The influence of significant strands of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century esoteric thought on the surrealist movement has often been noted, though has been little studied. Part 1 of this paper summarises current opinions on the esoteric interests of the surrealists in general and André Breton in particular. Part 2 includes an interview with Breton on astrology conducted by Jean Carteret and Roger Knare in 1954 and published in the French astrology journal L’Astrologue in 1968, reproduced by permission of André Barbault.

This article is based on a talk given to the Research Conference of the astrological Association in November 2002. The author argues for a non-causal explanantion of the working of astrology and bases his argument on the evidence of “entanglement”, the simultaneity effect of transits, the lack of evidence for any physical connection and the lives of Gaquelin’s professionals. He goes further in proposing that a real “secondary world” exists allowing not only the selection of birth times by the “star-born” but also the successes of Alexander technique and the “Inner Game”. Finally, he suggests that this concept of the secondary world has been anticipated by the ancient Tao beliefs, and that the scientific and Tao views are complementary.

To test whether astrologers using the whole chart can predict E (extraversion) and N (emotionality) in ordinary people, the charts of 160 subjects with extreme scores on the EPI were judged by 45 astrologers from beginners to recognised experts. The atrologers judged the direction (+ or -) of E and N, and indicated how confident they were in each judgement. As a control another 45 astrologers made the same judgements by simply guessing. The result was 5400 judgements each of E and N, the same number of controle judgemenrts, anda further 1500 judgements from a sub-test of 39 astrologers and 14 palmists. For both E and N the agreement among astrologers was very poor (mean kappa .10 for direction and .01 for confidence), and the hit rate was at chance level (mean 50.3% vs 51.0% for controls vs 50% expected by chance), showing if anything that judgements were made worse by looking at charts. Judgements made with high confidence were no better than those made with low confidence. Supposedly crucial factors such as technique, experience, use of intuition, and birth data accuracy made no difference.

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.

Previouisly unpublished data has aided the analysis of Bradley’s Jupiter-rainfall study. It is shown that Bradley’s results are spurious, due to the astronomical artifact of the Moon’s sidereal period being nearly commensurable with the Earth’s rotation.

Data provided by 3,480 respondents were used to test various hypotheses relating personality to date and time of birth. As predicted by astroogy, an alternating pattern with sun sign was found for extraversion. The water signs were found to be more emotional than the other elements but the distribution of neuroticism scores throughout the year was not random. It is suggested that if self-descriptions are influenced by knowledge of astrology this effect is not trivial. In the present study the sun sign connection could not have been picked up from hints given by the circumstance of testing. Gauquelin’s finding that associations between personality and planetary positions do not appear among ordinary people is supported, and presents something of a puzzle.

Sir Isaac Newton seems to have been the first person to have applied the precession of the equinoxes to history. His concern was not so much the dating of the astrological ages, but rather to use the location of the vernal point in the sidereal zodiac as a chronological indicator to historical events.

In this study I tested the astrological claim that synastry aspects between two natal charts play a role in human relationships. The sample used contained the birth data of 5648 parents who were non-celebrities born in France around the turn of the century. These birth data had originally been collected and published by M & F Gauquelin. To test this synastry claim I counted and analysed the mutual major aspects between partners (angular separation along the ecliptic) of 0, 60, 90 120 and 180 degrees (orb 5 degrees) of nine natal horoscope factors (Sun, Moon, Mercury,Venus, Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Asc. And MC). I derived the theoretically expected aspect frequencies from the sample by comining all male subjects with all female subjects, each gender belonging to specific age groups. To test the significance of the deviation between observed and expected aspect frequencies, I used the synasstry aspects in 500 samples of each 2824 randomly composed couples, and fitted probability-density functions to the frequency histograms of these data. The frequency of the grand total of aspects appeared to be significantly large. A genuinely significant high aspect frequency to the Sun in the charts of the wives took a heavy share in the surplus of the grand total. Hwever, the number of significant aspects as well as the magnitude of the overall deviation from chance level were not genuinely significant. Nevertheless, a significant majority of factor pairing showed a surplus of aspect frequency. In addtion, several combinations of aspects as well as their frequency orb dependencies did not falfify astrological doctrines on synastry. But since th effect sizes were very small the conclusion was that synastry aspects may play only a trivial role in partner selection.

I conducted a refinement of the synastry control experiment (1) in which the birth dates of married partners were shifted 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 days The surplus of aspect frequency gradually decreased with increasing shift magnitude. The maximum frequency appears at the zero shift. These findings reinforce the conclusion that the previously reported synastry effect is not due to methodological errors.