TAARP - Appendix E -
The Construction of the 60-Item Perdurabo/TAARP Data Base
What is called the 60-Item Perdurabo/TAARP Data Base evolved over the period from March 1995 to October 1995 as Glenn Johnson and I began our attempt to understand Crowley's concept of the "astrological complex".
Crowley has written many books on Magick/Mysticism. Those of his works most pertinent to astrology are:
In IV, above, Crowley gives the natal charts of 100 people of exceptional character. (See Section E3.0 for comments on the authorship of III and IV.) In II, III and IV, he presents an analysis of these charts. In II he specifically designates 14 of the individuals as being of supremely exceptional character. To date, Glenn and I have extracted the horoscopes from IV of these 14 individuals and 18 other individuals from the category of 100, who we think are in general not as exceptional as the 14. In fact, what we did was to choose all the individuals that Crowley specifically mentioned in II, III and IV with respect to the term "complex" (i.e., his concept of the "astrological complex"). Some of the individuals thus selected belong to the glorious group of 14 and some do not. There are 22 individuals whose natal chart discussions in II, III and IV specifically reference the term "complex". Of these 22, four were among the glorious 14 and 18 were not. To the glorious group of 14, Glenn and I added Crowley himself. Thus, we formed the group of 15 High PHENOMENON and the group of 18 Medium PHENOMENON. Again, let me emphasize that our original intention was to try to understand exactly what Crowley means by "astrological complex", and even many serious readings of II, III and IV did not clarify the issue for me. In addition to planetary aspects, such astrological issues as "the lord of the rising sign", "planets rising", and "planets culminating" are involved in Crowley's "astrological complex".
When Crowley did the research presented in II, III and IV, Pluto had not yet been discovered. Therefore, we have 14 natal horoscopes of very high quality people and 18 natal horoscopes of reasonably high quality people without Pluto included that were used by Crowley based on an ephemeris of the early 1900s. Furthermore, the planetary positions in these natal horoscopes are usually not given to an accuracy greater than a degree. We are not given the dates, times and places of birth corresponding to the natal horoscopes of the 100. However, since our primary goal is to figure out what he means by "astrological complex", and since all we have to work with are the 100 natal charts and his analysis of them in II, III and IV, this is not a great handicap. At some time in the future, after we have made reasonable progress in understanding his "astrological complex" concept, we plan to take a large number of very high quality individuals, and a large number of reasonably high quality individuals for whom we can establish reasonably reliable birth places, dates, and times, and apply a modern, accurate ephemeris, including information on Pluto, to the birth data, and then analyze the resulting planetary configurations with whatever adaptive pattern recognition software we have developed by that time.
To complete our group of very high quality individuals, we added Aleister Crowley to our original list of 14 so that we have a total of 15 very high quality people. Since we do not have access to the ephemeris Crowley used for his 100, we used Time Cycles, Inc. astrological software "IO", a modern, accurate ephemeris to calculate his natal chart and ignored Pluto. Subsequent to this calculation, we found a copy of his natal chart that he had done in one of his publications, The Equinox of the Gods. The chart he calculated for himself agreed very closely with the one we calculated.
To get a set of natal charts for ordinary people (whom we designate as "Low PHENOMENON"), we took 27 people that I know very well and calculated their charts with the IO software. Again, data for Pluto was thrown out. It is very important to note that for Crowley and for these 27 people, planet position data accurate to a minute was used in this entire study. This may be a serious mistake given that Crowley's natal charts on the 100 usually present planet position data accurate to only a degree. However, it should be noted that in the quantitative analysis results presented in Appendix B and Appendix C, in general the same trends distinguishing the High PHENOMENON (i.e., the very high quality individuals) from the Medium PHENOMENON (i.e., the reasonably high quality individuals), also distinguish the Medium PHENOMENON from the Low PHENOMENON (i.e., the ordinary individuals). So, maybe we do not have a serious data corruption problem. Future efforts are planned to help clarify this issue.
It only remains to be emphasized that in this report the terms High PHENOMENON, Medium PHENOMENON, and Low PHENOMENON refer, respectively, to the very high quality people (otherwise called "Famous 1"), the reasonably high quality people (otherwise called "Famous 2"), and the ordinary people (otherwise called "Others") as indicated in Table E-1.
