathered on the king.
- Four Thieves VinegarThe earliest telling puts the robbers at Toulouse, not Marseille: a 1721 Mémoire cites its Parlement's registers, where Bouvet found nothing.
Comparative Religion47
- Plastic Shamans and the 1993 DeclarationIt names no individuals and also looks inward, calling any Lakota who authorises outsiders a 'plastic medicine man'. Elders had issued a similar warning in 1980.
- The Caches That Rewrote the RecordBoth Laozi copies sealed in a Mawangdui tomb in 168 BCE, found in 1973, open with the Dejing, the received chapter 38, reversing the book's two parts.
- The Tarot's Egyptian Origin StoryCourt de Gébelin gave no evidence. Dummett (1980) traced tarot to a fifteenth-century Italian game, first tied to fortune-telling by the Comte de Mellet in the same 1781 volume.
- What Was Published Without ConsentNeither federal law covers a printed text: AIRFA (1978) names sites, sacred objects and rites; NAGPRA (1990) the return of remains and objects.
- The Sacred KingFrazer's Shilluk case came from Seligman's 1911 report. In 1948 Evans-Pritchard argued their kings were probably never ritually killed: the kingship, not the king, was divine.
- Rune Divination Was InventedBlum did not invent the blank rune. His Book of Runes (1982) says it came with a set made in Redhill, Surrey, that reached him in 1976, already glossed as the path of karma.
- The Invention of World ReligionsEarly modern reference works sorted religion into Christian, Jewish, Muslim and pagan. Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) traced how nineteenth-century European scholarship replaced that scheme.
- The Two Babylons and the Pagan-Origins GenreRalph Woodrow, whose 1966 book popularised Hislop, checked the footnotes, found 'they do not support his claims' and replaced it with The Babylon Connection? (1997).
- The Witch-Cult and the Nine MillionGottfried Christian Voigt reached the figure in 1784 by scaling some thirty Quedlinburg executions up to all Europe. Modern estimates: 40,000 to 60,000.
- Inventing the Mystic East'Tibetan Book of the Dead' is Evans-Wentz's 1927 title, set beside the Egyptian Book of the Dead; he glossed Bardo Thödol as 'Liberation by Hearing on the After-Death Plane'.
- One Origin for EverythingElliot Smith's test case, in Nature in November 1915, was an Indian elephant and mahout on Copán Stela B. Tozzer and Spinden replied in 1916: a blue macaw.
- The Dreaming Is a Translation Argument'Dream-times' was Francis Gillen's gloss on the Arrernte Alcheringa, printed in the Horn Expedition report of 1896. The missionary Carl Strehlow rejected it in 1907, reporting that the word meant one without beginning. W. E. H. Stanner's essay 'The Dreaming', published in 1956, carried the English term into the wider language.
- Who Decided It Was African ReligionMbiti never wrote 'Africa is incurably religious'. His 1969 line was 'Africans are notoriously religious', Platvoet and van Rinsum noted in 2001.
- AnimismTylor did not coin 'animism'. In Primitive Culture (1871) he took a term then 'especially used to denote the doctrine of Stahl', the phlogiston chemist, and redefined it as the general doctrine of spiritual beings.
- Blood and the Anthropology of MenstruationBuckley found the same view in A. L. Kroeber's unused Yurok fieldnotes of 1902. A woman recorded as 'Weitchpec Susie' gave a bathing formula and a myth treating menstruation as powerful.
- Mana as a Floating SignifierIn 1950 Claude Lévi-Strauss called mana a 'floating signifier': a symbol able to take any content, a function also present in European thought.
- Symbols Captured by the Far RightWalter Heck drew the SS double sig in 1933 from Guido von List's Armanen row: 18 pseudo-runes List published in 1908, modelled on the Younger Futhark, not the Elder.
- The FetishFetish is not an African word: de Brosses says French traders in Senegal forged it from Portuguese fetisso, and Pietz (1985) traces that to feitiço, witchcraft.
- The Golden BoughJonathan Z. Smith's 1987 Encyclopedia of Religion entry judged the dying and rising god category, first fully formulated by Frazer, 'largely a misnomer'.
- Songlines and What Chatwin Made of ThemNorris and Harney note that Chatwin coined the word in 1987; the older term was 'Dreaming Tracks'. Chatwin called his book 'an invented journey'.
- The Great Goddess and Matriarchal PrehistoryAt Çatalhöyük, the theory's showcase, Ian Hodder's digs from 1993 found no isotope difference between male and female bones; in 2004 he saw neither patriarchy nor matriarchy.
- Invented TraditionsTrevor-Roper (1983) traced the small kilt to Thomas Rawlinson, a Lancashire Quaker ironmaster at Glengarry from 1727, who had it made for his workmen.
- Iolo Morganwg and the Invented Bardic PastFor the 1921 Caernarfon National Eisteddfod, G. J. Williams proved that Iolo himself wrote fourteen of the sixteen poems he supplied as Dafydd ap Gwilym's for the 1789 edition.
- James George FrazerThe Golden Bough began as one question: why the priest of Diana's grove at Nemi held office until his successor killed him. Frazer's 1922 preface says answering it took twelve volumes.
- Sacred Geometry as a Modern CategoryThe Abydos Flower of Life, cited as Pharaonic, is graffiti near the Greek ICXC; David Furlong put it in the Christian era, perhaps as late as the fifth or sixth century CE.
- The Word 'Esotericism''Ésotérisme' first appears in 1828, in Jacques Matter's history of gnosticism. Hanegraaff stresses that it began as a scholar's label, not a name esotericists gave themselves.
- The Dying and Rising GodJonathan Z. Smith called the category 'largely a misnomer' in 1987. In 2001 Tryggve Mettinger defended it for a few gods, among them Dumuzi, Baal and Melqart.
- Witchcraft Accusation Across SocietiesThe "child witch" is new: UNICEF's 2010 study by Aleksandra Cimpric found it urban and "of recent date", grown over thirty years and fed by revivalist pastor-prophets.
- ParallelomaniaSandmel did not coin it: in 1961 he said he met the word in a French book of about 1830, and his footnote traces it to a Menzel.
- Myth and RitualHenri Frankfort's Kingship and the Gods (1948) charged Hooke's Myth and Ritual with forcing “one single pattern” on the ancient Near East.
- René GuénonHis Muslim name dates from Ivan Aguéli's 1911 Sufi initiation; Sedgwick finds nothing to suggest he practised Islam before reaching Egypt in 1930.
- The Teachers Who Came WestSoyen Shaku did not voice his own 1893 Parliament paper: the official record says Dr Barrows, the Presbyterian chairman, read it.
- Left and RightBlavatsky's Theosophical Glossary of 1892 already called tantra's left-hand Vamacharis "black" magicians, the sense "left-hand path" keeps in Western occultism.
- Rites of PassageVan Gennep denied the phases were equally developed: separation dominates funerals, incorporation marriages, and transition may shrink to a minimum.
- How the I Ching Reached the WestWilhelm–Baynes was not the first route: Legge's 1882 English names two forerunners, the Jesuit Régis's Latin, published by Mohl in 1834, and Canon McClatchie's 1876 English.
- Shamanism as a CategoryThe word was in Russian by about 1673, when the exiled Archpriest Avvakum, writing his Life, made the Tungus term a verb, shamanit.
- Did Alchemy Have One Origin?Chinese alchemy is attested centuries before Ge Hong. Sima Qian's Shiji, chapter 28, records the adept Li Shaojun telling Emperor Wu, about 133 BCE, that cinnabar could be transformed into gold.
- The PhoenixDescent from the Egyptian benu of Heliopolis is a nineteenth-century inference, drawn once Egyptologists found a sun bird venerated there. Reviewing that evidence in 1972, R. van den Broek judged it ambiguous, some of it perhaps shaped by Greek ideas of the phoenix rather than their source.
- The TricksterJung's commentary on the Winnebago cycle (1954) begins in Europe. Reading Bandelier's The Delight Makers (1890), a novel of Pueblo life and its Koshare jesters, had struck him with "the European analogy of the carnival in the medieval Church". He goes on to fools' feasts and the alchemists' Mercurius.
- The Wise Old ManJung's 1934 Eranos lecture, in Stanley Dell's 1939 translation, calls the wise old man "the enlightener, the teacher and master" and has no sentence on his two sides. "Like all archetypes it has a positive and a negative aspect" entered with the 1954 revision, which points to the fairy-tale essay of 1948.
- The Great MotherJung's 1938 Eranos lecture, at a meeting whose theme was "Die Große Mutter", opened by setting the theme aside. The concept came from the history of religion and was of no immediate concern to psychology, its symbol "a derivative of the mother archetype". His 1954 revision dropped the mention of the theme.
- Active ImaginationJung's paper of 1916 calls the method the transcendent function, and it lay unpublished until 1957. Joan Chodorow's edition of 1997 records that he first used the term 'active imagination' in public in his Tavistock Lectures, London, in 1935.
- The Child ArchetypeJung's 1940 essay refuses to read the child as the reader's own past: calling it "a vestigial memory of one's own childhood" merely begs the question. His note insists the mythological child is "emphatically not a copy of the empirical child" but a wonder-child, a divine child.
- The Hero's JourneyCampbell (1949) calls 'separation—initiation—return' the formula of the rites of passage, citing Arnold van Gennep (1909) on those rites. Van Gennep's own triad is separation, transition and incorporation: 'initiation' is Campbell's. 'Monomyth' he took from Joyce's Finnegans Wake (1939).
- SynchronicitySynchronicity was not coined with Pauli. Jung spoke of 'synchronism' in his Zurich seminar of 28 November 1928, as William McGuire's 1984 edition records. He first published 'synchronicity' in his memorial address for Richard Wilhelm, Munich, 10 May 1930.
- The Feeling-Toned ComplexJung turned Freud's 'royal road' in his inaugural lecture at the Federal Polytechnic, Zurich, on 5 May 1934. The via regia to the unconscious, he said, is "not the dream, as he thought, but the complex".
- Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of EcstasyThe English Shamanism of 1964 is not simply a translation of the 1951 French book. In his preface of June 1962 Eliade called it the second edition, corrected and enlarged, recording nearly two hundred publications that had appeared since 1948.
Mathematics5
- Golden RatioMeasured, the classic examples fail. Clement Falbo found in 1999 that nautilus spirals fit rectangles of about 1.33, not 1.618, and George Markowsky (1992) showed published Parthenon dimensions give ratios of 2.25 and 1.71.
- Vesica PiscisIn 1845 Parker's Glossary of Architecture said the name rests 'on no very sufficient authority'. Any special symbolism in the shape, it added, was held 'almost exclusively by English antiquaries'.
- Platonic SolidsNeolithic Scottish carved stone balls are cited as the five solids long before Plato (Atiyah and Sutcliffe, 2003). David Lloyd (2012) found 'no evidence for a prehistoric knowledge' of the set.
- Fibonacci SpiralNature mostly complies: of 768 spiral counts on 657 sunflower heads, reported by Swinton and Ochu in 2016, 565 were Fibonacci numbers. Some heads had no Fibonacci structure.
- TesseractIn A New Era of Thought (1888) the figure is a 'Tessaract': Part II, where it is named, was written up by Alicia Boole and H. John Falk from Hinton's sketch. His Fourth Dimension (1904) spells it 'tesseract'.
Scholarship2
- Yoga Body: Singleton's ArgumentIn 2019 Birch and Singleton showed the eighteenth-century Haṭhābhyāsapaddhati sequencing 112 postures, nineteen standing; Krishnamacharya probably used its Mysore copy.
- Agehananda Bharati and the Pizza EffectThe pizza effect began as a footnote in a 1970 article on neo-Hindu apologetics. Bharati wrote that plain Calabrian and Sicilian peasant bread returned to Italy after the First World War as the elaborate American pizza, newly prestigious.
History of Religions1
Psychology of Divination1
Renaissance humanism1