Happy Birthday Capricorn Research

Capricorn Astrology Research is officially 10 years old today.

This was the moment I launched my website.

The election chart was one I pondered over for some time.

Of course anyone would want a Grand Trine with an exalted Jupiter at the Midheaven.

Saturn and Neptune are the two strongest planets in my own chart so it seemed fitting that they were the other members of that pattern.

The Moon conjunct Mars in Gemini in the 9th house seemed fitting with a site that exists to teach about the workings of the Universe.

But the Sun in Cancer opposite Pluto and T square apex Uranus ?

Some might raise their eyebrows at this choice, but for me it was perfect.

I began the Capricorn Astrology Research Project with transit Pluto conjunct my natal Sun and continued the work with Uranus square it.

The background to my research is from observations made over 30 years. That was when I first read about the Gauquelin’s research into astrology. Michel and Francoise Gauquelin were scientists who set out to disprove astrology and did the largest scientific test of the subject back in the 1950s.

They tested many astrological themes without finding a link but there was one that kept recurring strongly.

This was a discovery that there are two areas of the astrology chart, just above the Ascendant in the 12th house and just past the Midheaven in the 9th, that have tremendous significance.

They tested a wide range of professions and found that the planet most closely associated with each is far more likely to fall in these areas of the chart than any other.

The shape of the spread was fascinating and the opposite points in the chart had correspondingly very low distribution.

This discovery has been called the Mars effect owing to the fact that the one profession that scored highest was the Mars distribution of Sports Champions.

The Gauquelins were impressed with these results because they had great statistical significance.
As perhaps the only real scientists that have seriously approached the subject of astrology with a truly open mind, they were both convinced that they had found proof of the subject working in human behaviour.

Needless to say they received a lot of opposition from other scientists who had a strong investment in debunking their findings.

But the strange thing is that they also received considerable opposition within the astrological community because their findings did not back up traditional theory.

For most astrologers, traditional as well as modern the 12th house is an area of weakness, so how come these sports champions had Mars there ?

The more I studied the Gauquelins’ findings the more I was convinced that they were on to something.

I have both the Sun and Moon in Capricorn in the chief Gauquelin sector ( an area that overlaps parts of the 11th and 12th houses).

I’d always had reason to question the classical interpretations of the 12th house which seem to write it off as a place of imprisonment, monastic reflection or hospitalisation.

If we put aside received notions around this area of the chart and actually look at the sky, we can see that the 12th house is the area where the Sun rises. It is literally the place where darkness ends and the Earth receives it first hit of light and warmth for that day.

Why has it been dismissed by so many astrologers as a place of suffering ?

My own experience has shown me that what a lot of astrologers call research is simply an untested rehashing of the prognostications of their predecessors.

As someone who is happy to call himself an astrological scientist, I am much more open to the findings of actual research into the subject rather than an inflexible belief in supposed truths that had been brought down from some mountain by someone claiming to be an astrologer 2000 years ago.

I have to stick with the notion that if we are using a placement to predict behaviour, it should actually work in practice considerably more often than not.

So if Mars in the 1st house is supposed to give athletic and competitive qualities and the 12th house some kind of weakness, you would expect that to be revealed by a study of several thousand sports champions.

If the actual result is the complete reverse of that we have to question the theory at least until further researches have proved it, and not just go on repeating it as gospel.

A major ongoing theme in my life has been to research astrology properly using statistical and empirical methods.

But I have been particularly drawn to this area of the chart.

I have always been fascinated by the astrology of politics and politicians.

I noticed time and time again, political leaders would have their Sun and other important placements in the 11th and 12th houses.

Obviously the 11th house would be acceptable to astrologers because that is the house of people coming together in groups with shared ideology and we broadly consign politics to the 11th.

But the 12th ? How come so many had this placement ?

I can remember reading an astrologer around the turn of the century trying to explain the fact that both UK Prime Ministers Tony Blair and Gordon Brown had 12th house Suns by saying that they were good at keeping their true intentions hidden.

I guess he would say the same about Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin, Mikhail Gorbachev, George W Bush, Silvio Berlusconi, Joe Biden, Jimmy Carter, Rajiv Gandhi, Theodore Roosevelt and Henry Kissinger to name but a few famous Sun in the 12th house shrinking violets.

This is the thing with astrologers, they are exceptionally good at coming up with some pseudo-psychological excuse to cover up their poor theories.

By 2008 I had compiled a database of about 1000 politicians and new software that I had acquired enabled me to research their placements.

I found that the 12th house was by some distance the most common place for the Sun, with the 11th coming 2nd and the 1st in third place.

There was also a slight bump around the 9th and 10th houses.

The graphical representation was very similar to that discovered by the Gauquelins.

Believing that my limited research into one profession had confirmed their discoveries, I recognised the need to do a control group for comparison.

So I chose to take the same number of charts from the public figures section on the Astrodatabank. In order to avoid any possible bias I picked them simply in alphabetical order, regardless of who they were and what profession they held.

My findings from this control group were initially disappointing because I realised that they were very similar to the politicians with the same kind of spread around the 12th and 11th houses.

I shelved the whole project for a while but still pondered the question why.

Sometime the following year I started to wonder if this focus on the 12th house could apply to all public figures regardless of any specific chosen profession.

It is fair to make an astrological case for people who have significant placements on the left hand side of the chart being more focused on the assertion of their own themes in life while those with a right sided emphasis find themselves more immersed in the themes of their relationships.

But this idea was traditionally associated with the 1st house not the 12th.

So I made the decision to extend my control group to cover every timed chart on the astrodatabank public figures section.

The databank is a collection of astrology charts that is split into two sections, one of named public figures and the other anonymous charts that had been accumulated over the years by astrologers from their own clients or their own researches.

This public figures section contained people who were well known for something, it could be media personalities, leaders or achievers in their own professional fields or people who had committed some act that had gained them some kind of wider recognition or notoriety.

At the time this section contained over 20,000 charts.

I realised that this was a massive undertaking because even compiling the control group first thousand had taken a couple of months ( I also had a full time job and two kids to raise at the time ).

But undaunted, I decided to give it a go recognising that I could keep testing my hypothesis as it went along and if it looked like it wasn’t going anywhere, I could always abandon it and focus my astrological researches on other areas.

I knew I had transit Pluto about to conjunct my own 12th house Sun so was expecting my life to change radically. I wasn’t really sure how that would pan out but felt that a massive research project might be part of it.

A new decade was about to start, so I made it my new year resolution to begin something that I later called The Capricorn Astrology Research Project.

Ordinarily I was not a fan of New Year resolutions. January 1st in England seemed like a very dumb time to commit to doing more exercise or going on a diet, simply because you’d been stuffing yourself and lazing around nurturing your chocolate and TV addiction for the past week and it would be cold and dark for the next three months.

But if there’s one sign that has resolve it’s Capricorn.

I did not elect the chart for this moment, it didn’t even occur to me to look at it until several years later.

It was simply new decade, new project.

Any new year resolution will always have the Sun at 10 Capricorn on the IC.

Pluto’s position I knew about because it was within a degree of my own Sun. I was also aware that the previous decade had ended with a lunar eclipse and that contained a T Square to Saturn.

Midnight placed this T square right on the angles with an apex Saturn rising.

No one in their right mind would have elected this moment, but I now see it as very fitting for a project that required an immense amount of entirely unpaid work and discipline to do something that every one else who knew about it thought it was completely pointless and absurd.

My wife ( at the time ) was very much against it. She had always complained at my outright refusal to make money from astrology by writing horoscope columns and bringing it into disrepute ( needless to say we had a dysfunctional relationship and only stayed together because we had a shared business and for the kids ).

All my spare time for the next three and a half years was spent copying every timed chart in the public figures section on the Astrodatabank ( over 20,000 ) into my own software and tabulating the results ( Capricorns have a very high boredom threshold particularly if it’s for their own mountain path ).

By the end of the first year I realised that I was onto something momentous and that helped me keep going.

Ironically if I had chosen to start this project 10 years later, I could have used the research section on the databank itself and covered it all in three hours rather than three years.

But I am a keen follower of the Gurdjieff principle ( Sun and Moon in Capricorn ) that the more effort, concentration, focus and personal sacrifice you put into something the more you will truly understand it.

So while putting the charts of each one into my own database, I tried to gain some simple understanding of the astrological forces motivating each of them to lead the lives that they did.

I made notes, particularly referencing their transits for important moments in their life.

So as well as discovering statistically indisputable proof of the subject, I acquired thousands of examples of major life changing events triggered by Pluto transits that I’m still documenting in these articles a decade later.

Ten years ago today, I launched my website.

I had already written the headline article – Capricorn Astrology Research Project. I took the summer off work in order to churn out articles for it, often writing two or three a day.

Looking at the website launch chart, it has phenomenal synastry with the chart for the beginning of the research.

Pluto in the 4th house at 10.10 Capricorn is exactly conjunct the 4th house Sun at 10.27 Capricorn in the earlier one.

The Sun in the 10th at 14.32 Cancer is tightly conjunct the Moon in the 10th at 13.14 Cancer.

The Ascendant at 2.17 Libra is conjunct the Ascendant of the earlier chart ( 7.24 Libra ) and its Saturn ( 4.30 Libra ).

The Moon and Mars ( at 24.35 and 25.10 Gemini ) is tightly trine the Jupiter / Neptune conjunction in the earlier chart ( 26.21 and 24.34 Aquarius ).

As I said earlier, this chart was elected to give me Jupiter on the Midheaven as part of a Grand Trine and a powerful Sun / Pluto / apex Uranus T Square.

I understood at the time that this work would cause massive upheavals in my family life ( Pluto in the 4th ) and particularly my marriage ( apex Uranus in the 7th ).

I felt that this was inevitable anyway as my eldest son had already left home and the younger one would follow a couple of years later.

My ex wife had grown more and more resentful of my astrology work and this built over the next few years. During one of her many manic episodes she erased all my spreadsheets from my laptop and the backup also deleting my software.

Fortunately I was able to buy a new version of it which found all my charts but the spreadsheets with the planetary distributions were gone forever.

To build them again would have taken another couple of years but I had already written many articles of the headline findings – Does This Prove Astrology

It was a massive loss that put the final nail in the coffin of our marriage. Due to this and numerous other reasons that had accumulated over the years, divorce proceedings were set in motion.

What I didn’t realise at the time was that this was only a small part of the T Square apex Uranus in the 7th house.

To give the website some exposure I joined Twitter and introduced my research to people in the astrology community on there.

Five years later, I met my soulmate on astrotwitter. We recognised each other and the fact that we had shared many previous lifetimes together.

The decade that started on a lunar eclipse in Capricorn and launched the research project, ended with a solar eclipse on my birthday.

Believe it or not my natal Sun is 4.05 Capricorn.

The lunar eclipse occurred at 4.06 Capricorn. It was also closely conjunct Jupiter at 5.20.

Karen and I married 10 days later.

The Capricorn Astrology Research chart with the T Square Cancer Sun in the 10th opposite Pluto in the 4th had uprooted me from my family and taken me to the other side of the world and the square to the apex Uranus had brought me real love for the first time in my life.

It is also important to note that apex Uranus in the 7th is at 12 Aries.

Karen has the Sun and Moon at 9 and 16 degrees Aries respectively.

Everything that has happened to me in the last ten years has been little short of miraculous, unbelievable and totally out of context with anything that had occurred previously in my life.

And yet when I look back at that chart for the launch of my website, it’s all there staring back at me.

I had actually forgotten this was the 10th anniversary of Capricorn Research until I had a very strong reminder of it just a few days ago and felt compelled to write this article.

Why was that ?

Because this week there was a Full Moon at 11 Capricorn / Cancer.