Research
The cosmos and the nervous system, measured.
Most claims made for astrology have never been put to a fair test, and most dismissals of it have never been either. We do the testing: carefully, in the open, and with no stake in the answer.
Our stance
We start from questions, not conclusions.
Every study begins as a hypothesis precise enough to fail. If Saturn's transit over the natal Moon is said to bring heaviness, what would that look like in sleep, in mood scores, in the words people use in a consultation, and how would it look if it were not true?
We then compare against controls: the same people in other periods, shuffled charts, and permutations that break any link to the sky. A tradition earns its place in our teaching only when the data supports it.
We publish nulls. A well-run study that finds nothing is a result, and we report it with the same care as one that finds something.
We separate roles. The people who form a hypothesis are not the people who score the outcome, wherever a study allows it.
We protect people. No one enters a dataset by name, and no one enters it without consent they can withdraw.
Areas of study
Six lines of enquiry.
Planetary transits & wellbeing
Do slow transits and dasha periods line up with measurable changes in mood, anxiety, sleep or life events, beyond what chance and calendar effects explain?
Circadian & lunar rhythms
The body keeps time with the sun, and some studies suggest with the moon. We study sleep, energy and emotion across solar and lunar cycles with precise ephemerides.
Stress, the brain & life events
How the stress response, the hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, shapes what people bring to a consultation, and whether chart timing adds anything to predicting it.
Personality & the chart
Chart factors compared with validated psychological measures, in blinded designs, so that we learn what jyotisha's language of temperament does and does not capture.
Consciousness experiences
Turning points, crises, insight, contemplative and meditative states: documented carefully in people's own words, then studied for patterns in time.
Human development & evolution
Life stages and long planetary cycles, and the wider story of how human beings have read and lived by the sky across history and cultures.
Data
Datasets built for science from the first record.
A dataset is only as good as its least careful entry. Ours are designed so that every record can say where it came from and how much to trust it.
The research corpus
Charts calculated on our platform join an anonymised research corpus with the name removed. With a client's separate consent, a structured summary of a consultation, covering the areas of life and the placements discussed, joins it under a pseudonym of two Sanskrit words.
- No names, no contact details
- Withdrawal removes the entry
- Published case studies need a third, explicit consent
Provenance on every record
Each chart carries a manifest: the ephemeris files and their hashes, the ayanamsa, the house system, the time-zone rules applied and the coordinates used. Two analyses of the same record will always agree on what the sky was.
- Historical time-zone rules (IANA tzdata), with ambiguous times refused rather than guessed
- Coordinates to six decimal places
- Birth-time reliability recorded, not assumed
Method
How a study runs.
Pre-register
The hypothesis, the outcome measures, the sample and the analysis are written and time-stamped before any data is opened.
Control
Every effect is compared with what shuffled charts, other time periods and permutation tests produce, so the sky has to beat chance.
Correct
Testing many placements at once finds false patterns. We correct for multiple comparisons and report effect sizes with confidence intervals, not only p-values.
Replicate
A finding is checked on held-out data before it is called a finding, and only then considered for teaching.
Publish
Results, positive or null, are written up with their methods so that anyone can check or repeat them.
The instrument
Siddhanta: a chart engine you can audit.
Research on astrology is only as precise as the astronomy under it. Siddhanta is our deterministic jyotisha engine, with a Python reference implementation and a production engine held to it by golden test vectors.
Collaborate with us.
We welcome psychologists, psychiatrists, neuroscientists, data scientists, historians and serious practitioners of jyotisha. If you would like to design a study, review our methods or work with the corpus, write to us.
Propose a collaboration Read our research ethics