Cosmos and Psyche Planetary Theory

Richard Tarnas, widely read American author of The Passion of the Western Mind and Cosmos and Psyche, presents a scientific theory of astronomy which diverges markedly from the mainstream. Tarnas’ hypothesis, in part, is that cycles of the planet Uranus correlate with innovation on Earth. He supports this theory by presenting a case for links between aspects formed between Uranus and other planets and events on earth. For example, that the long conjunction between Uranus and Pluto in the 1960s demonstrated the combined energies of those two planets, (characterized as innovation and transformation respectively) while the conjunction of Uranus with Neptune combined innovation and mystery in the early 1990s. This latter event he links to postmodernism and a relativist theory of knowledge. This typology uses theory of ideal archetypes from Plato and Jung.

Any physical basis for this analysis is not proven. Tarnas presents an anecdotal series of rhythmic patterns in human history, and argues that it is compelling. Worryingly, his use of the term ‘compelling’ applies a humanistic rather than scientific epistemology. While his writings do not defend astrological theories of sun signs, he does claim that the planetary aspects actually align with rhythms on earth.

An interesting theory for BAUT to test is Tarnas’ observation that major astronomers tend to be born when Uranus is in aspect to the Sun. Using conjunction, sextiles, squares, trines and opposition with an orb of say seven degrees provides 8 x 7 = 56 degrees out of 360 degrees of the ecliptic, or 7/45 = 15.55% of people, roughly one in seven, who should have this aspect. (1/7 is given by orb of 6.42 deg). He argues Sun/Uranus aspects appear more commonly than chance in birth times of famous astronomers such as Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler and Newton. The chance of any four randomly selected people having this aspect is 1/7 to the power of four, or 0.041%, about one in two thousand. To test if this Uranus/astronomer link applies further, BAUT readers could vote for a list of the ten or twenty most innovative astronomers of all time, and then look to see if Uranus/Sun aspects appear in their birth times more often than chance.

Current event: Stellium Mars Moon Node Uranus 14.04.07

I have gone ahead and done the study myself proposed in the opening post to test if statistically, Uranus/Sun aspects occur in a specific sample more frequently than chance would predict. This is straight scientific statistics. The test was positive.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astrologers provides birth dates of 32 astrologers born in the 20th century. Using an ephemeris, I listed their Sun-Uranus aspects. By chance, these should be randomly distributed. However, there is a pronounced clustering at the aspect angles (0, 30, 60, 90, 120, 150, 180 degrees), at double the rate predicted by chance. Six of the sample of 32 (19%) had Sun/Uranus aspects within orb of 1.4 degrees, where among the general population, only 9.3% (2.8/30) have these close aspects. Is this an artifact? You can see my spreadsheet and replicate it, including for other groups such as astronomers, drawn from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_astronomers.

What are the implications for astronomy? Think of it this way. Imagine viewing our solar system from outside, say from 1/10 of a light year away, 100 times beyond the orbit of Pluto. The most interesting thing is planet earth, the most complex object in the known universe. Now, from outside, our solar system will appear as a unit. The question will naturally arise, do the complex rhythms of earth mirror broader patterns in this system? This question is similar to the astronomical question how a large planet orbiting a distant star will affect the star’s position. However, we are able to test this question in vastly more detail here for earth. For example, and now this is looking up close, we can ask, does the complex genetic structure of DNA somehow mirror stable patterns of the cosmos in which it evolved? An example of such an effect might be that rhythmic energies of the Sun/Uranus cycle (which has repeated in stable pattern nearly four billion times since life began) have subtle effects on earth, at levels sufficient to influence the human psyche.

It is possible to mine the data, in just the way I have demonstrated above, to test this hypothesis. The data suggest that indeed, an ability at astrology, reflected in presence on the list of astrologers on Wikipedia, has a strong statistical correlation with Sun/Uranus aspects. The test above provides empirical evidence in support of this hypothesis. This test can be replicated on large scales and for other planets, and it should be replicated, as the information provided can be of immense practical use.

I hope people saw the beautiful conjunction between Venus and the new moon this evening.

In the sample of 32 people from the Wikipedia list, 6 had Uranus/Sun aspects closer than 1.4°, double the population average. By my calculation, this result will occur one time in 30 random samples (3.28%) so is highly significant at p=5%. With mean of 2.976 and standard deviation of 1.64, the result of six cases is 1.85 standard deviations more than chance.

This method of population statistical analysis for planetary aspects has not to my knowledge been widely used. A database such as http://cura.free.fr/gauq/11gdcura.html#** with scientists at http://cura.free.fr/gauq/11gdA2.txt can easily be, and has been, linked to planetary data. However, the statistical use I have seen of this data has focused on positions of planets in the sky (Saturn rising effect etc), not on the planets’ angles to each other and to the Sun.

The research I propose here extracts from such a database the difference between all the planetary angles to each other (their aspects) and the angles of a circle divided in 12, with this difference angle defined as the orb of the aspect. In other words, orbs are the difference between the aspect and the closest multiple of 30°. If the aspect between two planets is 92°, orb is 2°, while for an aspect of 149°, orb is 1° (150-1). In the Sun/Uranus case investigated here, the six unusual cases have orb < 1.4°. So 92°, with orb 2°, is looser than any of these six. (Sun and Moon and Pluto are here called planets for ease of reference).

Tarnas claims the combined energy of planetary positions at birth is activated in the human psyche each time a planet transits a main angle to natal planetary positions. This claim is unproven, but the study here provides a path to test it in purely quantitative statistical terms.

The http://cura.free.fr/gauq/11gdcura.html#** database can easily provide a list of all planetary relationships, identifying those in which each group is above or below average. Hence a ‘population map’ for leading scientists, and for the other groups, would emerge.

I used this binomial calculator and got a p-value of 0.0726 or 7.26%. I used 6 or higher instead of exactly 6, since you would have found any higher value even more interesting, and also took the liberty of changing p to the more precise value of 0.0933 from 0.0932 .

But the important question is whether you decided to test exactly these parameters before you looked at the data or looked at the data first and then decided to test this particular scenario. If you looked at the data first then you have a problem. There might be tens of different scenarios that you could have found interesting. The probability of this particular scenario happening by random chance may only be 7% but the probability of at least one of the interesting scenarios happening may well be (and in this case I think is) over 50%.

But even if this is what happened all is not lost. You now have a hypothesis that you can test. Find a different sample and repeat the test for the exact same parameters. And here's a beauty: the p-value is not determined by the phenomenon you are looking at. It's dependent on sample size. If you can get N=96 with 18 "successes" (expected if the first sample was typical) you'd get a p-value of 0.003. Just remember to construct your sample blindly, no looking at the data before you got it finalized

In the interest of openness I should state that I don't think there's anything to this. Actually, I suspect Tarnas looked at a large number of different scenarios until he actually found this one, with different planets, different professions etc. If he did this and doesn't admit it in his book he's just a crook. If he didn't he's just very lucky

But in the end if someone believes there might be something to this he can go ahead and test it. As long he's got specific predictions and a large sample that wasn't used to come up with the model he'll get a definite answer one way or the other.

__________________
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

I would suggest continuing the exercise by adding in the dates of 32 more astronomers and seeing if the correlation still holds.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

I have now done this, and the results are positive but weak. There are 106 astronomers listed on wikipedia with birth dates given since 1900. Seven have Uranus-Sun aspects with orb closer than one degree, but this is in line with chance. Two (Karl Jansky and Albert Whitford) have Uranus-Sun aspects with orb closer than 0.03 degrees, a finding only present in 2% of random samples of 106 people. The small number of correlations and the possible data error means this sample cannot be said to replicate the first finding with the group of 32.

Thank you for the correction on the probability function. I wrongly used NORMSDIST in Excel which gave me the 3.28% figure. 7.26% (~1/13) is correct.

This scenario with Sun Uranus aspects for these 32 people was the first I chose, for the reasons set out in the opening post. It did not come from Tarnas, but was my way of checking his claim. Tarnas observed Uranus/Sun aspects in major astronomers (Copernicus, Galileo, Descartes, Kepler, Newton), but did so anecdotally, not systematically. It is interesting that Tarnas himself is one of the six positives in the sample I found on wikipedia.

An informative and dispassionate book on these themes is ‘Astrology – Science or Superstition?’ by HJ Eysenck and DKB Nias, distinguished statistical psychologists. They survey claimed planetary correlations with sunspots, earthquakes, rain, etc, guided by the principle “we must be ruled by facts and be prepared to go in whatever direction they lead.” Sadly, many claims they look at turn out to be superstitious rubbish, with weak data, bad methods and lack of interest in factual scientific approaches. However, the work of Michel Gauquelin is the exception. Eysenck and Nias observe that the planetary correlations found by Gauquelin involve meticulous, replicated, diligently collected scientific evidence. They comment that critics of these findings often behaved in an irrational manner while Gauquelin remained calm and rational.

Eysenck and Nias suggest the need to extend the area of study to hitherto unexplored factors such as aspects. This is what I am trying to do, to test if Tarnas’s anecdotal claims about aspects have any compelling scientific evidentiary basis.

What could it mean? Eysenck and Nias comment that the strong inheritability of planetary effects (eg Mars rising) indicates a genetic disposition on the part of the foetus to choose its birth time to align with the planetary position. Considering the many amazing facts of evolution, such as salmon finding their home stream, turtles and coral laying eggs at precisely the right time to meet the best tidal conditions, etc, these subtle human correlations with the planets must be accepted as an amazing genetic fact. My interest is to mine the data to find more such facts linking cosmos and psyche.

So what does that indicate for your premise? (I'd also consider 106 to be a very small sample size, though I'll acknowledge that data is probably limited. Can you try a different group and a different correlation? Politicians, maybe?)

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

There are a few other checks that should be done; for example, what is the distribution of the birth dates of all the people in the countries/cities/hospitals/whatever that your chosen sample of astronomers were born in (over some suitable time interval)?

But, as Eckleston already pointed out, you also need to be very clear, ahead of making the selections and doing the tests, exactly how you will do the selecting, and exactly what tests you will be making.

My hypothesis was that some planetary aspects (angles between planets at multiples of 30°) would occur more frequently than chance on the birth dates of the eminent scientists listed by French statistician Michel Gauquelin. It will be recalled that Gauquelin proved that this group were more likely to be born when Saturn is rising or culminating, and that his findings were replicated under hostile skeptical peer review. Hans Eysenck noted that the Gauquelin database had not been interrogated to find consistent trends in planetary aspects, so I have now done this.

Gauquelin’s data is readily available at http://cura.free.fr/gauq/17archg.html. Within this site, http://cura.free.fr/gauq/11gdA2.txt has birth data for 3646 eminent European scientists. I converted this text data into a simple Excel list of birth dates. I then converted the ephemeris at http://www.achernar.btinternet.co.uk/fm.html, with dates from 1891 to 2100, into a digital spreadsheet. As well as allowing powerful aspect data mining, this spreadsheet can generate informative charts of all planetary positions for any contained time period, viewed from our geocentric perspective.

My test examined the group of 532 out of the 3646 scientists who were born between 1891 and 1910, and counted how many of this group were born when each of the 39 planetary pairs listed below were within 1.5° of a multiple of 30° apart. 28.6° or 31° would return a positive while 32° degrees would not, etc, and so on for the 3° orb each side of 60°, 90°, 120°, 150°, 180°, 210°, 240°, 270°, 300°, 330° and 0° aspects. The probability of a positive reading for any one aspect in the general population is about 10% (3° x 12/360 = 1/10), but can be calculated exactly from the ephemeris for each planetary pair. Average frequency of each aspect for a random sample of 532 people should be about 53.2.

The result was positive but weak. The strongest effect was the aspect between Mars and Saturn, occurring 64 times in the sample. The binomial calculator at http://faculty.vassar.edu/lowry/binomialX.html shows this or larger result occurs only once in 65.42 samples (1.53%), given that in the period 1891-1910, Mars-Saturn aspects occur only 9.14% of the time. (N=532,K=64,P=.0914). The aspect between Venus and the Node of the Moon was the most frequent in the sample, occurring 67 times, but its overall frequency during the period (9.77%) is slightly more than for Mars-Saturn. The probability of the Venus-Node result for the scientist group was one in 50.42 (1.98%) for this or larger result. Other aspects which appeared in the scientist group at a rate seen in less than 10% of random samples were Pluto-Node, Venus-Mars and Venus-Saturn.

Most interestingly, the trend lines in an aspect frequency chart of the two sub-groups 1891-1899 (324 scientists) and 1900-1910 (208 scientists) closely matched, when aspects are sorted by frequency in the total group. For the earlier born group, the trend line rises strongly from 6.8% to 12.2%, for the latter group it moves from 7.7% to 11.3%, and for both groups together (all 532) the frequency trend rises from 7.1% to 11.9%. The fact that these trend lines move strongly in the same direction shows that in each separate decade, the group of eminent scientists were more likely to be born at times when planetary aspects differed from the population mean in consistently similar ways. If there were no planetary effect, these trend lines would either be flat or move in opposite directions.

Tests were conducted for the following 39 aspects: Saturn-Node; Jupiter-Pluto; Jupiter-Neptune; Neptune-Node; Mercury-Mars; Sun-Mars; Venus-Uranus; Saturn-Pluto; Sun-Jupiter; Jupiter-Uranus; Saturn-Neptune; Sun-Node; Mars-Jupiter; Mercury-Pluto; Mars-Node; Sun-Pluto; Jupiter-Node; Sun-Saturn; Uranus-Node; Jupiter-Saturn; Mars-Uranus; Mercury-Jupiter; Venus-Jupiter; Mars-Pluto; Sun-Uranus; Mercury-Neptune; Venus-Pluto; Mars-Neptune; Mercury-Saturn; Mercury-Node; Sun-Neptune; Venus-Neptune; Mercury-Uranus; Saturn-Uranus; Mars-Saturn; Pluto-Node; Venus-Mars; Venus-Saturn; Venus-Node;

All data for these results is freely available.

Robert Tulip

Just a few comments:

Your second trial completely failed to reproduce the finding of the first one about Sun/Uranus aspects.
You looked at 39 aspects and one of them was unusual in that it happens once in 66 samples. In a sample of 39 this will happen 45% of the time.
2 out of 39 was less likely than 2 percent. This happens 18% of the time with random data.

Basically you took a 100 sided dice, rolled it 39 times and got a 1 and a 2. Hardly unusual.

You've got a good sample size and yet no signal. If there was the kind of effect you wrote in your first posts it would have had to show up in this kind of sample pretty clearly. Indeed if the original trend held the result would have been significant to 1-3.3*10^-11.

I'm not sure I'm getting this right but you plotted the frequency in one subgroup (then on a different plot for the other subgroup) against the frequency (or rank in frequency) in the complete sample? If you did this you can't expect the trend lines to move to opposite directions. The aspect with the lowest frequency will have one of the lowest frequency in both subsamples. That's why it's lowest, it got unlucky twice. Same with the highest. You expect some aspects to get lucky twice and in turn you expect them to turn up in the upper right in both plots.

You don't expect flat lines either becouse the expected distribution is not uniform.

__________________
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

Eh, weak patterns and unproven corrolations do not a scientific theory make. For instance, I've never been attacked by a tiger while wearing these shoes. Does that mean that these shoes effectively prevent tiger attacks? (obviously, no. well, maybe because of the smell, but...) If I ignore the fact that I've not been near a tiger while wearing these shoes, the data could suggest that the two things relate. They don't.

Sorry, I'm the king of obscure similies. But to apply this to the conversation, you could say that the alignment of (whatever planets you want here) in the 1960's created technology-oriented creativity, which is why so many afluent computer programmers/techs were born in that rough time period. Of course, this would be ignoring that the computer boom took off really in the 70's and 80's, so naturally people who were college-age at the time went into this field. Back to the actual claim, I think any study of astronomers born during this "cycle" should also be compared to societies advances in astrology, and astrologies importace in society at the time. In short, all factors as a whole need to be examined, not ignored. Granted it's not usually possible to identify and study all possible factors, but the more you get the better.

Hope that helps.

__________________

I'm like one of those idiot savants...well, except for the savant part.
"In order to increase awareness of the homeless, security have been given binoculars."

Thank you for this analysis, it concurs with my comment that the result was positive but weak. However, I disagree with your assertion that the sample size is necessarily good, as your comment discounts the likelihood that a larger sample may detect real but weak signals. I plan to follow up by broadening the study. Granted, the Mars-Saturn linkage - evident in these scientist’s birth times sixty times more often than in the general population - is well within statistical expectations. The question remains whether a larger sample will deliver results that are significant by finding trends in this group that differ consistently from others. Comparison of this group with others may find real variance in frequency of specific planetary relations among different professions.

I checked on Richard Tarnas’ comments on Uranus/Sun. His argument is that this aspect often occurs at birth of outstanding innovators. It would not be expected to happen more often than chance among the eminent astronomers and scientists analyzed here, unless it were established that innovation was a feature of this group.

Thank you for the correction on my trend analysis, which as you have shown is not significant. It shows my statistics is a bit rusty. The underlying intention was that a bigger sample and longer time series would enable comparison of frequencies of specific aspects by decade, with potential to identify any trends.

If it's just "outstanding innovators" that's described, why limit it to astronomers? What about (to pick a name out of my area of expertise) Shakespeare, arguably one of the greatest innovators in the English language? What about Miguel de Cervantes? Sir Francis Drake? (Can you tell what time period I've studied?)

Can I just thank you for your willingness to take criticism and suggestions? You are a refreshing change around here.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

Actually there is a way to test that by calculating correlations between the two subsamples. (or even just plotting the frequency in one subsample against frequency in the other) Unfortunately I don't know how you can do significance testing on that, as not all values above 0 are significant.

__________________
"The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity."

Dorothy Parker (?)

Gillian

Shakespeare’s birth date is uncertain, but Richard Tarnas says it was near Uranus opposite Venus. I am not sure regarding Cervantes and Drake.

In his book, Prometheus the Awakener – The Archetypal Meaning of the Planet Uranus, Tarnas lists the following prominent individuals with Uranus-Sun aspects: Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, Locke, Kant, Freud, William James, Mary and Percy Shelley, Byron, Keats, Rousseau, Emerson, Thomas Jefferson, Bob Dylan, Marie Curie, Margaret Mead, Gertrude Stein, George Sand, Simone de Beauviour. His Uranus-Moon list is headed by Mozart, Byron and Jung.

This method of listing individuals is like picking cherries - choosing the best among a long list of alternatives. It tells us little in scientific terms until the specifications of the sample list are provided and variance from chance is detected in a properly constructed test.

Robert

Quite true. For example, while I'm fond of Mozart, I certainly wouldn't consider him the greatest innovator in music. Jacopo Peri, whom few people could identify, is arguably a greater one; ditto Johann Stamitz and Giuseppe Torelli.

While it's true that Shakespeare's exact birthdate is unknown, it is highly likely to be 23 April, 1564. Cervantes was born on 29 September, 1547. Drake, okay, no one knows. But his sponsor, Elizabeth I--arguably one of the greatest innovators of her era--was born on 7 September, 1533. Any one of those has had greater historical impact, in my opinion, than Bob Dylan. True, they've had 400 years to prove it, and he hasn't, but I think in 400 more, Cervantes and Elizabeth I will be seen as more innovative still.

__________________
Gillian

"Now everyone was giving her that kind of look UFOlogists get when they suddenly say, 'Hey, if you shade your eyes you can see it is just a flock of geese after all.'"

"You can't erase icing."

"I can't believe it doesn't work! I found it on the internet, man!"

The challenge is to obtain data which will be scientifically interesting. 'Innovation' is a slippery concept, as your comments on Mozart and Dylan show. A test could be constructed, as I suggested above with inventors.

The scientist data I used was not enough to demonstrate significance, but the fact that the Mars/Saturn linkage was the biggest statistical anomaly among the list of 500 eminent scientists, appearing at a rate seen in 1 in 65 random samples, is suggestive, and could be compared to other large groups. Aspects of Mars are thought to indicate ability for self-expression through dynamic action, while aspects of Saturn are claimed to show capacity for self-discipline and structure in life. A Mars-Saturn link therefore suggests structured action, of the sort applied in science. This prima-facie link would need to be tested to see if the Mars-Saturn link appeared more frequently than chance in other groups of scientists.

Re your mention of innovation in music, I have developed a scientific model for the music of the spheres. For any given time period, for example the 1960s, the list of planetary positions I described previously can be converted to a logarithmic scale with 1 Aries representing A 220 hertz and 30 Pisces A 440 hertz. By applying a different tone to each planet, the result is music similar to Penderecki or Messiaen, with planetary conjunctions sounding as unisons, sextiles as major seconds, squares as minor thirds, trines as major thirds, and oppositions as tritones. I can send the midi frequency spreadsheet to anyone interested to help implement this.