Literary Adventures

This page will take you into pieces of literature that are carefully selected for their great content at the literary, scientific, or philosophical level. A short selection will be presented in full. A long one will be divided into sections that will be refreshed regularly. Emphasis and highlights are mostly ours, not made by the original author.

Here is our current selection:

Supernature By Lyall Watson

Part One - Cosmos

2 - Man And The Cosmos

Life on earth is like the bloom on a plum. In recent years parts of this delicate film of mold have got together and, by massive communal efforts, managed to throw a few tiny spores high enough off the surface to prevent their falling back. To do this they had to be boosted to the escape velocity of 17,500 miles an hour, which was a major undertaking, and yet all this time the plum itself was hurtling along at four times that speed.

We tend to forget that we are all space travelers. A handful of men, dogs, chimps, and germinating seeds have been on extravehicular activity, but the rest of the biosphere has had to stay aboard, where the ship's life systems can take care of them. We are only just beginning to learn how important earth's rhythms are to our well-being. Today jet aircraft move numbers of people rapidly around from one time zone to another, and like the cockroaches with extra ganglia, they have foreign rhythms imposed on their own. These cause considerable distress, because in common with all other living things we are influenced by the natural cycles produced by earth's rotation.

Human body temperature, for instance, is seldom exactly 37° C but follows a regular circadian pattern of change. Our temperature rises with the sun and goes on rising, along with the rate of heartbeat and urine production, until all three reach a peak of activity in the early afternoon. Metabolism then gradually slows down until it falls to its lowest level of activity, at about four in the morning. It is no accident that this is the hour invariably chosen by secret police and security forces for the arrest and interrogation of suspects. Life is at its lowest ebb during the dogwatch just before dawn.

Midwives have always complained about the hours they are forced to keep by babies that insist on being born just before breakfast. Halberg, the physiologist who invented the word circadian, has also produced statistics that show that this is not just an old midwives' tale. (132) Labor pains begin twice as often at midnight as at noon, and the peak in births occurs at about four o'clock, just when the metabolic cycle hits its lowest trough and the mother is likely to be most relaxed.

To test the effect of light and dark on the cycle, Mary Lobban of the Medical Research Council in Britain took a group of student volunteers to the Spitzbergen Archipelago one summer. (197) The islands lie north of Norway, well inside the Arctic Circle, where there is continuous daylight from May until August. The volunteers were divided into two groups that lived in colonies on separate islands. All those in one colony were given wrist-watches that ran slow; when these indicated that twenty-four hours had gone by, twenty-seven had actually elapsed. Those in the other colony had watches that ran fast, so that their 24-hour 'days' were really only twenty-one hours long. The groups lived according to their separate schedules and were examined six times every day.

Body-temperature rhythms of volunteers in both groups quickly adjusted to the new schedules: Temperature fell to its lowest level during the sleeping period and was at its highest soon after rising. No matter whether the person was on a 21- or 27-hour cycle, the rhythm followed the pattern of activity. It seems that man's temperature changes are quite independent of light and dark. The cycle of urine production took longer to acclimatise to the new schedules, but after three weeks all the volunteers were producing the greatest volumes of urine at the same time as they reached their temperature peak. This function, too, seems to be independent of light and tied more to the pattern of activity of the whole body, but Lobban fortunately took one further measurement of metabolism and this produced quite different results.

Among other vital trace elements, the human body contains about 150 grams of potassium. This is concentrated in cells such as the nerves, which carry signals by rapidly exchanging sodium and potassium through their surface membranes as they are stimulated. As the nerve recovers, after the impulse has passed, sodium is pushed out, potassium is taken back, and the cell is cocked, ready to fire again. Each time this exchange takes place, a little potassium is lost, and about three grams is excreted from the body each day. Normally, elimination of potassium follows a rhythmic pattern similar to that of body temperature and urine production, but at Spitzbergen it was found to be quite independent. All volunteers showed a cycle of potassium excretion, but the greatest amounts were being lost at regular intervals of twenty-four hours - actual hours, not hours as measured by their dishonest wristwatches. Follow-up studies of men at Arctic and Antarctic bases have shown that, even after two years away from the normal rhythms of days and night, 24-hour cycles of potassium excretion still persist.

It seems that, while gross responses of our organism are susceptible to short-term environmental changes, the basic activities of life, such as communication between separate cells, are controlled by deep-seated mechanisms that respond to the time pattern of the planet as a whole.

Man also has a natural tendency to respond to the annual cycle. Some workers have found that there is a circannual rhythm in body-weight change and in the frequency of manic-depressive attacks, but the most convincing evidence comes from our dates of birth. (244) In the Northern Hemisphere there are more children born in May and June than in November and December. The obvious explanation would seem to be that these children were conceived during August the previous year, when the parents were on their summer holidays and such things are more likely to happen. But there seems to be a more fundamental biological principle involved, because children born during May are, on the average, about two hundred grams heavier than those born in any other month. (118) This difference is caused by an annual rhythm in the production of hormones involved in pregnancy. We still have a breeding season.

The situation is of course reversed in the Southern Hemisphere. A study of twenty-one thousand army recruits in New Zealand showed that the taller men were all born between December and February, which are the midsummer months down under.

In both hemispheres, being born in the best months seems to carry a birthright of longer life and greater intelligence. Long life naturally depends on nutrition and health care and perhaps even hereditary factors, but the fact remains that in a comparatively homogenous area such as New England those born in March live an average of four years longer than those born in any other month. (269) The measurement of intelligence by IQ alone is suspect, but an analysis of seventeen thousand school children in New York showed that those bom in May scored better at these tests than those born at any other time. (156) A similar survey of mentally deficient children in Ohio showed a different pattern, with most being born in the winter months of January and February. (179)

Man and Moon

The third basic rhythm of life, the lunar cycle, also appears in patterns of human birth times. The moon is so closely linked to birth that in some places it is even called 'the great midwife'. To test this possibility, the two doctors Menaker collected information on more than half a million births that occurred in New York hospitals between 1948 and 1957. This enormous sample showed a clear and statistically significant trend for more births to take place during the waning moon than the waxing moon, with a maximum just after the full moon and a clear minimum at new moon. Other studies, in Germany and in California with smaller samples, have found no such relationship, but it is worth bearing in mind that lunar influences differ in different geographic locations. Tides in the Bay of Fundy rise and fall over fifty incredible feet, while the difference between low and high tide in Tahiti is only a few inches.

There is a connection between birth and tides. The times of births in communities living on the North Sea coast of Germany show that an unusually large number occur just at the time of high tide. In other words, there is a sudden increase in births each day just when the moon is passing directly overhead. A similar relationship occurs in Cologne, which is on the same latitude but far from the sea, so it is not the tides themselves that control uterine contractions, but the moon that influences both.

The time of birth is of course directly connected to the time of conception, and this depends on the phase of the menstrual cycle. It has not escaped notice that the average length of the female cycle is almost identical to the period between two full moons. All the women in the world do not of course menstruate on the same day at the same phase of the moon, but it is difficult to believe that the similarity between the two cycles is purely coincidental. The great Swiss chemist Svante Arrhenius once recorded 11,807 menstrual periods. He found that there was a slight relationship to the lunar cycle: the onset of bleeding occurred more often during the waxing than the waning moon, with a peak on the evening before new moon.

A recent German study of ten thousand menstruations also found a peak near the new moon. Other workers have found no such correlation, but it is possible that some confusion is caused by the method of measurement. We say that the menstrual cycle begins with the first day of bleeding, but this is just a convention: the uterine lining breaks down for three or four days and bleeding can become evident at any time during this process. The moment of ovulation, when the follicle bursts and discharges the egg, is a much more precise and important biological event and surveys made using this as the beginning of the cycle might show closer lunar connections.

The egg lives less than forty-eight hours, and unless a sperm reaches and fertilises it during this time, it dies. So conception can occur only during this rather short period. Eugen Jonas of Czechoslovakia has discovered that the time of ovulation is connected with the moon, and that the ability of a mature woman to conceive coincides with the phase of the moon that prevailed when she was born. (284) He has set up a service in several Eastern European countries that provides each woman with a chart based on her own lunar affinities. Used as a contraceptive measure, these charts have proved to be 98 per cent effective - which is as good as The Pill, and with no side effects. Of course the charts also give a woman notice of all those days in her life on which she can conceive, and they are now being used extensively to ensure fertilisation as well as to avoid it.

Jonas had many critics among obstetricians, but it must be said in his defense that menstruation as a whole is such a paradoxical process that there is a great deal about it that we do not yet understand. It is unique in our bodies in that it involves the regular destruction of tissues in a normal healthy individual. George Corner of Princeton calls it 'an unexplained turmoil in the otherwise co-ordinated process of uterine function'. (306) Perhaps the paradox once owed much more to lunar influence, and the present range in the length of menstrual cycles from nineteen to thirty-seven days is just an indication of its growing independence of this cosmic influence. Two American Air Force scientists have recently shown that it is possible to influence the cycle with an artificial moon. They selected twenty women with a history of chronic menstrual irregularity and persuaded them to leave their bedroom lights on all night on the three days closest to ovulation. All the women menstruated exactly fourteen days later, so perhaps the moon still influences menstrual bleeding quite strongly. (88)

There is definitely a close connection between the moon and bleeding in general. Superstition has it that the moon controls blood flow in the same way that it controls the tides. When bloodletting was a customary form of medical treatment, it was always done when the moon was waning, for it was believed that it was too dangerous to let blood when the light was increasing and the tide beginning to flood. This superstition may be founded in fact. Edson Andrews of Tallahassee reports that in a survey of over a thousand 'bleeders' - patients needing unusual means of hemostasis on the operating table or having to be returned to the theater because of hemorrhaging - 82 per cent of all the bleeding crises occurred between the first and last quarters of the moon, with a significant peak when the moon was full. Dr Andrews ends his report with the comment: 'These data have been so conclusive and convincing to me that I threaten to become a witch doctor and operate on dark nights only, saving the moonlit nights for romance.' (155)

There is something about moonlight nights that affects a number of people in strange ways. The very word 'lunacy' suggests a direct connection between the moon and madness; in fact this superstition is so widely believed that it was once even written into law. Two hundred years ago a distinction was made in English law between those who were 'insane', meaning chronically and incurably psychotic, and those who were 'lunatic' and therefore susceptible only to aberrations produced by the moon. Crimes committed at the full moon by those in the second category were considered more leniently by the courts. Superintendents of asylums have always feared the influence of the moon on 'loony' inmates and canceled staff leave on nights when the moon was full. In the eighteenth century, patients were even beaten the day before full moon as a prophylactic against violence on their part the following night. Official violence of this kind is now thankfully outlawed, but much of the old moon lore lingers on. There could be something in it.

The American Institute of Medical Climatology has published a report on the effect of full moon on human behavior in which it records that crimes with strong psychotic motivation, such as arson, kleptomania, destructive driving, and homicidal alcoholism all show marked peaks when the moon is full and that cloudy nights are no protection against this trend. (155) Leonard Ravitz, a neurologist and psychiatric consultant, has discovered a direct physiological connection between man and moon, which could explain these correlations. (266)

For many years he has been measuring the differences in electrical potential between the head and the chest of mental patients. He has also tested passers-by selected at random and found that all people show a cyclic pattern that changes from day to day and that the greatest differences between head and chest readings occur at full moon, particularly in mental patients. Ravitz suggests that, as the moon modifies earth's magnetic field, these changes precipitate crises in people whose mental balance is already rather precarious. 'Whatever else we may be, we are all electric machines. Thus energy reserves may be mobilised by periodic universal factors (such as the forces behind the moon) which tend to aggravate maladjustments and conflicts already present.'

Studies continue to be made on other possible physiological relations between man and the moon. It has been claimed that deaths caused by tuberculosis are most frequent seven days before full moon and that this may be linked to a lunar cycle in the pH content (the ratio of acid to alkali) in blood. (245) And a German physician reports correlations among lunar phases, pneumonia, the amount of uric acid in the blood, and even the time of death. (131)

The moon obviously affects man in many ways. The influence of lunar gravity is a direct effect, but where light is concerned, the moon is just a middleman basking in the reflected glory of the sun. So it is not surprising to find that man is even more strongly touched by the sun.

Man and Sun

The black death that drove Newton from his college and into a momentous discovery swept England in 1665. Astronomical records of the time show that this was a year of intense sunspot activity, and studies of annual tree rings, which are wider when the sun is disturbed, reveal that the terrible plague of 1348 was also accompanied by an active sun. (30) A Russian professor of history has been collecting correlations of this kind for forty years, many of them spent in Siberia for daring to suggest that major social changes might be due more to sunspots than dialectical materialism. (316) Tchijevsky claims that the great plagues, the diphtheria and cholera outbreaks in Europe, the Russian typhus, and the smallpox epidemics of Chicago all occurred at the peaks of the sun's 11-year cycle. He also points out that in the century 1830 to 1930 there were Liberal governments in power in England during sunspot peaks and that Conservatives were elected only in quieter years.

This sounds incredible, but we know that behavior is governed by physiology and we now have evidence that the sun has a direct effect on some of our body chemistry. Maki Takata of Toho University, in Japan, is the inventor of the 'Takata reaction', which measures the amount of albumin in blood serum. This is supposed to be constant in men and to vary with women according to the menstrual cycle, but in 1938 every hospital that used his test reported a sudden rise in level for both sexes. Takata started an experiment with simultaneous measurements of the serum from two men one hundred miles apart. Over a period of four months, their curves of daily variation were exactly parallel and Takata concluded that the phenomenon must be world-wide and due to cosmic factors. (313)

Over a period of twenty years, Takata has been able to show that the changes in blood serum occur mainly when major sunspots are interfering with earth's magnetic field. He made tests during the eclipses of 1941, 1943, and 1948 and found that these inhibited his reaction as much as performing them in a mine shaft six hundred feet underground. (312) He also experimented on subjects in an aircraft at over thirty thousand feet and discovered that the reaction took place more strongly at heights where the atmosphere was too thin to provide effective protection from solar radiation. Recent Soviet work lends support to the idea that our blood is directly affected by the sun. (299)

Over 120,000 tests were made on people in a Black Sea resort to measure the number of lymphocytes in their blood. These small cells normally make up between 20 and 25 per cent of man's white blood cells, but in years of great solar activity this proportion decreases. There was a big drop during the sunspot years of 1956 and 1957, and the number of people suffering from diseases caused by a lymphocyte deficiency actually doubled during the tremendous solar explosion of February 1956.

Other diseases directly affected by magnetic disturbance include thrombosis and tuberculosis. (280) On May 17, 1959, there were three very powerful solar flares. The next day twenty patients with heart attacks were admitted to a Black Sea hospital that normally deals with an average of two each day. Two French heart specialists have found that there is a very high correlation between the sun and myocardial infarctions (heart failure caused by blood clots). (253) They suggest that solar radiation promotes the formation of blood clots near the skin in people so predisposed and that these clots then produce fatal blockages in the coronary artery. Hemorrhage in the lungs of tubercular patients follows a similar pattern. (198) The most dangerous days are those in which the aurora borealis can be seen - that is, those days when strong solar radiation activity disturbs the atmosphere.

Many of the body's functions seem to be influenced by sun-induced changes in the earth's magnetic field. If this is so, one would expect to find that the nervous system, which depends almost entirely on electrical stimuli, would be the most affected. This seems to be the case. A study of 5,580 coal-mine accidents on the Ruhr shows that most occurred on the day following solar activity. (207) Studies of traffic accidents in Russia and in Germany show that these increase, by as much as four times the average, on days after the eruption of a solar flare. (249) A survey of 28,642 admissions to psychiatric hospitals in New York shows that there is a marked increase on days when the magnetic observatory reports strong activity. (109) This suggests that accidents may be due to a disturbance deeper than a simple decrease in reaction time. These results make it clear that man is, among other things, a remarkably sensitive living sundial.

The Planets

Our sensitivity to the sun extends from light rays into the longer wavelengths of radio. We see the sun, we feel its warmth, and we respond to changes it produces in the earth's magnetic field. These changes affect radio reception in a pattern that, as Nelson has shown, can be predicted by the position of the planets. (229) The amount of change is small, but its effect is most marked on biochemical processes such as nerve activity. Even by drilling two holes in the trunk of a tree, one can measure variations in electrical potential that follow the movements of bodies in our solar system, so it is no surprise to find that the complex human organism is affected by the planets. (54)

Michel Gauquelin, of the Psychophysiological Laboratory at Strasbourg, was the first to quantify this effect. His twenty years of painstaking research are summarised in his excellent book The Cosmic Clocks. (119) In 1950 Gauquelin became interested in planetary rhythms and looked for possible correlations on earth. As our planet spins on its axis, the sun and the moon appear to move overhead, rising and setting in solar and lunar days whose length depends on our latitude and the time of year. The other planets travel across our horizon in the same way, producing Venusian and Martian days that are equally predictable.

In Europe all local authorities record the exact moment of birth in official registers, so Gauquelin was able to collect this information and match it with the positions of planets computed from astronomical tables. (119) He selected 576 members of the French Academy of Medicine and found, to his astonishment, that an unusually large number of them were born when Mars and Saturn had just risen or reached their highest point in the sky. To check these findings, he took another sample of 508 famous physicians and got the same results. (120) There was a strong statistical correlation between the rise of these two planets at a child's moment of birth and his future success as a doctor.

Taken together, the two tests produce odds of ten million to one against this happening just by chance. For the first time in history a scientist had produced evidence that the planets actually influence, or indicate an influence, on our lives. This gives science a point of vital contact with the old beliefs of astrology.

Astrology is based upon the fundamental premise that celestial phenomena affect life and events here on earth. No scientist, and certainly no biologist familiar with the latest work on weather and natural rhythms, can deny that this premise is proved. Earth and its life are affected by the cosmos and there is room for argument only in the matter of degree. Astrologers make many claims that are still without foundation and may well be ill-conceived, but there is a growing body of evidence to show that some of it, at least, is true.

Michel Gauquelin continues to make the most important contributions in this field. Following his discovery of the link between Mars and medicine, he extended his studies to other professions and collected all the birthdates of famous Frenchmen he could find. (115) Once again there was an impressive correlation between the planets and professions. Famous doctors and scientists were born as Mars was coming over the horizon, while artists, painters, and musicians were seldom born at this time. Soldiers and politicians were born more frequently under the influence of a rising Jupiter, but babies born when this planet was in the ascendant seldom became scientists.

No famous French writer was born with Saturn in the ascendant, but not all relationships were so clearcut. Gauquelin had to resort to statistical techniques to demonstrate correlations - and the use of these raises certain problems. We know that in the Northern Hemisphere the month with the highest birth rate is June and that the days in June are longer than in any other month. So, despite the fact that there are equal amounts of light and dark in any year, there is a greater chance that babies will be born in daylight.

We also know that births follow a rhythmic pattern, with more babies being born in the morning than the afternoon, and this introduces yet another bias. Planets follow the same kind of motion as the sun, so the chances of a birth taking place in all hours of the planetary day are not equal. Gauquelin applied corrections for all these conditions before comparing his samples and assessing their significance. His statistics were examined in detail by Tornier, professor of mathematical theory in Berlin, who could find no fault with them, but another statistician suggested that the results merely reflected a national peculiarity of the French and that the same methods applied to other countries might produce different results.

Gauquelin was forced to do similar work in Italy, Germany, Holland, and Belgium until, three years later, he had twenty-five thousand records. The results were the same. (116) Scientists and doctors were positively linked with Mars and Saturn; soldiers, politicians, and team athletes with Jupiter. Writers', painters', and musicians' births were not linked to the presence of any planet, but clearly avoided Mars and Saturn, while scientists and doctors were negative on Jupiter. Solo performers such as writers and long-distance runners were much more markedly linked to the moon than to any of the planets. This time three well-known statisticians, including Faverge, the professor of statistics at the Sorbonne, studied the results and could find no fault with Gauquelin's calculations or the methods he used to collect his data. A control experiment was performed on people selected at random, which yielded results strictly according to the laws of chance.

One persistent critic of this work, though forced now to admit rather reluctantly that the position of certain bodies in our solar system has something to do with at least nine different professions, dismisses the whole thing by declaring that it is 'the absurd expression of an absurd experience'. His emotional dislike of anything occult disguises the fact that the work falls a long way short of showing astrology to be a proven fact. It shows, beyond reasonable doubt, that the position of the planets means something - the position, and not the planets themselves. We still have to decide whether the planets are acting directly on us or whether their position is merely symbolic of some much larger cosmic pattern of energy of which they, and we, are just a small part.

I want to return to this problem later, because, in a sense, it does not really matter what the causal agent is. If an astrologer can use the position of the planets as a reliable key to interpreting and predicting the action of a cosmic force, it makes no difference whether this force comes from Andromeda or from a flying saucer. Electricity was discovered and used very effectively a long time before anyone understood how it worked. What matters more at this moment is understanding the effect that the planets seem to have on us.

Firstly, we know that labor in pregnancy is more easily induced when the mother is relaxed at the lowest point of her circadian cycle. It has also been shown that there is a marked increase in births during magnetic storms, so it is possible that electromagnetic conditions at the time that a planet such as Mars comes over the horizon could bring on labor pains and induce birth to take place. (270) This would mean that only the mother was involved and that conditions at the moment of birth made no difference to the child at all, but it does not explain the link between the planet and the child's ultimate profession.

The second possibility is that the planet, or the prevailing conditions, modify the child at the moment of birth and determine its future in some way>. This is of course the orthodox astrological attitude: the pattern of the heavens at the exact moment of birth impinges on the child and shapes its destiny. Most modern astrologers are by no means fixed in this rigid, rather awkward belief, and I must say that, as a biologist, I find it unsatisfactory. What, for instance, is the moment of birth? The average time taken for the birth of a first child, from the moment the head meets the pelvic floor until the last limb emerges, is two hours. During this time a planet can change its position altogether. Some astrologers measure life from the moment of the child's first cry, but it is difficult to see why this should be the significant moment. There are other, more critical, times in childbirth.

The journey down the four-inch birth canal is probably the most dangerous we ever take, and at one point the child undergoes considerable trauma and discomfort, which might make it more than usually susceptible to outside influence. The pelvis rotates the baby's head into the best position for birth, and the softness of the skull bones, together with the space between them, allows it to pass without overt damage, but the uterus is shoving from behind with a force strong enough to break an obstetrician's finger. This could be the astrological moment, when the brain is tormented into a new kind of activity by the physical pressure on it and opens itself to cosmic influence. But this does not account for the normal lives of those born by Caesarean section, who, though deprived of the birth drama, still have their own unique destinies.

A stronger objection to the 'moment of birth' theory comes from what we now know about the cosmic forces involved. The womb was once thought of as the living equivalent of that 'constant condition' chamber much beloved of experimental zoologists, but belief in both must now be abandoned. The womb is certainly warm and comfortable, temperature and humidity controlled like a room in a Hilton hotel, but other conditions are not so uniform. A certain amount of light penetrates the thin, distended skin of the mother's stomach; every mother knows that a loud sound can frighten an unborn child and make it hammer on the walls of the womb in protest; and most radiation passes through the bodies of mother and child alike almost without pause. It is difficult to believe that electromagnetic forces from the environment influence a child only at the moment of birth, when it has been exposed to these forces throughout the period of gestation.

A far more likely theory is that the cosmic environment plays an important part at the moment of conception or soon afterward, when the raw materials of heredity are still sorting themselves out into the ultimate arrangement for the new individual. Even the smallest nudge at this time would be enough to alter the direction of development sufficient to produce a major effect on the end product. The amount of energy necessary to produce an effect increases as the embryo gets older, bigger, more complex, and less flexible. Most cosmic stimuli are fairly subtle, and it seems much more likely that they would act in the early stages of development than later on, at birth. Although the womb is by no means quiet, an embryo is cushioned from the environment and protected from some of its more obvious effects. In this relatively peaceful place, it is possible that the child learns to respond to signals that are masked from us by the barrage of stimuli outside.

A hamster deprived in the laboratory of the sun, which once told him when to hibernate, learns to change up from nature to Supernature and responds instead to the more subtle rhythm of the moon passing by. An unborn child might well be more sensitive than its mother to delicate synchronisers from space and even use these cues to 'decide' when to be born. The placenta and the fetus originate from the same cell, they are indeed the same flesh, so it is not unlikely that it is the child that gives the signal to the placenta that starts uterine contractions and begins the labors of birth. Which leaves us with the notion that cosmic forces could best influence man by acting at an early stage on the embryo to modify the blueprint in some way, and that the developing embryo remains in tune with the cosmos, perhaps even to the extent of setting the scene for its own first public appearance.

Gauquelin feels that the tendency for the baby to be born under a certain planet might be hereditary. To test this idea, he worked for more than five years on the birth data of several counties near Paris, collecting information on more than thirty thousand parents and their children. He plotted the positions of Venus, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn for all the people involved and found overwhelming evidence that parents born when one of these planets was rising most often gave birth when the same planet was in the same position. Factors such as the sex of the parent, the sex of the child, the length of the pregnancy, and the number of previous children had no effect on the results; but the correlation was highest if both parents were born under the same planet.

This idea is easily linked to the earlier one of the child itself setting the birth pace, by assuming that each individual carries a gene that makes him sensitive to a particular pattern of cosmic stimuli. We know that this is what happens in fruit flies, which unerringly emerge at dawn. Gauquelin concludes that a child's whole career depends on its genetic structure and that part of this determines when it will be born. He suggests that, by study of the position of the planets at birth, '... it seems possible to develop a forecast of the individual's future temperament and social behavior.' (117)

Michel Gauquelin himself seems reluctant to admit it, but this is exactly what astrology claims to do. It is time that we had a closer look at astrology.

Astrology

For a start, we can discard the popular newspaper version of astrology altogether. Glib, all-embracing predictions, in which everyone born under Pisces will have a good day for making new plans, while another twelfth of the world's population will be busy meeting attractive strangers, have nothing to do with astrology. They are held in well-deserved contempt both by astrologers and by their critics. Perhaps the best approach to the real astrology is to examine the tools of the trade and see how they are used. The most basic instrument is the horoscope, which literally means a 'view of the hour' and consists of a detailed and formal map of the heavens as they were at the exact place and at the precise time that the person was born. Every horoscope is different; if it is well drawn, with proper attention to detail, it can be almost as distinctive as a fingerprint. There are five steps in the construction of ahoroscope:

1. Establish the date, time, and place of birth.

2. Calculate the appropriate sidereal time.

We operate for convenience on a 24-hour day, but the real day length, the period of rotation of the earth relative to the universe, is four minutes shorter. Sidereal time is obtained from standard tables based on Greenwich in England, and corrections must be made for the time zone, longitude, and latitude of the birthplace.

3. Find the 'rising sign'.

The planets all move around the sun in the same plane, so we see them passing overhead always through the same belt of sky that extends all the way around earth. Situated along this line, which is called the ecliptic, are twelve main groups of stars, with the famous zodiac names. Some of these constellations are bigger and brighter than the others, but all are given the same value by dividing the belt up into twelve equal portions of 30°. The rising, or ascendant, sign is the constellation zone that is coming up over the eastern horizon at the moment of birth. This is not necessarily the same as the 'sun sign'. When someone says, 'I'm Aries', he means that he was born between March 21 and April 20, when the sun rises at the same time as that constellation. If a person is born at sunrise, his rising sign and sun sign will be the same.

4. Find the 'mid-heaven sign'.

This is the constellation zone that is directly overhead at the time of birth. Like the rising sign, it can be found from standard tables.

5. Plot the positions of sun, moon, and planets on a birth chart.

This map includes all the planets, even those below the horizon at the moment of birth. All details are taken from a book called an 'ephemeris' - meaning that which changes - which is published every year. So far the technique is perfectly respectable; no scientist could take exception to the logic involved and no astronomer can find fault with the tables used in calculation. The division of the ecliptic into twelve zones is in some ways an arbitrary one, but it is convenient and, as long as all the zones are the same size, there can be no objection to their being compared with one another. The animal or character that is supposed to inhabit each of the twelve zones is more an aid to memory than a real star pattern or a cosmic force.

In fact, since the ancient Babylonians set up their celestial Rorschach test and gave names to the splashes of stars, our axis had shifted slightly and the zones of the zodiac are no longer exactly in line with the constellations after which they were named. But this does not matter at all; the zones are precisely defined in the tables used to calculate a horoscope, and their symbolism is unimportant.

The basic tool of astrology is therefore a valid one and beyond dispute. Arguments arise only over the use of the tool, the way in which the horoscope is interpreted; but it is surprising how far science and astrology are in agreement. Astrologers begin their interpretation of the birth data by saying that things on earth are influenced by events outside. Scientists must agree. Astrology says that persons, events, and ideas are all influenced at their time of origin by the prevailing cosmic conditions. Science, which spends a large amount of its time measuring the continual changes in the cosmic scene, must concede that this is possible.

Astrology claims that we are most influenced by the celestial bodies nearest to us, the ones in our solar system, and that the two most important are the sun and the moon. Once again science, now that it knows about photoperiodism and the action of solar and lunar rhythms, can only agree. Astrology goes on to claim that the relative positions of the planets is important to us, and science, with Nelson's work on the influence of planets on radio reception in hand, must grudgingly admit that this, too, is a possibility. Then astrology goes out onto more shaky ground with the claim that each of the planets influence life in a different way. But, since Gauquelin's work on the connection between planets and professions, even this idea now begins to have a certain scientific respectability.

The real division between the establishments of science and astrology comes, not when astrologers point to changes in the cosmos but when they claim to know exactly what these changes mean. Both scientists and astrologers describe celestial events and plot the discernible changes these produce in the environment, but the astrologers go further than this and have erected an intricate, and what seems to be completely arbitrary, framework to help them interpret what they see. Most practicing astrologers now no longer even bother to look any more, but rely entirely on the traditional framework to make their interpretations for them. As this is the present stumbling block between the disciplines, it is worth examining the nature of the tradition more closely.

Astrology is an equation in which the positions of all the large bodies in our solar system are variables. The positions of the moving bodies around a fixed spot at a given time are predictable, and they combine to produce a unique set of conditions that can influence anything taking place at that spot. Astrology claims that each of the bodies has a special effect on us (Mercury controls the intellect), but that this effect is modified by the stars behind it at the time. Each of the twelve star patterns in the zodiac also has its own special influence (Virgo is said to have critical, analytic attributes), so Mercury appearing in the zone of Virgo at someone's birth is thought to make that person not only intelligent, but able to apply this intellect shrewdly and well. On the horoscope, or map of the heavens for that time, the planet is shown inside the 30° arc that is thought to encompass Virgo's sphere of influence.

Also on the horoscope chart is a second subdivision into twelve sections that is not based on any known astronomical observation. These are called the 'houses', and each of them, like the star zones, occupies 30° of the circle of the heavens. The first house starts on the eastern horizon and projects below it, and the rest follow on in sequence until the twelfth house, which lies just above the eastern horizon. So the rising sign is always in the twelfth house, but the zodiac zones and the houses never coincide exactly unless a baby is born just as one zone gives way to the next one. Like the planets and the stars, the houses also have traditional attributes. The tenth house, for instance, is said to relate to ambition and public standing. So if our subject with Mercury in Virgo also has these two in his tenth house, an astrologer would predict that the shrewd application of his intellect would probably make this person very famous.

So astrology claims that long experience has shown that planets have a predictable influence on character that is modified by secondary, though equally predictable, effects of stars in conjunction with the planet at that moment, and that the combined effects of these forces on a person are determined by the position of the planet/star combination in space at the moment of the child's birth. There are ten large bodies in our solar system, twelve groups of stars, and twelve areas they can all occupy, but astrologers believe that the most important associations are those actually on the eastern horizon at the time of birth (the rising signs) and those that will be there when the sun comes up (the sun signs). This tallies with Gauquelin's finding that it was the planet rising at birth that was linked with the profession. So, if a cosmic force exerts a special influence just as the earth turns toward it, it seems reasonable that this would be reinforced by the sun coming into view at the same time as well. Once again there is little in the mechanics of these suggested effects that would offend a broad-minded scientist, but it is with the specific attributes of the astrological tradition that difficulties arise. There is more of both to come.

Astrology goes on to claim that a person's character (as determined by a planet) and its manifestation (as influenced by a star group) are even further modified by the relationships of the different planets to each other. When a planet stands at a certain angle to another, they are said to be 'in aspect'. If the two can be seen together at the same point in the sky, they are in 'conjunction' and said to exert a powerful influence on events. If one is on the eastern and the other on the western horizon, they are 180 degrees apart and in 'opposition', which is said to be a negative, or bad, relationship.

If one is on the horizon and the other is directly overhead, they are 90 degrees apart, in 'square', and this, too, is bad. But if the angle between them is 120 degrees, they are in 'trine', which is positive and good. These are the main aspects, but angles of 30, 45, 60, 135, and 150 degrees are also significant. In practice, a variation of up to 9 degrees from these set aspect angles is regarded as permissible.

When interpreting an aspect, the astrologer uses the traditional value of the angle between them to assess the combination of their traditional attributes. Uranus, for instance, is said to be connected with 'sudden change' and Pluto with 'elimination'. Once every 115 years they come into conjunction; it happened in 1963, and astrology says that anyone born under this aspect is destined to become a world leader with enormous powers for either good or evil. It is fascinating at this point to look back at Nelson's work on radio reception. (229) He found that disturbance occurred when two or more planets were in conjunction or in 90 - or 180-degree aspect to the sun. These are precisely the aspects that astrology claims are strong ones and can be 'disharmonious' or 'bad'. Nelson also found that predictably good, disturbance-free conditions occurred when planets lined up in 60-or 120-degree angles to the sun. And these are the aspects that astrological tradition finds to be 'good'.

These factors and measurements are highly complex, but they form only a part of the vast latticework of intricate relationships used by astrologers. There are hundreds of thousands of recorded guides to interpretation, which cover millions of possible combinations of cosmic events. Even the most ardent devotees of astrology admit that their study lacks a clear philosophic basis, that the laws and principles governing it are still uncoordinated, and that the records are scattered and contain many errors. But the sum total of what can be examined is an impressive body of opinion which is full of rich, interrelated symmetries that seem to form an elegant and internally consistent system.

Our next step must be to examine the evidence of astrology in action.

It is impossible to investigate the traditions themselves; most of them are supremely illogical and seem to have no basis in any kind of dialectic system, and their origins are obscured in myth and ancient lore and are not available for scrutiny. But we can test the effects of the traditions and their accuracy in interpretation. The proof of the astrological pudding lies in the ability of astrologers to stand up to the consumers' test. The most rigorous and scientific test to date was one made in 1959 by an American psychologist, Vernon Clark.

Clark's first test was to examine the astrologer's claim to be able to predict future talents and capabilities directly from a birth chart. (75) He collected horoscopes from ten people who had been working for some time in a clearly defined profession. These included a musician, a librarian, a veterinarian, an art critic, a prostitute, a bookkeeper, a herpetologist, an art teacher, a puppeteer, and a pediatrician. Half were men and half women, all were born in the United States, and all were between forty-five and sixty years old. These horoscopes were given to twenty astrologers, together with a separate list of the professions, and they were asked to match them up. The same information was given to another group of twenty people - psychologists and social workers - who knew nothing about astrology. The results were conclusive. The control group returned only a chance score, but seventeen out of the twenty astrologers performed far better, with results that were a hundred to one against chance.

This shows that people's characters do seem to be influenced by cosmic patterns and that an astrologer can distinguish the nature of the influence just by looking at the horoscope, which is a traditional, ritualised picture of the cosmic pattern.

Clark then went on to test the astrologers' ability not only to distinguish between patterns but to predict the effect of a pattern. He gave the same astrologers ten pairs of horoscopes; attached to each pair was a list of dates showing important events such as marriage, children, new jobs, and death that had taken place in the life of the person who belonged to one of the two charts. The astrologers had to decide which horoscope predicted such events.

The test was made more difficult by the fact that the two charts in each pair belonged to people of the same sex who lived in the same area and were born in the same year. Three of the astrologers got all ten right, and the rest again scored better than a hundred to one against chance. This shows that an astrologer can tell, from the birth data alone, whether an accident or a marriage belongs to a particular horoscope. Which means that he could, in theory, have predicted these events before they happened.

Still not satisfied, Clark arranged a third test. He thought the astrologers might have had too many clues to work with, and so he gave them a further ten pairs of birth data with no case history, no dates of important events, no personal information of any kind except that one member of each pair was a victim of cerebral palsy. Once again the astrologers were able to pick the right one far more often than could be attributed to chance. Clark concluded that 'astrologers, working with material which can be derived from birth data alone, can successfully distinguish between individuals'. In fact these tests, in which the astrologer works 'blind', without seeing his subject, are like a physician diagnosing a disease without seeing his patient. To me, as a scientist, they provide impressive evidence that the astrological tradition is not just a meaningless jumble of superstitions, but a real instrument that can be used to extract more information from a simple map of the heavens than any other tool at our disposal.

These results, taken together with those of Nelson and Gauquelin, imply very strongly that cosmic events affect conditions on earth, that different events affect conditions in different ways, and that the nature of these effects can be determined and perhaps even predicted.

One field of prediction in which astrologers are very often consulted is, 'Will it be a boy or a girl?' They enjoy some success in their forecasts, which is hardly surprising in view of the limited number of possibilities, but news filters out of Czechoslovakia about a new technique that promises much more than a 50 per cent chance of a right answer.

Eugen Jonas is the Czech psychiatrist whose interest in lunar rhythms led to the discovery of a successful natural method of birth control. In following up his work, he has hit on a new lunar correlation that makes it possible to predict the sex of a child with great accuracy. (168) The method is based on the moon's position in the sky at the time of conception. In classical astrology, each of the zodiac zones has a polarity, or sex - Aries is male, Taurus female, and so on. Jonas has discovered that intercourse leading to conception at a time when the moon was in a 'male' star zone produced a male child. At a clinic in Bratislava, he made the necessary calculation for eight thousand women who wanted to have boys, and 95 per cent of them were successful. When tested by a committee of gynecologists, who gave him only the time of intercourse, he was able to tell the sex of the child with 98 per cent accuracy.

Work now in progress on artificial insemination shows that it is possible to separate male and female sperm by passing a weak electric current through a sample of semen. (217) We know that the moon produces regular changes in the earth's magnetic field, and we know that life is sensitive to these changes. It is a simple and logical step from these premises to the assumption that a similar kind of sorting could take place in semen in a living organism. The effect of environmental fields on the sperm would be enhanced by the fact that semen is made and stored outside the body of most mammals. Jonas' discovery tells us two important things about this process. One, that it seems to be governed by a regular, two-hourly cosmic rhythm, one of the shortest yet discovered; and two, that this rhythm is exactly as predicted in traditional astrology.

We are left with a picture of astrology far removed from that given by stargazing newspaper columns, where facile guidance is offered on the basis only of the sun sign. In many people's minds the zodiac and astrology are synonymous, but Virgo and her friends are only part of a very much larger and more sophisticated complex. In fact the complex is so cohesive that it is difficult to understand how it could have come about. The accepted background for astrology is that it owes most to the Babylonians (or Chaldeans), who, being nomadic in a climate that allowed an unobstructed view of the sky, readily accepted the idea that divine energy is manifest in the movement of the heavenly bodies.

The textbook history goes on to recount how this concept gradually became enlarged as omens and portents were included, until the planets became associated with every aspect of life. Then this ritual was handed on to and refined by the Greeks and the Romans and the Arabs, until it reached its full flowering in medieval times. John West and Jan Toonder reject this account and suggest, in a meticulous historical and critical survey called The Case for Astrology, that it owes much more to the Egyptians, who in their turn brought together the pieces of 'an ancient doctrine that at one time fused art, religion, philosophy and science into one internally consistent whole'. (339)

It is possible that the roots of astrology go back as far as the last ice age - a bone more than thirty thousand years old was discovered recently to be marked in a way that suggests lunar periodicity. But an awareness of the planetary paths and periods can be traced only as far back as the building of the first pyramid, about 2870 BC. Five thousand years is only two hundred generations, and it is difficult to believe that this is time enough to compile a system whose most simple contention could only be checked a generation later. Some of the more unusual events take place so seldom - Uranus and Neptune have been in conjunction only twenty-nine times in recorded history - that this type of trial-and-error development is inconceivable. The picture of astrology growing slowly over the years, as bits and pieces of evidence were discovered and added from time to time, is an equally unlikely one. Trying to decide which cosmic pattern produced a particular effect is like trying to discover which particular gene of the thousands on a chromosome controls the color of an individual's eyes.

The American Federation of Astrologers has thirteen hundred members, and the American Society of Geneticists has double this number, so it is fair to compare their efforts in an attempt to give some idea of the scope of the problem. The major tool in genetic research is the fruit fly; one fruit-fly generation lasts two weeks; two hundred generations would last eight years; work on the fly began in 1909, but it took more than fifty years for a full picture of even one chromosome to be completed. Even if we accept the problems as being roughly comparable, that represents a span of fourteen hundred human generations, or thirty-five thousand years of intensive research to build up the astrological picture. In fact, the scheme of traditional astrology is so much more complex that we are driven to the conclusion that it must have originated in some other way.

It seems obvious that astrology is not the result of some sudden insight of the 'Eureka!' kind; it never sprang fully formed from anyone's mind. So if it did not arise in either of these ways, there is only one other possibility: that it evolved, like a living organism, out of the very stuff of which it is made.

In the bush country around Darwin, in Northern Australia, there lives a termite that constructs a weirdly shaped nest. Many termites cement fine grains of sand together with saliva and pack it into huge, rock-hard mounds, but this species builds slabs ten feet square and only a few inches thick that are scattered across the outback like enormous tombstones. The fact that every single one of them has its long axis oriented exactly along the north-south line gives the insect its name Omitermes meridionalis, the compass termite.

Each termitarium is like an iceberg, with most of its structure beneath the surface, and the part above the ground is honeycombed with ventilation shafts that form the air-conditioning plant for the entire fortress. Thousands of workers rush up and down the airshafts, opening and closing them like valves as they labor to keep the temperature in the deeper, brood chambers constant all day long. In the cool of the early mornings they need to take up as much heat as possible, and so the broadside of the mound faces directly into the rising sun. At noon they are more concerned with losing heat, so the mound exposes only its knife-edge to the sun, now directly overhead. Built into every single one of the termite laborers is an awareness of the sun's movements that leads it to construct its little bit of the mound so that the whole thing relates to the cosmos in a way that expresses the needs of the society. The termitarium is literally shaped by cosmic forces.

I believe that astrology arose in this way: that an awareness of cosmic forces predisposed man to certain ideas and patterns, and that, despite the fact that each contributing astrologer could see only his little bit of the structure, the final synthesis took on a natural and relevant form.

I know that this sounds mystic, but there are good scientific grounds for my belief. As chemistry was discovering that all life was built up of the same few basic substances, physics was investigating the substances themselves and discovering that fundamental particles of matter all behave in the same way. They all have a wave motion. We know that information, whether it is a sound signal or an electromagnetic impulse such as light, travels in waves; now the new field of quantum mechanics shows us that there are matter waves as well and that an organism receiving information is itself vibrant with wave patterns. If two waves of different frequencies are superimposed, there will be points along their path where the two touch, where they both peak together and interfere with each other.

This interference is called a beat, and a number of beats in a regular sequence produces a rhythm. Everything in the cosmos dances to these rhythms.

John Addey, an English philosopher, has discovered such rhythms in human birth times. He tried to find out whether it was true that those born under the sun sign of Capricorn were longer lived than others, by collecting the data for 970 ninety-year-olds from Who's Who. (2) There were no more Capricorns than any other sign, of course, so he went on to see whether it was true that Pisceans were short-lived by collecting data on young polio victims. (3) Once again there was no connection, but when Addey looked at the data from both tests more carefully, he found a wave pattern running through the year. This was a regular pattern, which had 120 peaks in the year - it was vibrating in the 120th harmonic. A horoscope is built around the ecliptic circle of 360 degrees, so if the wave pattern is applied to this, it peaks once every 3 degrees. Addey went back to his test data and found that a child born every third degree was 37 per cent more likely to contract polio than a child born at other times.

Addey went on to apply wave analysis to other sets of data (339) and found that the birth times of 2,593 clergymen corresponded to the 7th harmonic and that 7,302 doctors fitted into the 5th harmonic. (4) This is probably the most important of all recent discoveries that give the old astrology and the new science a place to meet on common ground. It demonstrates quite clearly that astrological data are amenable to a statistical approach and that, treated in this way, they yield results that are in direct accordance with our knowledge of the basic laws of matter. The cosmos is a chaotic frenzy of wave patterns, some of which have been orchestrated on earth into an organised life system. The harmony between the two can be understood only with the aid of a score, and of all the possibilities open to us at this moment, astrology (for all its weird origins and sometimes weirder devotees) seems to offer the best interpretation.

I come to this conclusion from two directions: On one journey I travel as a scientist, picking my path with care and logic, guided by the map of established knowledge, and arrive satisfied that astrology, if not proved, has at least not been disproved. There is good evidence, which is soundly based and amenable to both examination and repetition, to suggest that there is enough truth in astrology to warrant that it be taken seriously and pursued further. On the other path I travel as an individual with a training in science but with a willingness to stop and consider almost anything out of the ordinary. I come upon astrology this way and live with it long enough to satisfy myself that there is something in it. To be sure, there are inconsistencies and vague, ambivalent statements - astrology is particularly weak and open to criticism in the field of prediction - but still I am left with a feeling of tightness. A feeling that, even if the goals are sometimes questionable and the reasoning often weak, astrology has hit upon a form that makes basic sense.

I do not believe that emanations from the planet Mars make a man 'decisive, freedom-loving, and a pioneer'. This is simplistic nonsense. But I do believe that there are complex patterns of cosmic forces that could predispose an individual to develop along these lines. The astrologers may be right in asserting that these conditions prevail when Mars is coming over the horizon, but even if that is true, the planet is merely a symptom of the over-all complexity. It is like the second hand of a watch, which provides a visible indication of the precise time but depends entirely on all the hidden springs and wheels that actually set the pace. I also disagree with the notion that birth is the critical moment.

It seems far more reasonable to assume that cosmic forces are acting on everything all the time and that the moment of birth bears the same relation to the rest of life as the momentary position of Mars does to the rest of the cosmos. We know that the time of birth is related to lunar cycles, to solar rhythms, and to an inherited tendency to respond to these patterns in a certain way. It seems likely that birth, the early stages of fetal development, fertilisation, and even intercourse are related in the same way, forming a continuum in which no one moment is intrinsically more important than another.

There are some mystical things about astrology, but there is nothing supernatural about the way it works. Man is affected by his environment according to clearly defined physical forces, and his life, like all others', becomes organised by natural and universal laws. To believe otherwise is tantamount to assuming that the Encyclopaedia Britannica was thrown together by an explosion in a printing works.

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