Re-evaluating the Gauquelin Data

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PAGES

1. Introduction
2. Expected and Observed planetary frequencies in the Gauquelin professional groups
3. The Ertel Enigma
4. Report by the French Skeptics, 1982-96
5. The Work of Arno Müller
6. From the Archives
7. Synastry Effects in the Gauquelin 'Heredity' Data
8. Poets and the Moon
9. Character traits
10. Venus
11. Database of Character-Traits
12. Introvert-Extravert
13. Physicians and Sports Champion Data
14. Where's the Data?
15. Was It Significant?
16. A Fourfold Effect
17. The Shape of the Gauquelin Professional-Data Effect
18. Astro-Psychological Problems
19. Françoise and Michel, a Productive Partnership

14. Where's The Data?

1. Michel Gauquelin's first book L'Influence des Astres (1955) cited all of his French sources and gave the birthdata that had been used. One can therefore reconstruct the results he obtained, and check them (See Page 13).

2. Then in 1960 the results of Europe-wide replication appear, l'Hommes et les Astres, resulting from collaboration between Françoise and Michel, whereby they obtained birthdata from registry offices in five or six European nations. That was a monumental achievement, and their book cited full details of all the sources. It should have been their fundamental work... but there was one catch: it did not give the birth-data, so nobody could check its results.

Here is the well-known graph of Mars and sports champions, which has been widely reproduced. No-one can reconstruct it, or will ever be able to, because the data was not released.

3. In 1970-72 data for the European professional groups was published, in large volumes, these being the only books co-authored with his wife Françoise. These groups are generally much larger than those he had earlier described in 1960. Regrettably, these data-volumes do not comment on where the data came from. MG averred that the 1970-72 volumes 'were directly compiled from material previously published,'¹ viz the 1955 and 1960 books, which is rather vague and hardly adequate.

When in 1970 the Gauquelins published their 'final' total of 2,088 sports champions, we would like to have been told where the extra six hundred had come from. Instead, they merely stated:

The birth data published in this series corresponds roughly to the results given in 1960.²

Roughly? Here is how 'roughly' the two correspond:

	1960 totals	1970 totals
Sports Champions	1485	2088
Science & Physicians	3305	3647
Military	3142	3047
Politicians	993	1003
Actors	1270	1409
Artists (Painters & Musicians)	1345+703=2048	1473+1249=2722
Writers & Journalists	826+824	1352+674

They're all different! So we have a fairly catastrophic legacy, whereby the 'definitive' Gauquelin totals, of 1970-72, are not defined or sourced. One may surmise that the data alluded to in the two previous books was contained therein - but in that case, how come the 1970 volume (as up on CURA) has got less military birthdata than Michel claimed to have in 1960? The great replication of 1960 should have been or could have been real science in action, confirming the central hypothesis, but it cannot readily be evaluated, because no-one ever gave us the data. The effect here, it that anyone approaching the subject is going to be permanently muddled as regards what the numbers are supposed to be.

4. His 1988 book Written in the Stars was a retrospective work, looking back at what he'd done. It consistently used the 1960 data from Les Hommes et Les Astres. It is quite hard to comprehend how this could have been done, without people complaining that (a) it was all unverifiable because he never released the data, and (b) why had he not used the corrected data from California? It had a Foreword by Hans Eysenck and an afterword by Geoffrey Dean.

For a shockingly sceptical evaluation of the Gauquelin's historic work on Mars and Sports champions, see my recent article in 'ISAR International Astrologer' journal, The Gauquelin Mars-Effect: Did it Replicate? of the April 2020 issue.

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