What is the Horoscope Hermit hypothesis?

Dear Reader,

What do I think might connect the sky with our experience of life? My starting question is whether changing celestial conditions have a relationship with what we experience, even if traditional astrology hasn't described that relationship accurately.

The explanation below is my proposed model. It brings together my spiritual beliefs and ideas I'd like to investigate.

The proposed model

I believe we are souls living through organic bodies. To picture astrological influence, I imagine a magnet with twelve different polarities, one for each sign. By polarity, I mean a kind of quality or relationship within the model. I then imagine planets as lenses that change how those energies interact.

In my spiritual picture, the soul connects with the body at conception. Since that time is usually uncertain, I use birth as an approximation for the starting chart. Later planetary movements may interact with that pattern. I imagine changing conditions, much as a ship encounters changing weather, while the people aboard still decide how to respond.

What the hypothesis does not establish

I haven't measured these proposed energies or shown that planets act as these lenses. The images help explain what I'm thinking; they don't establish a physical mechanism.

The model also needs to account for the lives people actually lead. Two people with similar charts can have very different families, opportunities, and choices. Any useful explanation must leave room for those differences.

The research direction

The next step is to choose one part we could test. For example, does a clearly defined astrological period correspond with a particular experience more often than other periods do? We'd need to decide what to count before seeing the results.

That's the research I hope to work towards. Some parts may turn out to be useful; others may need changing or letting go. For now, this is the idea behind Horoscope Hermit, with the questions still open.