Seeing title, and reading information about this book, I wanted to have high hopes as to its contents. There are so few good books combining Chinese Astrology with almost anything else. Alas, as often happens, I was let down.

The author does seem a good job of making ties between Chinese Astrology and goddesses, moon phases and planets, and some of herbs, at least on surface, but like most books one can find involving this ancient tool, it is ill researched.

It errors just as many others before it, and many after I am sure, in stating that a persons Chinese Astrological sign is related to year in which they are born. This is incorrect. It does allow that a Chinese New Year does not start on same day each year so that you must not look at only year, but full date of when you were born, if born near change of calendar year. It, however, leaves it at that, stating that this is how you find your Chinese Astrologic Sign.

Now anyone who has any real interest in Chinese Astrology is going to see same errors I did in this. The Year is not your personal Chinese Astrological sign. That is a truthful as saying a person is just an Aquarius and following those little horoscopes you can find in most papers or online. Any good Astrologer will tell you to avoid those, and any good Chinese Astrologer will tell you to avoid using year as your sign.

I could answer your questions with vague concepts that don't mean anything to anyone, and say something like "The electroplasmodic waves of individual planets travel through quantum solar field to combine with neurotelepsychic particles within our individual aura fields, thus causing psychoelectron pulses to begin effecting synapses within our brains." But answers like that don't really mean anything to most of us and besides I made that up! The truth is that science has barely figured out how moon affects us. We know that it moves tides through it's gravitational pull. We know that women's menstrual cycles are often in alignment with moon. We know that apparent waxing and waning of moon is really just shadows being cast upon it's surface. It isn't really disappearing and reappearing. We know that more babies are born on full moons then any other time in lunar cycle. We know that lunacy is weirdness that sometimes effects people during nights of full moon. But why? Why should size of a shadow effect such things? Isn't moon same size and therefore have same amount of magnetic gravitational pull no matter how much shadow covers it's face? Modern science knows a little bit about our relationship with moon mostly through observation. When astronauts walked around on moon, they didn't find some magical reason for all of these lunar influences.

There was a time in ancient history when mankind thought moon was a grandmother goddess that decided when women would be pregnant and when they would menstruate instead. If you asked them why they believed it or how did moon regulate pregnancies and menstrual flows, you would have been told to observe it for yourself. It's no different then seasons and their continual cycle of birth and death. To argue point would have been ridiculous. Of course Grandmother Moon is in charge of such things, look for yourself, silly! Mankind hasn't really gotten too much further along in his understand of such things. We put our focus and energy into studying other things, like medicine, weapons, and commerce. There's so many amazing mysteries to explore while we're on this planet, it's not really surprising to me that we still don't know very much about magical workings of anything. We observe a lot and take notes to compare future events to past events in hopes of finding patterns and cycles that will somehow explain things or at least let us predict what's next. This is most apparent in our scientific study of weather, earthquakes, and volcanoes. The same holds true for astrology.