The topic is very hard to summarize because understanding what Astrology is and how it works requires a totally different model of the universe than we usually rely on.

It's easier to understand what Astrology is not.

Two key ideas to ponder:

1) "The" future and "your own" future can not be predicted by any tool because you have Free Will. So does everyone else. What can be predicted with very good certainty is that you won't use your Free Will. Nor will they.

2) Astrology can tell you WHEN but not WHAT. We live inside a giant clock - the solar system. It's not an appointment book. It's a clock. It can tell you that it's 2PM in your Life -- it can't tell you that you have an appointment with the Dentist at 2PM or that you'll have to have all your teeth extracted because you didn't brush and floss enough when it was 10AM in your Life.

An Astrological Natal Chart is a flash photograph of the moment your Soul became bound to your Body. The Soul chooses that moment as best it can, according to what the Soul seeks to master or address in this Life.

The starting moment of a life or a sequence of events (such as a novel plot) has coded into it all kinds of challenges and opportunities that will unfold in a specified order.

But these aren't specific events -- they are categories of raw materials available for shaping by Free Will into the events which become the story of your life.

You don't have a "destiny" -- you have a Microsoft Dropdown Menu Bar where some choices are grayed out.

I talk a lot about how a writer can use Tarot, Astrology in my review column which is printed in the paper magazine, The Monthly Aspectarian, then posted to their website (lightworks.com ) then archived here.  It's been monthly since 1993. 

On Amazon you will find the first in a five book series on the Tarot, Never Cross a Palm With Silver  .

Two more volumes in that series, Swords and Pentacles, have been posted a chapter at a time on Tuesdays the last half of last year where I co-blog with 6 other writers.

http://www.aliendjinnromances.blogspot.com/

To find the 20 posts on Swords and Pentacles, search the blog on Tuesday or Tarot, or Swords, Pentacles. There are several newsletters or discussion Lists where the announcement of publication of all volumes will be carried. They are available on http://www.simegen.com/archives/  -- Newsletter-L -- Lifeforce-l -- Rereadable-l

As noted on the first page of this section, Tarot and Astrology are really one topic. To learn Tarot, study Astrology. To learn Astrology, study Tarot. They are inextricably intertwined because one deals with the Soul's choices the other with the Body's opportunities.

As learning a language teaches you about another culture, learning these mathematically based tools teaches you about another universe structure. (yes, Tarot is Mathematically based)

Most people don't know they have a view of the universe, a philosophy. It's a shock to discover one hiding inside you.  Finding out what is in your philosophy   can be a shattering epiphany, even deranging.

Thus this study is not for everyone. Read Never Cross a Palm With Silver for how to discover whether you really want to know any of this -- or not. It's a very short book.”

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Here's the long version of the answer.

The truth is nobody knows how any of this esoteric stuff works. 

Astrology and Tarot are both empirical sciences.  Way back when "science" was invented (Ancient Greece; Aristotle; fast-forward to Bacon in England), humanity discovered we got much faster and easier, better and more profitable results from science than from magic.  So magic was abandoned. 

Magic just never got any research grants, government programs, Ph.D. thesis writers, or Pharmaceutical Company investments. 

So nobody really knows how Magic does what it does.  Worse yet, nobody really knows whether Magic actually does anything -- because it hasn't been researched properly. 

Not understanding the square root of minus 1 does not keep people from turning on the lights with a switch.  Not understanding how Astrology works doesn't keep people from using it to shed light on a murky topic either. 

Understanding "how" astrology works requires developing a theory of "what" astrology is. 

Where did astrology come from?  It came from crude empirical observations of coincidences between what was visible in the heavens and what happened on Earth.  The lore accumulated generation after generation. 

Today, these observations of mere coincidence are codified with computers which do the number crunching ever so much faster.  And research has revealed many new mathematical tools with which to compare what is happening in the heavens with what is happening to a particular person.  What's happening in the heavens is as predictable as clockwork.  What's happening to a person is not. 

Thus we have ways to understand what is happening to a person who is battling through a series of challenges no science can delineate or comprehend.  We can look at what happened to other people "like" this person "when" certain indicators appear in the heavens. 

Astrology is being turned into a "real" science by the data handling of computers -- but it hasn't happened yet.  So we can talk here about how this compendium of accumulated historical observation called Astrology can be used by a fiction writer. 

Astrology is really a branch of psychology.  Every writer has to delve into psychology at least to the point where an understanding of human behavior -- of MOTIVATION -- can be articulated. 

Character depth, Relationships and motivations are the pure substance of story.  In conflicting motivations, writers find their richest material. 

But it isn't enough to have your own view of what motivates people.  You have to develop an awareness of what "readers" think motivates people, and then explain your view to the readers in terms of their own concept of motivation. 

You have to translate your own understanding of what motivates real people into what motivates your characters so that you can write the the characters in a way readers will understand and thus believe.  So you need a language in common with your readers.  And you need to know more about human motivation than your readers do. 

A wide and deep study of all the schools of psychology can produce that kind of understanding in a writer.  A brutal education in the school of hard knocks can do it too. 

Easier and faster - especially for the mathematically inclined - is to get a good astrology program (such as WinStar from Matrix Software which is the one I use also favored by Noel Tyl.)  And start doing charts for people you know, using interpretive books to puzzle it all out.  I recommend the "Planets In" series of interpretive books and all the books by Grant Lewi. 

The world tends to use Astrology and Tarot to try to predict the future.  Individuals want to know what is going to HAPPEN TO THEM, or how to achieve specific goals. 

The anxiety that drives people to Astrology is often most deeply rooted in a frantic need to connect with themselves -- to experience their own uniqueness.

People want to know their OWN future.  Is it right to marry this person?  Should I get a divorce?  What will happen if I quit my job now?  Do I have to go back to school?  When will my mother die?  Why does everyone hate me? 

People want to know what makes them so different from everyone else.  They want specifics about who they are and how to subdue the world around them. 

That screaming anxiety, the need to know the future, is the exact moment a writer has to capture in a story's main character.  X-ray that moment of screaming anxiety for what drives a person to that moment, what they do to resolve that anxiety, and how all the loose pieces of the person's world then fall into a pattern which reveals the meaning of that person's life and you reveal your theme -- what the story says about the meaning of Life. 

The story character's "story" begins with the drive toward that moment, climaxes at the action taken by the character because of the anxiety, and concludes with the resolution of the character's need to know. 

That anxiety will drive a real person to an astrologer.  And some astrologers are good enough psychologists that they can counsel such a frantic individual. 

But that counsel does not originate in the compendium of Ancient Wisdom called Astrology. 

Astrology can not tell anyone about their individuality.  It can't describe unique individuality.  It can't describe HOW YOU ARE DIFFERENT from everyone else. 

Astrology can tell you how you are JUST EXACTLY LIKE every other human who has ever walked this planet.  (and maybe some other planets too).

Astrology has amassed data about millions of people, and crunched that data down into trends, generalizations, categories of behavior, areas of interest, times of challenge and times of rest -- times of building and times of disintegrating. 

Astrology is a lot like actuarial statistics.  We know the average lifespan is about 74 years -- but that doesn't tell you how long you will live. 

Astrology is statistics distilled to a pure essence over more than a thousand years of record keeping.  (OK on crumbling parchment, hand calculated, but it's amazing what humans can do with pen and paper!)

The secret to powerful fiction writing is vivid, individual, quirky, unique characters.  But astrology is not about individuality.  So what good is Astrology to a writer? 

With a sound understanding of Astrology, a writer can craft a unique character who can be understood by, recognized by, the reader as someone they know -- because whether they know anything about astrology or not, every single breathing human being understands astrology intuitively. 

We all recognize the life Passages.  At 7 years old, kids become very self-directed individualistic people.  At 14 - they know it all.  At 21 they're gone off into the world, have the world by the tail and nothing can deter them from their folly.  Ah, but at 28-29, all the chickens come home to roost for better or ill. 

What is that 7 year cycle?  It's the quartering of the natal chart by Saturn.  The age of 28-29 is the most visible, most shared of all challenges -- people recognize the time between turning 27 and turning 30 as a big cliff.  The 31 year old looks back over a chasm at the 25 year old and sees a child. 

Every one of the 10 cyclical objects Astrology tracks (SUN, MOON, MERCURY, VENUS, MARS, JUPITER, SATURN, URANUS, NEPTUNE, PLUTO) has a periodicity that is recognizable like that.  In addition to making aspects to their own birth position, all these objects make aspects to each other creating "cross terms" in the equation that is a Life. 

As in an engineer's force diagram, two forces operating on an object at an angle produce a third -- a "resultant" -- and the force will move the object along the resultant path.

So the "aspects" that one of these 10 celestial objects make with a Natal Chart work like that - producing a "resultant" effect. 

When you think about it like that, you see how complicated it can be to discern what a given moment in a given person's (or character's) life might be like.  The moment in a life is an amalgam of 10 or more major forces.  Once it's amalgamated, it's very hard to separate out the individual effects. 

But with all the millions of lifetimes astrologers have documented, broad categories of "resultants" have been identified and named. 

Certain celestial conditions are reliably associated (empirically) with certain kinds of human challenges or results.  Grant Lewi's books HEAVEN KNOWS WHAT and ASTROLOGY FOR THE MILLIONS synthesize combinations of effects with cycles to show you how to discern how combinations will work in real life. 

You don't have to learn astrology to see these associations.  You already know them because you've seen them operating in lives around you -- or even on the 6 O'clock News. 

Recently, Noel Tyl identified a complicated Natal Chart formation type that results in the life pattern you have seen again and again in the Rich and Famous.  He calls it extreme Prominence.  See his book Synthesis and Counselling in Astrology, the Professional Manual (but this is NOT suitable for beginners, trusth me!). 

So the question comes down to how can it be that life-patterns are so common, so repetitive, that even people who don't know astrology can identify those patterns? 

The superstitious are likely to assume that because a certain aspect and transit combination always results in a certain type of life-incident (car accidents, for example) - the transit CAUSES the incident. 

But science teaches us that the mere coupling of events in time does not indicate a cause-effect relationship between them.

To muddy the picture further, in astrology, the CAUSE can PRECEDE the EFFECT.  (this is referred to as the "orb of influence" -- a symbolism can materialize any time plus or minus 6 months of the zone of highest probability). 

Ancient Wisdom says "the stars don't compel; they impel." 

Here is where the writer must choose some of the elements of the THEME of the work.  Here is where the universe building begins. 

In order to build a character which is unique -- yet comprehensible to the reader in terms of what the reader already knows about human nature and life-patterns -- the writer must select (and then stick with) a philosophical answer to the question about the relationship between the bodies in the sky and the life of a person. 

The nature of th relationship you choose will reveal much about the universe you build -- and perhaps more about the universe you live in than even you know. 

Everything else in your THEME -- which dictates every event, every character trait, and mostly the resolution of the conflict -- must be totally consistent with the answer you choose to the question of how the Heavens are connected to human life and personality. 

This answer must reflect where you stand on the existence of God, The Soul, Immortality after Death, maybe even The Resurrection. 

What is our Universe?  What is the purpose of life?  What is the purpose of your life?  What is the purpose of your characters' lives? 

All of those answers are dictated by your answer to the question of the coincidental connection between Life and The Planets. 

Is the connection mere accident?  Is the Universe an accident?  Is the Universe a mechanism?  Was it "created" to be a mechanism and left to run unattended?  Or is the universe and all life the direct, ongoing, result of the conscious attention of the Creator? 

If the Universe and Life have a meaning -- then maybe The Planets are a clue to that meaning left for us to puzzle out? 

Or maybe there is no meaning - and the search for meaning is a waste of time?

Or maybe there is no meaning - and the search for meaning can actually CREATE meaning? 

Any of these postulates will generate a vast, rich, wonderful and fertile imaginary universe to tell stories in. 

Each answer (and all the ones I haven't mentioned) defines the specific audience for your fiction.  Your fiction will make sense only to those readers who share your answer, or can stipulate it for the sake of argument (believe 6 impossible things before breakfast). 

To extend the "reach" of your fiction to the widest possible audience, you need to find the answer shared by the largest number of people even if they've never asked themselves the question.  Subconsciously, each of us harbors a philosophy which contains answers to all these questions.  Most of us do not harbor a uniform and consistent philosophy - thus our actions often seem irratic to outside observers.  Characters humans can believe in must share that inconsistency, but to gather a large audience for your fiction, you must use inconsistencies shared by large numbers of people. 

The most recent poll of the population of the USA indicates that while most people don't bother with Church or other organized worship, they do by and large believe in a Creator who takes a personal interest in the universe and our lives. 

Many people who study the Western Esoteric Traditions often start with Astrology and eventually delve into Tarot and end up studying Kaballah. 

I have my own, personal answer (not used necessarily in all my novels, but visible in some).  You don't have to look at the universe the same way I do -- but to write coherent fiction, you must look at the universe some ever which way!  And each novel you write must adhere to a consistent view of the universe and try to impart that view to the readers.  The view of the novel's universe does not have to be your own - but if it differs, it must differ in an internally consistent way.

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So here is my own current (ever changing) take on this problem of the relationship between the placement and movement of the planets in the heavens and the placement and movement of us people below. 

Astrology and Tarot are really two heads for the same sonic screw driver. 

Astrology is all about this life (that started when you were born) with this personality (described by but not caused by the Natal Chart's organization).  Life has its peaks and valleys and the personality of this life just struggles along coping as best it can. 

The personality of this life is just a sub-set of the Soul's Personality -- of "who" you really are behind it all, unknown to anyone but yourself and God. 

The Tarot is all about the Soul's Personality and what it can achieve in this life, what it can learn, what procedures and techniques it can master in this life, what talents it can lend to the personality. 

The Tarot deck has the structure of the Kaballah's Tree of Life - 4 repeating patterns of 10 numbered cards.  (10 planets to track - 10 numbered cards per suit). 

4 is the minimum number of variables necessary to form a Boolean Algebra.  4-ness is a very salient property of our 4-square reality (3 dimensions and Time). 

There are 4 letters in the Ineffable Name of God. 

I could go on and on -- but you get the idea.  Numbers are the basis of reality,  physical and psychological and spiritual.  God is creating (present progressive tense) our entire reality via NUMBERS - via vibration, cyclicity.  We are solidified spiritual speech. 

The human being's Eternal Soul is one of God's creations. 

The Soul enters manifest reality through the dimension of Time. 

I learned that in a Chabad course on the nature of Time.  For all the references and what I learned, see the first 6 review columns of 2007.   They're all titled the Soul-Time Hypothesis: something.

It took me a few years to understand what it means that the Soul enters manifestation through Time. 

My original education is in Chemistry with minors in Physics and Math.  I think like a Physical Chemist. Mysticism bewilders me. 

But I'm a born mystic.  So I couldn't let go of this idea until I'd rearranged everything I know around it to see what this would do to my philsophy.

It changed my personal philosophy in subtle ways and gave me a new understanding of how it can be that we can take our birth time and place and mathematically describe our personality (not Personality, mind you) and the TIMING OF the challenges we must face in life.

This solar system existed long before we were born (even before the Internet, believe it or not). 

The solar system has changed over all that time -- we argue that our Moon may be a captive because it's so large, and we see that maybe Mars has a totally different northern hemisphere than southern because of a huge, gigantic, meteor strike long-long-long ago.  We theorize that Pluto may be a captive and not a planet at all.  Earth's periodicity - year and day length - have changed.  The solar system has evolved.  Galaxies likewise.  All of space-time constantly changes. 

It all spins.  All the galaxies, our galaxy, our sun, the planets around our sun (planets around other suns) -- it's all MOVING THROUGH TIME. 

At some given moment, our Soul injects into this giant physical reality and we are BORN. 

The Soul penetrates TIME generating a personality to deal with Time.  From that moment on, the personality is subject to the linear sequence we call time. 

(yes, I know about string theory, and M theory, and that there is no such thing as simultaneity, and how gravity and time interact and so on.) 

Science spends most of its time studying Time -- measuring it, theorizing about the speed of light which is a component of so many of the formulas physics uses to build useful things.. 

We live inside a giant clock - and we spend our lives studying that clock, trying to hear it tick. 

The clock ticks whether we're here or not.  It doesn't cause us to be here.  It doesn't waft us away.  It doesn't limit us.  It doesn't do anything except KEEP TIME. 

We are Souls - we are swimmers in this ocean of Time.  And we're trying to learn to swim.  The ocean of Time doesn't cause us to learn to swim - we dove in ourselves.  The waves of Time don't dictate which swimming stroke we'll choose to use. 

The stars do not compel -- nor do they impel.  They simply keep going -- and we are learning to walk to their beat, to jump double-dutch, or write a screenplay to the beat. 

I had barely managed to swallow this concept - the Soul enters manifesation through the dimension of Time - than these Chabad people taught me something else. 

The purpose of human life is to make this material reality into a dwelling place for the Creator of it.  Everything we are and everything we do (whether we know it or not) is targeted toward that very clearly visualized goal. 

We didn't dive into Time just to play in the ocean waves (or at least not all of us or not every time we dive in).  We are here to complete a task. 

It just explains so much! 

The pervasive imagining of utopia, for example.  So many really popular novels have been written about "the perfect world."  And so many people feel that would be so boring they can't imagine it.  Everyone has an opinion on utopia. Why?  Because actually that's what we're here to do - to make the world easy, beautiful, loving, kind, generous, perfect.  Everyone will be sane.  (imagine that - I'm not sure I could stand it!) 

Consider the Hero's Journey.  Consider all the archetypes - King, Warrior, on and on -- each archetype is an imagining of something perfected, pure of its type.  And these archetypes are real - they have power, they subsume so much of our existence.  How is it we're able to imagine such things?  Imagining is a kind of creating.  Archetypes organize existence into categories by defining the pure form of the category.

Well, that's the kind of thing you can learn from Astrology.  Astrology defines the archetype behind a life-form. 

People go to an astrologer in the grip of angst about their own personal, unique, individual life and identity -- but all Astrology can discuss is the archetypes behind their life and personality. 

How those archetypes manifest within the time-frame of a given Life is entirely a matter of the human being's Free Will. 

Of course, we do our best to avoid using our Free Will.  We let parental conditioning, subconscious compulsions, other people's values, genuine childhood trauma, etc command our existence -- and to the extent that we abjure our Free Will, the fortune-tellers can "predict" our future just by applying the laws of Inertia.  All the fortune-teller has to do is extrapolate along a straight line from the client's birth moment and "predict" what will happen next.

Real astrologers and Tarot readers don't do that.  They are genuine spiritual counselors who attempt to explain the client's "now" (which can be plus or minus a few years) in such a way that the client becomes motivated to engage their Free Will and craft life anew. 

Real astrologers and Tarot readers (and those who use other methods, too - runes work!) use these tools just as a psychological counsellor would use say the latest research on compulsive behavior to discern whether the client is suffering from compulsive behavior or something that mimics it.  . 

Some of the best astrologers and Tarot readers are actually psychic and can use that kind of sensory input to interpret a Natal Chart or card spread (or both). 

When all the information is fully blended, it is very difficult for  anyone, least of all the practitioner, to say where any given piece came from.

And it's the same with a writer.  No way can a writer tell you where a particular character came from -- or why this or that trait of that character can't be changed no matter how the editor demands it. 

Fictional characters are no more random collections of traits than human beings are.  To be engaging, entertaining and comprehensible, a fictional character must be formulated exactly the way a human being is (only maybe not so complex). 

The writer achieves this creation of a fictional character the same way an Astrologer or Tarot reader achieves a comprehension of a client -- a gestalt of a thousand little things. 

Astrology is all about Time and how our Free Will uses it to create our Life.  Tarot is all about the Soul and how the Soul struggles to manifest some part of itself into Time, to learn to surf the ocean of time, big waves and all. 

Astrology can clue you in to what you're doing - Tarot to how you're doing. 

Look hard at your Tarot reading for a week, then study the transits to your natal chart for that week - keep notes while you live out the week - and eventually you will comprehend how these two tools are reading out the same forces and how you, yourself as an individual are creating something unique out of the grand archetypes.

Armed with this non-verbal level comprehension of the structure of the universe, you may be able to portray a character will will walk off your pages into the dreams of your readers. 

Jacqueline Lichtenberg

http://www.slantedconcept.com