Richard Tarnas is the guy you point to when someone says astrology is only for people who don't think hard. Because this man thinks extremely hard, with citations.
He's a real academic, a cultural historian and philosophy professor. His first book, The Passion of the Western Mind, is a genuinely respected history of Western thought; it gets assigned in universities. So he had all the mainstream credibility you could want.
And then he spent decades on a much riskier book: Cosmos and Psyche. The argument is wild but careful, that the timing of major planetary cycles, especially the slow outer planets, seems to correlate with patterns in human history. Waves of revolution, creativity, upheaval, and awakening lining up with what's happening in the sky.
He's careful about what he's claiming. He doesn't say the planets reach down and cause wars. He calls it archetypal cosmology: the idea that the cosmos and human experience seem to move in step, to rhyme, in a way that's hard to write off as pure coincidence once you've seen enough of it. Correlation as meaning, not as mechanism.
You can finish his work unconvinced, and plenty of smart people do. But it's the most serious, most rigorous version of the astrological idea anyone's put on paper, and it's a fascinating read even as a skeptic. He makes you sit with the possibility instead of just laughing it off.