hi spock,
fascinating post that you have shared here for everyone interested in seeing astrology reach a place of recognition on many levels.. i am not sure what has to happen for this to take place, but i had a lot of hope and optimism instilled in me via the gauguelin research only to see it erode via the numerous attacks on it..
The attackers have had surprisingly little success in discrediting the Gauquelin results. The most serious challenge, posed by Geoffrey Dean, focuses on the smallness of the effect size. That, however, is at least partly a red herring. The Mars effect is
not athletic prominence. It's a trait that gives you an edge if you happen to be an athlete. But since the Mars effect is only one of a number of factors that affect athletic success, it can't by itself make you a superstar. If you're marginal it'll make you not too bad. If you're not too bad it'll make you average. If you're average it'll make you pretty good. If you're pretty good it'll make you very good. And if you're very good it'll make you one of the best and possibly one of the prominent athletes in a Gauquelin-style experiment. The statistical effect size is small because athletic prominence measures the Mars effect only indirectly. But a small effect size is easier to explain away than a large one. Dean claims to have found (but gives no raw data in the piece I read) that the effect size increases as birthtime faking increases, and notes that it would take only a small percentage of faked data to produce the very small Gauquelin effect sizes. He argues that parental faking
could be the source of the Gauquelin results. However, this assumes not only that some parents provided false information and not only that they knew what false information to provide, but also that doing so made their children more likely to succeed. An experiment more closely based on what the Mars effect actually is would, if the effect is real, likely settle the matter. It would not, however, lacking a mechanism that explains the effect, satisfy skeptics who assume the statistical result
must be an artifact because such an effect can't possibly exist. (
After Symbolism does, by the way, offer an explanation for astrological effects, albeit only for the kind that I think actually exist.)
At the same time the Gauquelin material isn't the only or even the best evidence for astrology, or the best source of astrological knowledge. Developmental psychology, including adult lifespan development, is a rich source of astrological insights. After all, developmental psychology is about what happens at what age. Age transits, each planet conjoining, squaring, or opposing its natal place, also happen at about the same time for everyone, hence are also about what happens at what age. The twin giants of cognitive developmental psychology are Jean Piaget and L.S. Vygotsky. The major periods in Piaget's scheme are the sensorimotor stage, the preoperational stage, the concrete operational stage, and the formal operational stage. But Johnnie doesn't go to sleep Tuesday in the preoperational stage and wake up Wednesday in the concrete operational stage. There must be a way of getting from one to the other, a transition period. Piaget didn't have much to say about transitions and didn't include them in his scheme, but we would expect them to coincide with the boundaries between stages. Those boundaries coincide with age transits. Hence the sensorimotor stage begins at birth and ends with Mars conjoining its natal place, the first Mars return; the preoperational stage begins with the Mars Return and ends with Saturn squaring its natal place; the stage of concrete operations begins with Saturn squaring its natal place and ends with Jupiter conjoining its natal place, the first Jupiter Return; and the period of formal operations begins with the Jupiter Return and continues into adulthood.
For the most part Piaget's scheme includes only stages, not the transitions between them. Vygotsky's scheme includes not only stable periods, the relatively long periods
between transits, but also critical periods, the relatively brief periods
of the transits. Hence he refers to the crisis at age one, which can be attributed to either Sun conjunct Sun, the first Solar Return, or Mars opposite Mars, or both; the crisis at (the turn to) age three, which coincides with Jupiter squaring its natal place; and the crisis at age seven, which coincides with Saturn squaring its natal place. With Piaget we can get some idea of the nature of a given transit/transition by noting how a given stage differs from its immediate predecessor and thinking about what it would take to effect that kind of change. With Vygotsky, however, we have descriptions not only of the stable periods but also of the transition periods that connect them. For instance, during the first three years a child is very concrete and literal-minded in her thinking. She finds it difficult to say, even if instructed to do so, "Sally is walking across the room," if she can plainly see her sitting in a chair. Also, during the first three years motivation is not clearly separable from perception. If a child sees a bright light she moves toward it. She listens intently to an interesting sound. A door gets opened and closed, a ball dropped or rolled. Each stimulus directly evokes a response until she becomes bored with it and responds to the next interesting stimulus. She is, in a sense, a slave to her immediate environment. She does not, in the sense that an adult or older child does,
decide what do do.
At the turn to age three a new characteristic, imagination, begins to emerge. This isn't imagination in its full flowering at the Jupiter Return but its precursor. The child is now able to have one thing stand for another. The stick in his hands is the steering wheel of the car he's "driving" around the living room or yard; or the horse he's "riding" as he chases the bad guys. (True play begins at three.) At the same time more complex wants emerge that are not single actions but activities that are made up of a number of specific actions: going to the store with Mommy; playing cowboys and indians with Bobby. The child can now decide what he or she wants to do, and can be frustrated when those desires are stymied. Stubbornness and willfulness is characteristic of the crisis at age three. The child refuses to change her mind even when it would be reasonable to do so, even when what her parents want her to do is something she'd ordinarily want to do. She refuses to change her mind because she's trying to
have a mind of her own, to be able to follow her own wishes without being deflected from moment to moment. Vygotsky asserts that "if the crisis for some reason passes sluggishly and is not clearly expressed , this leads to a serious delay in the development of affective and volitional aspects of the child's personality at a later age."
Another development at three ties together and helps explain these changes. Life takes on a narrative structure. The child mutters while he's doing something: It go there now. No good. Push it. His remarks are cryptic and not easily decipherable. Piaget called this egocentric speech and attributed it to childhood egocentrism, in which the child's speech isn't social. He hasn't yet learned to communicate by putting himself in the shoes of others and providing the verbal clues that would enable someone else to know what he's talking about. Vygotsky, however, argued that the child's speech is social from the beginning. What changes at three is speech splits into two parts, the original speech for others and a new function, speech for oneself. He noted that the incidence of egocentric speech increases when the child is engaged in a difficult task, and that over the next few years it becomes even more cryptic. What's happening is the child is talking himself through what he's trying to accomplish.
He's telling himself what to do. Egocentric speech doesn't die out as Piaget thought but goes underground at age seven (!) and becomes inner speech, the thinking in words that we often associate with thinking per se. Not only does egocentric speech not need to provide the details that would make it comprehensible to others, since the child knows who and what he's talking (thinking) about, it doesn't have to be out loud, either. Now he realizes who he's talking to, himself, and at that point egocentric speech becomes thinking in words. The three-year old in essence always thinks out loud. The seven-year old has learned to think to himself.
This enables us to understand and differentiate the Jupiter and Saturn effects from each other. The child at seven often comes across as artificial and pretentious. That's because he's learning to present a facade, a public self that he tries to live up to, but he's new at it. This is the beginning of impression management, and also deliberate dissembling and lying. As I said earlier what emerges at the Jupiter square is complex wants, things we like to do, and throughout life new hobbies and enthusiasms, as well as relationships involving shared activities, tend to change at Jupiter intervals. (I think close examination would reveal that many (most?) of us first got turned on to astrology during a Jupiter transit, and that further developments in that interest occurred at Jupiter intervals.) What emerges at the Saturn square is a conscious self-image, an image according to which we organize our activities and are able, for the first time, to hold to a task and to regularly perform duties and live up to responsibilities. It's no accident that the Spartans sent boys to live in barracks and train as soldiers at age seven, that Medieval children became apprentices at seven, that cultures the world over begin training their children at this age and have rites of passage to mark this important psychological milestone. They do so because at seven the child develops capabilities she didn't have previously. We don't train or use children at an earlier age because we can't. The Saturn self corresponds to Freud's ego and Maslow's esteem needs. (Just as different wavelengths of light are perceived as different colors, so, too, the structure of the psyche is composed of different temporal wavelengths. You could say that the ego is simply that facet of the self that comes to the forefront at seven-year intervals. It's a seven-year pulse.) When we engage in a hobby or other pleasurable activity we have fun. When we live up to our desired self-image we feel good about ourselves and enhance our self-esteem. Just as our hobbies and enthusiasms tend to follow a Jupiter schedule, we make career changes (in the broader sense, as outgrowths of shifts in self-image) according to a Saturn schedule.
Age transits don't, of course, account for individual differences. For that we need transits to other planets, whose timing varies from person to person. In my chart, for instance, Mars is conjunct Saturn. (The sign doesn't matter because I don't think astrological signs are real.) This means that everytime Mars transits conjunct, square or opposite its natal place it simultaneously does the same to Saturn. Saturn similarly makes simultaneous transits to its own place and Mars. And this has developmental consequences. It accounts both for individual differences
and development, because we aren't born with fully developed adult personalities. We have to become who we are. (See the subsection "Transit Patterns and the Evolution of Personality" in section 2 of
After Symbolism for further details.) But age transits are not only, with the input of developmental psychology, potentially the most rigorous, well-attested part of astrology. They're also a foundation on which to build. Understanding the effects of Saturn
per se, as it transits in relation to its own natal place, seems to me a prerequisite for understanding the effects of Saturn in relation to the other factors in the chart, and thus ultimately not only individual personality but also the structure of the human psyche.
i can dimly imagine what astrology might be like in the future if the astro community and a greater community beyond astrology is able to bring astrology into the present where it is recognized in some legitimate manner.. in the meantime i note a strong return to the past documents that have become available in the past 20 odd years and a real resurgence in 'traditional' astrology which doesn't seem concerned in the least about the concerns you address in your post here.. do you have any thoughts on this that you'd like to share?
I think it's partly due to a need to believe and a consequent shying away from any approach that might undermine it, and partly a turning away from science and statistics in response to disappointed expectations. Underlying both is the kind of reasoning we absorb when we learn how to do astrology. I have no problem with astrologers being committed to believing in some form of astrology. If I did I'd have a problem with myself. I think it's a myth that students of physics, chemistry and biology accept the validity of what they're studying because the evidence convinces them, whereas astrologers believe in astrology because they're gullible and superstitious. But my commitment is to the idea that there
are correspondences between the earth and heavens. It doesn't commit me to specific beliefs about the nature and extent of such correspondences, about their causes, or about how we deploy our knowledge of them when we delineate. That's what research is for, to tell me what I
can believe even if it's not what I learned from textbooks. But I think many astrologers are committed not just to the idea of correspondences but to the fleshed out belief system handed down to us. In the face of our inability to demonstrate the validity of our existing beliefs and practices, and given a prior belief in a
working astrology discovered by or revealed to our ancient predecessors, it's no surprise that some of our more thoughtful astrologers would look to the past for lost or forgotten knowledge. Ultimately I think their disinterest in a more rigorous, scientific approach to astrology is due to a lack of faith that there is anything to find by such means. That lack of faith is in turn due to unrealistic expectations that positive statistical results would be easy to come by and would validate astrology in exactly its present form.
As for the mode of reasoning I refer to above, which underlies and emphasizes the tendencies and reactions I think I see, consider the abstract to
After Symbolism: "Symbolism has been both the saviour and achilles heel of astrology. By enabling it to seem valid to its adherents it has insured its continued existence and development. It's nature, however, limits the extent of that development. Since astrology can be "right" even when the chart or event is wrong there is no confrontation with reality to correct and improve it. Astrology can move to a higher level only if symbolism is supplanted by empiricism. An empirical astrology would not merely be illustrated by real-world observations. It would be based on them. The purpose of this article is to show how." The first two sections of the article analyze symbolism and contrast it to empiricism, but the article as a whole is about what comes "after symbolism". But it's hard to get there from within the conceptual box provided by the existing paradigm, which I think accounts both for the anti-empirical tendencies that are at the heart of the unconcern you refer to as well as for the often overly hostile and even hysterical responses I encounter when I critique symbolism.
the book you are in the process of working on sounds as though it will capture the spirit of your posts here in this thread and will be a very interesting exposé that i'd enjoy reading.. i wish you all the best in staying on track to complete that project which is probably quite a commitment of time and energy. for that you will need to remove the distractions that you mentioned earlier in order to get the sleep for the energy required.. i find getting the concentration to do my best work sometimes difficult to find and even more of a problem with added distractions, this forum sometimes being a blessing and a curse in that i enjoy interacting with others like you here, but find i haven't set strong enough boundaries to keep my focus on what i need to be doing as much since coming here in the fall.. thanks for your comments here as they are quite fascinating to read and watch unfold..
In a sense I'm working on the book everytime I post, because I'm always working out ideas in my head as well as trying out ways of putting things so as to more effectively get across what I'm trying to say. So in addition to the fact that I enjoy these discussions, they serve a purpose.