traditional / modern / contemporary

waybread

Well-known member
sandstone, it appears that we agree on a few points. What a relief.

And I know how whole signs, equal house, and unequal house systems operate, as well as the AC-MC axes within them. No need to "preach to the choir."
 

sandstone

Banned
hi waybread,

we have generally been in agreement on many things! i have an open mind on the different house systems as i feel there are so many question marks around the application of astrology, it is just one more to remain flexible with. perhaps i am being too wishy washy for others, but many of the hard and fast positions others take with astrology seems the result of not having thought of how much of astrology overlaps and has much subjective bias is built into it with so many factors that a person might or might not consider.. i continue to see astrology as primarily an art as opposed to a science.. for this reason, i am happy if someone wants to try to bring a more scientific approach to it.. i am not sure just if or how it will be done..
 
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spock

Well-known member
Hi Spock-- Live long and prosper!
Thanks! Makes me feel hundreds of years younger.

If you find a "person of interest" on the Astrodienst Astro-DataBank, and scroll to the bottom of the bio-sketch, you will see how he's been catalogued-- usually in multiple ways. Then you can click on a category of interest. There may be a way to cross-index people for multiple categories, but don't ask me how.
Thanks for the tip. I pulled up basketball players (2800+) and football (American Football, not soccer) players (1700+). Surprised there were so many but most of them were not stars. Seems they're collecting basketball players, football players period, not just famous ones. One wasn't even an athlete. He was an actor. He wanted to play basketball when he was young but wasn't good enough, so he went into acting instead, while retaining an interest in the sport. And those factors, an early desire to be a professional basketball player and a continuing interest in the sport, were considered sufficient to include him in that database. No doubt many uses can be found for this database, but Gauquelin-style research is probably not one of them.

In the case of my looking at the French artists, I had to search beyond French names in the list of artists, as painters with French names might have been born in other countries. I wanted to stick with those born in France, however; on the grounds that France has a long tradition of supporting the fine arts, as well as a long tradition of recording birth times! I came up with a couple-dozen, sticking with the better-known artists as there was more readily available biographical information about them.
Not clear why France's tradition of supporting the fine arts would make the charts of its artists especially revealing, but the tradition of recording birth times is certainly relevant.

To the extent that there was some validity to the Gauquelin's data distribution, I thought that progressions might explain why they found planetary strength in cadent houses near the angles. Suppose a boy were born with Mars in the 9th, and at the age of six or seven, Mars progressed to conjunct his midheaven. Suddenly his athletic ability is noted, and he gets extra attention to develop his skills. In contrast, Mars natally situated east of the MC is already past the point of becoming angular by progression, for a very long time.
What kinds of progressions? Don't we have so many, including converse, that we can put a given planet wherever we want it whenever we want it there? In that case we're all superstar athletes and brilliant painters and famous scientists and highly accomplished doctors and successful businessmen.

Actually, a good place to study birth data might be the middle and upper castes of India, as they have such a longstanding tradition of astrology as central to their culture-- unlike in the West. I've noticed that most Indians who ask for chart readings know their birth times to the minute.
Nice idea! Wonder how difficult it would be to get birth data for indian athletes, doctors, scientists, etc.?

sandstone, I think there are some real problems with the Gauquelin studies, such that only the Mars Effect is still viable-- and it might be too slender a peg on which to hang astrologers' truth-claims. See: www.astrology-and-science.com.
I think the problems are exaggerated but am rereading the relevant material on the astrology-and-science website in case there's anything I've overlooked, forgotten or ignored. Dean is a knowledgeable about statistics but the little band of ex-astrologers he hangs with are like reformed drunks hammering at their former drinking buddies to see the light. They're not as objective as they think they are, in my opinion. Dean is also not good at seeing things in context. In Theories of Astrology he says, "According to Huckeby (2003) the solution is a return to observation, to look for patterns, to see what repeats over the years as the transits repeat. He asserts (wrongly) that science cannot explain astrology, and speculates that astrology is no more than an evolved sensitivity to planetary cycles (precisely what signals are being detected is not stated)." Dean thinks he (i.e. a scientist) can explain why astrologers believe in (i.e. are fooled by) astrology. That's what he apparently had in mind when he said I was wrong in asserting that scientists couldn't explain astrology. But the context of that section (3. A Mechanism for Astrology) makes clear that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that neither scientists nor astrologers can explain how astrological correspondences could possibly exist. On the other hand, if he did understand me correctly when he said that, the denouement is he's proven astrology's validity! Dean was equally oblivious to context, it seemed to me, when he and I debated each other through an exchange of articles once, at which time I was surprised at how rigid he was, how little he responded to counterarguments once his mind was made up, and how little insight he appeared to have into human nature. Similarly, It seemed to me, when I read some of Dean's statistical arguments attacking the Gauquelin results, that he wasn't as objective as he believed and that there were reasoning errors in his arguments. But I'd rather not insist on the latter point until I've thoroughly reviewed his arguments.

It is hard to say how we might use their findings in chart interpretation for ordinary people. I don't recall whether the original studies included women, but I don't think so. If so, not many; and French women born during this period would have faced obstacles to becoming notable in most professions. Also statistics operate at the level of probability. If there is a 75% chance of someone with Mars in the 9th house becoming sports champion, for example, that is probably statistically very significant; yet it doesn't explain the other 25% who have Mars in the 9th yet who don't become athletes. It isn't clear how much of the Gauquelins' work, based on France, would be applicable to very different cultures.
Since the Mars distribution is nonrandom only for eminent athletes, not athletes in general, that is, has nothing to do with career choice, why does that 25% need explaining? Athletic eminence isn't the Mars effect, either. It's a window through which we can see it. At present I think the Mars effect, if it exists, is essentially the opposite of laziness, which is why I've been calling it unlaziness. I think Gauquelin meant pretty much the same thing by iron will. He meant, I think, that people with this quality are able to push themselves physically harder than others can, that they can will themselves to keep going when others fall by the wayside. I suspect it's a physiological quality, a kind of need for physical activity, that explains why people who have it don't put things off, work harder than other people, and are able to keep going when others give in to exhaustion. Imagine an athlete who stays late at practice when others have gone home, who never lets up during a game, who always gives 110% effort. Will he not do better than a player of comparable talent who doesn't pratice hard and who plays hard only sporadically durng games? Now imagine we have 100 players in some sport ranked according to talent. Imagine 20 of those players have Mars in a plus zone and display the qualities I just described, and that they rank 3rd, 8th, 13th, 23rd, 28th . . . 98th. Now let's rerank them not on raw talent but on how well they actually do during their careers. Since each is more successful than he otherwise would have been, they now rank 1st,3rd, 13th, 18th . . . 93rd. Each has improved five places. Each is better than he would have been had he lacked this quality. What the Gauquelin results show, which is all that they can show, is that the Mars-effect people are overrepresented at the very top. The rest of the Mars-effect people also have an edge over otherwise equally talented peers but are like the 90% of an iceberg that's under water.

Now for a different but related point. I frequently hear it said that the Gauquelin findings apply to groups rather than individuals. After all, even though 24% of sports champions have Mars in one of the key sectors, as opposed to the 17% expected by chance, that's still only one-fourth. And if we asked what percentage of all people with Mars in a key sector are sports champions the percentage would be even smaller (because most of them wouldn't even be sports professionals). In that case, the argument goes, being a sports champion doesn't necessarily mean you'll have Mars in a key sector, and having Mars in a key sector doesn't mean you're likely to be a sports champion (or even an athlete). But that argument misses the point. Since multiple factors contribute to being a sports champion, no one factor determines the outcome all by itself. Having will-power in the Gauquelin sense contributes to rather than determines success in sports. What Mars in a key sector directly predicts, if the Gauquelin findings are valid, is not success per se but the ability to push oneself, to work hard and ignore fatigue. If we want to know how to apply the Gauquelin results in individual cases, it means telling clients not that they'll be drawn to sports, or even that if they happen to be in sports they'll be successful. Rather, it means telling them that they're go-getters, that they don't put things off, that they can push themselves harder than most people can, and that this is an advantage in some professions (sports, business, the military), irrelevant in others, and even a disadvantage in a few (writing). To the extent that the Gauquelin findings are valid they're potentially applicable to men, women, children and (I'd think) all cultures.

Back to my earlier point of athletic eminence not being the Mars effect per se but a window through which we can view it. If the Mars effect is unlaziness or something akin to it any activity in which that's an advantage can in principle be the basis for a Gauquelin-type experiment. If we can find activities in which other factors are fewer or less influential to the outcome the Mars peaks and the significance level should be even higher. Gardners who have particularly weed-free gardens might be one possibility. No doubt there are others. By such means we could not only home in on the nature of the Mars effect, if it exists, but also determine more precisely where the plus zones actually are.
 
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waybread

Well-known member
Hi Spock (incidentally, I prefer "The Text Generation" of Star Trek, myself)--

1. I find the "sports" champions designation to be a little troublesome, because most athletes make their mark when they are young. Then they have to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. So most of them have two (or more) careers. But I guess making it onto a pro team is close enough to be defined as an athlete.

2. If you are going to look at a profession, I think it's important to determine that the country has a tradition of supporting it. We wouldn't look for artists so much in the Arab world, for example, because of their proscriptions against representational art. We wouldn't look for ice hockey players in The Gambia, because this country doesn't have a history of supporting this sport.

3. In terms of progressions, I was thinking of 9th house planets that quickly progress to the MC; or 12th house planets that quickly progress to the AC. (The 3rd and 6th houses seem less relevant to the Gauquelins' power zones.) In the case of an athlete, we may look at, for example, a 9th house Mars that hits the MC through progression or solar arc when the kid is old enough to demonstrate some talent, yet young enough to benefit from coaching and focusing on sports.

4. Geoffrey Dean has some good critiques of astrologers' subjectivity on those pages. The problem beyond the basic critiques is that so few astrologers understand science or statistics, and so few scientists or statisticians want to touch astrology with a barge pole. However, I think science is simply the wrong comparable with astrology. Qualitative social science research seems much more appropriate as methodologies to look at astrology.

5. So far as I recall, the Gauquelins just pretty much looked at people's professions, as listed in the French equivalent of Who's Who. I don't think they got into nuances of how planets affect people's personalities. Personally, I think some planets function differently in male and female horoscopes. To what extent and in what direction is partly dependent upon the person's time, place, culture, and socio-economic status.

By way of analogy, medical researchers have, at long last, realized that a huge number of studies of heart disease "controlling" for white male subjects, actually don't transfer neatly over to female patients, whose symptoms may be very different. The notion that the Mars effect would apply identically to male and female charts is a proposition to be tested, not assumed.

6. it appears that you have a more sophisticated take on astrology than the Gauquelins did. On the other hand, they were statisticians by training, and had to start somewhere.
 

spock

Well-known member
spock,
from what i recall the times would have only been rounded off 30 minute type intervals, or even less.. i don't believe they were rounded off to the hour if they knew it was somewhere closer to the 1/2 hour.. i don't recall reading anything about 'rounded off to the hour times' on the data i seem to remember seeing..
I've got one of the Gauquelin volumes right here in front of me, with times for 2089 sports champions. I'll scan it. Okay, the first 82 entries are French athletes, of which three quarters (61) are timed only to the hour. Of the rest 11 are timed to the half hour and the remaining 10 more precisely than that. In a 25-man Italian section that follows 10 are given to the nearest 5 minutes and one is 22 minutes after the hour. That's all I have time for now, but so far, at least, a very high proportion of the French athletes (and only a few of those 82 were from the 1800s) are timed only to the hour.

i like what you said here >>Since the symbolism of any given configuration can be made to fit virtually any outcome, astrologers are "right" more often than there are things to be right about. Hence symbolism, along with a multitude of factors and methods, and loose logic (e.g. geo Mars square helio Venus), enables us to think astrology "works for me" even though we actually know very little about the nature and extent of correspondences between earth and the heavens<<

however the example you offer is an interesting one in that some astrologers, t pat davis in particular, has done a fair amount of research in this area - all can probably be blown off as subjective - on geo to helio positions.. another astrologer relatively well known - isaac starkman works combining geo and helio positions as well.. neither of these 2 relatively well known astrologers, one still alive would be considered a neophyte either..
Sandstone, I knew Pat and agree she was experienced and knowledgeable, and I don't doubt Starkman is, too. Evidently you're puzzled that two knowledgeable astrologers have pursued seriously a practice I'm suggesting is erroneous, but to me it's no surprise. As in other fields beginners learn how to do astrology by following examples—paradigms!—the sample delineations students encounter in their textbooks. In so doing they pick up, without realizing it, the modes of thought embedded in those examples. Before this they see things experienced astrologers can no longer see, such as the embarrassment of riches the neophyte is confronted with when she first tries her hand at prediction. She wonders how to narrow down the flood of possibilities. Eventually everything falls into place, as she learns to see like other astrologers and therefore not see certain things. It's extraordinarily difficult to think outside the box provided by the paradigm. But until we have something akin to a scientific revolution in astrology these modes of thought will hamstring our efforts to see astrological order in nature.

The relevant mode of thought here is a characteristic failure to appreciate that the word is not the thing, the map is not the territory, the symbol is not the thing it stands for. In the thumbnail below geo Venus is at 0 Cancer, helio Mars is at 0 Capricorn. If we go by the names and numbers, 0 Cancer and 0 Capricorn, it looks like an opposition. But what does it mean when we say planets are in opposition? In a geo chart in which the coordinate system is centered on the earth it means they're on opposite sides of it. And in a helio chart it means they're on opposite sides of the sun. But if we take Venus' geo position and Mars' helio position to indicate they're in opposition, just what exactly are they on opposite sides of? If we want to say they're opposite a point in space, which is true, it's also true that there are points in space from they're 0° apart, 23° apart, in fact all angular distances simultaneously. Geo-helio aspects are just one more way to multiply opportunities to be "right". Not that I think Pat or Starkman pursued it consciously for that reason. I think it's an unconscious imperative, again, absorbed via exposure to our paradigms (or, collectively, "the" paradigm).
 

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sandstone

Banned
hi spock,

thanks for your comments here with more information on the gauguelin data..

i am not puzzled when two apparently knowledgeable astrologers take a different approach then the one i take.. i do give it some consideration though, but that is usually about as far as i go unless i feel there is real merit in what is being offered.. before logos there was mythos. i tend to think a more literal interpretation of anything has real limitations to it which is why i like astrology and the world of myth and symbols in general. the subjective part of astrology is real enough for me which might not come across as all that objective to others. i accept this.

i am always exploring others astrological ideas and processes..much of it i consider subjective further blurred by the countless different approaches that are baked into there views or interpretations.. i taste the bread and i wonder about the ingredients while others may be saying what a great tasting bread it is. perhaps there's a right and wrong way to bake bread, but i think astrology is more art and less object like a loaf of bread..i prefer to not think of astrology in terms of right or wrong and more like art with the beauty in the eye of the beholder and not based on changing cultural ideas of beauty..

i am quite willing to overturn many ideas that i and others have on astrology and have seen myself do this in an ongoing manner, usually in a gradual way, but sometimes more aggressively. i don't really think of myself as trying to fit in, but i suppose we all think this way to an extent even if others see us as part of the sheeple..
 

spock

Well-known member
I'm appreciative of the food for thought spock :smile:

- so, here's a scenario:

"the native" wants their haircut but somehow other matters intrude, until one day everything flows along smoothly and "the native" is hey presto! in an unplanned way, at the hairdressers, having their hair cut (they did not intend having their hair cut that particular day however a phone call to the hairdressers resulted in an available appointment) - would one expect Mars to be in aspect to "the native's" Ascendant/Descendant?
Probably not. Getting her hair cut is presumably something she does regularly. And if she picked up the phone on the chance that an appointment might be open it wasn't an unplanned event. I see the similarity to the way I've been putting it, that we "get around" to doing something we might not otherwise have gotten around to, but it's generally something we haven't been doing. If she works out at a fitness center every Thursday, or belongs to a reading group, she might well have started in each case during a Mars transit. It's also a matter of timescale. If she'd been meaning to get her hair done but had been too busy or distracted, then on impulse one morning called to see if there were any openings, it might be worth seeing where transiting Moon was when she made the call. Maybe even transiting Asc, too (although I'd considet the Nonagesimal, 90° above the Asc, as the actual transiting factor).
 

Frank

Well-known member
Good example of the old adage "Take nothing for granted" spock! The native in question is male and rarely has hair cuts - interestingly at the time of the event the transiting Ascendant zoomed over their natal Mars - while transiting Mars was on their ascendant... :smile:

It's the adage that I adhere to in practice. I find that the Sidereal Zodiac doesn't work in my practice - even going so far as using Vedic practices in the Tropical Zodiac. To good effect. How would one explain that?

And I've been using Hellenistic techniques since 1997 (since I worked with Robs Schmidt, Hand and Zoller, so one need not disparage me for being unknowing).

The fixation and adherence on the Sidereal Zodiac is an artifact that only the most intransigent Hellenistic Astrologers adhere to. If you read the Hellenistic astrologers in Koine, it's obvious that they knew about precession long ago...and preferred the Tropical Zodiac.
 

spock

Well-known member
Hi Spock (incidentally, I prefer "The Text Generation" of Star Trek, myself)--
Is that a pun or a typo? I prefer The Next Generation, too. More sophisticated, not so black and white. more nuanced characters, not such overt and simplistic moralizing. (Remember the guys with half black and half white faces, only reversed from each other?)

1. I find the "sports" champions designation to be a little troublesome, because most athletes make their mark when they are young. Then they have to figure out what to do with the rest of their lives. So most of them have two (or more) careers. But I guess making it onto a pro team is close enough to be defined as an athlete.
It's enough to define a person as an athlete if he is on the high school basketball, football, or track team. It's enough to define him as a pro athlete if he plays for a pro team, even if only for three or four years (the average for football players). And when he no longer plays he's no longer an athlete. How is that a problem? Joe Montana is one of the best quarterbacks ever to play (American) football. He's in the football Hall of Fame. The fact that he's now retired as a pro athlete and is doing something else doesn't change that fact. It doesn't mean he wasn't an eminent football player when he was playing.

2. If you are going to look at a profession, I think it's important to determine that the country has a tradition of supporting it. We wouldn't look for artists so much in the Arab world, for example, because of their proscriptions against representational art. We wouldn't look for ice hockey players in The Gambia, because this country doesn't have a history of supporting this sport.
The Gambia, which is about the latitude of Central America, doesn't have much in the way of ice and snow, so of course ice hockey isn't "supported" and it would make no sense to try to compile a list of eminent Gambian ice hockey players. There aren't any, eminent or otherwise. And I see your point about Arabic representational artists. There aren't very many (I assume) so, again, no sense wasting valuable time. But Germany, italy, Belgium, England, America, etc. do have representational artists in considerable numbers, even if not supported to the extent that they are in France. France also supports cycling, but one of the all-time great cyclists, Lance Armstrong, is an American. Is he less great because Americans don't support cycling as much as the French do? You could argue that he's even greater for having succeeded so brilliantly at the international level despite that lack of support. It seems to me the only reason to cast your net less widely would be a lack of accurate birth data. On that criterion, at least to judge from a cursory scan through the Gauquelin data, Italy would be a better place to look than France.

3. In terms of progressions, I was thinking of 9th house planets that quickly progress to the MC; or 12th house planets that quickly progress to the AC. (The 3rd and 6th houses seem less relevant to the Gauquelins' power zones.) In the case of an athlete, we may look at, for example, a 9th house Mars that hits the MC through progression or solar arc when the kid is old enough to demonstrate some talent, yet young enough to benefit from coaching and focusing on sports.
Yes, I assumed you meant they progressed to the angles. I was wondering what kind of progressions you had in mind, but never mind. If the Gauquelin peaks had been on the angles (despite the lack of accurately timed birth data) we'd have been satisfied with that and wouldn't have needed to invoke progressions (which I don't think are valid anyway). If they were on the other sides of the angle we could invoke converse directions or progressions. No matter what the facts are we can make them fit. But that's a problem, not a solution.

4. Geoffrey Dean has some good critiques of astrologers' subjectivity on those pages. The problem beyond the basic critiques is that so few astrologers understand science or statistics, and so few scientists or statisticians want to touch astrology with a barge pole. However, I think science is simply the wrong comparable with astrology. Qualitative social science research seems much more appropriate as methodologies to look at astrology.
I agree with Dean's critique of astrologers' subjectivity. Where we differ, which was the crux of our disagreement in The Seattle Astrologer, is on the origin, reasons and underlying nature off that subjectivity. And I think it's inarguable that few astrologers understand science or statistics, and that scientists and statisticians want nothing to do with astrological research. From their perspective it would be like researching how the cow jumps over the moon.

As for the rest I would contrast not "science" (natural science?) and "qualitative social science research" but simply quantitative and qualitative research. Natural science hasn't always been quantitative, and in fact became so at a specific historical juncture in a specific institutional context. Thomas Kuhn argues in "Mathematical versus Experimental Traditions in the Development of Physical Science" (in The Essential Tension: Selected Studies in Scientific Tradition and Change) that a science has to reach a certain level of development via qualitative research before quantitative research is even possible. As I recall you and Mark discussed qualitative versus quantitative research in the sticky thread, and I thought your position was more insightful and defensible than his.

5. So far as I recall, the Gauquelins just pretty much looked at people's professions, as listed in the French equivalent of Who's Who. I don't think they got into nuances of how planets affect people's personalities. Personally, I think some planets function differently in male and female horoscopes. To what extent and in what direction is partly dependent upon the person's time, place, culture, and socio-economic status.

By way of analogy, medical researchers have, at long last, realized that a huge number of studies of heart disease "controlling" for white male subjects, actually don't transfer neatly over to female patients, whose symptoms may be very different. The notion that the Mars effect would apply identically to male and female charts is a proposition to be tested, not assumed.
The Gauquelins, or perhaps just Michel at that point, started out looking at professional eminence, but they wondered if that eminence (at least the part of it attributable to the "Mars effect") had a psychological basis. The character traits method was the means of testing that hypothesis. They went back to their list of eminent athletes, read their biographical entries, the existence of which established them as eminent in the first place, and culled all the the trait words contained in those bios. They then determined the distribution of traits characteristic of sports champions, and found that that distribuition was even more significantly nonrandom than the distribution of eminence per se. Their findings of the traits characteristic of eminent professionals are contained in Series C of their publications, of which I have Volume 2: The Mars Temperament & Sports Champions. So they definitely did investigate how planets affect people's personalities (although I don't think affect is quite the right word) .

However, I think it's also true that, as you suggest, we shouldn't assume that a given configuration works out the same way for both men and women. Grant Lewi, whose Heaven Knows What and Astrology for the Millions provided the jumping-off point for my own astrological career, makes that point repeatedly. In his aspect delineations he frequently begins sentences with "In a man's chart . . ." or "In a woman's chart . . ." And I am cognizant of how ill-served women have been by medical science's blinkered insistence on using white male subjects as the norm. Your qualifications of time, place, culture and socio-economic status are undoubtedly also relevant, albeit I think the planetary function per se in each case is the same. If we say, for instance, that Mars conjunct Sun indicates assertiveness, I think we'd have to also note that men and women aren't necessarily assertive in the same way. Likewise for the other categories you mentioned. As you say it's a proposition to be tested, not assumed.

6. it appears that you have a more sophisticated take on astrology than the Gauquelins did. On the other hand, they were statisticians by training, and had to start somewhere.
Your perception of my sophistication vis a vis the Gauquelins might or might not be correct but is at least partly based on a misperception of the nature of the Gauquelin research. My ideas about the psycholgical nature of the Mars effect, the Saturn effect, the Jupiter effect and so on are an extension of, not a de novo addition to their own thinking.
 
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waybread

Well-known member
Hi Spock. Yup, that was a typo. But a humourous one. Maybe the Star Trek producers will be ready to start series #5, to be displayed on hand-held electronic devices.

Sure, one could look for artists in other countries. My focus on France, in the first instance, however, was the Gauquelins' claim that this country had solid birth times, going back to the early 19th century (thanks to Napolean, I believe.) I wasn't sure I would get the same density of eminent painters born in other countries, who also had accurate birth times. No birth times, no Gauquelin zones. This, I believe, is what is known in qualitative research as a "convenience sample."

I think the problem with athletes is a bit more complicated. I live in Canada, where our current Governor General, David Johnston, had quite a career in college-level ice hockey. I don't have a birth time for him, so I can't tell if he has Mars in a Gauquelin power zone. If we looked at him as a young man, we might think of him primarily as an athlete. However, he went on to become a university professor, administrator, president, and then the Queen's representative in Canada. Johnston is not only typical of many athletes who go on to have serious, major non-athletic careers; but to most Canadians his athletic days are pretty secondary to what essentially is his current vice-regal post.

So if we take someone like Johnston, who might, for all I know, have Mars in a Gauquelin power zone, presumably we have to find some other signature/s to account for the rest of his far more eminent career.

US president Gerald Ford was a star football player, but that isn't what puts him in the history books. What astro-configurations do? Do we assume he's got both Mars and something else in a Gauquelin power zone? Appropriate for a US president, he's got Jupiter in the 9th, probably in a power-zone. Yet Ford's Mars is in his first house, which is not what the Gauquelins predicted for sports champions. (Source: Astro-DataBank)

For sure, a statistican wouldn't predict all athletes' Mars placements would show up in the cadent houses, but this suggests another problem, which is that statistics doesn't explain its correlations, let alone the data outliers that do not fit the projected pattern.

Also, I am not sure what to make of the "psychology" of athletes. I've never been a huge fan of Big Sports, but a former co-worker of mine who was, argued about sports building character, teamwork, and so on. Presumably these are good qualities for people to have in their post-athletic careers.

I wonder what the Gauquelins would make of sports champions today, in the era of performance-enhancing drugs, and Olympic races won or lost by a fraction of a second!
 

spock

Well-known member
hi spock,

thanks for your comments here with more information on the gauguelin data..

i am not puzzled when two apparently knowledgeable astrologers take a different approach then the one i take.. i do give it some consideration though, but that is usually about as far as i go unless i feel there is real merit in what is being offered.. before logos there was mythos. i tend to think a more literal interpretation of anything has real limitations to it which is why i like astrology and the world of myth and symbols in general. the subjective part of astrology is real enough for me which might not come across as all that objective to others. i accept this.

i am always exploring others astrological ideas and processes..much of it i consider subjective further blurred by the countless different approaches that are baked into there views or interpretations.. i taste the bread and i wonder about the ingredients while others may be saying what a great tasting bread it is. perhaps there's a right and wrong way to bake bread, but i think astrology is more art and less object like a loaf of bread..i prefer to not think of astrology in terms of right or wrong and more like art with the beauty in the eye of the beholder and not based on changing cultural ideas of beauty..

i am quite willing to overturn many ideas that i and others have on astrology and have seen myself do this in an ongoing manner, usually in a gradual way, but sometimes more aggressively. i don't really think of myself as trying to fit in, but i suppose we all think this way to an extent even if others see us as part of the sheeple..
I'm not quite sure how to respond, sandstone, since you seem to be reacting to something other than what I said. I said nothing about them approaching astrology diiferently than you do. Clearly, it's me that they differ from. But your use of "however" and the content that follows suggests that you thought experienced astrologers, not just neophytes thinking geo-helio aspects are valid is an oddity, is puzzling, is a counterexample, is something in light of my argument that geo-helio aspects are fallacious and in fact don't exist. Neither did I say or imply that you're "trying to fit in" (my impression is exactly the opposite), although your last sentence suggests you read me that way. I'm sorry if I offended you. It wasn't my intention.
 

sandstone

Banned
hi spock,

no offense taken, and from reading your comments just now, it's clear that we both appear to misunderstand one another!

as for the 2 different astrologers perceiving the data differently, it can be any 2, including you to them, or me to anyone else for that matter.. it was a general comment not directed to you or anyone else specifically.

i think it is an interesting topic - geo to helio positions and mixing them... while i have read one of t pat davis's books and i have seen isaac starkman show his work and conclude that mixing the 2 systems is helpful for him, it isn't something that i do.. thinking it thru, it makes very little sense to me, but perhaps this is yet one of the many problems with astrology.. it leaves itself open to pretty well any crack pot idea if someone says they see some merit in it.. astrology is symbolic, but just how far one wants to remove themselves from any connection to the reality it is based on is interesting to consider..

one area that i have been reading and contemplating recently is the different predictive systems in use in astrology - directions, progressions, profections and etc.. transits seem to be taken for granted but were never given as much weight as they are now.. profections on the other hand are a very old system for predictive purposes but for the most part fell out of use a long time ago.. they are witnessing a small comeback.. primary directions have largely fallen out of use due the difficulty in doing them, but with the aid of computers they are making a comeback.. secondary progressions were introduced by placidus i believe as he was unimpressed with profections and solar returns as far as i understand it.. all of these tools are going to appear to have something going for them on some level or else we wouldn't be hearing about them, but it remains to be seen just how much value they hold, or whether they are based on anything substantial.. mixing geo and helio positions does seem like a bizarre thing to do, but perhaps i can't comment with any authority until i try them.. i tend to ignore what i don't understand up to a point.. they are mostly a curiousity for me and that is about it. thanks for your ongoing comments on the gauguelin material and the conversation you are having with waybread...
 

spock

Well-known member
Hi Spock. Yup, that was a typo. But a humourous one. Maybe the Star Trek producers will be ready to start series #5, to be displayed on hand-held electronic devices.
And me with no hand-held electronic devices. (I've never owned a cell phone, much less a smart one.)

Sure, one could look for artists in other countries. My focus on France, in the first instance, however, was the Gauquelins' claim that this country had solid birth times, going back to the early 19th century (thanks to Napolean, I believe.) I wasn't sure I would get the same density of eminent painters born in other countries, who also had accurate birth times. No birth times, no Gauquelin zones. This, I believe, is what is known in qualitative research as a "convenience sample."
The availability of "solid birth times" is a reasonable criterion. Perhaps even more reasonable is the ease of obtaining those times, an issue sandstone raised in one of his posts. French birth times appear to be the least accurate of the countries the Gauquelins canvassed (according to a sandstone post I can no longer find and my own cursory scan of birthtimes in one of my Gauquelin volumes), but if you can't obtain those more accurate times it's a moot point. So it would be nice if you could cast your net more widely, but I can see how there might be difficulties preventing you from doing so.

I think the problem with athletes is a bit more complicated. I live in Canada, where our current Governor General, David Johnston, had quite a career in college-level ice hockey. I don't have a birth time for him, so I can't tell if he has Mars in a Gauquelin power zone. If we looked at him as a young man, we might think of him primarily as an athlete. However, he went on to become a university professor, administrator, president, and then the Queen's representative in Canada. Johnston is not only typical of many athletes who go on to have serious, major non-athletic careers; but to most Canadians his athletic days are pretty secondary to what essentially is his current vice-regal post.
Some interesting stats: Less than 1 in 17 high school football players goes on to play college football. Less than 1 in 150 college players goes on to play pro ball. Virtually every pro was a star in college. Yet the great majority of pro players are "ordinary athletes" according to the Gauquelin criteria. The gap between high school and college is large but the gap between college and the pros is far greater. I'm sure cycling in France and ice hockey in Canada follow a similar pattern: an extremely steep pyramid with only a tiny minority being eminent enough to have (as a group) a nonrandom Mars distribution. All the rest are, in the context of the Gauquelin research, ordinary athletes. In that context David Johnston was "an ordinary athlete".

So if we take someone like Johnston, who might, for all I know, have Mars in a Gauquelin power zone, presumably we have to find some other signature/s to account for the rest of his far more eminent career.
If, for argument's sake, Johnston had been an eminent athelete according to the Gauquelin criteria, then yes, we'd have to find some other "signature" to account for the rest of his, as you put it, "far more eminent career."

US president Gerald Ford was a star football player, but that isn't what puts him in the history books. What astro-configurations do? Do we assume he's got both Mars and something else in a Gauquelin power zone? Appropriate for a US president, he's got Jupiter in the 9th, probably in a power-zone. Yet Ford's Mars is in his first house, which is not what the Gauquelins predicted for sports champions. (Source: Astro-DataBank)
No, we don't assume Ford has Mars and "something else" (Jupiter?) in a power zone. If we had a large enough sample of individuals eminent both as athletes and politicians then, yes, I'd expect both Jupiter and Mars to be overrepresented in the power zones. But eminence in either area is the result of multiple factors, not just one, and the effect of Mars and Jupiter on athletic and political supremacy, respectively, are so tiny that they show up only at the very highest level of eminence. But Ford was definitely not that eminent as an athlete and I'm not certain he was as a politician, since he was not elected president but inherited the position when Nixon resigned. When presidential candidates pick their running mates they typically pick someone who will 1) help "balance" the ticket and 2) not outshine the presidential candidate. That often gives us mediocre running mates like Dan Quayle and Sarah Palin. Yet the latter, due to her populist appeal to the ignorati, was still able to outshine her boss/running mate despite having the intellectual firepower of an empty thermos bottle. Ford, when he was picked to replace vice-president Agnew, was also considered to be a lightweight but was above reproach ethically.

Even if we say, solely for the sake of argument, that Ford was an eminent athlete and politician, we can't expect him to have Mars and Jupiter anywhere in particular because, as I said, eminence is the result of multiple factors, at least some of which are far more important than Mars or Jupiter in a power zone. Hence there are several possibilities regarding Ford's Jupiter position. One, it's past the MC in a power zone and he was an eminent politician at least partly because of it. Two, he was born a little earlier than his birth certificate says he was and Jupiter is on the MC in a power zone and he was an eminent politician at least partly because of it. Three, it's past the MC but the MC is at the center of the power zone and Jupiter is within orb of a conjunction to it and is therefore "in" the power zone, and he was an eminent politician at least partly because of it. Four, he was born quite a bit earlier than his birth certificate says and Jupiter is on or within orb of a conjunction to his 1° Pisces Nonagesimal, which is actually the center of the power zone, and he was an eminent politician at least partly because of it. Five, Jupiter is not close enough to the MC, which is in the middle of a power zone, to be within orb of a conjunction to it, and he was an eminent politician for reasons that more than made up for his lack of the Jupiter effect. Six, Jupiter is not close enough to the Nonagesimal, which is the actual middle of the power zone, to be conjunct it, and he was an eminent politician for reasons that more than made up for his lack of the Jupiter effect. Further research is necessary to determine where, exactly, the power zones are and what, exactly, the effect is of having a given planet there.

A similar set of possibilities can be adduced for his Mars position. Note, for instance, that Mars is closely conjunct his 1° Pisces Nonagesimal. But Ford, like Johnston, was not an eminent athlete according to the Gauquelin criteria. Even if Ford and Johnston were eminent athletes you shouldn't expect to find Mars in a power zone, wherever that zone might be. The Gauquelin research does not show that a person with Mars in a power zone is likely to be a sports champion. The Gauquelin research does not show that a sports champion is likely to have Mars in a power zone. Even the skeptic groups that repeated the Gauquelin experiments, who desperately wanted them to fail to the point of violating their own academic principles by cheating—even those groups, which included statisticians far more knowledgeable than you or I, did not raise the issues you're raising because they're not legitimate issues. If they were it's inconceivable that they wouldn't have jumped all over the chance to discredit research findings which they "know" can't possibly be true.

Addition to the previous paragraph: The point of the preceding is not that Mars won't be in a power zone for an eminent athlete. It might or might not be. We simply don't know because athletic eminence is not the Mars effect. Being a self-starter, which is closer to what the Mars effect is, is simply a quality that's apparently an advantage everything else being equal. We need to find other categories that are more strongly impacted by being a self-starter, or a way of measuring that quality more directly while clarifying what it actually is, so we can get larger effect sizes.

For sure, a statistican wouldn't predict all athletes' Mars placements would show up in the cadent houses, but this suggests another problem, which is that statistics doesn't explain its correlations, let alone the data outliers that do not fit the projected pattern.
Data outliers, if you're referring to eminent athletes who don't have Mars in a plus zone or non-eminent ones who do, aren't really outliers for the reasons given above. Since statistical correlations don't come readymade with explanations, just as the bones paleoanthropologists dig up don't come with labels indicating where they fit in the human lineage, the point is to look for plausible explanations, perhaps with the aid of additional research designed for that purpose. To the extent that we don't yet understand the why of correlations it's a research problem, not a problem with the research. Throwing up our hands at problems that knowledgeable statisticians don't see as problems, whose problem is simply that they don't see how such correlations could possibly exist, is not the answer.

Also, I am not sure what to make of the "psychology" of athletes. I've never been a huge fan of Big Sports, but a former co-worker of mine who was, argued about sports building character, teamwork, and so on. Presumably these are good qualities for people to have in their post-athletic careers.
I take the building character thing with a large amount of salt, but mainly it's just one more statistically irrelevant consideration. Athletic eminence, political eminence, etc. are each attributable to multiple causes, of which the Mars effect or the Jupiter effect is only one, and not necessarily the most important one (to judge by the effect sizes). I suspect that highly successful athletes who become highly successful in a subsequent career have qualities, such as extreme ambition and high intelligence, that correlate well with success regardless of the area of ambition. The Mars effect, the Jupiter effect, the Saturn effect, etc. confer a slight advantage, everything else being equal (it rarely is, though), in specific areas of endeavor, but that need not be true of all the factors that lead to success.

I wonder what the Gauquelins would make of sports champions today, in the era of performance-enhancing drugs, and Olympic races won or lost by a fraction of a second!
Probably nothing at all prior to actually doing relevant research. If the most eminent cyclists, for instance, are now getting there by cheating, possibly an experiment covering athletes eminent during the drug era would fail to show a nonrandom Mars distribution, but that's not a given. As for fractions of a second, the 100 yard and 100 meter dashes are always won by a fraction of a second. Because the entire race will last only nine or ten seconds even the last place finisher will be less than a second behind, but less than a second can mean way behind and that person will probably consistently be way behind by a margin of less than a second. Lance Armstrong won seven times in a row in the Tour de France, none by more than a few minutes in a race that lasts about three weeks! Yet no one who knows anything at all about sports in general and cycling in particular would describe him as anything other than absolutely dominant during that period and one of the greatest cyclists ever. He was not lucky seven times in a row. Average margin of victory has more to do with the kind of sport and the maturity of the sport than anything else.

I have to wonder, waybread, given that there are legitimate reasons to worry about the Gauquelin results (the possibility of subtle experimenter biases in making selections; the sheer implausibility of such correlations), why you keep throwing up one objection after another, most of them spurious (in my opinion). Do you have an animus against the Gauquelin research or statistical research in general? I don't myself but I nonetheless prefer qualitative approaches which I think are more important at this stage in astrology's development. Some of them, such as the cognitive development theories of Jean Piaget and L.S. Vygotsky, have tremendous potential to enrich our understanding of astrology. Thanks to Vygotsky in particular I now have a far deeper understanding of Jupiter and Saturn, not only as dynamic factors but as levels of the psyche, than I had before reading him. Jupiter in some respects was a closed book for me until I encountered certain key Vygotskian texts. You've touted a more qualitative approach, if I'm not mistaken, both here and in the sticky thread above. Are you doing, or have you considered doing, qualitative research yourself?
 
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sandstone

Banned
hi spock,

all i recall saying about the french birth data is that it was the only country in europe at the time where one could pay to get birth data that was on another person.. in order for the gauguelins to repeat their study in other countries it was mu ch more difficult in that they first had to get the person, or relatives of the person to allow them to get it with a signed letter or something to that effect.. this is what i recall from reading the literature.. when they submitted the statistical evidence for a connection between planets and career based on proximity to the angles the board where these things are decided, decided the info must be skewed and was some fluke or a result of it being french so they were told they had to replicate it using data from other countries.. thus another 15 years or so was spent trying to address this issue..

as for the accuracy of the data, french or other euro countries, i don't have any info on this but know waybread suggested, and perhaps yourself, that much of it was rounded off to the hour or 1/2 hour which would change the data some..
 

waybread

Well-known member
Spock, I fear we could debate "who is a sports champion?" till the cows come home. Different countries have different criteria, and favour different sports. I believe the Gauquelins selected their sample out of a French version of Who's Who.

Also, so far as I know, the Gauquelins didn't pre-judge whether some of their sample "were born great, achieved greatness, or had greatness thrust upon them."
 

spock

Well-known member
hi spock,

all i recall saying about the french birth data is that it was the only country in europe at the time where one could pay to get birth data that was on another person.. in order for the gauguelins to repeat their study in other countries it was mu ch more difficult in that they first had to get the person, or relatives of the person to allow them to get it with a signed letter or something to that effect.. this is what i recall from reading the literature.. when they submitted the statistical evidence for a connection between planets and career based on proximity to the angles the board where these things are decided, decided the info must be skewed and was some fluke or a result of it being french so they were told they had to replicate it using data from other countries.. thus another 15 years or so was spent trying to address this issue..

as for the accuracy of the data, french or other euro countries, i don't have any info on this but know waybread suggested, and perhaps yourself, that much of it was rounded off to the hour or 1/2 hour which would change the data some..
I just reread this thread from the beginning and found what I erroneously remembered you saying. It was actually me quoting Geoffrey Dean! "In his section on Gauquelin Dean mentions that '[d]uring 1860-1930 the proportion of birth times registered with some precision in minutes was France 16%, Belgium 18%, Holland 30%, Germany 49%.'" Sorry for the confusion.
 

spock

Well-known member
Spock, I fear we could debate "who is a sports champion?" till the cows come home. Different countries have different criteria, and favour different sports. I believe the Gauquelins selected their sample out of a French version of Who's Who.

Also, so far as I know, the Gauquelins didn't pre-judge whether some of their sample "were born great, achieved greatness, or had greatness thrust upon them."
I take issue with what you just said but see no point in pursuing the matter further. Clearly, our take on statistics is incommensurable.
 

sandstone

Banned
hi spock,

i am curious where you stand with the gauguelin research.. for me, i think it was a good attempt at trying to substantiate some of the ideas to astrology.. it is funny how some astrologers might not want that to happen as it might require a paradigm shift...
 

spock

Well-known member
Sorry to have taken so long to respond. I've been distracted by family crises and developments.
hi spock,

i am curious where you stand with the gauguelin research.. for me, i think it was a good attempt at trying to substantiate some of the ideas to astrology.. it is funny how some astrologers might not want that to happen as it might require a paradigm shift...
It was more than good. It was a brilliant and heroic effort that has stood up remarkably well to the attempts of skeptics to discredit it. Three successive skeptics groups tried and failed. Each behaved irrationally and even hysterically in the face of findings they knew couldn't be valid because they knew astrological effects couldn't exist. They violated protocols agreed to by themselves and the Gauquelins, protocols to which the Gauquelins scrupulously adhered. In several instances they made additional demands necessitating years of additional work by the Gauquelins, which they undertook without complaint. When results didn't turn out as they expected they stalled, kept the Gauquelins in the dark, and eventually released statements that were less than fully honest. Philosopher Paul Kurtz, the driving force behind one of the groups, resorted to what would be called outright cheating if it was done deliberately. (I don't know if it was.) That same group shut out one of its most respected members, Dennis Rawlins, when he protested what was going on. He subsequently wrote an expose, sTarbaby, which was published in Fate magazine. Throughout the Gauquelins' behavior was exemplary, that of the skeptics groups an embarrassment to other skeptics dismayed by their treatment of the Gauquelins and their failure to abide by the principles of free inquiry. It's not just astrologers who hem and haw, back and fill when results don't appear to support their deepest beliefs.

The Mars effect controversy bears a striking resemblance to the earlier one involving Wegner's continental drift hypothesis, in which circumstantial evidence was discounted or ignored because how could massive continents plow through solid oceanic crust? Once convincing evidence was provided showing not only that continental drift had occurred but how it could occur resistance collapsed virtually overnight. The entire earth sciences community converted during 1965-66, and a couple of years later the theory of plate tectonics was born, leading to the more rigorous and effective level of research that has characterized the earth sciences ever since. There is a lesson here for astrological researchers. Until we can explain how astrological effects could possibly exist any evidence we offer that they exist is going to be discounted, and I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing. I've written about astrological causation, but making sense of astrology is possible only if we're willing to reconsider what sorts of effects actually exist and how astrology actually works, something astrologers are strikingly resistant to doing. As you note above it might require a paradigm shift, and such shifts are always vehemently resisted.

More recently Geoffrey Dean thinks he has a non-astrological explanation for the Gauquelin findings, which he calls social attribution. He thinks parents, especially during the 19th century and especially in the rural areas from which much of the Gauquelin data was drawn, have tended to avoid reporting births on dates or for times considered unlucky or evil, such as Halloween, Friday the 13th, midnight, etc., and have tended to prefer fortunate dates. Also, he claims that following almanacs in which rising, culminating and setting times are given was much more common then than now. I have read his arguments carefully since I last wrote here and there is something about them that bothers me, but I'll need to reread (and ponder) several more times before I can get clear on it. It's a serious challenge, not to be taken lightly. I'm not entirely convinced, but neither am I willing to dismiss his statistics and the interpretation he puts on them until I understand both more fully. In any case even if the Gauquelin findings evaporate it doesn't necessarily prove astrology doesn't exist. There are other lines of research I've been following in recent years which suggest the existence of astrological effects, albeit not the kinds of effects the overwhelming majority of astrologers believe in. Whatever is or might be true about astrology is obscured by an awful lot of nonsense.
 
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