SIDEREAL SPORT ASTROLOGY: ESHELMAN'S METHOD FOR PREDICTION

The following explores the relationship between the techniques of Sidereal mundane astrology and major athletic competitions, especially the outcome of the largest, most-watched, most culturally engaging sports event in America each year, the Super Bowl. As of February 7, 2016, we had 50 Super Bowls behind us, which was a reasonable number to investigate empirically and statistically for patterns that we can use to predict the outcome in the future.

Our goal was to find whether a pattern of astrological analysis exists, using the methods of Sidereal Mundane Astrology, that conforms to the game outcomes of the past. If we could identify a “best fit” pattern for historic data, we would be primed to test this pattern with predictions of future games.

Such a pattern was found. It allows prediction of 90% of the games and gives accurate predictions for 84% of the games for which prediction is possible. In other words, if you had applied this technique to the first 50 Super Bowls, you would have “sat out” five games and, wagering on the other 45, would have won your wager 37 times.

This study of sports astrology also has been work-shopped on Solunars.com for several years. I owe the motivation for this research project, and much of the theory of prediction, to colleagues and collaborators who prefer to veil themselves behind online pseudonyms. Of these, the hands-down champ in sports astrology is Sidereal astrologer “SteveS,” who continues to push this research with great passion. The methods discussed below have been applied not just to the Super Bowl, but to many kinds of college and professional sports, with outcomes that, while not always perfect, have easily beat the results of most sports gamblers.

Theory of Game Prediction

Each year, the Super Bowl is a “battle of the champions” competition between two professional football teams in the National Football League that have competitively risen to the top of their conferences (sub-leagues). Since 1967 it has been the final professional American football game of each season. Vast numbers of football fans across the nation annually devote a weekend to watching the game, often with friends at parties packed with food, beverages, and much excitement. Typically, interest is especially high in those cities with local teams playing in the game that year because these cities have the highest concentration of fans.

Some cities have cultures with more enthusiasm for the game than others. Therefore, some games, representing more intense historic rivalries, naturally draw more attention and more emotional force.

This local enthusiasm and impact are the basis for our theory of the predictability of the winner. Mundane astrology is the study of the masses, not of individuals. Events that merge vast numbers of people into a common “group mind” show more powerfully in the tools used by mundane astrologers. Such events as natural disasters, major political happenings, and other news-dominating contemporary events naturally draw vast numbers of people’s minds to the same topic and sidestep the ego-distinctions of individuals in favor of the mass mind responses of a common herd. Probably no event more typifies this kind of submergence of individual ego-distinctions into a group mind like the intentionally induced mob madness of a major sports event.

Besides the immediate fan involvement during, and in the immediate aftermath of, the game, the Super Bowl creates other practical implications for fans and others. Though the Super Bowl always boasts more parties than even New Year’s Eve in most parts of America, the after-game celebrations are more intense and joyous among fans of the winning team, meaning that they are more abundant and joyous in the home cities of the winning team. Significant economic considerations also exist, not the least of which is through gambling.

Therefore, our basic theory of game prediction centers on mass reaction to the outcome in terms of such things as joyous celebration and economic gain. These are modified by the intensity with which local culture in those cities includes passion for football.

The Biggest Event of Its Time

For this working theory to be applicable to a given game, the match must be the biggest event absorbing local consciousness at the time. Usually this is the case with the Super Bowl: few things happen in most cities in a year that are bigger, especially if a local team is playing. Potentially, though, another event could be bigger than a given game.

In a recent year, due to unusually severe winters, much of the Midwest was buried under ice, snow, and extreme cold. This was reflected in the Sidereal lunar ingresses of the time, which mostly had Saturn angular along paths cutting through the affected regions. Many football teams from those regions were competing in playoff games. We wrongly predicted they would lose because of Saturn’s dominance of the most immediate charts. However, many of those teams won. The severe weather, which created economic burdens and during which many died of exposure or suffered hardship, was a more dominant reality than the outcome of the playoff games. [A separate factor that affected the accuracy of our predictions of those games was undue reliance on the lunar ingresses. Normally, this would be a primary focus in Sidereal mundane astrology, but research shows that it should not be so primary for predicting sports events – at least, not for the Super Bowl.]

Another striking example is the 1989 World Series. During the broadcasted warm-up of one game in San Francisco, the 6.9 magnitude Loma Prieta earthquake struck, killing or injuring thousands of people and causing billions of dollars in property damage. We probably could not have used mundane astrology to pick which team would win anyway, since San Francisco was playing Oakland – effectively identical geographic locations – but, in any case, the earthquake was a bigger deal. The charts, shown in the “Earthquakes” chapter, are a mashup of sports enthusiasm and tragedy.

During 2017 basketball playoffs, charts looked excellent for South Carolina, even though the team was not expected to do well. The Gamecocks exceeded expectations but eventually were eliminated. A day later, their female counterparts won the title: There was a second story running concurrently.

Additionally, in early attempts to predict other sporting events, success was achieved in games between fierce traditional rivals and the sort of game where one could reasonably say, “The whole town comes out for this one!” However, on lesser games, or even important games where the cities involved do not have a culture of total absorption in a match, the outcome is less predictable. In those cases, the game simply is not the biggest event in most people’s lives in that city at that time.

This history of successes and failures encourages our underlying theory that Sidereal mundane astrology shows not the outcome per se, but the psychological impact of such events on the mass mind of the population of a city or other region.

The Data

For each of the first 50 Super Bowl games, the date and location (city) of the game was collected, as well as the home cities of the two teams playing. Uniformly, 10:00 PM was used as the ending time of the game: This is nearly always a good approximation and, in any case, no factors relevant to the techniques tested would be affected unless the time were off by at least several hours and, in most cases, by a day.

How Each Technique Performs

Individual performance of the different Sidereal ingresses and quotidians seem different from other situations. Probably, this is a consequence of the timing of the games, e.g., most of them occurred in the immediate aftermath of a new Capsolar, or Master Year Chart, so it was also one of the most recent and immediately effective charts; but this is not the entire explanation, since the Capsolar also performed well in those early Super Bowls that occurred early in January, at the tail end of the old Capsolar.

For unclear reasons, lunar ingresses (which usually are extremely important) performed badly. In fact, part of the developed prediction technique for sports events is to consult them only when nothing else tips the scales to one of the teams and a “tiebreaker” is needed. Perhaps even this is overly generous use, and the lunar ingresses should be entirely disregarded.

I can only theorize on why lunar ingresses behave this way. Here are three theories:

1. Lunar ingresses are intimately connected to so many collateral factors (not the least of which is the weather) that perhaps they are less likely to give a clear, undistracted answer about one event during their week.

2. Athletics invoke the hero archetype of the Sun and, in fact, the Moon seems to be an anti-athletic, anti-competitive factor in natal horoscopes despite its strong connection to crowds, sensation, and whatever is popular and mass-enthusing.

3. Since the Super Bowl is an annual event, occurring only once in each 12 months and representing a climax of an annual cycle, perhaps it is rightly described best in the Master Chart of the Year. (This theory could be tested against other predictable annual events such as the World Series, and contrasted to more frequent, non-annual events.)

Here follow observations and reports about how each major layer of the “stack” performs.

Year Charts

As shown throughout this book, the Year chart is the Capsolar in mid-January, unless the Capsolar is dormant for a location. In that case, the Cansolar from the prior July steps in (or flows through) as the effective Chart of the Year. The Year chart proved to be our single best key to predicting Super Bowl winners; i.e., historically it has the most reliable fit to the game outcome. Saturn closely angular in the Year chart (say, within 3° of the angles) is almost a perfect guarantee that a team will lose. (This effect is neutralized if both teams have Saturn angular and strengthened if the other team has Jupiter closely angular in its local Capsolar.) The graph shows planets’ close angularity and close Moon aspects in the Year charts for winners subtracted from the count for losers, meaning that a bar reaching above the graph is pro-loss while one reaching below is pro-win.

Quarter Charts

The solar ingress of the current Quarter needs to be examined for a complete picture, though it is not as strong as, or supersessive of, the Year chart. Usually, the Quarter chart and Year chart are identical for the Super Bowl because it usually occurs immediately after a Capsolar, which serves not only as Year chart but as ingress for the first quarter of the year. Distinctive Quarter charts can occur in two ways: (1) The game occurs before mid-January, so that the prior year’s Capsolar remains in operation, and the mid-October Libsolar is the current Quarter chart. (2) The Capsolar is dormant so that the prior Cansolar flows through as “acting” Year chart, and the prior Libsolar flows through as “acting” Quarter chart. And, of course, for sports matches other than the Super Bowl, competitions can occur at any point in a year.

Quarter chart statistics are nearly identical with those of the Year charts, but with somewhat reduced excesses. This is no surprise, since they are often the same chart and, when not, often are statistical “noise” across the face of the data. One exception though, is that Moon is more strikingly emphasized for losing teams. Because it also tied for most active in the Year charts, this lunar pattern seems true across all solar ingresses and just happens to stand out even more in statistics for the Quarter charts.

Lunar Ingresses

To make a long discussion short: At least for the Super Bowl, and (it seems from watching other matches) for sports prediction in general, we probably always should ignore lunar ingresses. Most especially, one should not interpret an angular Venus or Jupiter in a lunar ingress as designating a winner. Usually, it is exactly the reverse!

Day Techniques (Capsolar Based)

Our two most powerful daily timing techniques are based on the Capsolar. In simple terms, they are transits to the angles or Moon of the Capsolar or its CapQ progressions, our most reliable mundane astrology tool.

For Super Bowl wins, these factors are secondary to the Capsolar itself, though read substantially the same: Saturn angular in the CapQ or transiting a Capsolar angle is nearly, by itself, a guarantee that a team will lose, especially if the opposing team has Jupiter angular.

Let me make this practical point perfectly clear: Across 50 Super Bowls, the distribution of Saturn in Day techniques was almost evenly distributed among winners and losers, predictively useless by itself. However, after filtering out those cases already clearly predicted by Saturn angularity in the Capsolar, Saturn’s angularity in the daily charts identified the largest block of losers.

Another point of extreme interest in the Capsolar-based daily charts is that Pluto and (not far behind it) Venus show as the most active planets for everybody. Venus ubiquitously present likely reflects that everybody everywhere is partying. Winners and losers alike party on Super Bowl day! (Angular Venus anecdotally appears more helpful in predicting lesser game winners.) As with solar ingresses, Moon is more likely to be angular in the CapQ for losers than winners.

Day Techniques (Cansolar Based)

As discussed elsewhere, the Cansolar-based daily methods (CanQ and Cansolar transits) are about 70% as strong as Capsolar-based methods. Best practice is to consult them primarily when the Capsolar-based daily techniques do not give an answer. In our game prediction model, we use them that way: Only if the CapQ and Capsolar transits give no answer, or an insufficiently clear answer, are the CanQ and Cansolar transits consulted. Otherwise, we ignore them.

When consulted, they behave the same as the Capsolar-based techniques. Statistically, they disclose two additional interesting factors, though, since Neptune and Mars are the two most active planets across the board for Cansolar-based daily techniques. However, Neptune is primarily active for winners and Mars for losers! This does seem to generalize across other techniques as well. (Neptune also has a surplus for winners in the Capsolar-based methods.)

How Each Planet Performs

Planet natures are consistent throughout astrology, though these natures express themselves with distinctive quirks in different situations. For the present purpose of determining Super Bowl winners, we find them operating especially as follows:

SATURN is the clearest indicator of the outcome of the games. Closely angular in the Capsolars, CapQ, or Capsolar transits of one team (and not the other), Saturn nearly guarantees a loss.

JUPITER means winning in Year and Day charts, though it will not override a Saturn angularity: Jupiter and Saturn both angular tends to lose.

MOON appears anti-athletic. After Saturn, it is the factor most actively distinctive for losing teams. This is consistent with research in natal astrology, especially the Gauquelin findings, which show Moon at the birth of eminent athletes avoiding the angles as assiduously as Mars clings to them, representing character traits exactly opposite those of the typical competitive athlete. Despite Moon’s usual identification with popular things that stir the herd-mind, it is extremely high, in all categories of solar ingresses and their progressions, for losers.

SUN astrologically embodies the “hero archetype,” which is the basis of America’s adulation of its conquering, champion athletes. Confirming this, in lunar ingresses Sun is the most common planet for both winners and losers – the heroes parading and off to the fray!

VENUS, though benefic, is not a reliable predictor of victory for the Super Bowl. In the Day charts, it is a lead planet for both winning and losing teams and seems to represent the widespread partying and social celebration regardless of the game’s outcome.

MARS, surprisingly, is a malefic for this purpose. For athletics (and highly competitive situations in general), one might expect Mars would be a strong contributor. However, based on the outcome of games historically, it works against the team (perhaps confronting them with more aggression, strength, and ferocity than expected: Mars coming in from the outside, not emerging from the inside). Mars transiting solar ingress angle especially marks a losing team. However, Mars-Jupiter aspects foreground indicate athletic excellence and winning.

PLUTO is extremely high for both winners and losers. (In the Capsolar, it is more often prominent for winners than losers.) Its extreme activity across the board seems to be singling out those teams that make it to the Bowl, which (regardless of the outcome) adds them to the history books.

URANUS is not a big player in these games. Generally, it simply means surprises – being taken by surprise – and sometimes collaborates with Pluto to show reversals or beating the odds. In fact, this “bet on the underdog” counsel from Uranus and Pluto is their best contribution in predicting the outcome. More generally, Uranus is responsible for more (and more exciting) turn-overs during a game, causing more surprise and excitement.

NEPTUNE is not a malefic in these charts unless aligned with Mars and Saturn. In the CanQ and Cansolar transits, it is much more active for winners than losers. Neptune simply means the mob-madness of fandom, the essence of the spirit of sports events of this type.

MERCURY is not a helpful factor.

Technique of Predicting Super Bowl Winners

Based upon the data from these 100 events (50 games for two cities each), a protocol has emerged that proves highly successful. Results are not perfect (100%), but, when applied to historic games it proves over 80% accurate and has served us in predicting other major athletic event outcomes.

1. Most important to picking winners is to not focus on picking winners. Instead, pick losers. Only pick winners if you do not find a clear loser. This is inferred by the data, where Saturn angularities nearly guarantee a loss, but Jupiter angularities in the same charts do not override and indicate victory. Both teams are already winners, already champions, making extra money and bringing economic advantage to their home cities. Therefore, any “winner” symbolism could potentially apply as well to getting to the Super Bowl in the first place, rather than winning the game. On the other hand, “loser” symbolism usually can only manifest in losing the game.

2. The Capsolar is the best guide to prediction, followed by the daily timings.

3. Lunar ingresses are far less reliable than solar ingresses for game outcomes and perhaps of no practical value. I recommend not consulting them at all.

4. Do not rely too heavily on secondary indicators of winning-losing mentioned above unless (a) they are quite clear and (b) you are unable to call the event from Saturn and Jupiter angularities.

Alabama vs. Clemson, 2017

Having derived this system from Super Bowl examples, we have applied it to numerous other sporting events. I want to give one recent example particularly dear to my colleague SteveS. In the 2017 college football national championship game, the Crimson Tide of the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa played the Clemson Tigers. Alabama was favored to win by 6.5 points: Las Vegas gave two-to-one odds against Clemson. However, in a surprising upset, Clemson won 35-31 with a touchdown scored in the last second of the game.

The astrologer’s question ahead of time was whether the populace of Tuscaloosa, Alabama or Clemson, South Carolina would be happier at the end of the game, which occurred January 9, 2017, about 10:45 PM in Tampa, Florida. This question was answered correctly on the Solunars forum over a month before the game, based on the charts described below.

Our recommended method is to attempt to identify the loser and, only if we fail at that, attempt to identify the winner. Check the Capsolar, its quotidian, and transits to its angles. Saturn on any of these is a clear mark the team will lose unless a matching (negating) Saturn occurs for the other team as well. If the Capsolar or CapQ does not give a clear answer, check the Cansolar equivalents; otherwise, ignore them. If no Saturns identify a loser, then a Jupiter angularity will mark a winner; but Jupiter angular alongside Saturn will not overrule a “losing” chart.

Year Chart: Capsolar

For Tuscaloosa, the 2016 Capsolar Moon was a mere 0°06' from Eastpoint (and just over 1° from Ascendant), joined by Uranus rising (3°). Though Moon has a poor record for winning, nothing is decisive about this chart, so we check the Cansolar for a second opinion.

In the Cansolar we find Neptune on Eastpoint (1°04') closely square a widely foreground Saturn near Midheaven. Saturn foreground is the clearest signal of who will lose a game, though, ideally, I would like to see it closer than this 5½° placement.

For Clemson, Uranus is 1° from Ascendant in near-partile square to a foreground Pluto. To the extent this contributes anything to the question, it shows at least frequent turnovers and (if other indications do not contradict this) a beating of the odds and reversing the odds-makers’ expectations. Since Clemson was expected to lose, this could point to a surprise win.

Assessment: From the Year chart, therefore, we see a possible loss by Tuscaloosa and a good chance of an odds-overthrowing upset by Clemson.

Quarter Chart: Libsolar

For Tuscaloosa, we get a different message for the quarter. Jupiter is closest to an angle, about 1° from Descendant. If predicting the game outcome came down to predicting a winner, this chart would carry a lot of weight; but, as stated above, it is much more reliable to predict a loser than a winner, so we hold this Libsolar back in reserve.

For Clemson, a near-partile Mars-Pluto conjunction squares Ascendant. Several other planets are foreground, including close Jupiter and Mercury contacts, and moderate Sun and Uranus. Though Jupiter is slightly closer for Tuscaloosa, this only becomes a factor if we switch tactics to predicting the winner instead of the loser.

Assessment: If we have “loser” indications in other charts (as we do), the Libsolar contributes nothing useful.

Capsolar Quotidian & Transits

For Tuscaloosa, nothing is on the CapQ angles or transiting the Capsolar’s angles, so we check the CanQ. Ingress Saturn is 1°17' from IC, square transiting (0°53') and ingress (0°55') Neptunes on quotidian Descendant – the angle being 0°01' from their midpoint at the time the game ended. This is one of the clearest indications that Alabama would lose.

For Clemson, CapQ Ascendant squares ingress Pluto (1°28'), which is closely square Uranus. We read this as upsetting the odds, which would favor the underdog, Clemson. Transiting Uranus conjoins Capsolar Ascendant (0°48'), reinforcing this; and Uranus is part of a partile Sun-Uranus square at game’s end (0°31'), making this even more exciting and surprising.

Assessment: Tuscaloosa has clear loss indicators. Underdog Clemson has indications that there will be an upset.

Conclusion: Tuscaloosa has weak indications of loss in the Year chart, and strong indications of loss in the CanQ. Clemson has no loss indicators at all. Additionally, Clemson, the team expected to lose, has repeated indications that the odds will be overturned and an upset will occur. For underdog Clemson, this is as good as a prediction they will win.

Based on these principles and these charts, it was correctly predicted that Clemson would win – something that, without astrology, was not evident until, literally, the last second of the game.