Gauquelin's Mars effect, rerun with a modern engine

A fifty-year controversy

From the 1950s onward, the French researcher Michel Gauquelin reported that Mars appears more often than expected just after its rise and culmination in the birth charts of great champions. He found no effect, however, for the signs of the zodiac.

The result remains disputed. A French skeptics' committee, the CFEPP, tested 1,066 French champions and published a negative result in 1996; the psychologist Suitbert Ertel objects that it included too many second-rank athletes. The disagreement is less about the calculation than about the choice of subjects.

The results

First row: we use the data Gauquelin published, with no new selection. The control redistributes birth times among the champions: same dates, same places, same distribution of hours, but no remaining link between the time and the person. The gap persists, slightly below the figure he reported (about 22% against 17%).

Second row: the hypothesis is set before the calculation, since Gauquelin associated Jupiter with actors. Among 357 actors with a certified birth time (Rodden AA or A), the effect is absent. This corpus reflects current fame rather than the professional eminence Gauquelin selected for, and its size cannot reveal a small gap. So it does not refute Gauquelin, and it does not confirm him either.

What this result does not say

Finding the gap again in his own data does not prove that Mars acts on anyone. The permutation rules out date and time biases, but not a possible selection in how the series was assembled, which is precisely what his critics object to.

Each series carries a single hypothesis, set in advance. The six other bodies in the actor corpus serve as controls, and none is significant.

This study validates neither the signs, nor the houses, nor an individual reading. It is published by Your Astral Life, which sells astrological readings: one more reason to check the method below.

The method

• First series: LERRCP, series A, volume 1 (1970), reissued by CURA and restored by the g5 project. 2,087 births from 1817 to 1945, with times already given in standard time.
• Calculation: JPL DE442 ephemeris, equatorial coordinates of the body, 36 sectors. Key zones: sectors 1 to 3 and 10 to 12.
• Control: 2,000 permutations of birth times with a fixed seed. The p-value is empirical, so never below 1/2001.
• Second series: 357 actors with times rated AA or A, chosen from Wikipedia page views, with the same calculations and the same control.

Download the counts per sector (CSV)

Sources

• g5 project: restored Gauquelin series (the original file remains under copyright)
• Wikipedia: Mars effect
• Skepsis: The Mars Effect in Retrospect (a skeptical view)
• Suitbert Ertel: reply to his critics