Like so many other people, pagans and mainstream folk, I read my astrological forecast every day. Guess what, it’s almost never right. I have quite a few books about astrology in my bookcase. I’ve even paid to have a full astrological chart done. Hell, I’ve charged people to draft charts for them. Once it’s all done you have pages of information about houses and planetary interactions. So much information that I got lost in it and it ceased to make sense to me even when I was the one casting the chart.
I have no doubts that the position of the planets at the moment of our birth does have an influence on us. An INFLUENCE, not a directive. All that other information is important, too, but it’s so easy to get lost in that stuff that you forget the planets and their positions. Thinking on this for a few years I decided that I was not an astrologer. I look just at the planets, including Pluto, at the moment of someone’s birth and put together a really good chart of just those. I am in essence a cosmographer. Let others deal with houses and trines and all that jazz. I keep things to the planets because they are our neighbors.