What’s The Collective Noun For A Lot Of Astrologers ?

In astrology as in all walks of life, every cloud has a silver lining.

The recent argument between the Whole Sign House cult and those that deny their supposed historical preeminence seems to be going nowhere apart from further down the pan of entrenched positions and personal insults, but there has actually been one largely unnoticed thread that if pursued to its logical conclusion could eventually return the whole subject of astrology to its rightful position as the first and most important study.

This is a direction that is generally shunned by astrologers themselves and if they do come across it, their response to its findings are often defensive and evasive.

This direction is called actual astrological research.

This very week I came across a thread on astrotwitter where a few acolytes posed the question of looking into a theory expounded by Robert Hand whereby he would expect a particular kind of distribution of the Lot of Fortune in the charts of astrologers.

The intriguing but also rather quaint response of these followers was ” let’s do a research project “.

The form that this ” project ” would take was to ask other astrologers on twitter to tell them where their own Lot of Fortune resides in their charts so they could see if Mr Hand was correct.

As an astrological researcher of nearly 50 years experience I have to applaud any kind of movement in this direction. It certainly suggests a departure from the general response to anything that is postulated by one of their heroes.

The usual thing is to assume that their teacher knows what they are talking about and so it is then regurgitated as part of their own research into the subject.

This is the go to method of most traditional astrologers for whom the word research means reading lots of old books and then repeating the opinions of their ancestors.

Actual research is taking any one of these theories and testing it rigorously against what actually occurs in real life to see if there is any substance in it.

While I am please that this project is taking place, I do feel the need to point out one or two things that need to happen before something can actually be called genuine objective research.

Any subject group used for research needs to be independent of the people conducting the experiment and not open to any kind of unconscious bias.

The problem with asking your mates on Twitter is anyone there who knows where their own Lot Of Fortune is will probably already be signed up to the idea that it has an effect.

So the people most likely to respond to such a question have a built in desire to find a favourable connection.

Consequently if they have a Fortune placement that they believe fits the theory they are more likely to share it with the researchers. Conversely, if they believe they don’t have such a placement, they are more likely to keep it to themselves.

Readers might think this is being over Virgoan about the whole thing but an important point of proper research is to try and filter out any influences, conscious or not that would skew the findings.

Another really important point is to ensure that your choice of subject group is large enough to really be able to deduce whether there is an actual link or not.

My feeling is this project is likely to fall short on both counts.

But there is no need for it to fail at all.

When I undertook The Capricorn Astrology Research Project I had to trawl through the whole of the Astrodatabank, taking every single timed chart ( over 20,000 ) on the database and putting each one through my own software before I even began to sort any of the results and test them for statistical significance.

This painstaking and systematic work was required so that I did not unconsciously choose subjects that would fit with my desired results.

This work was a full-time activity and took me 3 years ( 2010 – 13 ) to complete.

A decade later I am still processing the results but have published enough of them to have proved beyond any possible doubt that an astrological link exists.

In that decade the response of sceptics has been generally of the ” that can’t be true so it isn’t ” variety and they then blocked me. I expected as much.

But astrologers have really surprised me in that they have frequently adopted the same response as the sceptics.

Because while proving an astrological link, my findings do not generally back up their own favourite theories.

So these self proclaimed truth seekers only seem to be interested in truths that agree with their own.

Research is actually a lot easier to do these days because the Astrodatabank has a page that allows you to look at the placement sign and house distribution of any subject group that you wish to.

The Capricorn Research Project included an analysis of the 953 Astrologers that were on there at the time.

The results showed a clear, statistically proven emphasis on the 11th house amongst other things. See – Is Astrology An Aquarian Discipline ?

Now, ten years later there are 1595 astrologers charts on the same database, and guess what ? You can even at a few touches of buttons find out what the distribution of the Lot Of Fortune is for these people.

But of course you don’t have to because while every man and his dog have been barking at each other about whether people 2000 years ago used houses or not, Capricorn Research has done the work for you.

The distribution of Fortune by sign and house is as follows

FORTUNAAVERAGE
ARIES135132.916667
TAURUS148132.916667
GEMINI140132.916667
CANCER126132.916667
LEO113132.916667
VIRGO112132.916667
LIBRA144132.916667
SCORPIO148132.916667
SAGITTARIUS133132.916667
CAPRICORN138132.916667
AQUARIUS122132.916667
PISCES136132.916667
TOTAL 15951595.32332
CHISQ0.3233241
1126132.916667
2156132.916667
3134132.916667
4138132.916667
5106132.916667
6130132.916667
7133132.916667
8130132.916667
9129132.916667
10144132.916667
11136132.916667
12133132.916667
15951595.42158
0.42157643

As you can see from the above spreadsheet I have tabulated the results for each sign and house alongside the expected average figure.

As with any astrological research, the findings are very interesting.

The highest score for Fortune by sign is for Taurus and Scorpio with 148 each.

The lowest was Virgo with 112 followed by Leo with 113.

In terms of houses the leader was the 2nd house with an intriguing 156.

The lowest would be the 5th with 106.

I’m not sure whether this is the kind of distribution that Robert Hand was looking for. His own Lot of Fortune is in Leo in the 2nd house. That sign placement would appear to be untypical but the house one would be.

This focus around the 2nd sign and house with a low in the 5th sign and house is interesting.

But does it mean we have found a link ?

Readers might notice the figure at the bottom of both columns. This is the P figure used by statisticians to determine whether a distribution has significance or not.

The magic P figure that says it does is anything below 0.01

Scores of 0.3233241 and 0.42157643 sadly fall some way short of this mark.

Given that this is a large and objective sample any statistician would dismiss its findings as being nothing at all.

So it seems that there is no real significance in the distribution of the Lot Of Fortune in the charts of astrologers.

A finding that I would say seems to doubt whether Fortuna has any influence at all.

But maybe the choice of astrologers as a subject is a poor one. Perhaps we should look at billionaires instead, maybe they would have Fortune in Aquarius and the 11th.

So what could we call the collective noun for a Lot of astrologers ?

I guess it depends who is doing the calling.

We might call ourselves Pros, sceptics would probably use the word Cons.

I have come across many and their view is that astrologers are ” a statistically insignificant bunch of money grubbers “.

Given that, maybe we shouldn’t tell them about Fortuna being in Taurus and the 2nd then.

Posted on February 21st 2023

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