Can Astrology Be Proven (updated)
Posted by Lazarus on December 27th, 2025 filed in Astrology Defined, Astrology DefinitionI took a pseudoscience university course a number of years ago and did a paper on Michel Gauquelin, a psychologist and statistician who attempted to demonstrate the validity of astrology for more than 40 years. He was not an astrologer and actually opposed the practice of it.
He set out to prove a correlation between the positions of the planets at the time of birth and certain human characteristics. After going over thousands of birth charts, there appeared to be statistical positions of the planet Mars in the charts of athletes (called the Mars Effect), with similar placings of the planet Jupiter for actors, and with Saturn for scientists. His calculations and assumptions were verified by a third party in 1960 by the Belgian Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of Paranormal Phenomenon. This same committee later changed its mind and to save face, set out to disprove Gauquelin’s findings. If you ever have a chance to do the research, the reasons for this reversal become fairly obvious. It is similar to the stories that you read or even some of the things you have experienced first hand when an organization or individual approves something and then withdraws their support when they come to realize all the negative press they receive.
Update: after reading numerous journals and accounts both for and against his findings and taking into account all the political wrangling that was occurring to try and disprove his studies, I came to the conclusion that Gauquelin had not proven a causal relationship but only a correlation between sports champions and positions of the planet Mars in the sky at the time of their births. While this is an interesting finding, it did not conclusively prove that astrology is anything but a pseudoscience.