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.

This article presents a re-analysis of some recently published data from a study of astrologers’ keywords. The study was by Francoise Gauquelin who, it is argued, seriously underestimated the significance of some of her results. It is shown that chi-squared analyses of the agreement between 14 astrologers and the Gauquelins’ independently derived lists of planetary traits for four of the planets, yield extremely significant results for all of the astrologers, both ancient and modern. In addition, the data are analysed by means of Cohen’s kappa to give measures of agreement which are appropriately corrected for chance expected agreement. Finally, kappa is used to make a comparison between the reliability of astrological diagnosis of the planets’ effects and a related field, psychiatric diagnosis of clinical syndromes. See also Letters, “Statistical significance tests” Vergo Correlation Vol, 2 Issue 2 pages 38 – 40 and Letters Statistical significance tests” Startup Correlation Vol.3 Issue 1 1983 page 51.

To test whether astrology can predict E (extraversion) and N (emotionality) in ordinary people, subjects with extreme scores on the EPI were selected from 1198 subjects mostly from the southern hemisphere, all of whom had known birth times. The result was two replicate sets each with 54 extreme subjects for each of E+, E-, N+ and N-. The average pair of opposite extremes was roughly equivalent to the two most extreme persons in a random sample of 15 adults. The following factors were tested: tropical signs, decans, elements, sidereal signs, aspects, harmonics, hemisphere, Gauquelin plus zones and angularity, both individually and in combination. The latter excluded sidereal signs but included midpoints and Placidus houses. If astrology predicts that factor X indicates, say, E+, then the frequency of X should be higher in extreme E+ subjects than in extreme E- subjects. The results of 132 such tests, and a multiple discriminant analysis, showed that no factor performed consistently above chance level.

Studies of crop yield in relation to the Moon’s position at sowing show that 27.3 day sidereal rhythms may be present. A wave-harmonic approach to such rhythms in three years of sowing data is presented. Estimates of the amplitude and phase of the rhythms are discussed. The latter indicate that the ancient sidereal zodiac, rather than the more widely used tropical zodiac, best fits the existing data.

Statistical tests based on the chi square statistic are described for detecting seasonality and sun sign periodicity in birthday frequency sets. The tests for periodicity make use of the 50% probability test and contingency table analysis (2×2 and 2×12 contingency tables) and are capable of detecting alternant-sign and alternant-sign-pair periodicity in small frequency sets (24Read more ›