"Bill D - When you say you've looked at your charts, can you say more?"

yes, I had a serious amateur 'do' my charts a number of years ago, and I have from time to time looked at various published sources...from silly newspaper blather to detailed attempts to explain the relevance, much as *daylia* has done. And I went to the site she noted and entered my data and read the results. From those sources, I have looked at various formulations of my 'potential' and 'indicators'.

What I see over & over are slippery generalizations that are easy to apply and which, with a little imagination, seem applicable and even useful as advice......but the advice offered is usually reasonable for almost anyone, and the 'indications' that are supposed to relevant to my particular chart are off the mark just as often as they are on.

*daylia* just chided me for not paying more attention to they ones that do 'seem' relevant...".. did it slip your mind that we also find many 'correlations' in data that are highly significant and meaningful?...", but the point I was trying to make was that 'correlations' are only a way to establish points for further research to see if we can find causal or predictive factors that validate the correlation and justify collection of more data in that area. (obviously, the professors salaries and alcohol consumption data did not remain closely linked over time, and faded out as 'relevant' when other data sets were considered.)

   In Astrology, it is possible to assign relevance in such a way that you will always discover seemingly meaningful patterns, just as meaningful patterns were 'discovered' in text analysis and explained in such books as "The Da Vinci Code"...but with enough analysis, patterns can be 'discovered' in ANY lengthy text...from the Bible to "War & Peace" to "The Joy of Cooking".

The problem is, no one has ever yet offered a reasonable explanation of why or how the patterns of astronomical bodies can either predict OR indicate tendencies and potentials for individual humans.

Practioners will tell you that 'how' & 'why' are not the point...that the point is to SEE and USE, no matter why it works. They explain that thousands of years of study have discovered the patterns, and it would be folly to ignore useful information...etc...(and that the stars do not actually 'cause' stuff to happen, but merely show one's tendencies and indicate potentials). But as I said above, this indicating and potentializing is dependant on subjective (yes-SUBJECTIVE!) analysis of arbitrary data and relies on techniques that are only useful within the Astrological 'rules' system...the system breaks down when subjected to stringent assessments of both statistical analysis and scientific method.........but, as we have seen, practitioners simply state that their subject matter is outside the realm of those physical realms...

can't win...