Hello forum, here’s something to consider. One of my hobbies used to be figuring out the secret behind Astrology, it’s a fun intellectual exercise, and is slightly relevant to the philosophy of human consciousness (it says something about the inescapability of the human brain / human mind identity, which is consistent with my nondualist philosophy).
From what I’ve seen, there are generally two kinds of people, the irrational ones who beleve in all those charts and our fate being written in the stars, and are incapable of critically examining their beliefs. And the irrational ones who are fairly convinced that there’s nothing to Astrology, consider themselves to be rational, and adopt this smarter-than-thou attitude. Very little middle ground between the two camps, imo it’s a good indicator of how most people can’t think outside the box.
It’s pretty simple, Astrology has been around for thousands of years and still won’t go away, because it also has to do with a very mundane yearly cycle of nature, it has to do with seasonal biology. During gestation and shortly after birth, as the human brain is forming, it’s fairly susceptible to whatever conditions are typical for the seasons. The amount of sunlight, the temperatures, the human body’s hormonal reactions to all the conditions etc. Depending on which roughly 12 months were the first 12 months of our lives including gestation, slight variances get hard-wired into our brains and remain permanently. Even as adult we can slightly experience the influences of the seasons on us if we pay attention, apparently the newborn brain is that much more sensible to them.
This doesn’t work at the Equator though, it’s mostly a thing in places with 4 rather different seasons, and a great variance in the amount of sunlight. That’s why Astrology is such a big thing in Europe, the US and China. Remember humans migrated from Africa, evolved under pretty much constant summer for millions of years before that, so this whole seasons business is still somewhat alien to our physiology. Now I may be wrong on this one, but from I’ve seen, this seasonal biology affects Afro-Americans even more, which is obviously because they just recently got moved to a place with 4 seasons.
So yes, the date of birth does matter. This is a great taboo of course in a culture where we pretend that everyone is equal psychologically. I think there were some statistical studies that shoved that the birthday does correlate with things like career choices and suceptibility to various health issues, but they didn’t dare to investigate beyond that.
The arbitrary 12 Sun signs are a reflection of this yearly cycle. People born in the middle of a Sun sign are more likely to have typical traits of that sign. People born on cusps are a mixture of the two signs. The rest of Astrology: the other kinds of signs like rising signs for example, the planets, the elements, the charts, the fate etc. are all nonsense, but as long as we base them on the Sun signs, there will always be a grain of truth to them.
This is the start of the investigation into the ‘real’ Astrology. It gets somewhat complicated beyond this, over the years I seem to have discovered a hidden double-pattern: we get two major influences hardwired at 6 months (I guess when the brain more or less gets finalized) and at 9 months (at birth), the other influences appear to be much lesser than this. Trying to find the exact mechanisms how the various Sun signs are created is pretty fun, I think I’ve identified some of the seasonal influences by now, won’t go into detail. It’s all pretty muddy and uncertain.
This kind of psychological knowledge is unbeliavably useful in everyday life though, it helps understand the odd behaviours of so many people, where most others just scratch their heads. It works at a more basic level than for example the MBTI, but one can combine them. I can also guess someone’s Sun sign with like 30% accuracy where random chance should be some 8-10%.