Hostility to astrology is disproportional to its historical merits. Yes, contemporary crass, micro-divination is to be despised, but ancient astrologers were simply proto-astronomers, proto-physicalists, aware that the universe at large and components of it must have a causal role in the behaviour of organisms on earth. Who, today, would dispute the role, historical and instantaneous, of the sun in the development of life; who would deny that the gravitational field of the planets is real, though faint. That it is conscious or intentionally directed, we for very good reasons doubt, and here we part from the predominantly animistic astrologers of antiquity whose determination to find personalities in the planets now seems comic (perhaps our tendency to see human behaviour in terms of intentions will look as quaint a thousand years hence).
The sneering modern scientist should actually honour ancient astrology as a worthy ancestor, rather than taking his tune from the Christian church, which was the natural enemy of this quasi-pagan proto-science, with its multiplicity of causal factors, its strange reluctance to find a single will behind all phenomena, more than a hint that it was all an elaborate symbolisation of arbitrary process beyond human understanding, and above all, because it seems to lack any sense of a transcendent morality.