Skyscript Astrology Forum

Venus Aspects:

Statistical proof of astrological effect on partner selection, analyzing synastry aspects (venus-sun-moon) of married couples for more than 3000 marriage certificates

Good day, I would like to share a little bit about this research I did about 4 years ago (2016), and if you have some feedback will be very glad to read! Also if you have any idea of statistical research or have access to marriage certificate tabulated data I would like to hear from you!

This I made about 4 years ago, it started as a hobbie trying to incorporate statistical analysis into astrology, as a data nerd I asked myself if there could be a statistical analysis similar to Gauquelin work, that could be bullet-proof in the face of skeptics critique, avoiding the "cherry picking" problem and most important, a research design that could be "replicable".

Then I thought analyzing the synastry of married couples could be a good replicable design, because it is impossible to cherry-pick the marriage certificates. Then with almost four thousand marriage certificates I found that some aspects between venus-sun-moon surpassed statistical significance versus random control marriages, and something noteworthy is that the statistical significance was highest with a tighter small orb.

The data is in google spreadsheets so anyone including skeptics can check it.

I believe that these findings can be replicated with more marriage datasets. This data was manually entered to excel. If you have a tabulated data it would be nice to check it!

Thanks for reading!

Victor


- PDF document only (read this first):
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B5_Y9r ... sp=sharing

- All the tables and data:
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

- Marriage certificates scans (raw data)
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/ ... sp=sharing

thanks for sharing victor!~ i looked at the first pdf file that you linked to..

so if someone came to you and asked you if 2 people were suited to getting married, do you think you can say with any certainty whether it was a good idea to marry or not?? what would you be looking for?

cheers
james

james_m wrote:so if someone came to you and asked you if 2 people were suited to getting married, do you think you can say with any certainty whether it was a good idea to marry or not?? what would you be looking for?

Hi James,

Good question! Although this research was done looking for statistical proof of astrology, and a marriage opinion would take a lot more information, I would be looking at the number of aspects in the synastry, and also at the strength of those aspects (small orbs). The smaller the orb the greater the effect. This would be a good start, based on the data.

Besides that, it would be nice to have someday a research of the divorce synastry statistics doing a similar analysis and find out if there is a pattern that could predict divorce. Then maybe we could have a more complete opinion on a specific couple.

Cheers!

victor,

thanks for your comments! and welcome to skyscript by the way too!

i used to think closer aspects were quite important.. i am not as convinced as i used to be... my wife and i have been together for 30 years... we have a sextile between moon and venus that is 2 degrees orb and her saturn is in a 3 degree orb to my midheaven, but after that the orbs don't seem to matter so much as the general themes that connect.. my moon in her sun sign and my venus in the sign opposite... her venus in my mars sign, but very large orb and etc. etc... i become less convinced of the importance of orbs for this sort of thing, but i am only speaking from my own position and haven't done any statistical study to back it up!

another theme i have become fascinated by in the past few years is the importance of the nodal axis in seeing connections between people.. in the case of my wife and i, my sun is close to her north node, while her mars squares my nodal axis... i think most relationships are a mix of good energy and challenges! it is hard to pin it down to anything, but looking for sun- moon- ascendant in one chart for connections to venus in the other is a good place to start... cheers james

james_m wrote:victor,



another theme i have become fascinated by in the past few years is the importance of the nodal axis in seeing connections between people.. in the case of my wife and i, my sun is close to her north node, while her mars squares my nodal axis... i think most relationships are a mix of good energy and challenges! it is hard to pin it down to anything, but looking for sun- moon- ascendant in one chart for connections to venus in the other is a good place to start... cheers james

Yes, Moons Nodes interaspects are very important in all close relationships, not just husband and wife. And natal planets to Moons Nodes show the kind of people we mix with.

I don't see either Mars or a square to the nodal axis as being negative. Half the time Mars is positive, and I haven't noticed that a square is any different from an opposition or conjunction (and trines are much weaker, just background).

james_m wrote: i used to think closer aspects were quite important.. i am not as convinced as i used to be... my wife and i have been together for 30 years... we have a sextile between moon and venus that is 2 degrees orb and her saturn is in a 3 degree orb to my midheaven, but after that the orbs don't seem to matter so much as the general themes that connect.. my moon in her sun sign and my venus in the sign opposite... her venus in my mars sign, but very large orb and etc. etc... i become less convinced of the importance of orbs for this sort of thing, but i am only speaking from my own position and haven't done any statistical study to back it up!

Hi James, thanks!! The orbs I tested were 10°, 5°, 3°, 1.5° and 1°. The ones that had "statistical significance" were orbs 3° and smaller, so according to statistics that moon-venus and the saturn-midheaven aspects in your marriage could be explained by the aspect strength. But that is only a tiny part of synastry analysis. Also this study is very narrow because it has the objective of being replicable just as scientific studies taking only a couple of variables. I chose aspects instead of signs because it is easier to have a numerical approach.

I agree with you in the importance of the orb, it can't be considered as the most important thing in a synastry, but for statistical purposes it is "manageable" :-)

james_m wrote: another theme i have become fascinated by in the past few years is the importance of the nodal axis in seeing connections between people.. in the case of my wife and i, my sun is close to her north node, while her mars squares my nodal axis... i think most relationships are a mix of good energy and challenges! it is hard to pin it down to anything, but looking for sun- moon- ascendant in one chart for connections to venus in the other is a good place to start...

Fleur wrote: Yes, Moons Nodes interaspects are very important in all close relationships, not just husband and wife. And natal planets to Moons Nodes show the kind of people we mix with.

James, very interesting you mention about the nodal axis. I might try to explore the data, starting with the sun-north node. Have you seen another connections, aside this one?

Thanks for the comment Fleur, have you seen some specific patterns?

Have a good day!

Victor

Fleur wrote: I don't see either Mars or a square to the nodal axis as being negative. Half the time Mars is positive, and I haven't noticed that a square is any different from an opposition or conjunction (and trines are much weaker, just background).

Indeed, the data showed that synastry squares also influence partner selection, just as well as conjunctions or oppositions!

Thanks for the study, Victor! It makes me think that I still have hope to meet my other half in the future. <3

It seems to me that the well-being of marriage is influenced not only by the compatibility of the couple and the influence of the planets but also by many external factors, among which are mostly the material and physical components. If we want astrology to influence our life more, humanity needs to study in more detail the influence of heavenly bodies on our life. Let's be honest, now the energetic forces of planets and stars are not studied so well, because humanity has not yet advanced so far in the study of space. I hope that with the development of the launch company and various space agencies and companies, we will be able to better study the energetics of the planets and their influence on our lives. I hope this will help us better plan our lives and our relationships in the future.

Victor Echazarreta wrote:Venus Aspects:

Statistical proof of astrological effect on partner selection, analyzing synastry aspects (venus-sun-moon) of married couples for more than 3000 marriage certificates

Good day, I would like to share a little bit about this research I did about 4 years ago (2016), and if you have some feedback will be very glad to read! Also if you have any idea of statistical research or have access to marriage certificate tabulated data I would like to hear from you!

Hi, thank you for sharing the data. I enjoyed reading it. And i will look to the details later. And I very much appreciate your effort and courage to publish it.

All people with acces to the internet do have acces to hundred thousands of married couples data, including their birth-times. But few astrologers
are interested in those astrological statistical facts. As they were for them in the past so disappointing. So they decided to deny the astrological facts and to focus on the role of individuality (for which we de not have control groups available, so the role of statistical testing was wiped out).

Statistically testing astrology would be for them (and Christians) like testing the effect of a prayer when being in Daniel in the lions' den:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_in_the_lions%27_den

In Daniel 6, Daniel is raised to high office by his royal master Darius the Mede. Daniel's jealous rivals trick Darius into issuing a decree that for thirty days no prayers should be addressed to any god or man but Darius himself; any who break this are to be thrown to the lions. Daniel continues to pray daily to the God of Israel, and the king, although deeply distressed, must condemn Daniel to death, for the edicts of the Medes and Persians cannot be altered. Hoping for Daniel's deliverance, he has him cast into the pit. At daybreak the king hurries to the place and cries out anxiously, asking if God had saved his friend. Daniel replies that his God had sent an angel to close the jaws of the lions, "because I was found blameless before him". The king commands that those who had conspired against Daniel should be thrown to the lions in his place with their wives and children, and that the whole world should tremble and fear before the God of Daniel.[7]

Without doubt, love, prayer, surrender and silence work in those situations better than blunt panic and agitation. But that heavenly experiment was only done in Disney movies with vegetarian lions...

One of the major problems in astrological research that you also encountered, is that we only see tiny effects, that could wel be explained away by the sampling error and other kinds of obvious bias.

See my experience with ADB astrology research:
http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... _research/

To test the statistical validity of the ADB categories against odds the ADB Research Group developed several tools. One of them is simple spreadsheet to calculate confidence intervals (ci).

http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... rology.ods

Of course to calculate a confidence interval, one needs to have an idea of what normally would be expected (mean, standard deviation of the population). And here the at random shifting of entries earlier found, is not likely to represent a correct control group. As in real life quite different values would be found.

But this is not the major source of statistical error.

I have three major complaints/objections.
1) You should never use an one-sided statistical test when case and control groups only differed some few percents.
Not the biased expectations of astrologers do matter when doing statistical tests, but only the actually found facts.

2) Keep in mind the effects of data mining. If you do many tests with random samples, some of them will be of interest. And if you 100 variables, 5 of them will just bny chance seen as significant. As they deviated more than average from the expected mean than was expected in 95% of the cases.
And if you do that data mining daily with small samples in a not that systemic way, encountering large deviations from the mean, because of the many degrees of freedom involved with astrological questions, you could encounter many Wow experiences, that have no statistical significance a all when doing a meta-analysis (A psychologist would say, when taking the helicopter view).

3) See the picture below. You can redo the calculations using:
http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... ology.xlsx or http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... rology.ods
I just calculated the confidence interval of the estimation of the mean effect size based on widely accepted statistical standards.
[/img]

The problem here lies in your control group. What is the best expectation of the average mean. Normally it would be the combined found values in the case and control groups. See the explanation of the use of statistical testing in The calculation of the effectiveness of medication:
http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... tion[quote]
The problem is that you cannot reasonably explain events afterwards, when you could not predict them with a reasonable amount of certainty before. This simple argument may seem to be rather abstract, so let us explain it with an example dealing with the calculation of the effectiveness of medication.[/quote]

http://vissesh.home.xs4all.nl/mystiek/a ... ritic.html

Astrologers warn against generalisations. But at the same time, they ignore the problem of statistical variation, when they assume that the interpreter has to consider the whole chart, as if it were possible to understand the interaction of all its components. They simply explain away the many exceptions to their rules with supposed to be known other modifying astrological factors, thus with the complexity of the chart, transits and so on.

When a Taurean just by chance displayed Taurean behaviour, biased astrologers would see this as a case for astrology and when he did not, there should be some other astrological factor involved with it. But, astrologers never provided any serious statistical evidence for the presumed effect or interaction of any of them. And that is serious problem. How could a judge ever believe a suspect who explains his incredible statements with other incredible statements?