Dodona Update
Zip Dobyns
All is well in our small corner of paradise. I've planted a fig tree to replace the one the gophers got, and this time we put heavy wire underneath and all around it, having learned from the big Sunset Western Garden Book that gophers are especially fond of the roots of fig trees. Also planted a grape vine, am enjoying hot peppers and green onions in my window box garden with the first tomatoes almost ripe. We are adding store rooms to try to house some of the overflow books and magazines from the 5th Ave. house in Los Angeles as well as the constant accumulation which goes on here. Bill has been working hard on a variety of projects, and may even have solved my problem with invading mice who took up residence every time I went on a trip. Last year, we had a family of Scott orioles who shared the hummingbird feeder with the Anna hummingbirds. This year, we have both Bullock and Hooded orioles drinking from the feeder. They are just gorgeous—orange and black with white wing bars. The Scotts were lemon yellow and black.
On the astrology front, the Book of Saturn is written, except for Maritha's final editing and the numerous charts and tables and appendices which have to be worked out. ACS hopes to have it in print by the end of this year. I was also thrilled to finally get the data from Sweden so we could replicate the study done by Sara Klein for her Ph.D. dissertation. Readers will recall that Sara had over 1,000 subjects who were unable to work for three months or more following work-related accidents. She found the transiting Sun conjunct, square, or opposite the natal Sun at the time of the accident with staggering odds against chance. She had chi-square figures with 8 and 9 zeros, which is unheard of in studies with humans.
We were figuring that transiting Uranus in its own sign was the right timing to finally have a major breakthrough in astrology research. Well, Uranus threw us a surprise, which is pretty common with Uranus. Mark processed the data for nearly 3,000 subjects who had critical accidents during a single year in the country of Sweden. The U.S. is theoretically a free country, but our authorities are too afraid of the religious right on one side, the materialistic scientists on the other side, and the lawyers in the middle who might sue anyone who released public data, even though all we needed was the birth date and the accident date of the victims, so there was no way anyone's privacy could be threatened.
We thought we might get different results with the females. Sara's sample was mostly males. But, what we got was total non-significance for aspects between the transiting Sun on the day of the accident and the natal Sun of the victim. Sara's data came from people who filed claims in two clinics in California. In Sweden, medical needs are met without any need for special claims. The Swedish sample of serious accidents does not match the range of all of the accident victims in Sweden in that year. We are currently discussing how to interpret this fact that victims of serious accidents in Sweden in 1993 were not representative of the total general population of people who had accidents that year. For the males, age 40 to 44 was the dividing group where the numbers of expected and observed accidents were almost identical. Below age 40, fewer individuals had serious accidents while from age 45 to 64 there were more serious accidents. The females only varied by having matching numbers in the expected and observed groups between age 40 and 49. Since older individuals theoretically are less fit and coordinated and thus more prone to accidents, as well as slower to heal, it may be that the results which need to be explained are the ones from California. The extended time of fewer serious accidents for the women also fits the tendency for women to live longer than men. Sara suspects that some of the claims by younger individuals in California may have been fraudulent.
Of course, checking for aspects between T Sun and N Sun is just the beginning. We will be looking at aspects involving all of the planets at the time of the accident though in over 400 cases out of 2865 we do not have the time of the accident, so we can't use the T Moon for those.
My initial thought is that these results support the symbolic nature of astrology, demonstrating that people in different cultures respond in different ways to the basic principles. California is the “golden” state, noted for its focus on solar principles—ego, self-esteem, showmanship, grandiosity. We may find a quite different principle or combination of principles in other countries. When we have time! We will keep you posted.
I hope to see some of our readers at the ISAR conference in Chicago in early July. Mark, Maritha, and I will all be speaking there. And, have a good summer!
