Wunder takes issue with my study of rural-urban differences of popular belief whose results showed that Geoffrey Dean’s eight indicators of superstition are not valid. He doubts that country people from Gauquelin samples were more superstitious than townspeople. A review of past studies on rural-urban differences, however, provides abundant evidence that country people, even still of late decades, do tend to be more superstitious and more conservative in general than townspeople. Seeming counter evidence from studies of recent changes in urban and rural beliefs, provided by Wunder, makes sense only in particular contexts (such as revivals in urban settings of esoteric practices) which have no bearing on widely acknowledged differences between rural and urban belief systems. The critic thus fails to save Dean’s explanation of Gauquelin planetary effects, which is based on a theory of parental tampering.

The importance of harmonics in describing the diurnal distributions of natal planetary positions for groups of professionals in data collected by the Gauquelins is discussed. The hypothesis of “parental tampering” is is explored although it is considered unlikely because the distributions are, in some respects, contrary to traditional astrological expectations.

It is suggested that conventional statistical significance tests are inappropriate for research in astrology and that Bayesian methods are better. Bayes’ theorem is explained using probability tree notation and examples from everyday life. It is argued that Michel Gauquelin could have inadvertently biased his work on planets and character traits – but still have been right. Examples are offered from the history of science to show that prominent scientists have often embellished results to make them more convincing. Finally, a Bayesian analysis of the Astro-Questionnaire results taken in conjunction with Gauquelin’s character trait work indicates that a prior probability of 1/5 develops to a post probability of nearly 2/3. It is proposed that this analysis gives support to the contention that further experimental work on the character trait hypothesis is needed.

2297 volunteers completed personality questionnaires, measuring Psychoticism, Extraversion, Neuroticism, Impulsivity, Venturesomeness and Empathy. The most extreme scorers – top and bottom 12.3% – were subjected to a diurnal planetary sector analysis. Some samples showed a slight association with certain planets, associations that require replication.

This follow-up to “The Moon’s nodes in Synastry” investigates a further 18.000 emlnent couples. lnitially, the results were statistically significant, until the addition of a large number of royal couples. The results show marked similarity to those of the original study, and it is now clear that any result is most dramatic with conjunctions to the partner’s moon.

In Correlation 1, 1, I was accused by Michael Startup of having under-estimated the results of several astrologers’ description of the Moon, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn’s psychological meaning. He contests one expected value of 50% and estimates it at 20%. The statistical reasons for my estimation of the expected value are described here, together with the diffiuclties of working statistically with psychological trait words, which explains the somewhat complicated method used to measure the accuracy of astrologers’ keyqords adopted in the second test in my booklet.

Gauquelin maintains that the correlation between birth frequencies of eminent people and the position of planets at the time of their births arre due to some hereditary readiness. According to this view specific responsiveness of professions to the planets is associated with character dispositions, in support of which M and F Gauquellin provided empirical evidence by extracting trait expressions from biographies. Using more rigorous controls, the author, with help from a research student, tested for trait variation in biographies among groups of professionals having different planets in sensitive zones. Trait extractors did not know the planetary positions of the perosnalities to which the biographies were devoted. The character trait hypothesis was not supported. Previous positive rsults reported by M and F Gauquelin might be explained by not having excluded extraction bias arising from astrological knowledge and expectancies.

In this article the author points to an unmet requirement in any theory of inheritance of astrological planetary placings in diurnal space. For any characteristic to be heritable it must confer a selective advantage on the organism carrying it. While it seems difficult to understand why children should acquire greater survival ability from inheriting personality traits from their parents the picture is very different when the modern concept of inclusive fitness is used in combination with a systemic view of the family group. With these more advanced concepts a new hypothesis is derived relating astro-inheritance to the new parameter of birth order of each sibling in a family. Some preliminary testing with a small data sample provides some confirming results, and unusually for astro-research the hypothesis can be tested without a null hypothesis. Contribution of further data samples are invited.

A critical examination and replication of an experiment by Ertel on Gauquelin’s character trait hypothesis (CTH) is reported. Ertel and co-workers re-analysed the same US birth data used by Gauquelin in a previous report of positive results to test for bias by Michel Gauquelin in extracting the traits from biographies. Ertel reported negative results, concluding that CTH positive findings were due only to Gauquelin bias. The present study closely followed Ertel’s procedure, using the same material once again, but the extractions were made by two students at the University of California at Fresno under the authors’ supervision. The results confirm Gauquelin’s former positive results, contradicting Ertel’s conclusions, and suggest a Gauquelin bias insufficient to affect the main results significantly in favour of CTH. Possible reasons for the differences between the results of the present study and Ertel’s are discussed.

This paper is the result of research conducted on a database of the horoscopes of Australian parents and their children. The work was stimulated by Michel Gauquelin’s hereditary work, which I judged had not really considered the traditional horoscopic associations that can link one chart to another. These associations, such as rulership of a planet over a sign, exaltation and angularity, are additional ways in which an astrological influence can be represented from one generation to another. This research paper explores these types of relationships. The results indicate that the astrological concepts of old rulership seem to be more influential than new rulerships when establishing a correlation between the charts of parents and their children. This holds true over a range of different experiments. However, the most interesting result in the entire project came from the ancient Greek disused technique called the noddings of the Moon. This gives surprisingly strong results when the mother’s chart is considered. The data can also be examined via sorting by the gender of the child, as well as their order of birth. This proves to be quite important, with a consistent emphasis over most of the projects showing that the first-born child’s chart contains a greater frequency of correlations.
Keywords: Gauquelin, old rulership, noddings, first-born child.