I will try to steer for comprehensible substance - tell me if this is lacking in clarity and if so where specifically, or otherwise what specifically you need to know to begin.
The only objectifying test of astrology is an empirical one.
One test is for someone to give me a number of points in time and space on Earth one of which is their birth, and the astrologer tries to pick out the right chart based on what he perceives of the person.
Another is for the astrology to outright say the sun is here moon there, ascendant this and probably A in the xth house, B in y, etc.
I can not sustain a success rate in the later, because I don’t try for one. But this is what a professional astrologer had to be able to do when the art was taken seriously. It is still taken seriously, but it is being obscured by printing horoscopes based on the isolated position of the sun, which is virtually certain to be irrelevant or incorrect, given that aspects determine everything. But everything. There is nothing that is not explicit in a chart or a progressed chart. And with explicit I mean explicit: exact conjunctions at momentous events are ubiquitous. Probability is not even a factor. It is more like gravity. The only restriction to it is that the human life is beyond comprehension - not that its set of strengths and weaknesses and course of obstacles is not absolutely determined. The interplay between many such determined paths through the human density of transience, causes the courses of fate (2) versus destiny (1), a choice which is determined at - only, it looks like - angular portals of intensification or multiplication.
We are always under the influence, first of the sun and our own orbit(ascendant), then moon (semi-retrograding, ‘slipping’ moon points are crucial to avoid error in magic (shortcutting relations by invoking numerical and qualitative patterns of propagation)) - and then of the planets. I can not account for their force except on a level of deep subtlety; as I said we are all of us on Earth embedded not only on Earth but in the flat plane of the Suns outposts, and this whole is blanked covered by the scintillating intelligence of the magnetic fields, propagating their ‘logics’ in gods knows what complexities but all of our brains are directly embedded in this system, in some fields more even than they are ‘stuck on our spines’. A brain can keep functioning without a body, and still be uninfluenced by its location on Earth, by the position of the Sun, but also by the moons phase and proximity to the Earth, which causes the tides but also correlates with increases and decreases of conceptions and murders and pull at the waters in our body and brain. The moon is primarily connected to the body and the mother, as it influences the waters and the bleeding. We are not isolated from our system. We can of course live in bunkers; it is likely that to be born and conceived in a bunker means to be born more ‘neutrally’, whatever that means; more in terms of genes perhaps, with less character of ones own. More in terms of the times, the architecture of the bunker, the clothes -
to be born under the stars then means to be delivered free to oneself.
A third is a reading of a chart without knowledge of the person it applies to.
A fourth test is semi empirical, it is a reading done of the person with the chart next to him. This is what is by far the most common and easy and unfalsifiable and what makes the image of astrology. If I had a the money to hire some programmers and advertising space I could make dating site whose worth would run in the billions because it has an unsurpassed success rate. I have a lot of date, gathered by specialist friend, of the type of alignments that are consistent in lasting romantic bonds. The consistencies are strong enough to make marketable predictions; if out of a pool of 500 there are 48-51 men with moon on the woman’s Juno, there are also 48-51 women with moon on the mans Juno. So genders relations to planets are interchangeable, but planetary relations are not. It is the coherence of patterns Every body is a step in the pattern. Ever alignment is a shared step, a resonance of will and identity.