Two things that jump out at me is the assumption that astrology is only your sun sign (Aries). I think astrology gets a lot of flack, simply because it's so complex, and people want the boiled-down version to be as useful as the detailed. Your sun sign does not lord over your chart, it works with, influences, and is influenced by, everything else. I also tend to look more at a person's ascendant than their sun sign for the basic personality, since I see the sun sign as your private self, and your rising as how you relate to the world, and other people. So if I was to try and see how that person is relating to the world around them (and therefore, me) I would look at the rising, to begin with (but not stop there).
Then, with the influences of "gas clouds"... I always use this metaphor, and then I'll finish with someone much more eloquent than I.
Look at the influence that the moon has over the water on the earth. It causes water to swell, to move, to change. And then look at how much water is in our body! I don't think it is possible to say something doesn't effect something else, the "everything is interconnected" philosophy that has seemed to pop out of me the past few years.
And, now, someone who says it better than I:
[FONT=georgia, bookman old style, palatino linotype, book antiqua, palatino, trebuchet ms, helvetica, garamond, sans-serif, arial, verdana, avante garde, century gothic, comic sans ms, times, times new roman, serif]The cosmos is a vast living body, of which we are still parts. The sun is a great heart whose tremors run through our smallest veins. The moon is a great nerve center from which we quiver forever. Who knows the power that Saturn has over us, or Venus? But it is a vital power, rippling exquisitely through us all the time.
-D.H. Lawrence[/FONT]
And, just for funsies, another one.
[FONT=georgia, bookman old style, palatino linotype, book antiqua, palatino, trebuchet ms, helvetica, garamond, sans-serif, arial, verdana, avante garde, century gothic, comic sans ms, times, times new roman, serif]I know that astrology isn't a science... Of course it isn't. It's just an arbitrary set of rules like chess or tennis.... The rules just kind of got there. They don't make any kind of sense except in terms of themselves. But when you start to exercise those rules, all sorts of processes start to happen and you start to find out all sorts of stuff about people. In astrology the rules happen to be about stars and planets, but they could be about ducks and drakes for all the difference it would make. It's just a way of thinking about a problem which lets the shape of that problem begin to emerge. The more rules, the tinier the rules, the more arbitrary they are, the better. It's like throwing a handful of fine graphite dust on a piece of paper to see where the hidden indentations are. It lets you see the words that were written on the piece of paper above it that's now been taken away and hidden. The graphite's not important. It's just the means of revealing their indentations. So you see, astrology's nothing to do with astronomy. It's just to do with people thinking about people.
-Douglas Adams[/FONT]
