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.

The author challenges the supposition that the belief systems proposed by Dean (2000) should be more pronounced in rural than urban areas and uses empirical data to demonstrate the validity of that challenge. Rural-urban disparities in the percentage of people who agree to the item “Good luck charms sometimes do bring good luck” (results based on answers from n = 14395 respondents from 12 different countries) suggest that rural people are not more superstitious than those from urban areas. The implications of this are discussed.

Leo Knegt (1882-1957) was one of the Netherlands’s most eminent astrologers. When tested in a 1933 blind trail by the lawyer Cornelis van Rossem, his interpretations were found to be both accurate and at times amazingly specific, certainly more specific than most astrologers today would consider possible. In effect, Knegt seems to have been an astrological white crow, living proof of the impossible. So the big question is how did Knegt do it? What was the secret of his success? The author suggests that this is simply not known and goes to state that if it were, it could revolutionise astrological practice and research. In this article, the author looks at the blind trial in detail, giving examples of Knwegt’s specific interpretations and the charts they were based on, and asking the readers of Correlation for help in trying to find out how Knegt did it.

J. F. Ruis compared birth frequencies between males and females of ordinary people (Gauquelin data) across planetary sectors and claimed that certain frequencies differed significantly. Since the dates of birth in his male and female sub samples had not been matched, the result might be due to an astronomical-demographical artefact. The present study tries to replicate Ruis’ result using the same data with male and female sub samples matched for date of birth (n+ 7,593) each. Each sub sample was divided using the median birth day as the dividing point, into two successive cohorts. For each cohort the male proportion of births, indicating the gender difference, was determined across 36 sectors of 5 planets. If gender differences exist they should be stable across successive cohorts, but gender differences in the first cohort did not reoccur in the subsequent cohort. This was revealed by correlations. The observed lack of stable differences cannot be attributed to the method since the same method successfully demonstrated stability in identifying Mars-prone professionals and ordinary people. The finding of Ruis is thus most probably due to an astronomical-demographical artefact.

The Gauquelin distributions for professionals are examined and the chance of finding such close clustering of the phase angles for the 3rd and 4th harmonics is shown to be very small. An experiment of simulating “noise” addition to the data (to resemble the tampering noted by Dean) is described and it is shown that the phase angles are robust against noise. A speculation by Addey that the 3rd and 4th harmonics represent subsets of one population is examined, and it is shown that the ratios of the amplitudes of the 3rd and 4th harmonics for each of the professional groups varies widely (as would follow if Addy’s speculation is true).

The predictive qualities of Vedic astrology were tested using 20 pairs of birth data. One of each pair was a real person who had died in a road accident. The other was a fictitious person who acted as a control. In each pair the birth place was the same, and the birth dates were no more than three months apart, as were the death dates. Using Vedic astrology a form of astrology widely applied in India, the author (working blind) attempted to identify the genuine accidental death. The result was 11 hits and 9 misses, which is not significantly different fro the 10 expected by chance.

Birth data for 20 politicians and 20 painters, in randomised order, were given to eleven experienced astrologers, who had to judge which was which. The test was performed using internet communication. Participants of the tests, individually, did not perform better than chance nor did they succeed as a group. Moreover, mean agreement was poor. The result is consistent with previous studies. Possible reasons for the failure are discussed.

The story of phrenology is rich in lessons for astrology. But the literature of phrenology is so huge, so clogged with side issues (of philosophy, of politics, or religion, of morality, of society in general), so often tedious to read (wordiness being the style of the day), and so difficult to find except in specialised libraries, that these lessons have gone largely unrecgonised. Like astrology, phrenology encourages you to assess yourself and act on its findings to achieve harmony with the world. Like astrology, it flourished because practitioners and clients saw that it worked. It was claimed to be “so plainly demonstrated that the non-acceptance of phrenology is next to impossible.” But the experience-based claims of phrenologists are now known to be completely wrong. Could the same apply to the experience-based claims of astrologers? To answer this question, the author looks at phrenology’s social context, history, literature, testimonials, stock objections, and experimental tests, all of which have parallels in astrology, ending with phrenologists’ views of astrology and vice versa. The author concludes that the answer appears to be yes.

The aim of this study is to compare sociability scores with the birth time in calendar and seasonal months of a population of 524 students (Ss) of an average age of 22.09 years, by using the Eysenck and Wilson psychological test. The position of the Sun in eleven out of the twelve zodiacal signs corresponds significantly to alternations of higher and lower sociability for the odd and even signs of the zodiac respectively, this being in conformity with astrological tradition. On the other hand, a significant sinusoidal evolution (COSINOR) in sociability scores appears with a maximum in Libra which can explain the very low score of Aries because of the position of the minimum of the curve at the level of the sign (p<0.05). These results seem to validate the astrological zodiacal signs.

Most statistical studies done to investigate astrological claims either measure an astrologer’s capabilities (matching tests etc.) or oversimplify human subjects as belonging to a certain category (sportsman, extrovert …) or not. A way to avoid this might be to measure something like “instinctive” attraction or repulsion to someone unknown. The author tested this (in 1992) by judging 369 people on the street on a scale from “bah” to “wow!” (attraction -3 to +3). The assumption that people who had their natal Moon, Venus or Mars position in a major aspect with the same object in the author’s radix, would get a higher attraction score, appears to be confirmed with a significance in the order of 5%. The more (of these 3) aspects present between “judge” and test person the higher the average attraction. Also, the smaller the aspect orb, the higher the average attraction. Remarkable was that sextile aspects seem to have no effect.