Well, it’s 55 years to the day since French researcher Michel Gauquelin put this advert in Ici-Paris offering free personal horoscopes, which was jolly generous of him, wasn’t it?
Well…
Gauquelin is sometimes described as an astrologer, but was in fact a statistician and psychologist. He was investigating astrology, and wrote up his experiments in this 1969 book.
In this case, he began by observing that, in around 1967, various companies started up offering horoscopes done by — ooh! — a computer. A new-fangled horoscope done by, like, science and that. The adverts looked something like this:
“How could we resist?” Gauquelin writes, and then describes how he sent in birth (and other significant) dates of 10 criminals, including a priest who shot his mistress, a woman who abducted a baby, and Dr Marcel Petiot, France’s most notorious mass murderer.
Here’s the opening paragraph of the horoscope which came back for Petiot — a man who was, apparently, “fond of propriety and endowed with a moral sense which is comforting — that of a worthy, right-thinking, middle-class citizen”:
Well, apart from the small matter of the 27 people who thought he was smuggling them out of occupied France in WWII, and who he robbed, murdered and dissolved in quicklime (unless it was 63 people, or possibly more), yes, he was a delight.
The gangster Albert Millet had “a happy, euphoric nature”, Elisabeth Ducourneau, who poisoned her mother and husband, was a “creature of reason … purity and perfection”, and child abductor Simone Macridès “a strong, solid and stable character”. You get the idea
The next step — and there’s a clue in the opening paragraph — was really fiendish: place an advert for readings of their own and send over 150 respondents the same horoscope: that of Dr Petiot. But they also sent a questionnaire and a stamped, addressed envelope:
They also got a number of touching testimonies, including
On the whole, everyone who knows me found it accurate, and especially my wife, who knows me perfectly
and:
Then Gauquelin looked up a company in another advert, and discovered this much cheaper option was coming from exactly the same address. Their horoscope for Dr Petiot
contained a totally different psychological interpretation.
(Fakir Birman was the stage name of Charles Joseph Fossez, a 1930s clairvoyant who was fined for «avoir fait commerce d’illusions» so gave it up to become a lingerie salesman — which is so ludicrously French, it’s a wonder he didn’t become a bicycling onion seller in a beret.)
Oddly, in a 1950s experiment, Gauquelin discovered the ‘Mars Effect’, an apparent link between sporting prowess and the position of Mars at the time of one’s birth — a finding which apparently “haunted Gauquelin for the rest of his life”.
Whatever errors he may have made there, though, his point that the technology may change but charlatanism doesn’t is not about to get old any time soon.
