Here's the link to Rob Brezny's site (Free Will Astrology):

www.freewillastrology.com/

Brezny is simply awesome, and I think that he's really not that much into astrology any more. He does his horoscopes by more than one method, and I think pulling a card from the Antero Alli Vertical Oracle deck as the significator for the sign for the coming week is a key part of his method, and a lot of just plain guesswork too. I find his horoscopes to have always been completely inapplicable to me and my life -- but I just enjoy reading them, and everything else he writes. His book "Pronoia" is a masterpiece; the guy is brilliant fun, an extremely loving and perceptive jester who can crack your mind open.

The "free will" part reflects what a lot of modern astrologers say, that the planets' influences aren't there to rule you but to help you in some way -- but up until modern times, astrology, wherever found: Egypt, China, India, quickly became this absolute morass of rules about what you could do when, and not that much about divination - a huge industry still exists in calculating the right time to do every single thing you can possibly imagine in India, and I know people who are completely into it and who plan their every activity by the planets. But then, they have plenty of time to do that, and their activities are few, and they don't have a job, and for some of them, frankly, it just becomes a justification of their natural procrastination. Due to the complexity of each person's chart, when you intermingle that with the complexity of all the celestial influences considered in astrology, you come up with a fine mess, and the outcome is that the prohibitions greatly outweigh the permissions--and nobody without special training can penetrate the complexities. Which, for an Indian astrologer who makes his living figuring out the right times for things, is the whole reason for his being.

Despite the fact that I can see definite correspondences between astrological tenets and actual beings and events, I just got so completely fed up with astrology a long time ago -- I'm still keen on astronomical goings-on and pay attention to sun, moon, stars in that way -- but not being able to sign contracts and having your car and electronics break down for up to 30 days three times per year, every year, because of Mercury retrograde????? Puhleeze. Even though it is a fact that there are a whole lot more car and computer breakdowns during those periods, and even though I'm still superstitious enough that I bought my last car only a good week after Mercury went back direct . . . I resent it!!! For me, I can't garden by the moon -- I've gotta garden when certain entirely other influences come into play: me, the weather, the available time, whether my hand is up to digging, and do I have enough energy to move --- these are the forces that govern my garden and yard. Not the moon.

So for me I've just demanded of the Universe that it leave me the heck alone!! I am busy and have no time for planetary interferences.

On top of all this -- people never seem to notice that while power over us all is granted to the teensiest farthest planetoid, the biggest power over us is obviously Earth. Which is completely omitted from astrology. Right there you have to scratch your head and say wha???

Yes, the moons effect on water pulling the tides and even the crust of the earth itself due to gravitational pull do make a whole lot of conceptual sense. How you translate that into affecting physical development in the womb does not. Sure gravity is pulling on the mother & the baby & everything around us in various proportions but the infinite gravitational influences couldn't have any predictable outcome on personality, at least not by our number crunching capabilities at this point in time and definitely no time in the past. And effect on energy configurations....what's an energy configuration? Certainly not something you can measure or even describe at this time and if it's not measurable (and thus not provable) it's pure speculation.

I'm not trying to be mean here but there's a whole mess of new age pseudoscience that people "believe" in because it sounds cool & uses words & thoughts from actual science. But belief is not enough to make it true.

I like a lot of what the astrologers at astro.com have to say. Their interpretations of the data really resonate with me - they tend to come from a place of describing the energies in detail that are being expressed at any given time and advising the individuals that they have choices of how to work with those energies.

I've gone through a few phases between doubt and faith in the time since I first started reading astrology (many years), but when I look back on my life and see how it describes times I've already experienced and the interactions with people I know, I tend to feel it's pretty accurate.
As some folks in the astrology tribe say, it doesn't matter if you believe in astrology - it's just another language for describing and explaining our existence and if it helps promote some understanding, all the better!

Free >> words came before numbers <<

Numbers are words.

Free >> Modern scientists still can't explain everything by rays or emissions, or pure mathematics. That's why systems are still only systems, and never apply generically, across the spectrum, to all people. <<

I agree. Science does not "explain" anything. It's a model. It's usefulness is in its predictive power, which is why I am interested in the predictive power of astrology.

For example, I would feel confident that I would make money on an even bet that if I flipped a coin a thousand times, it would come up heads less than 750 times. Because there is a lot evidence to support the predictive power of probability theory, I have confidence in that, but it really doesn't explain anything. It's just a model.