A Researcher Inside Astrology

John Addey came to astrology as a Cambridge undergraduate in the 1940s and spent the rest of his life trying to put the subject on a research footing from within. In 1958 he was among the founders of the Astrological Association of Great Britain, which became the main organized home for serious astrological study in the country, and he later served as its president; in 1970 he helped establish the Urania Trust to support astrological education. His working life was shaped by ankylosing spondylitis, a progressive spinal disease that left him increasingly disabled, and it was partly through convalescence that he found the time for the enormous data collection his projects required.

His two most cited studies gathered birth data on a scale unusual for the field: several thousand nonagenarians, tested against the traditional claim that long life goes with particular zodiac placements, and a large sample of polio cases. The traditional claims failed, but Addey noticed something else in the distributions: regular wave like ripples, patterns that repeated when the zodiac circle was divided by whole numbers. Rather than abandoning astrology on the negative results, he concluded that its real structure had been mislaid by tradition, and that the waves were the phenomenon itself. That conclusion became the harmonic theory, the project that occupied the rest of his life and made him one of the most influential astrologers of the twentieth century.