In 1974, Michel Gauquelin met Hans Eysenck, then Britain's best-known psychologist, in Paris, in the office of the psychology journal for which he worked. He suggested that the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire could be used to tell the difference between Jupiter and Saturn types - the former being extravert and the latter, introvert, he explained. This seems to have had quite an effect upon Eysenck, because a year later he published an article on this subject in the weekly New Behaviour1, proposing that a hypothesis on this matter should be testable.
A few years later, a paper co-authored by Eysenck on the subject used his EPQ on students:
Jeff Mayo, O. White and Hans Eysenck (1978) An empirical Study of the relation between astrological factors and personality Jnl. Social Psychology, 105, 229-236
which we return to later, soon followed by:
Gauquelin, M & F. and Eysenck, S. B. G. (1979) 'Personality and position of the planets at birth: An empirical study British Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol:18: pp.71-75.
Gauquelin, M & F. and Eysenck, S. B. G. (1981) 'Eysenck's personality analysis and position of the planets at birth: A replication on American subjects' Personality and Individual Differences, Vol 2(4) pp.346-350.
These did not have Hans Eysenck's name in them, but that of his wife Sybil, and used the character-traits which the Gauquelins had been extracting from biographies.2
Sybil Eysenck would make a judgement about each term in these studies, deciding whether it was +E or-E. For example, she reckoned that 'arguer, athletic, attractive' were extravert while in contrast 'accurate, awkward and confidence (lack of)' indicated an introvert.3 Both these papers claimed to show Mars and Jupiter as extravert and Saturn as introvert.
A year later in 1982, Hans Eysenck summed up these results:
Extraverts are significantly more frequently born when Mars and Jupiter had just risen or had just passed their upper culmination; introverts when Saturn had just risen or just passed its upper culmination.4
There has never been any follow-up to these papers: maybe readers were not unduly impressed by having one person make a summary and rather arbitrary judgement over trait-terms?
Yearly astrology-research conferences began in 1982 at the Institute of Psychiatry at the Maudesley Hospital in South London, to which Eysenck belonged: psychology students would there brush shoulders with astro-researchers, and Eysenck could be heard chatting with Professor Suitbert Ertel in German! Psychologist Beverley Steffert, a member of the newly-formed AIR group (Astrologers in Research), had a hand in making these conferences happen.
In 1983, Françoise published a contrast between two different personality types.5 She reckoned that a group of drug addicts showed the opposite of the customary 'Gauquelin effect:' Rotated at one-eighth of a circle with respect to the four 'Gauquelin sectors,' did they show four 'introvert' sectors of non-achievement so to speak?
The first diagram shows a composite line made by FG, where she seems to have added together the different planetary-career results: 'very successful people (broken line) are in obvious contrast to Martinek's results with drug addicts (black bars).' In her next diagram we are shown (Figure 2) 'Mars placements for active people (sportsmen, military men) in sharp contrast to Mars placements for contemplative characters (painters, musicians, poets).'
The peaks obtained with drug addicts were in obvious contrast to the low frequencies in "Cadent houses" (our "key-sectors" numbered 1, 4, 7 and 10, in the direction of the daily motion of the planets). With prominent professional notabilities, we obtain the exactly reversed graph (see continuous line in our Figure 1). This "anti-correlation" is statistically significant. It finds its causal justification in the personality differences of both groups, the successful celebrities obtaining recognition by fighting efficaciously the difficulties of life, and the drug addicts receding from these difficulties into the blissful oblivion of narcotics.
That may have been Françoise's first statement about how the 'Gauquelin effect' could (she reckoned, or hoped) apply to ordinary people and not just the very elite eminent groups as her husband claimed.6 She found a similar contrast in the professional groups:
There is a result, in our professional groups, which offers a similar contrast (see our Figure 2): the painters, musicians and poets form a group of artists oriented more towards contemplation than action, while the sports champions and military men prefer action to contemplation; their planetary results on the whole show the same "anti-correlation" as the drug addicts compared to the successful celebrities; and the anti-correlation reaches its maximum if we consider the results with the planet Mars.
That sounds similar to the introvert-extravert polarity on which she had published a few years earlier, but she did not say that. It is doubtful whether the drug addict data here is statistically significant, as the numbers are too small (n=116), but FG's comments here remain of interest.
To test this idea - of personality attributes related to Mars, Jupiter and Saturn - four people (in 2017) made introvert-extravert ratings for the thirty-five character traits described in the previous section (on a scale -2 as Introvert, -1 as maybe introvert, 0 as neither introvert nor extravert, +1 as maybe extravert and +2 as extravert), with mean values derived per trait. Thus the scores they obtained were -
Active 1, 1, 1, 2 => 1.25
Ardent 0, 0, 2, 0 => 0.5
Authority 0, 0, 1, 2 => 0.75
Etc. (For scores of all 35 trait-terms, see here)
The average values of these scores were then plotted against the strength of a planet in terms of the percentage excess or deficit (in the four cadent houses at birth, as compared to the other houses) as described in the previous section. The Mars graph is shown for the 35 traits.
The correlation here is highly significant. It may help here, to note the three strongest Mars-traits around the 200 mark, as being strongly extravert: they were combative 207%, vitality 206% and energetic at 197%. That means that these three traits were found in biographies of persons having Mars in cadent houses at birth, twice as frequently as in the other houses. At the other end, two of the lowest-scoring traits score around -1 on the vertical scale, ie judged as being introvert, are pure 43% and tranquil 57%.
The Saturn-graph here shown goes in the other direction, i.e. the more frequently Saturn appeared in the four Key Sectors, the more introvert the traits tended to be. Thus in the Saturn-graph we see how the two 'strongest' (highest-scoring) traits were silent 168% and cold 165%, both rated as strongly introvert.
Thus we endorse the approach which the Gauquelins took on this matter in their 1979 paper, but may have improved upon the methodology.
The Eysenck-Mayo paper published in 1978 was hailed as 'probably the most important astrology story of the century' by Phenomena, The Bulletin of Astrological News & Information (May 1977, p. 2). Malcolm Dean, its Canadian editor, had a breezy optimism, but alas his journal only lasted a few years.
Using the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, the authors found a quite simple effect, whereby alternate sun-signs tended to be extravert (Aries, Gemini, etc) and then introvert (Taurus, Cancer, etc.). Other academic psychologists were able to replicate this effect, eg Prof Alan Smithers and Heather Cooper found very similar results, published a decade later in the same Journal of Social Psychology.7 We are here looking at the only positive 'astrological effect' ever published and then replicated in academic psychology journals.
Some debate ensued over whether this effect only appeared with people selected because they knew about astrology. Well-known British astrologers such as Dr Nick Campion vehemently rejected the claim which Eysenck and Nias had made in their book Astrology: Science or Superstition that the effect was caused by people reading sun-sign columns! Did these columns lead people to perceive themselves as introvert or extravert? The subject has been well reviewed, together with another positive-result confirmation using 992 non-astrological subjects, by members of a Dutch psychology department in 1990. 8
While this effect has nothing to do with the Gauquelins, it is here included because a test of it is feasible using their own character-traits.
The data-set here used has 35 character-traits (see previous section) cited altogether 4,353 times in biographies of 1,142 people: that is just over four traits per person, on average. To test the Mayo thesis, one needs some measure of whether a person is introvert or extravert. One could say that a minimum of three such traits per person are required, for such an estimate to be credible. Accordingly, all birth names were deleted which had only one or two traits assigned to them, and that left just 557 people who had three or more character-traits. Thereby a mean value of these traits introvert-extravert was assigned to them. Their solar zodiac longitude at birth was ascertained.
The graph shows a best-fit 6th harmonic waveform put through the data, i.e. one going through six cycles per 360° circle of the zodiac. It extends over sixty degrees, so that if someone was born with the Sun at, say 2° Gemini, i.e. 62° zodiac longitude, that appears as 2° on this graph. It has an amplitude of 25%.9 A 'moving average' can be used to smooth the data, two of which are here shown, one of 100 points and the second of 50 points (which means that each point is an average of about one-tenth of the data). So, the effect does indeed exist and is quite significant 10 (More traits were scored as extravert than introvert, a feature one may assume of celeb biographies, which pushed the overall mean up to 0.2, with scores ranging from +2 to -2).
It was Dr Carl Jung who popularised the concept here used: introversion he said was an "attitude-type characterised by orientation in life through subjective psychic contents" while extraversion was "an attitude type characterised by concentration of interest on the external object." It's the one bit of psych-language that everyone feels that they understand.11
And yet, problems remain. Thus, one of the volunteers who did the rating of introvert-extravert scoring for the traits, the Finnish K.T., took exception to the ratings for the trait, 'ardent' which were '0, 0, 2, 0' (see above). He assigned it a rating of +2, and wrote "I don't understand why all others gave 0 to the attribute 'ardent' since according to the dictionary it is clearly related to extraversion:
Ardent, adjective
1. having, expressive of, or characterized by intense feeling; passionate, fervent:
an ardent vow, ardent love.
2. intensely devoted, eager, or enthusiastic; zealous:
an ardent theatregoer, an ardent student of French history.
3. Vehement, fierce:
They were frightened by his ardent, burning eyes.
4. burning, fiery, or hot:
the ardent core of a star.
There is scope here for further discussion. But overall, it is clear that the introvert-extravert dimension of personality has much value in terms of demonstrating how the cosmos works upon the human psyche, and in being part of a language whereby astrologers and psychologists can communicate with each other. The proposal which Michel made to Hans Eysenck in 1974 appears as vindicated. The optimistic conclusion reached by Hans Eysenck
Perhaps the time has come to state quite unequivocally that a new science is in the process of being born12
was surely correct.