Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

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Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

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For the consideration of the Forum.

The following is a brief essay on "Synchronicity; an Acausal Connecting Principle", by C.G. Jung. All quotations from the Routledge paperback edition of 2008.

In his seminal work "Synchronicity; an Acausal Connecting Principle" the Swiss psychologist C. G. Jung suggested that a mental and a physical event could be connected in a way that did not depend on the one causing the other, or observing the other. That is, there was no exchange of energy or information between the two. Rather, the one coincided with the other because both shared a particular quality, variously described as "meaning", "virtue", or "Tao".

For instance, the mental foreboding of a friend's death could coincide with the sad event. In Jung's psychological terms, the foreboding and the death were both ordered by the same "archetype"- a mental element, associated with an emotion, which ordered both psyche and world alike. The coincidence ("happening together") of mental and physical state was revealed to be meaningful, even though it appeared to have occurred by chance alone.
The implications for astrology are obvious. As astrologers, we would say that the foreboding and the death were ruled by the same planet (or, took place under the same configuration of planets), and, indeed, the "gods and goddesses" for which the planets are named are considered archetypal images by Jung. Similarly, character and life events meaningfully coincide with the planetary configurations at birth.

Noting this, Jung organised an interesting "astrological experiment" to determine whether those aspects traditionally taken to indicate marriage were indeed emphasised in the charts of marriage partners- a statistical test of synastry, in fact. I will confine myself to the initial run of the experiment, in which Jung took the charts of 180 married couples, and analysed them for 50 aspects that could possibly be made between Sun, Moon, Venus, Mercury, and the Asc/Desc axis.

In terms of conventional statistical analysis, the results were disappointing. Although Moon/Sun aspects did indeed feature more prominently in the charts of partners, the results were held to be "not of statistical significance".

I will explain in slightly different, but more modern terms than Jung uses. The expected "chance" number of pairs of charts showing a particular aspect, given an orb of +/- 8 degrees and 180 such couples, would be (360/16)180=8. The average number found was 8.72, and this would not be considered sufficiently different from 8 to reduce the chance of its happen to less than 5% (1 in 20)*.

But as Jung himself points out, the maximum deviation from the expected number was found to be 18 (for woman's Moon conj. man's Sun). Similarly Asc conj Venus scored 15, Moon conj. Asc 14, and the Moon was involved in 6 out of the 8 aspects that scored 13 and over. The difficulty with the conventional statistical approach is that "...it represents only the average aspect of reality and excludes the total picture". That is, it doesn't concern itself with the qualitative meaning of the results, and particularly not with the extreme cases wherein such meaning might be found.

I can best explain this using the I Ching as an example. there are only 64 hexagrams (I leave out a consideration of changing lines, just to make the point- doing so doesn't change the argument). If you cast the Ching daily, and at the endof the year consider how many times each hexagon turned up, you will probably observe an average occurrence very close to that expected by chance (between 5 and 6 occurences per hexagram). A statistician would leave it at that- the occurence of each hexagram occurs as per chance expectation, case closed. For the Oracle's devotee, however, it is clear that individual instances of the occurence of a given hexagram were significant, in that it meaningfully coincided with advice appropriate to the devotee's mental and life condition at the time of throwing. It is this association, this meaningful coincidence, that matters.
With this in mind, let us return to the data of Jung's 180-couple experiment, and consider whether the pattern of the 50 aspects over the partners' horoscopes was the same as that of the control group. This is easy to do; we pair off the two sets aspect by aspect, plot them, and draw conclusions from the plot and its associated statistics. (For instance, the 11 pairs of charts showing Venus conj. Asc amongst the married pairs are matched to the 7.9** showing the same aspect amongst the control pairs, and so on).

In statistical terms, we are looking for a correlation between the results for the married and unmarried pairs. The astrologer would expect zero correlation- that the pattern of traditional "marriage" aspects for married couples would have no point of comparison with the pattern for the unmarried control group. If there is a connection, if the astrological hypothesis is mistaken, the points will coincide or lie close to each other. The plot is attached. Does it look like there's a connection?

Let us go further. A statistical test of the hypothesis "There is no correlation between the instances of significant aspects for married and unmarried pairs" can be tested by calculating what's called a Pearson correlation coefficient, a particular number which measures the closeness of two sets of data. The closer this number is to zero, the less likely it is that there is a correlation. The coefficient value for jung's data is 0.006; so small, there's only a 31/1000*** chance of its happening. This is a very imperfect measure; we don't know enough to expect a linear (simple, straight-line) relationship; but it indicates that there may be something going on.

A test known as the "Chi-square test" may be more useful. This tests the hypothesis that the pattern of results from the married couples is the same as the pattern from the unmarried. The astrologer would suggest that it isn't, and indeed, we find ample reason to reject the hypothesis****. We can legitimately conclude that the two sets of couples have very different astrological profiles vis-a-vis the 50 special aspects. This in fact tells us that something the scientist doesn't want to see is happening, ratherb than confirming something the astrologer does want to see. But again, it is suggestive.

Therefore, Jung's experiment, crude and imperfect though he admits it is, does give stronger evidence than he supposed that the traditional marriage aspects indicate nuptial connection between natives. It should, however, be noted that no scientist would be impressed by this. A scientist would point out that "correlation is not causation", and that an effect is incidental unless some mechanism can be postulated to account for it. Moreover, the means of the datasets are too alike to suppose a significant difference. To this, the astrologer would reply "I'm not investigating any kind of cause; the phenomena I'm interested in are connected acausally, by a meaningful factor called synchronicity. And deviations from the mean are more useful in this context than the mean itself."

"Ah", the scientist will say. "Mumbo-jumbo."

*For fellow mathematicians, I reproduced these results with a 1-sample t-test to find p=0.128, and with an independent-samples t-test against Jung's control group to find p=0.49 (based on data pp. 66-67).
**This isn't a whole number because Jung used a frequency count over a control group 32,220 strong, adjusted for 180 pairs- a perfectly sound statistical procedure (p.65).
***p=0.969.
****Formally, Chi square tests the null hypothesis that the two sets of results come from the same statistical distribution. The p-value is 0.838, which is very good grounds to reject the hypothesis.
Erratum in the edition used: Please note that the histograms on pp. 70, 71 have vertical axes which begin on one instead of zero.
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Re: Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

Post by Mersenne »

Some interesting new information on Jung's Synchronicity.

In the "Astrological Experiment" the probabilities quoted for the observed values of the aspects in the three samples are found using a Poisson approximation. This is in fact a very poor approximation, and every critical aspect is a lot more improbable than Jung thought it was.

Batch of 180 pairs, quoted: 1/1000, should be 1/2700.
Batch of 220 pairs, quoted: 1/10000, should be 1/77220.
Batch of 83 pairs, quoted: 1/50, should be 1/68.

This makes the experiment much more successful than has hitherto been thought, though still subject to the above. The odds of all three aspects being found rises from 1:62,500,000 to 1:1,772,199,000 (if we accept the "two-ant" scenario, but to 1:525,096,000 with the more resalistic "three-ant").

An addendum to Jung's "Fish run" of 01/04/1949. An eighth coincidence should be added; on the day in question, there was a square aspect from transitting Neptune to natal Mercury, indicative of the challenge of the synchronistic to the rational. And of course, the fish motif is particularly appropriate to Neptune. The odds against an aspect this close (0.1 degrees) is 1/1800, so whatever the probability of the original run of seven, this should be divided by 1800.
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Re: Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

Post by admin »

Um...how would one go aout doing this, if one wasn;t a 'mathematician'' ? What parameters could one choose/use ?

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Re: Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

Post by Mersenne »

Hi Admin,

The best non-mathematical approach to identifying and analysing series is the methodology of Paul Kammerer. There's a good summary of his methods in an appedix to Arthur Koestler's The Case of the Midwife Toad, reprinted at

http://www.life-cycles-destiny.com/for/ ... mmerer.htm

But it amounts to keeping a diary, and noting coincidences (however trivial). The dates are very important; if a series becomes apparent, one can then examine transits to the natal horoscope at that time.
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Re: Synchronicity: Jung's Astrological Experiment

Post by admin »

I've gone through this over and over, and have kept records (though, intermittently because I keep forgetting to do so...sometimes/often such strikes me with too much at the time, and haven't kept it close enough to make a record). This may be a common issue ? Ir's hard to keep a record. Perhaps it's a matter of discipline ? And not least of all...interest, so that it can be taken further.

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