This report provides primary credence to evolution of the human organism beneath the heavens. Natural selection has favored vertebrates attuned to heavenly rhythms. The lower vertebrates including salamanders undergoing selection, feed, reproduce and migrate in accord with solar and lunar rhythms. As descendants of these successfully adapted creatures, humans possess brain circuits reflecting hundreds of millions of years of inherited genetic programs linked to sun and moon cycles overhead. Humans appear to be sensitive to subtle energy shifts associated ultimately to trajectories of the ancient sun and moon through the heavens. These chronomic genes accompany emergence of mental function in humans enabling them to survive and succeed in diverse environments. Rising interest in chronomics as a mental science requires careful enumeration of the multiple cycles driving human mental function. The recent advances in measuring human unconscious mental processes promise growth this decade of a new quantitative science raised to a level of sophistication comparable to molecular measurement in genomics. In empirical studies the author has devised novel approaches to detecting multiple intermeshed cycles in salamanders and in humans. Emergence of this new understanding can be illustrated by application of an analytic genomics method to detect an otherwise inaccessible human 260-day cycle. Future advances in this new biological discipline promise powerful new perspectives on the evolution of cosmic influence.

This paper is an historiographical inquiry into some problems that arise when confronted with so-called supernatural, irrational or superstitious phenomena in human history. Other descriptions are possible, of course, but none of them without at least some question-begging – something that itself points to the principal problem. As an initial formulation, let us define that as follows: how can the historian describe and explain these phenomena without participating in the very processes – characteristically, to coin a phrase, ones of power/knowledge – that produced them in the first place?1 And this problem becomes especially acute when the discourse in question, like astrology (but unlike, say, phrenology) is still the subject of contemporary controversy. This is not something I hope to resolve here, but perhaps I can improve the quality of the questions it raises.

Evidence is presented that warfare and economic growth are correlated with outer-planetary fundamental waves and harmonic waves during the 500-year period from 1500 to 1999. This period represents 1 cycle of the combined fundamental waves of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and Pluto. Three war indexes (civil, international, and global) and real economic growth of 7 industrialized nations (Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, United Kingdom, and United States) are tested for significance with planetary fundamental waves and harmonic waves. Graphs of outer-planetary fundamental waves from 1450 to 2050 are presented, and general comparisons are drawn between the Renaissance and New Age periods.

The methodologies of social science, particularly those advanced by Eysenck and Nias in their review of critiques of astrological studies, are commended. Since there will be multiple factors influencing behavioural outcomes over the lifefspan, very large subject pools are necessary in order to estimate the contribution of various non-astrological factors. An aproach to human action derived from the work of Parsons is advocated, considering simultaneously cultural, social system, personality and cosmobiological (including astrological) influences. Despite numerous interacting forces influencing human action, it is choices that are determined, not the action itself. Ultimately, we are free agents and our actions are not “written in he stars”.

Birth counts of Gauquelin professionals across time of the day show large dips at midnight. Geoffrey Dean posits that parents avoid reporting that hour at registry offices because of fear of spooky effects (Fears). In Francoise Gauquelin’s view, however, parents merely avoid date ambiguity. In the present study, count of minute-by-minute frequencies of hospital births (1987-1994, N = 320,817) were analysed. Hypothesis: midnight avoidance, if due to Fears, should not occur in records of recent hospital births where parents are excluded from the reporting process. Result: the hospital data did show a considerable lack of births at 0:00 h sharp. For hospital births, only Avoidance makes sense while Dean’s Fears claim cannot apply here. Conclusion: it is inconceivable that Avoidance being traceable in recent hospital birth data, did not also guide 19th Century parents’ birth reports. Dean argued that Fears went along with adjusting their children’s birth hours to auspicious planetary positions so that Gauquelin planetary effects were deemed explainable, largely or even entirely, by occult beliefs. But since midnight avoidance is more plausibly explained by Avoidance rather than Fears, Dean’s seemingly strongest argument for bringing Gauquelin planetary effects down to earth is shattered.

This paper addresses a question that is concerned with the distribution of harmonic points around the circle, ecliptic or diurnal, which result when each degree is multipled by a certain number of harmonics. The method of how to do this is presented and discussed together with the merits of examining the resultant relationshipos when harmonics considered as pure numbers are manipulated.

See also Erratum for this article pp 62-63 Correltion 21(2) 2003

The medical astrologers of Ancient Greece: the iatromathematici, and the later European physician-astrologers, assumed a correlation between events in the heavens and those on earth that was relevant to both health and disease. Some of the early practitioners of modern scientific medicine did the same under the aegis of what we might term proto-cosmobiology, though none of them could provide an adequate mechanism to explain the nature of the link they believed existed between the skies and ourselves. With the discovery and elucidation of the pineal gland’s functions in the mid-twentieth century, which are discussed in detail, we were in a position to provide such a link, and to a great extent, we can now explain in conventional scientific terms how those influences of the Sun, Moon, planets and other celestial phenomena studied by the early iatromathematici and early cosmobiologists could, can, and do, affect us.

This article discusses trait-word extraction methodology as used in extensive analyses of US-Presidential biographies. It is made clear that there is an objectively verifiable methodoly for trait extraction which suggests that Ertel’s claims that the flawed methodology used by the Gauquelins invalidates the whole Character Traits Hypothesis (CTH) are not justified. The study continues by using the analyses of Simonton for each president, which includes a score on 4 scales (Interpersonal, Charismatic, Deliberative and Creative) to examine the correlations with Plus-Zone planets. Significant correlations are found on a small sample because the methodology of Ordinal data can be applied, in contrast to the Chi-Squared and other testing which is all that can be done on the Nominal data found in the Gauquelin source. The implication of this so-far neglected study (since 1997) is that CTH must be re-examined, and that the work of Simonton who has studied eminence over many years needs to be considered before ill-informed decisions are made to reject CTH. In addition the use of a methodology such as this would allow the study of small samples of the Gauquelin database with a view to re-examining CTH.

Michael Glykas is generally known as a learned conservative theologian who wrote a refutation of Byzantine Emperor Manuel Komnenos’ defence of astrology in the latter half of the twelfth century. However there exists substantial evidence that Michael Glykas had a dual identity as the shadowy Michael Sikidites who in his youth was known for his occult interests, suspected of political sedition against Manuel, and imprisoned and blinded as punishment for sorcery. With skill and critical astuteness, Glykas directs his refutation not so much against Manuel’s philosophical arguments as against the claims of his evidence, and thus seeks to cast doubt upon the moral and literary integrity of his Emperor in an attempt to redeem his own reputation. Within half a century of the reintroduction of astrology to the West, Glykas was the first person in many centuries to stir up all the old Christian objections against the fatalism of the stars.

From the 2nd century AD the coincidence of Passover and Easter was recognized as a problem for the Christian church by the church authorities, and in the 4th century, after Christianity became the Roman state religion, Roman authorities took steps to prevent Passover and Easter coinciding. This effort was complicated by the growing separation between the churches in Rome and Constantinople. Though from the 2nd century the majority of Jews lived in the diaspora, at least up to the 10th century the calendar was governed by a rabbinical court in Eretz Israel (the Land of Israel). Here we discuss the changes in the Jewish calendar in the 5-8th centuries AD, the middle (c. 636 AD) of which period witnessed an abrupt transition from Byzantine rule over Eretz Israel to Arab rule. In this period no serious changes were made in the basic mathematics of the Jewish calendar; the only changes had a political context. Here we discuss a single but singular feature of the Jewish calendar, the ‘Deĥiyot’ [postponements] of Rosh Hashana. Our major claim is that Deĥiyah D [postponement from Wednesday to Thursday] and Deĥiyah U [postponement from Friday to Saturday] entered the calendar c. 532 AD as an ingenious Jewish response to Emperor Justinian’s ban against the Passover feast (Nisan 14) falling on a Saturday, instituted to mend a famous calendar rift between the Roman and Alexandrian churches. Next we claim that Deĥiyah A [postponement from Sunday to Monday] became part of the calendar no earlier than when the 2nd day of the festivals Rosh Hashana [New Year] and Sukkot [Tabernacles] acquired the status of sacred day and we raise the lower historical boundary of Deĥiyah A’s introduction in the calendar up to the time of the first Gaonim [heads of talmudic academies in the Arab caliphate] (c. 658 AD). We also suggest the reasons for the timing of three other deĥiyot.