How does astrology work?

Two different things get called astrology, and almost every argument about it comes from mixing them up.

The first is arithmetic. Where the Sun, Moon and planets were at a given moment, seen from a given point on Earth, is a solved problem — the same calculation that predicts eclipses, run backwards to the minute you were born. Nobody disputes it, and it is not open to interpretation.

The second is a reading. Taking those positions and treating them as a language for talking about a life is a tradition roughly two thousand years old. It is not a scientific finding, there is no known mechanism, and no controlled study has shown it predicts events. That is worth saying plainly rather than burying.

What is left, once you have said it, is still worth something: a structured vocabulary for noticing patterns in yourself — one specific enough to be surprising and old enough to be rich. Astrology is good at giving you words for a tension you already had and had not named. It is not good at telling you what Thursday holds.

One test does most of the work: ask what it would look like if it were wrong. A reading that cannot be wrong is not telling you anything. If every outcome confirms it, the orb was set too wide, or the claim was too vague to have been a claim.

The second test is whether you were told which system you were read in. Tropical or sidereal, which house system, how tight the orbs were. Those choices change the answer, and an astrologer who will not say which ones they made is not being mysterious — they are being unaccountable. Gori uses the tropical zodiac and whole sign houses, and the orbs it allows are listed on the aspects page, read straight out of the code that computes them.

The third is the easiest. Anything that gives you a date, a yes, or a warning it wants you to pay to resolve is selling certainty that astrology does not have.