I think the comparison is that both fields are often misunderstood through oversimplified descriptions. “Astrology is just Sun signs” and “LLMs are just stochastic parrots” are both reductionist summaries that leave out a lot of the interesting discussion. Whether either ultimately succeeds at what it claims is a separate question.

As for astrology itself, I became interested through Carl Jung, who viewed astrology as a symbolic system that reflected recurring psychological patterns and wrote about it in relation to archetypes and synchronicity ( Man and his symbols .) Astrology provides a symbolic language for thinking about cycles, temperament, motivation, and meaning.