As you pointed out the key is in cycles.

Cycles rule everything. This naturally is because energy moves vortically. When energy completes a rotation it has completed a cycle and begins anew. All life regenerates. Regeneration is only made possible via cycles.

Our cells regenerate. Everything from our heart to our brain has its own cycle of cell replacement. All animals, plants and all life as we know it also obey cycles.

The 25,682 year cycle of the precessional, which ancient astronomers already had discovered back before recorded history, has been used as the major cycle marker in astrology. This then has been broken into positive and negative cycles.

The science for this has long since been lost. Basically someone with quite a bit of knowledge, a LONG time ago, explained the simple energy waveform with its positive and negative aspects to a group living way back when. This individual/group of scientists/time-traveler/what-have-you explained cycles and the sine wave as the fundamental unit of energy. Naturally, the primitive minds could no more fathom a sine wave than some folks can a vortex. ;-)

As a result, we had snake worship, snake cults and we have the medical staff or caduceus:

This symbol derives from the original description of opposing wave forms cancelling out and creating a healing. If you have a negative sine-wave and a positive sine-wave of the same frequency when they are in phase - they cancel out. The staff is the line of equilibrium. It's SOOOO simple and yet to primitive minds it just doesn't make any sense. This symbol was then assigned to the ancient greek god Hermes (Mercury) and associated with commerce and medicine.

In the future, all illness is understood to be manifestations of distorted energy wave-forms in the atoms & molecules that compose cellullar tissue. Cancer, dystrophy, etcetera all can be identified by unique signature distorted wave patterns. Treating illness is not a chemical proposition, which is very inefficient and often ineffectual, but rather is an electronic proposition - the generation and direction of energy - "wave therapy".

Cancelling waveforms at the nano/molecule level is the future of medicine. Understanding the cancelling of wave forms is now just a hundred or so years in advance of current medical understanding and about a few hundred more years in advance of effective treatment technology give or take a few developments and blog entries ;-)

Back in the day, this stuff I'm explaining now was thousand of years in advance of the aboriginal/tribal minds prevalent around 1500 bc. (not accounting any other time travelers. ;-)

A sine-wave means nothing to these folks, but it looks a lot like a snake.

So snakes it is! Snake worship grows. In Crete we have the snake goddess which was again just an example of failed understanding:

All sorts of perverted rituals were developed, secret cults established and all based on a complete inability to grasp the concept of energy. The caduceus was assigned to Hermes and already linked to astrological healing based upon the planets positions, etcetera.

Yes, the solar system and the calendar all are linked like gears in a watch. You can measure all sorts of precise cycles and then observe and create associations. Astrology is the assignment of personal characteristics and events to certain cycles or rythyms. Naturally such assignment is subject to vast interpretation and limited datasets.

To say those under the sign of Cancer are homebodies and sensitive becomes a generalization. Sure some will fit the description, but others will not. Identifying cycles is not the problem with astrology so much as the interpretation of what the properties of these cycles are.

Each planet does not have any direct influence on those born, but rather the position of the stars/planets is merely a marker to use as a point of reference for observation. If over time a preponderance folks born around a certain date demonstrated a certain personal characteristic - that characteristic was observed and added to the traits of those born under that sign. And so it went for hundreds and thousands of years, evolving it into a very complex set of cycles/charateristics and outcomes or "fates" of those born at a certain time.

Today it's mostly hokum.

There is no understanding of the what or why of cycles. No understanding left of how people change over time and learn or accumulate wisdom in all these various cycles, much less how to heal with just your own mind - using your sine-wave based electrical nervous system and thoughts - which was one of the original components of the sine-wave/cycle teachings to the ancients.

All the assigned character traits/ predictions founded in astrology are a 65/35% hit/miss affair.

You'd get almost the same success ratio by flipping a coin. Without the meat of the understanding of energy to give it a practical/precise aspect, astrology is merely "educated" fortune telling.