( g5 )

The purpose of this program is to build data usable to perform statistical tests on astrology (with birth times and timezone offset). These tests, initiated in the 1950s by Michel Gauquelin, followed 3 directions :
  • tests on professional groups,
  • tests on heredity,
  • tests on character traits.
This program deals with the data used to build professional groups.
The assertions of Gauquelin and followers are :
  • we can observe anomalies in the distributions of some planets in the births of famous people ;
  • the anomalies are more important for very eminent people ;
  • these statistical anomalies can be observed only for natural births, the effect disappear for induced deliveries. For this reason, studies are limited to births before 1950.
One particular effect (the repartition of Mars in the births of sportsmen, called "mars effect") gave rise to very long polemics without any consensual conclusion.

The main orientations of Gauquelin5 program are :
  1. Gather the historical data, check them, correct them, and merge them in a single database.
  2. Connect the historical data to standard datasets like wikidata and complete birth times to build larger groups.
  3. Build new eminence indicators and sort famous persons by eminence rank.
Note that g5 is not concerned by data analysis (performing statistical tests), it only deals with documentation, restoration and production of data.

Why Gauquelin5 ?

There are several reasons to care about the data used to perform statistical tests on astrology :
  • Scientific
    History is so confused that the question to know if these statistical anomalies exist out of human bias is still open.
    Internet provides data to check all Gauquelin assertions : professional, heredity, traits and much more semantic. With larger and more reliable groups, it's today possible to check Gauquelin claims.
  • Political
    A domain of research was banned from universities, and skeptic tests played an important role.
    G5 program aims to answer a question : did the skeptic cheat ? An answer can be obtained, but this implies to reconstitute the historical data, provide new eminence ranking for athletes and reproduce the analysis done by Suitbert Ertel, to see if his accusations of fraud are valid or not.
  • Historical
    Historians of science can use the data to establish the facts, as data are the main materials used to perform the astrological tests.
  • Technical
    These data are interesting because they contain birth time. And birth times are generally neglected in the web. Take for example wikidata : birth dates are set to 00:00:00. There is no way to make the difference between "this is a date with no time information" and "this is a date with time = 00:00:00" (maybe there is a way, but I didn't find it).
    Birth times of persons better the web, give it more precision and can be useful for other disciplines studying human activity.

Current implementation

Most code already developed concerns step 1 of g5 (restoration of historical data).
G5 currently uses the following data sources :
  • Data gathered by Michel et Françoise Gauquelin (serie A, files D6, D10, E1, E3). Gauquelin5 program use data coming from version 5 of C.U.R.A Gauquelin archives.
    Note: Since november 2020, Cura data became closed data. Gauquelin5 program does not use data published after this date on this web site.
  • Suitbert Ertel and Arno Müller data, made available on web site.
  • Scans of Arno Müller's Astro-Forschungs-Daten sent by Nick Kollerstrom.
  • CSICOP data sent by Kenneth Irving, previously unpublished.
  • Gauquelin 1955 (paper) book "Les hommes et les astres".

Data are corrected and imported in a common database, currently containing
  • 22 083 persons with birth time.
  • 99 persons with birth day and without birth time.

Several data sources still need to be found to complete the restoration, see Historical tests.

Generated data can't be considered yet as reliable (in particular legal time, timezone offset and place identification need test and debug).

About this program

The name "Gauquelin5" comes from the main source of information, "Archives Gauquelin version 5", from

This program comes with an auxiliary repository,, containing raw data and draft material.

Code needs php 8.0 or higher ; tested on linux (ubuntu 20.4 and debian 10 buster).

The software, current documentation and all files containing corrections or informations are released under the following licences :
This documentation is written in a globish as close as possible to english, but uses french conventions for capitalization, spaces and large numbers :
  • Names of months, weekdays, languages etc. are not capitalized.
  • The characters ; ? ! are preceeded and followed by a white space.
  • White space is used as separator for large numbers (for example one million is written 1 000 000).
  • Marriage is written mariage, address is written adress.

This software has a slow development pace because I do it on my spare time.

Repository created by Thierry Graff in 2017.
Current status : g5 development in pause, busy to work.