Big Astrology Book of Research

by Renay Oshop

AyurAstro.com

renay@ayurastro.com

Copyright 2026, all rights reserved

Project Index

Quick Reference Table

# Title Domain N / Scale Outcome Verdict
01 Ultra-Wealthy Birth Patterns Natal / Wealthy Cohort N=20 billionaires vs. 152M births Mixed No statistical significance (underpowered); large effect sizes worth pursuing
02 Planetary Cycles & Market Volatility Financial 18,869 trading days (1950–2024) Weak positive Real but tiny correlation (r=0.0226); no predictive power
03 Lunar Effects on Biological Events Health / Births 156M births, 45 years Null Full Moon Effect definitively refuted at massive scale
04 Who Believes in Astrology, and Where? Demographics N=4,729 (Pew) + 50 states Positive Urbanization r=0.719; R²=0.743; astrology is urban/educated, not folk
05 Mercury Retrograde — Real or Bias? Calendar / Cognition 24 years synthetic data; Bayesian Null (methodology) No effect after detrending; calendar confounds explain all variation
06 Harmonic Analysis of Planetary Aspects Natal / Achievement N=86 celebrities, 5,000 baseline Positive (selective) H4/H7 elevated in achievers; H5 lower in artists than expected
07 Machine Learning & Planetary Cycles ML / Personality N=19,632 Big Five + N=82 charts Mixed Cyclic age: null; Profession classification: 29.3% vs. 16.7% baseline
08 Tropical vs. Sidereal Zodiac Zodiac Systems N=86 celebrities Null Sun Sign worse than random in all zodiac systems; Sidereal marginal edge with full chart
09 Solar Activity & Quality of Time Solar / Mood Methodology only Incomplete Research design presented; mood dataset needed
10 Synastry & Relationship Longevity Relationships N=2,722 couples (Wikidata) Mixed Outer planet signal = mortality artifact; Mars-Mars p=0.0006 genuine
11 Longitudinal Health & Longevity Health N=936 celebrity deaths Null Sun sign: p=0.964; Saturn affliction: p=0.71; no longevity signal
12 Market Volatility & GARCH-X Financial VIX 1990–2024; S&P 500 Null Planets worsen GARCH forecasts; correlation exists but not predictive
13 Circular Statistics & Personality Natal / Personality N=211 celebrities Null No zodiac clustering by profession; seasonal birth confound explained
14 Essential Dignities: Tropical vs. Sidereal Traditional Techniques N=52 celebrities Mixed Scientists: debilitated Tropical, dignified Sidereal (p=0.042, N=21)
15 Birth Order & Astrological Factors Natal / Birth Order WLS N=34,762 + Pantheon N=291 Mixed Saturn shift = astronomical fact; firstborn Fire signs elevated
16 Creativity, Genius & Astrology Natal / Creativity N=758 creatives, 7 fields Null Neptune aspects lower in geniuses than random; powered null at N=758
17 Planetary Alignment & Historical Events Mundane N=498 events (1666–2023) Strong positive +148% cosine sum on event days, p<0.0001 — strongest result in book
18 Solar House System (Surya Lagna) Traditional Techniques N=86 celebrities Positive 31.8% hit rate vs. 25% baseline; BF=23.5 (pre-specification caveat)
19 Mundane Astrology — Specific Aspects Mundane 500+ events (1700–2025) Incomplete / Mixed Base rate problem: outer aspects active ~48% of time
20 Astrological Rule Discovery Natal / Pattern Search N=86 celebrities Positive (selective) Mars in Libra 18.6%, Moon in Scorpio 17.4% — Hardship Hypothesis
21 Eclipse Cycles & Seattle 911 Calls Mundane / Behavioral 1.4M 911 calls (2013–2026) Null No elevation in emergency calls on eclipse days
22 Astro-Weather Forecasting Weather NOAA GHCN 124 years global Mixed Water Sign/rain = seasonal artifact; syzygy precipitation dip marginal
23 Chart Similarity & Career Outcomes Natal / Clustering N=95 public figures Partial positive Vedic within-career clustering p<0.001; generational confound present
24 Electional Astrology & IPO Returns Financial ~10,000 IPOs Null All three electional rules: <0.2% return difference
25 Fixed Stars & Natal Interpretation Traditional Techniques N=936 celebrities, 12 stars Descriptive Regulus/Altair Z-score findings; uncorrected for multiple testing
26 Compatibility & Relationship Survival Relationships N=2,722 couples Null r=0.009; survival curves overlap perfectly; Soup Metaphor
27 Horary Astrology — Moon as Oracle Traditional Techniques N=10 Lilly charts + pilot Incomplete Void of Course and Via Combusta framework ready; data needed
28 Solar Houses & Life Domains Traditional Techniques N=33 celebrities Positive (descriptive) Politicians peak at 1st Solar House (+166%); category patterns emerge
29 Asteroids & Psychological Archetypes Natal / Asteroids N=936 celebrities Mixed Pallas/Juno/Vesta solar conjunctions elevated; Chiron generational caveat
30 Chinese Zodiac & Personality Cross-Cultural N=19,632 Big Five Confounded All traits p<0.001 but η²≈0.002; generational cohort explains results
31 Planetary Patterns & Disease Outbreaks Mundane / Health WHO outbreaks 1900–2025 Suggestive Saturn-Uranus p=0.0021; none survive Bonferroni for 66 tests
32 Historical Prediction Accuracy Practitioner Track Record N=39 predictions (1555–2022) Null 56.4% accuracy, p=0.26; electional worst at 25%
33 Planetary Dignities — Extended Traditional Techniques N=758 creatives Positive (selective) Writers: weak Mars (p=0.011); Filmmakers: strong Sun (p=0.027)
34 Solar Return Predictions — Cosine Method Predictive N=451 life events, 104 figures Mixed Moon-Lilith at Death (p=0.009); Venus-Uranus at Marriage (p=0.016)

Synthesis: What 34 Studies Tell Us

The Landscape of Outcomes

Across 34 projects, the verdicts distribute roughly as follows:

This is not a book where everything "works" or everything fails. It is a book where some methods reveal something and others reveal nothing — and the pattern of what works and what doesn't is itself the finding.

Theme I: Scale Kills Folk Mythology

The book's most powerful null results come from its largest datasets, and they target the most culturally durable astrological claims:

Project 03 analyzed 156 million births over 45 years and found the Full Moon has zero influence on birth timing (ratio: 1.001). With that much data, even a 0.1% effect would be detectable. It wasn't there.

Project 05 decomposed 24 years of daily travel data and found that Mercury retrograde anomaly ratio (1.002) is indistinguishable from baseline. The apparent chaos of retrograde periods vanishes once holiday seasons, weekly rhythms, and seasonal trends are removed. The fault is in our calendars.

Project 03 and Project 05 together make the same methodological point: the most famous astrological claims collapse when the confounds that prop them up are stripped away. The Full Moon isn't causing anything; it's just visible. Mercury retrograde isn't causing anything; it's just well-timed to coincide with the year's most naturally chaotic periods.

Project 26 adds a third entry: testing 100 planet-pair combinations against 2,722 couples' relationship duration produces r=0.009. Aggregate astrological compatibility scoring is, in the book's own words, making "soup" — blending all the information into undifferentiated noise.

Theme II: The Strongest Signal Is Planetary Clustering, Not Sign Placement

The book's most compelling positive result is also its most conceptually unusual. Project 17 did not ask whether Saturn is in a particular sign during wars, or whether Jupiter trines the Sun during economic booms. It asked something more fundamental: when the planets happen to be bunched together in the sky, does that correlate with major historical events?

The answer is a striking yes. On days of major historical events (wars, revolutions, crises, disasters — 498 events from 1666–2023), the aggregate Sum of Cosines metric is +148% higher than on random days in the same period. The p-value is effectively zero.

This finding suggests that if planetary influence operates at all on collective human behavior, it may do so through some aggregate alignment property rather than through the specific symbolism of individual planets in individual signs. Traditional astrology asks which planets in which signs. The data suggests the more powerful question is: how clustered are the planets overall?

Project 31 (disease outbreaks) attempts the same type of analysis with more modest results — Saturn-Uranus shows p=0.0021 but doesn't survive Bonferroni correction. Project 02 (financial markets) finds a detectable correlation between Jupiter-Saturn distance and volatility that is real but explains less than 0.1% of variance. The aggregate-clustering signal in Project 17 stands alone as the strongest empirical result across all 34 studies.

Theme III: The Hardship Hypothesis

One of the book's most internally consistent themes runs through five separate projects that approach the same question from different methodological angles:

Do successful people have "good" charts or "difficult" ones?

Traditional astrology says good placements — strong dignities, harmonious Trines, benefic aspects — describe capable, successful people. The data says the opposite:

The convergence across five independent analyses using different datasets, different methods, and different traditions (Western dignity scores, Vedic Moon phase, harmonic waveform analysis) is the most internally consistent finding in the book. If astrological positions encode any real information about psychology, the signal appears to run against the traditional interpretation. Friction, not flow; debility, not dignity; tension, not ease.

This is not what traditional astrology predicts. It may describe something real about how achievement works: the people driven enough to become historically notable may be constitutionally unable to rest in "ease." Or it may be a selection artifact in celebrity datasets. But the pattern is too consistent across too many methodologies to dismiss as noise.

Theme IV: The Zodiac Debate Has a Partial Answer

Project 08 directly tested Tropical vs. Sidereal for profession prediction and found both worse than random when using Sun Sign alone. But the larger picture across the book tells a more nuanced story:

This pattern suggests the two systems don't simply disagree about which is "correct." They may be capturing different things. The Tropical zodiac, tied to seasons and solstices, may encode information about yearly biological and social rhythms. The Sidereal zodiac, tied to the actual constellations, may encode something else — perhaps more relevant to cultural identity or long-arc personality structures. Both have domains where they show modest signal; neither dominates the other globally.

Project 23 adds a further wrinkle: chart similarity within career groups is significant in the Vedic zodiac (p<0.001) but only marginal in the Tropical (p=0.061). The Vedic system may be capturing more of the within-group similarity structure for these cohorts.

Theme V: Demographics Are More Predictive Than Astrology

Project 04 is the most practically significant study in the book, though not in the way the other projects are significant. It doesn't test whether astrology works — it tests who believes in it and why.

Three demographic variables (urbanization rate, college graduation %, median income) explain 74.3% of state-level variation in astrological search interest. That R² is higher than most astrological models in the book achieve for any outcome.

The counterintuitive finding: astrology is most prevalent in urban, educated, higher-income populations. This completely inverts the "folk superstition of the uneducated" framing. Contemporary American astrology is a culturally urban practice embedded in wellness culture, identity-based spirituality, and the social milieus of educated young adults.

Project 30 (Chinese Zodiac) adds a footnote: large-N personality data showing apparent zodiac effects are almost always generational confounds. Different animal years contain different birth cohorts. The statistics are real; the astrology is not driving them.

Theme VI: What Traditional Techniques Actually Reveal

Several projects tested traditional astrological techniques that have rarely been subject to statistical analysis:

Fixed Stars (Project 25): Cosine intensity analysis of 12 major fixed stars across 936 charts found a few Z-score signals (Regulus/overdose, Altair/cancer, Altair/homicide) but nothing that survives multiple-testing correction. The cosine intensity methodology is a genuine improvement over binary orb analysis.

Solar Houses (Projects 18, 28): The Surya Lagna (treating the Sun as the Ascendant) achieves hit rates of ~31–32% against a 25% random baseline, with Bayes Factors of 17–24 in Project 18. Project 28 shows Politicians peak at the 1st Solar House (+166%), Scientists cluster in the 5th (Creativity). The practical value here is significant: Solar Houses require no birth time, opening up much larger research datasets.

Horary Astrology (Project 27): The Moon as Oracle study is still a pilot, but preliminary data is intriguing — Via Combusta shows −5.8% IPO success rates, while Void of Course paradoxically shows +5.2% (contradicting tradition). The methodology is ready; the dataset is not.

Solar Returns (Project 34): Moon-Lilith at Death (p=0.009) and Venus-Uranus at Marriage (p=0.016) survive as exploratory findings once generational artifacts are removed. The demographic artifact detection methodology is the project's exemplary contribution — it correctly identifies Uranus-Neptune (1990s) and Uranus-Pluto (1960s) conjunctions as the cause of spurious signals before reporting the genuine ones.

What the Book Doesn't Settle

Several questions remain genuinely open after 34 studies:

The wealthy cohort (Project 01): The Hardship Hypothesis signals are compelling — Aries Sun at +147%, Amavasya Tithi at +350%, Sagittarius Vedic Moon at +140% — but N=20 cannot power a 12-category test. A cohort of 100+ verified billionaires with high-quality birth data could provide a definitive answer.

The mechanism question (Project 17): The planetary clustering correlation with historical events (p<0.0001, +148%) is the book's strongest result and also its most mysterious. What physical or social mechanism could explain it? Selection bias, recording bias, and actual electromagnetic influence are all on the table. The statistics demand an explanation that isn't yet available.

The Sidereal/Vedic clustering (Project 23): Within-career chart similarity being statistically significant in the Vedic system (p<0.001) with a 22% elevation needs replication in a larger, independent dataset. If it holds, it is one of the most interesting career-astrology findings in the literature.

Horary (Project 27): The most scientifically tractable branch of traditional astrology — binary outcomes, specific timestamps, historical archives — has not yet been studied rigorously. William Lilly's Christian Astrology (1647) alone contains hundreds of timestamped charts with known outcomes. Digitizing this archive is a tractable project with potentially clear results.

Reading Guide by Interest

For skeptics: Start with Projects 03, 05, 26, 32. These are the strongest null results: Moon phases don't affect birth timing, Mercury retrograde is a calendar artifact, compatibility scoring is noise, and historical predictions are coin flips.

For researchers: Projects 17, 06, 10, 23. These contain the most methodologically interesting positive or partial results: planetary clustering and historical events, harmonic tension signatures in achievers, the Mars-Mars relationship longevity signal, and Vedic chart clustering in career groups.

For traditional astrologers: Projects 14, 20, 25, 33, 34. These engage directly with traditional techniques — dignities, fixed stars, frequency patterns, solar returns — with mixed but often intriguing results. The Hardship Hypothesis (Projects 06, 14, 20, 33) will be the most challenging finding.

For cultural observers: Projects 04, 30. These reveal more about who practices astrology and why than about whether it works — and in some ways those are more useful findings for understanding astrology's contemporary role.

All 34 project rewrites are in their respective project-XX/rewrite/ directories. Original archived content, raw data outputs, and code are preserved in project-XX/backup/.