Either/both. I don’t think people know enough about what causes things like that for me to give a solid answer. There’s a lot of personality disorders that SEEM to manifest early enough that we could say a kid had them from birth. But how do you know when people don’t even have a personality for the first few years?
I don’t know much about astrology, but this sort of outlines my confusion with it. Based on what you’re saying here, it seems like there would be seasons/days in which retards wouldn’t be born, and seasons/days in which tons of retards would be born. Though I was more thinking narcissists, psychopaths, and stuff like that when I brought it up- stuff for which predictions about optimism and values and such would have radically different answers. I’m picturing a nurse in a maternity ward looking at a nursery full of this week’s or this evenings births, and thinking “There’s a whole lot of future assholes/empaths/go-getters/optimists.” It seems less plausible when you think of any given chart applying to a whole mess of people, instead of just the one you’re talking to. Or to put it another way; there are people out there with a clinical diagnosis of some mental issue that basically means that they will never be optimistic about anything, ever. They’re like Tony Soprano’s Mom or whatever. Does astrology entail that none of them have the same birthdate as me? That strains my credulity to the point of snapping.
This confuses me to. Let’s say a horrible thing happens to me when I’m 8, and turns me into a retard. You’re saying my chart would reflect that. You mean the chart of the day I was struck retarded, right? But doesn’t everybody alive have the same chart on a particular day? Or does the chart for that day when I was struck retarded interact with the chart of my birth, somehow?
Skilled astrologers are certainly good at convincing other people that it works; so good that otherwise rational people have been convinced of it for zillions of years. So there is something about it that keeps it going through multiple cultures and multiple epochs. I have some reservations that keep me from thinking more of it than that.