Surely you jest, Mr. Piper. People were making very sophisticated astronomical measurements in many ancient civilizations. I suspect the practice of astrology was probably was an offshoot of some of those practices.

At any rate, that's what I've been told by people who do charts. They say you need the time of birth to know what your rising sign is, and a bunch of stuff about which houses your planets are in, or something like that. If the people who invented astrology didn't have access to telling time in one way or another, I would imagine they wouldn't have come up with the idea that the time of one's birth determines one's rising sign, etc, and the question would be moot.

Here's an (oversimplified) example of how this would work... I'm a capricorn with leo rising. My sun sign alone doesn't match up in many respects with the way I tend to approach things and the way I tend to look at things, but when the leo rising is added and adjustments are made, there is a pretty close correlation with a lot of my tendencies. Here's a for instance... from time to time, I tend to seek out the limelight (that's a leo thing). But because of the capricorn tendency to not want to be the center of attention, when I get there (in the center of attention), I find that I wonder what the hell I was thinking by putting myself in such a position, and I want to go hide in a shadow somewhere (capricorn).

My son is leo with leo rising. He loves nothing better than being in the spotlight, and never regrets it once he's there.

Saggitarians like to take food off of other people's plates and eat it. I don't know why, but almost all of the ones I know do that. Aquarius women are usually in a constant state of crisis. If there is no crisis brewing in their lives at any point in time, they will (unconsciously perhaps) create one. Aquarius men are not like this (except for a gay friend of mine who is an aquarius... he is like aquarius women in that regard).

I don't know if I believe any of this astrology stuff, or if maybe I believe some of it, or none of it. But I don't really care because I like it. I find it to be interesting and fun, and it has esthetics that I find pleasing. And coincidence or not, it's a source of amusement for me when my daily horoscope matches what happens to me on any particular day (sometimes even down to specific events). I don't use it to make any decisions (except maybe sometimes when it urges caution about something... and then I will try to be vigilant about what is being cautioned. I can't really see any harm in that).

I like circuses, too, and I play the accordion. I figure, to each his or her own.

Karma, on the other hand, according to my own beliefs, is simply the rules of the game each of us sets up with the decisions we make and the actions we take. If we behave dishonestly, for instance, we set up the rules of the reality we live in to be one that includes dishonesty, and in such a reality, we will tend to see a lot of dishonety around us. If we behave with compassion, we set up the rules of the reality we live in to be one that includes compassion, and we will tend to see a lot of compassion around us. So from my perspective, when we experience the cause and effect of karma, it's just that we are experiencing the effects of the rules we put in place ourselves. Which isn't to say that every bad or good thing that happens to us is a result of karma. There can be many other reasons why things happen the way they do. Karma's just one part of the mix.