Researching Astrology Can Be Fun

Have you ever gone to a lecture and heard a theory you wanted to check out, such as "the ruler of the 10th in the 4th indicates work from the home"? Never got around to it, did you? Have you ever wondered what the common elements are in charts of people with arthritis, but had a hard time finding enough charts to establish a clear pattern? With AstroDatabank, you can quickly and easily explore the connections between astrology and behavior.

At AstroDatabank, we're not so much interested in "proving astrology" as improving astrology. Proving astrology would require rigorous data collection and advanced statistics that would bore anybody with less than four planets in Virgo. However, there's lots of useful research that can be done to improve astrology, and this is the type of research that will directly benefit the practicing astrologer.

Filters

For example, you could filter to find 50 charts of people with arthritis, what common astrological themes would you look for? Strong Saturn? Lots of Capricorn? Saturn-Moon aspects? Lots of fixed signs? Even without statistics, you can find things that work and things that don't. What you want to know is what percent of the charts have the features you're looking for. AstroDatabank can make this easy for you.

AstroDatabank's Filters (click to enlarge) allow you to select groups of data based on one or more criteria. You could, for instance, focus on all people having a history of alcoholism or those with all inner planets in earth signs.

AstroSignatures

AstroDatabank's AstroSignatures take filters to a new level; they are much subtler than filters. Filters are very strict; they can only select charts based on whether they fit a pattern or not. AstroSignatures are more forgiving; they score charts on how well they fit a pattern.

If you use a filter to find people with lots of earth in their chart you have two choices:

• An overly restrictive AND filter: "Show me only people who have all personal planets in earth signs", or
• An overly inclusive OR filter: "Show me all the people with any personal planet in an earth sign.

I call this the "Goldilocks problem."  Filters are either too tight or too loose.  

With filters, you can’t ask questions like "Show me people who have three out of four personal planets in earth signs." You would use an astrological filter to find everyone with the Moon in Taurus. You would use an AstroSignature to find out who has the strongest Moon by using sign, house, speed and aspects to score the strength of each person’s Moon.

AstroSignatures are not a totally new concept in astrology. When you count planets by element you are doing an AstroSignature calculation. AstroDatabank has taken this concept and generalized it so you can count anything in the chart.  For example, suppose you were looking for the person with the most Piscean signature in the AstroDatabank. You might count planets in Pisces, planets in the 12th house, and aspects to Neptune for a "Pisces Prominent" score. That's what we have done on the screen below:

Notice that we can also give more weight to some factors. In the example above, each planet in Pisces is worth one point and aspects to Neptune are worth 3 points. 

There are lots of fun things you can do with AstroSignatures. Here are just a few suggestions:

• Find individuals with high and low scores for Uranus prominent. Are the high scoring people individualists and the low scoring people conformists?
• Find extreme examples of high earth and low earth charts. What kinds of live do these people lead. We actually did this study and you can see the results.
• Develop an AstroSignature for courage. Does Woody Allen score higher or lower than General MacArthur?
• Do alcoholics have a greater score for Neptune prominence than the general population?
• Do victims of violent crime have a greater emphasis along the Pisces-Virgo axis than the rest of the population?

There is also a serious side to AstroSignatures. AstroSignatures are the breakthrough required to build a science around astrological knowledge. AstroSignatures allow astrologers to put more rigor into their models. We all believe in the basic astrological theory that planetary patterns are correlated with patterns of behavior. We may even be able to agree that Saturn in the 2nd house gives fear of not having enough material resources. But we do not have a consensus on which is more important in determining a person’s ease with money: aspects to the planets in the 2nd house or aspects to the rulers of the 2nd house. What is the most important consideration in aspects: the planets, the signs, the houses, the angle, or the orb? After years of practice, expert astrologers develop gut feelings about these considerations, but we still don’t have a way to compare one person’s expert opinions against those of another.

AstroSignatures allow expert astrologers to express and refine their expertise. The ability to measure and test hypothesizes that describe which planetary patterns correlate with which behavior patterns is the breakthrough we have been seeking to establish a scientific basis for astrology. Before AstroDatabank, it took years to conduct an astrological study because of all the hard work in collecting and tabulating the data. Now this work can be done in hours.

A Research Community

At AstroDatabank, we're building a community of astrologers and researchers – all those interested in furthering the progress of the profession.

Currently, we foster that community through publishing research articles, providing a list of research resources, and trading ideas about the charts of celebrities.

We're working on the support facilities and materials for an even more robust research community, and will be filling you in on our progress via our weekly newsletter. So be sure to sign up for our mailing list. (form at left)

" THE ultimate collection for any serious astrologer or student wishing to proceed with serious research, and test existing astrological hypotheses."

Frank Clifford,
author of the Clifford Collection, included in Solar Fire.

More from Frank

Course List

AstroDatabank maintains a comprehensive list of astrology courses and classes.

Click for list

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How is the data categorized?
AstroDatabank categorizes each birth record with appropriate keywords, describing their characteristics, important events in their lives, and significant relationships they've shared.

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