Page 28 - ISAR International Astrologer, April 2021; Vol 50 #1 Research The Science of Synastry and the Urge to Merge Nick Kollerstrom S ynastry between two charts expresses some depth of soul-affinity or dynamic between a couple. We’ll here be looking at individual planet-pairs in large groups of married couples, and for these large groups any results are going to express to what extent such affinities are coherent through the group. Thus, any such result say between Mars and Venus would express something in common be- tween all of the marriages, or rather of the attractive forces that brought about the marriages. One should not expect this to be universal, so there might be no universal ‘laws’ of synastry: although a Mars-Venus dynamic does sound pretty basic. The results here shown are from France, and we’ll be looking at two different data-sets separated by a hundred years. They tend to show solar interactions with nothing much lunar, whereas in other cultures it could well be the other way round. In Carl Jung’s famous syn- astry experiment, which he did in Switzerland, the links seemed to be mainly lunar.1 The first data-set we have was collected by the two Gauquelins, Michel and Francoise. They published it as what they called ‘heredity’ data in various dif- ferent publications. You can view them here. 2 The present study only looks at married couples and not parent-child relations, which is what the Gauque- lins were primarily concerned with. A few years ago these different groups were compiled into one huge data-set of twenty thousand married couples, with birth- data. 3 That is, I believe, the world’s best synastry database. It seems odd in retrospect that the Gauquelins never did this, but only looked at the separate groups: 4 Perhaps this was because their work belonged to the pre-computer era, which seems so long ago now, before home computers had arrived. This synastry data- base has an especial value, as belonging to ‘gay Paree’ around the beginning of the 20th century. If synastry was going to work anywhere it surely ought to be there: the romance, the lovely ladies, les liasons dangereuse, the happy music, the ardent passion! I published in 2015 an account of synastry found within that database, ‘The Chemistry of Attraction.’ 5 Whereas, in the modern era when divorce is easy, might one expect collective synastry effects to show up differently? In the year 2000, Didier Castille published his report “Sunny day for a Wedding.” 6 He had managed to ob- tain literally millions of birthdates of French married couples, having worked in a national statistics office, and he showed that their suns were closer together that would be expected by chance: whatever time of year one partner is born, the other was more likely to be born around that time. His data was for marriages contracted between 1976 and 1997. As he wrote: "Marriages between people having the same solar longitude (more or less 30°) are more numerous than predicted. In contrast, an anal- ysis of lunar longitudes reveals no statistically significant correlation." He also found the same for parent-child relations: charts of mother and child had their suns closer together.
Transcript
Page 28 - ISAR International Astrologer, April 2021; Vol 50 #1
Research
The Science of Synastry and the Urge to Merge
Nick Kollerstrom
Synastry between two charts expresses some depth of soul-affinity or dynamic between a couple. We’ll here be looking at individual
planet-pairs in large groups of married couples, and for these large groups any results are going to express to what extent such affinities are coherent through the group. Thus, any such result say between Mars and Venus would express something in common be-tween all of the marriages, or rather of the attractive forces that brought about the marriages. One should not expect this to be universal, so there might be no universal ‘laws’ of synastry: although a Mars-Venus dynamic does sound pretty basic. The results here shown are from France, and we’ll be looking at two different data-sets separated by a hundred years. They tend to show solar interactions with nothing much lunar, whereas in other cultures it could well be the other way round. In Carl Jung’s famous syn-astry experiment, which he did in Switzerland, the links seemed to be mainly lunar.1
The first data-set we have was collected by the two Gauquelins, Michel and Francoise. They published it as what they called ‘heredity’ data in various dif-ferent publications. You can view them here.2 The present study only looks at married couples and not parent-child relations, which is what the Gauque-lins were primarily concerned with. A few years ago these different groups were compiled into one huge data-set of twenty thousand married couples, with birth- data.3 That is, I believe, the world’s best synastry database. It seems odd in retrospect that the Gauquelins never did this, but only looked at the separate groups:4 Perhaps this was because their work belonged to the pre-computer era, which seems so long ago now, before home computers had arrived.
This synastry data-base has an especial value, as belonging to ‘gay Paree’ around the beginning of the 20th century. If synastry was going to work anywhere it surely ought to be there: the romance, the lovely ladies, les liasons dangereuse, the happy music, the ardent passion! I published in 2015 an account of synastry found within that database, ‘The Chemistry of Attraction.’5 Whereas, in the modern era when divorce is easy, might one expect collective synastry effects to show up differently?
In the year 2000, Didier Castille published his report “Sunny day for a Wedding.”6 He had managed to ob-tain literally millions of birthdates of French married couples, having worked in a national statistics office, and he showed that their suns were closer together that would be expected by chance: whatever time of year one partner is born, the other was more likely to be born around that time. His data was for marriages contracted between 1976 and 1997. As he wrote:
"Marriages between people having the same solar longitude (more or less 30°) are more numerous than predicted. In contrast, an anal-ysis of lunar longitudes reveals no statistically significant correlation."
He also found the same for parent-child relations: charts of mother and child had their suns closer together.
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Mars – Venus
The most primal synastry between ‘couples in love’ has to be that of Mars-conjunct-Venus. Here is what it looks like for half a million charts using Didier Castille’s data.
The computer finds the zodiac longitudes of his Ve-nus and her Mars, subtracts one from the other, then sums all of these angles in a frequency table, spread over 360 degrees. We’re especially interested in what happens around 0° and 180° i.e. the conjunction and opposition positions, because that’s where the action is. The graph is plotted around the conjunc-tion aspect, between the two synastry charts.
To test for significance (above graph), ten degrees be-fore the aspect and ten degrees after were taken, and the former had 3% more marriages than the latter (1662/ 1614 => 3%) It’s a fairly wide-orb effect. So how does that compare with the opposition? Let’s put them together, only using the trend-lines:
What does this tell us? First of all, it ‘proves astrolo-gy’ in that the frequency distributions are centred on the main conjunction-opposition axis between Mars
and Venus. It expresses the primordial polarity of male-female and Mars-Venus. They are intertwined. This graph is surely telling us something about true love, but exactly what would be hard to say.
To make a forecast that can be tested on some future lot of data, the best here could be: marriages are more likely before the conjunction than before the opposition - of her Mars and his Venus (Graph be-low))
Men and women were, in this group,(graph above) more likely to get married just ‘before’ her Mars and his Venus had met together, over a span of some twenty degrees. But, what is here meant by ‘before’ and ‘after’ is not clear, and leads to some head-scratching.
That effect shows up in the earlier Gauquelin ‘Hered-ity’ data but with the genders reversed! Here we see (above graph) a much larger swing between before and after (about 15% if we take 5° before compared to 5° after).
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This relation is very traditional and indeed alchemi-cal: the conjunction Mars-Venus ‘as our astronomie inferior sheweth’ as Edward Kelly might have said to John Dee.
Sun-Venus
The earlier Gauquelin data showed synastry between Sun and Venus. Again this is very compatible with traditional astrology.
The above shows the opposition aspect, between these spheres in the natal charts. We see how the main effect chimes just after the exactitude. Sun-op-position-Venus is indeed a mind-boggling concept – and this is the biggest synastry effect in the Gauque-lin data, true love blossomed there!
As before we superimpose the conjunction and op-position graphs, using only the trend-lines to make it clearer, so they are both centred on the conjunction / opposition.11 (See graph above)
Taking five degrees after the syzygy position (con-junction /opposition) then the excess of opposition over conjunction is 70 / 51 => 36%, which is huge. One-third more marriages happened within that five-degree span after the opposition Sun-Venus as compared to the conjunction! That’s the biggest ef-fect, which appears in this data. We can’t tell exactly what that means but it must mean something.
All this work was done originally with help from astro-researcher Ray Murphy, Down Under in Ad-elaide. His made the following statement based on this data:
“Women marry men 15% more often if he has Venus conjunct or opposite her Sun within 2 degrees.”
Now that is a headline-grabbing result! (Above graph) It was very highly significant but alas did not replicate though into the later French data.
Some readers will wish to play around with these two huge databases, to detect other synastry effects. It does seem odd that the well-timed Gauquelin data shows no lunar synastry, eg that between Sun and Moon would be very traditional. What this means is that untimed birthdata can be used, so these effects can be tested on large groups of married-couple birthdates.
People might not believe in the concept of ‘star-crossed lovers’ these days, but these results confirm that something of the kind is still happening in our modern world.
A Venusian Postscript
Here (below) is the Venus-Venus graph as generat-ed by Tierry Graff using the large synastry database of half a million. Venus’ motion in the zodiac has a fivefold pattern which shows up here and we see
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how that pattern gives a low score around the 180° opposition position in contrast with much higher values around 0°, i.e the conjunction position. That difference is astronomical, caused by resonance-in-teraction between Earth and Venus.
Above is Venus’ motion around the Earth as seen from above over a long period. It shows the fivefold pattern, which is fairly fixed in the zodiac, or only moving very slowly. There are five retrograde loops here, when Venus comes nearest to Earth.12
Endnotes:
1. astrozero.co.uk/astroscience/documents/Nick_Kollerstrom_Investigating_Aspects.pdf See my ‘Investigating Aspects,’ section 3 (a chapter in Mark Pottenger’s Astrological Research Methods, 1995).
4. The Gauquelins kept looking for something that was in fact non-existent, their ‘Heredity effect’ see newalchemypress.com/gauquelin/research7.php
5. AA Jnl, ‘The Chemistry of Attraction’ NK Nov/Dec 2015 astrozero.co.uk/astroscience/NIck_Kollerstrom_Chemistry_of_Attraction.pdf
6. aureas.org/rams/castille02us.pdf ‘Sunny Day for a Wedding’ RAMS journal Paris 2000.
7. My Gauquelin page: newalchemypress.com/gauquelin/ his: tig12.github.io/gauquelin5/histori-cal-tests.html
8. g5.tig12.net/observe/a00/a00-aspects/
9. from g5.tig12.net/observe/a00/a00-html/
10. At g5.tig12.net/observe/gauquelin/heredi-ty-newalch-20916/gq-aspects/ select sun-sun and that is a frequency-distribution 0-360° of that angle for the twenty thousand couples.
11. The second graph uses five-point moving aver-ages so the trend-lines for opposition-aspect are not quite identical.
12. In the graph shown, ‘M-VE-F-Ve' alludes to ‘Mother’ and ‘Father’ not male and female, so don’t get confused if you are checking out these graphs. For more on the Venus pentagram pattern see my book Venus the Path of Beauty (reviewed in ISAR December 2020 Journal).
Biography:
Nick Kollerstrom, PhD is a science historian who was affiliated to University College London for fifteen years. He promoted the Green Party while living in Guildford Surrey, for twelve years. For thirty-five years he has produced England’s moon-gardening calendar. He recently obtained a grant from the Urania Trust for making the Gauqulein work and data more available for home computers. See www.astrozero.co.uk/astroscience/koll2indx.htm
You may also want to read Nick's book, The Dark Side of Issac Newton https://www.pen-and-sword.co.uk/The-Dark-Side-of-Isaac-Newton-Hard-back/p/15571
