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.

In part 1 of this article I reported a significantly high frequency of synastry aspects in married couples. In this article I present the results of a control experiment in which the birth dates of the couples have been shifted in time. I produced 16 control samples consisting of couples whose birth dates were shifted with a constant number of days backwards and forward in time. I found that the shifts rendered aspect totals which were not significant. Only small shifts (two days) produced results that were close or even slightly larger than the aspect total connected to the unshifted birth dates. So my conclusion was that the previously reported finding is not due to an artefact associated with the age differences between married partners.

Reviewing literature published in the past 50 years, the authors find no support for the traditional idea that moon phases are associated with psychiatric dusturbance. The authors propose that modern findings can be reconciled with traditional beliefs through the mechanism of sleep deprivation which was caused by brilliant noctural light during the full moon. Today’s populations are largely shielded from this lunar effect by modern housing and lighting conditions. But the partial sleep deprivation caused by the brilliance of the moon would, according to modern neuropsychiatric studies, have been sufficient to precipitate mania in people with this underlying disposition, and seizures in individuals with the vulnerability fo seizure disorder. The authors proposed experimental possibilities for the validation of their sleep deprivation hypothesis.

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 for both health and diseases.
Some of the early practitioners of modern scientific medicine did the same under the aegis of what we might term, proto-cosmobiology, though none would provide an adequate mechanism to explain the nature of the link they believed existed between the skies and ourselves.
Within the discovery and elucidation of the pineal gland’s functions in the mid twentieth century, which are discussed in detail, we can now to a greater extent explain in conventional scientific terms how those influences of the sun, moon and planets and other celestial phenomenon studied by the early iatromathematici and early cosmobiologists can, and do, affect us.

From the conclusions on KI-37, after reviewing a variety of studies which have attempted to disprove Gauquelin’s findings:

“So forty years after Michel Gauquelin first announced the discovery of his planetary effects to the world, and twenty seven years after the beginning of the Mars effect controversy, we see Gauquelin’s findings are essentially as he specified them in his first two books. The sideshow of the controversy continues even as I write this, but the voice of the debunker hustling his own version of the truth is like a carnival barker and beginning to crack.”

Studies of astrology with univariate statistical designs have yielded inconclusive results. This thesis proposes the use of a multidimensional statistical model to examine astronomical concomitancies of human behavior

Birth data for the study were obtained from Alcoholics Anonymous members (n = 53) and a sample of the general population of Michigan (n = 217). The model was evaluated with these data using Discriminant Function Analysis. Hypotheses derived from the model were supported for group centroids (p < .00001) and group covariances (p < .03). The resulting function correctly classified 80.7 percent of the data from which it was derived (p < 10-16). The function also correctly classified 72.2 percent of a second sample (n = 230) of Michigan births (p < 10-10). By comparison, T-tests using the same data found 9.4 percent of the variables significant at the .05 level (p < .05). The findings support the use of a multidimensional model to evaluate astrological hypotheses about human behavior.

From the Conclusion on p. SE46:

“The Mars effect, having shaken off three skeptics’ attacks, needs to be reassessed by those who failed to disarm it. For the skeptic committees this should not pose much of a problem. They merely need to live up to their own principles of ‘methodological skepticism’ … The present study has shown that the results do survive all rechecks. Are the researchers now ready to accept planetary correlations as an objective for science?”

Ertel’s argument is that when the new studies by the skeptics are carefully considered and interpreted, Gauquelin’s original findings are supported.

“Of all the astrological problems which beckon to us from the future there is one which must excite the thoughtful astrologer more than any other. It is also the problem the solution of which may prove to
be of greatest practical scientific value to mankind. This is the question of how astrology and genetics are to be related and, specifically perhaps, how the genetic code is expressed astrologically.
To put the matter in a nutshell, we know that there are laws of heredity by which natural characteristics are transmitted from generation to generation; we also know that the natural characteristics of each person are described by the horoscope
calculated for his date, time and place of birth. It therefore follows – and we must be clear about this, it does inevitably follow – that the astrological code, by which the horoscope is interpreted, must be in agreement from one generation to the next …
On the most basic scientific level Michel Gauquelin has demonstrated the existence of an astrological relationship between the nativities of parents and children in a massive scientific experiment involving the horoscopes (all calculated for the time of birth) of some 25,000 parents and children.”

All deaths occurring in North Cheshire, UK were logged by cause of death, and month of birth. In this period 502 individuals killed themselves. Suicides differed in months of birth from non-suicides to a highly significant degree (p<.01). Suicide from hanging was significantly more frequent in those born in September and July (p<.005). Those whose suicide was caused by a violent method were significantly more likely to have been born in Summer months. While astrological or planetary factors at time of birth were not considered as causal possibilities, such explanations are open to exploration.