The prosperous ironmonger Samuel Hemmings and King George III were supposedly born at the same hour and died at the same hour after lives showing striking similarities. The original source is said to be a death notice in the newspapers of February 1820 but such a notice could be found. However, a notice was found that mentioned a respectable furnishing ironmonger Richard Speer. It said he was born at the same hour as the King, died near the same time, and to show his loyalty he chose the same day to get married. It makes no menion of his prosperity or of similarities in their lives. But even the simulataneous birth and marriage may be in doubt, because there is no mention of Samuel Hemmings or Richard Speer in the baptism and marriage records for London in the International Genealogical Index. The probability of such a birth and death twin occurring by chancew when corrected for multiple endpoints is unremarkable. The life of George III is unusal, well documented and deserving of astrological study.

My first scientific analyses in medical astrology tested traditional astrological hypotheses (especially the correspondence of the signs of the zodiac with parts of the body, starting from the head down to the feet), which when scientifically tested, do not seem to be confirmed … among 423 patients. The … use of a pathology coding system, required for statistical study, could make further collaboration possible.

The distribution over the diurnal cycle of Sun, Moon, Mercury, Venus, Mars, Jupiter and Saturn was computed for both genders of 2824 Gauquelin couples. I found that the distributions of the five “Gauquelin planets” in combination are significantly different between the two genders. Wives have a higher frequency of planets near the Ascendant, especially of Venus.

Full text available at:
http://www.src.uchicago.edu/~gavr1/Season-of-Birth.pdf

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.

The majority of those who read their ‘star signs’ can identify aspects of their personality in what they read and it is possible that this may influence their attitudes and actions. The research literature has neglected astrological signs as possible predictors of suicidal behaviour and ideas. To see whether astrological birth signs are associated with suicide and method used, data were collected from the Public Healh Department in North Cheshire on Coroner’s verdicts of suicide and open verdicts in all deceased aged 60 and above between 1989 and 2000. The timing of suicide deaths was compared with those occurring from natural causes. Most of the comparisons were not statistically significant, except for suicide by hanging, which was significantly elevated in those with a birth sign in Virgo, and lowest in those born in Saggittarius and Scorpio. In addition suicide by violent methods showed a significant excess in thos born in summer months.

An attempt to replicate Ruis’ recent results on a further 20,000 couiples suggested that the results do not generally replicate. However, there was an excess of synastry aspects to the wives’ Suns in 5,000 non-eminent couples.

Kelly’s and Saklofske’ crilticism of Smithers’ 1981 study are examined and it is suggeseted that they have not fully appreciated the argument presented: that astrology may be an unwitting source of self knowledge. Since people vary in their knoweldge of astrology and of themselves, it is not surpprising that the apparent sun sign correlations should not emerge in all studies. Further data are presented to show that it is extremely unlikely that the patterns described in Smithers’ study were produced by some weakness or artefact in the measuring technique. lt is important to establish whether the apparent astrological effects on self image are transient or nt. This is currently being investigated.

According to Geoffrey Dean’s tampering hypothesis, superstitious parents of just-born babies who later would become eminent professionals tended to report wrong birth dates at registration offices so as to make the births fall on auspicious days, including Christian feast days. I scrutinized the validity of this claim by counting births on Christian feast days for a sample of French priests (Gauquelin data, N=884) and Belgian Benedictine monks (Verhulst data, N=1506). Dean’s sample of non-clerical Gauquelin professionals (N=15,942) served as a mundane reference sample. Since Christian families bringing up future priests and monks are generally more religious than families bringing up children of mundane professions, their motivation to shift their children’s births on Christian feast days should be stronger than among families with mundane offspring – provided that such motivation exists at all. Consequently, birth counts on Christian feasts of future priests and monks should be more numerous compared to birth counts on Christian feast days of future actors, journalists, military leaders etc. However, the results show that births of future clergy on Christian feast days are not significantly more numerous than birth counts of mundane offspring. Birth counts differ between fixed and movable feasts, with births on fixed feasts alone perhaps slightly supporting Dean’s stance, but births on movable feasts entirely disconfirm his hypothesis. The fixed versus movable feast difference is unexpected and escapes any interpretation in terms of tampering. It is concluded that birth counts on Christian feasts cannot responsibly be used as indicators of superstition.

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.