In this paper evidence is presented that political and economic cycles of activity are correlated with celestial cycles. Political patterns of war and peace, and economic patterns of recession, depression, recovery and prosperity are closely associated with the fundamental and harmonic waves of the five outer planets of the solar system throughout the 20th century. Correlations of political and economic dependent variables with several planetary waves are statistically significant. Graphs of outer-planetary fundamental and harmonic waves for the 20th and 21st centuries are presented and interpreted from a political and economic perspective. Global warfare is predicted beginning in 2032. Recommendations are made for further research.

Modern philosophers generally accept astrology as a source of sympathy and support, but they reject it as a source of knowledge. This matches the idea, introduced in KT1, that astrology can be viewed in two ways, one in terms of the purely subjective satisfaction enjoyed by users, and the other in terms of its objective accuracy. The discourse looks at some philosophical (I.e., conceptual) problems revealed by each viewpoint. Astrology from the satisfaction viewpoint is generally unproblematic: (1) Satisfaction typically rests on value judgments and subjective feelings, both of which can legitimately differ. So arguments about the extent and type of satisfaction provided by astrology may be pointless. (2) The astrology so viewed need not be true and is therefore uncontroversial. (3) Nevertheless problems can arise if astrologers needlessly embrace assailable arguments. Why undermine uncontroversial claims with assailable arguments? (4) Problems can also arise if satisfaction depends on perceptions that are in fact false. Action based on false perceptions could be harmful. Astrology from the accuracy viewpoint faces numerous problems: (1) Astrology is defined as precisely not the result of any means we know of. (2) Astrological effects are essentially statistical, are non-identifiable except after the event, and therefore cannot be an independent source of knowledge. (3) Astrologers have been reluctant to describe what their model predicts, the criteria by which it could be tested, and the evidence they would accept as showing it had failed. (4) No claims to accuracy can be justified unless astrologers make proper experiments and distinguish between alternative explanations and have independent reasons for thinking that astrological effects exist.

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.

Although a family history of schizophrenia is the best-established risk factor for schizophrenia. environmental factors such as the place and season of birth may also be important. Using data from the Civil Registration System in Denmark, we established a population-based cohort of 1.75 million persons whose mothers were Danish women born between 1935 and 1978. We linked this cohort to the Danish Psychiatric Central Register and identified 2669 cases of schizophrenia among cohort members and additional cases among their parents. Results: the respective relative risks of schizophrenia for persons with a mother, father, or sibling who had schizophrenia were 9.31 {95 percent confidence interval, 7.24 to 11.96), 7.20 {95 percent confidence interval, 5.10 to 10.16), and 6.99 {95 percent confidence interval, 5.38 to 9.09), as compared with persons with no affected parents or siblings. The risk of schizophrenia was associated with the degree of urbanisation of the place of birth {relative risk for the capital vs. rural areas, 2.40; 95 percent confidence interval, 2.13 to 2.70). The risk was also significantly associated with the season of birth; it was highest for births in February and March and lowest for births in August and September. The population- attributable risk was 5.5 percent for a history of schizophrenia in a parent or sibling, 34.6 percent for urban place of birth, and 10.5 percent for the season of birth. Conclusions: Although a history of schizophrenia in a parent or sibling is associated with the highest relative risk of having the disease, the place and season of birth account for many more cases on a population basis. {N Engl J Med 1999;340:603-8.) {Copyright 1999, Massachusetts Medical Society.)

A re-assessment of Jung’s astrological test of synchronicity provides no convincing reason to believe in either. Nevertheless, precisely because of this, Jung’s results still provide food for thought.

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.