Correlations between birth counts and planetary positions (Gauquelin planetary effects) have been acknowledged by Geoffrey Dean for a long time. In 2000, the correlations were given “a powerful explanation” by his construct of “attribution” (Dean, 2000). In Dean’s view, Gauquelin correlations are “man-made”, thus “artifacts”. Dean’s conjecture is imaginative, yet it provokes demurs. Of his three ways of “attribution”, “perinatal control” is dismissed by expert medical judgment, and “self-attribution”, in Dean’s own view, as untestable and therefore unscientific. The “parental tampering” claim, Dean’s main argument, deserves scrutiny, as follows:
The idea that parents, reporting their just-born children’s births at registration offices, tampered with birth time in order to improve their children’s astrological fortune, appears implausible a priori. Dean presupposes that in AD 1800-1950 families of eminent offspring believed in Gauquelin-type planetary correlations (“neo-astrology”). Such belief, if existent, would have differed considerably from traditional Ptolemaic belief. The rise among professional elites of a pervasive reform of Ptolemaic tradition, spreading out evenly all over Europe overcoming linguistic and cultural barriers should have left written traces. Dean does not provide even a single document as proof that such belief existed.
Neither does Dean consider, by model calculation, that the number of believers in neo-astrology who were informed enough about planetary movements in the sky, who were skilled enough to calculate auspicious planetary positions, and who were prepared enough to tell a lie at registration offices, was far too small to produce up to 6% birth count deviations from chance as observed by the Gauquelins.
Dean’s seemingly strongest empirical evidence for his parental tampering claim, the correlation across professions between G-effects and “midnight avoidance” (interpreted as “fear of spooky effects”), turns out to be spurious as soon as his one-variable measure of profession-specific G-effects is replaced with the more comprehensive and thus more reliable measures that should have been used. Moreover, an illegitimate boosting of the crucial correlation between midnight avoidance and G-effects contributes to the wrong impression that birth times might have been tampered with by superstitious parents. The simplest factual counter-evidence undermining Dean’s midnight avoidance argument are data showing that parents avoided birth times at midnight sharp only (at 12:00 h) thus evading date ambiguity, no avoidance of reporting birth times for the rest of the “spooky hour” (0:01 h through 0:59 h) is noticeable.Dean’s seven subsidiary variables of “day avoidance”, allegedly indicating tampering with birth dates, are also unrelated to “midnight avoidance”, allegedly indicating tampering with birth hour. His correlational network of tampering with birth date and birth time collapses.
Abstracts are provided of five studies, published in Correlation, whose goal was to test hypotheses derived from Dean’s attribution claims. Their results are negative throughout.
It is concluded that Dean’s scrutiny of Gauquelin data corroborates the reality of planetary effects. His “attribution” claim, however, his attempt to explain them by artifacts, went astray. Gauquelin planetary effects remain as unexplained as before. There are reasons to be concerned that Dean may continue to spread this blunder regardless. In that case, the challenging results of Gauquelin’s life work might be disparaged in public, and the motivation of potential researchers to pursue the riddle of his remarkable discovery might run dry.

Despite Chinese Astrology’s long history, the celebrated ‘Chinese Zodiac’ did not appear in China until the sixth century. Whatever its origins, it was indeed a happy invention, for in replacing ancient Chinese seal-script signs, the twelve animal names helped the astrologer and client to understand the astrological significance of the hours of the day, the months of the year, and the harmonious relationships between them. This paper offers suggestions regarding the possible sources of the Twelve Animals, and shows briefly how they are used in interpreting Chinese horoscopes.

This paper will discuss the relevance of the ‘four levels of interpretation’ of medieval theology – literal, allegorical, moral, anagogical – to the teaching of astrology at both undergraduate and postgraduate level. In an educational system increasingly bound to positivist assumptions a way is required to lead students to a deeper perception, and experience, of the symbolic. This system unlocks the door to a hermeneutic of divination and magic relevant and accessible to beginners in this field, yet grounded in philosophical and theological tradition.

Between 1691 and 1711, London “coffeehouse” newspapers devoted to a “question-and-answer” format, such as the Athenian Mercury (1691-1697) and the British Apollo (1708-1711), employed anonymous experts to answer readers’ questions and impart simplified knowledge about natural philosophy and phenomena. At the same time, they marketed a “culture of civility” to non-elite individuals, which included encouraging gentlemanly curiosity about the natural world. Not only did the Mercury and Apollo’s editors spend a good deal of effort convincing their audiences they were credible sources of knowledge, an authoritative virtual “academy” of experts, but audience responses can be assessed in the running “conversations” of questions and answers. These papers therefore may be utilized as gauges of public attitudes towards particular topics in natural philosophy, such as astrology, and to what extent astrology was considered a legitimate subfield within “scientific” studies in the early modern period. Both the Mercury and Apollo also served an expressly didactic function, wittily illustrating to their less-informed readers which scientific theories were currently fashionable, and which ideas were the provinces of only “vulgar beliefs”; a comparison of the two papers is a measure of the progressive vulgarization of belief in astrology between 1690 and 1711. Although previous scholars were correct in their claim that many elite natural philosophers largely disavowed astrology (both natural and judicial) by the first decade of the eighteenth century, among the literate cits of London who were largely the audience of the Mercury and Apollo, the legitimacy of astrology was still a matter of active debate.

The astrological worldview takes for granted an interrelated wholeness to which humanity belongs, a systemic totality having harmony, resonance and tuning as primal characteristics. On the contrary, modern science assumes a paradigm in which separateness, reductionism and empirical positivism implies the strangeness between human (the observer-knower) and universe (the observed reality). This thesis-antithesis antagonism is searching for a synthesis capable of solving its contradiction into complimentarity, giving rise to a new paradigm rooted in a human-cosmos integrated vision without losing the explicative success of modern science. Twentieth century research, both in science and astrology, has begun to pave the way towards such an emergent worldview. This paper offers a glimpse at all of this.

The paper addresses the boundaries between astrology and science and concentrates on a demarcation problem. It will explore the criteria science poses for new sciences. In order to be a science one has to take into account for example the idea of a theory, methods and paradigms. An independent branch of science is known for its own methodology but in astrology’s case usually statistics are introduced. However, qualitative methods will give new and fresh viewpoints to this issue. “Astrology and Science – A New Millennium” discusses the position of astrology in the academic world and the possible advantages and disadvantages that might arise along with that position.

The reasons for astrology’s long exile from the academy have been as much psychological as intellectual and political, for it represents the shadow of the scientific, professional and technical value-system of the contemporary academic culture. The reintroduction of astrology as a serious topic of university studies produces an inevitable collision between the norms of intellectual objectivity (the stance of the modern scholar who stands apart from the material being studied) and the reality of what C.G. Jung called the objective psyche, or collective unconscious, from which we can never fully separate our conscious standpoint. For astrology systematically reveals the unconscious, archetypal factors underlying conscious experience and collapses the subject-object dichotomy fundamental to the modern psyche and the modern intellect, thus undermining the assumptions and identity of the modern scholar. To reintegrate astrology into academic life requires bringing more objectivity into astrology but also bringing the implications of the objective psyche fully into the academy. This requires a historical perspective on astrology’s psychological position since the Enlightenment and a capacity to do personal and intellectual ‘shadow work’ in academe – a slow and costly alchemical process, but a necessary one if astrology’s full contribution is to be realized.

The paper will briefly outline the manner in which the authority of the ancient Egyptians is invoked in several surviving astrological works of antiquity, with the focus on the second century works of Vettius Valens and Claudius Ptolemy, representatives of two vastly differing approaches toward the astrological lore. Consequently, the argument shall involve the question of Valens’ alleged Egyptian travels and the stance he assumes with respect to Nechepso and Petosiris, to end with the discussion of Ptolemy’s way of dealing with the inherited tradition. It will be shown that while sharing in some general tendencies and, moreover, facing the same tension between the contrasting urges of tradition vs. innovativeness, the two astrologers choose separate ways to extricate themselves from the dilemma.

The Triple Moon Goddess of contemporary New Age thought has much deeper roots than is commonly believed. This paper demonstrates how Akkadian astrological tradition appears to have been incorporated in the development of a triple Moon goddess during the Hellenistic era. It offers an example of the way that astrological knowledge can be important in the practice of historical research.

This paper will look at a topic hitherto equally neglected by classicists and medieval historians: the manner in which medieval scholars (including many churchmen) found a way of fitting the classical pagan deities back into Christianity through the medium of planetary magic. This enterprise lasted from the twelfth to the eighteenth century, and is one of the lost themes of the history of European religion