An analysis of birth and death dates for 161 persons who killed themselves in New York between 1969 and 1973 found no statistically significant common planetary transits.
To test the hypothesis that planetary astrological effects are weak but real, I conducted a small study of data collected by Ms Nona Press of dates of birth and death of suiciders. I acknowledge and thank Ms Press for kindly providing this data, and for referring me to her report on the study in her book
New Insights into Astrology.
My interest in this material came from reading
The Moment of Astrology by Geoffrey Cornelius, which explains that considerable analysis of natal data of this group in the 1970s failed to find any evidence for astrological predictions. My study sought to test the claim by astrologers that the planetary transit explanations in the book
Planets in Transit by Robert Hand have an obvious real meaning for cycles in human psychology. My hypothesis was that if transits have an effect, then a reasonable size statistical analysis of extreme events, such as suicides, should show some patterns of common planetary timing. For example, the planets Mars and Saturn, traditionally known as malefics, could be thought to influence the mood of people considering suicide, such that more than normal numbers kill themselves at a particular point in the Mars-Saturn cycle, measured in relation to where planets were at the time the person was born.
I entered the 161 birth and death dates provided by Ms Press in hard copy into a spreadsheet, and then linked this to ephemeris data and calculated all transit angles for each planetary pairing. This produced a listing, each sorted by angle, of all individual planetary transits for the group at their date of death, as well as some planetary midpoint transits. Technical details are available on request.
The hypothesis posited that graphs of this group would look different from the null hypothesis of no effect. The
transit graph for the Mars-Saturn midpoint at date of death is attached as a representative example. Looking at the position of this midpoint against the natal planetary positions of all 161 cases, the trend lines are very close to the population norm, shown by the diagonal straight line. All inner planet transits cluster around this line, while the outliers are artifacts caused by the short four year death date range (1969-73), during which the outer planets hardly moved. Any significant deviations from normal would be shown by lines appearing flatter for one part, showing bunching of suicides during a specific angle of the transit to the natal planetary positions. For example, if there were a tendency for people to kill themselves when the Mars-Saturn midpoint was opposite the point on the ecliptic where the Moon was when they were born, an outcome in rough conformity with Mr Hand’s predictions, the moon transit trend line would be horizontal at 180°, and it would be clearly visible away from the trend line. Instead it closely hugs the average population trend of the null hypothesis of no planetary effects. A discrepancy would show that more than average numbers killed themselves at one stage of the Mars-Saturn midpoint cycles against natal planetary positions. However all findings appear to be well within statistically probable limits, with roughly equal numbers at each angle and no detectable bunching. The same pattern emerged for other planetary transits.
This study shows that transit effects are too weak to be detected at this scale. However, it may be that the paths leading people to kill themselves are too diverse to be detected by this crude approach of comparing planet positions at dates of birth and death. Resolving data to exact moments could study the moon and also introduce further complex factors such as house positions. My interest was to see if a simple crude analysis would produce promising results, but it did not.
These findings do not disprove transit influence, but they show that any such influence is too weak to appear at this level of data. A larger epidemiological study of birth and death dates could increase the sensitivity of this same method. For example, looking at 100,000 heart attack victim dates of birth, onset and death might show significant results. If such data were available this method could quickly analyse to test for empirical validation of astrological predictions at population level.
Robert Tulip