Is It The Age Of Aquarius Yet?

The fabled Age of Aquarius – does it mean anything at all? Ever since the musical Hair was first performed back in 1967, there has been a vague sense that the Aquarian Age had something to do with hippies or free love or world peace or . . . something.

Anyway, from that Boomer point of view, the Age of Aquarius probably ended about fifty years ago . . . that is, unless you bring up the subject among a group of astrologers. Then what you will typically see has very little to do with a song about “harmony and understanding, sympathy and trust abounding . . .” Then what you will typically see is closer to World War Three. Opinions on the subject of the astrological ages tend to be trenchant – and the general thrust of them usually runs down the road of claiming that the hippies had it all wrong. The Age of Aquarius is real enough, but that it is still far off, lying somewhere in the distant future.

I disagree. I think we are in it now. I think we have already been in it for over a century. 

In this newsletter I want to make my case that the beginning of the Age of Aquarius dates back to 1903-1905. 

Let’s start with science class.

Earth’s north pole describes a slow circle in the sky, sort of like a child’s spinning top winding down. This cycle – called the Precession of the Equinoxes – takes 25,771.5 years from start to finish. As the north pole slowly circles around the starry background, naturally the position of the Celestial Equator shifts too – tilt the child’s top and you can’t help but tilt the painted stripes on its sides as well. To follow the logic of what we are about to explore, four astronomical facts are necessary:

• At the Solstices, the Sun is maximally far north or south of the Celestial Equator, while at the Equinoxes, the Sun is aligned with it. 

• The Sun is always on the ecliptic – the Sun is what defines it. 

• Two plus two makes four: at the Equinoxes, the Sun is where the Celestial Equator and the Ecliptic cross. 

• That crossing point is slowly moving backwards against the background of the constellations, taking 25,771.5 years to return to where it started. 

What all this boils down to is the fact that the Sun’s position on the first day of Spring (or the first day of Autumn) relative to the starry background is slowly precessing in retrograde fashion. Gradually it shifts from constellation to constellation. Four or five millennia ago, on the day of the northern Vernal Equinox, the Sun rose into the constellation Taurus. After some centuries, it began to rise into the constellation Aries, then into the constellation Pisces . . .

• I emphasize the word “constellation” because constellations are different from signs. That, as we will see, is really the key to understanding the conflict around when the various ages begin and end. 

Unlike astronomers, we astrologers define “the first degree of Aries” as the position of the Sun on the ecliptic on the day of the northern Vernal Equinox. Long ago, it aligned with the actual constellation of stars that we call  “Aries.” That’s how the connection between the constellation and the sign was first made. The trouble is that because of the precession of the equinoxes, that is no longer true. 

• Here’s the whole problem in one sentence: astrology as most of us practice it in the West is based on the seasons, not the stars. (Vedic astrologers and the Western siderealists use the constellations.)

Theoretically, defining the twelve Ages is very simple: the “Age of Pisces” began when the Vernal Equinox left the constellation Aries and entered the constellation Pisces. And the Age of Aquarius began – or will begin – when it enters the constellation Aquarius.

The question upon which all the current arguments hang is where exactly is the boundary of the constellation Aquarius? The problem is that all we actually see up in the sky is a bunch of stars. Unless we invent them ourselves, there are no boundaries around them. Different cultures have “connected the dots” differently, but these pictures in the sky are always fanciful and arbitrary. Constellations are folklore, not any kind of objective, measurable reality. 

• That fuzziness around constellation boundaries was an inconvenience for astronomers – a problem they solved by committee. The boundaries of the eighty-eight official constellations were adopted by the International Astronomical Union in 1928 and published in 1930.

If we take the IAU’s constellation boundaries to be the holy gospel of truth, the Vernal Equinox will enter Aquarius around the year 2597 AD. By that standard, we are not even close to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, so put away your guitars, your bongs, and your bell-bottom bluejeans. 

  As I mentioned earlier, many serious astrologers pooh-pooh the notion that we have already entered the Aquarian Age. Their argument is founded upon their great and unquestioning faith in the map of the sky that the International Astronomical Union published almost a century ago.

There are however some fundamental problems with that kind of thinking.

Have a look at this diagram:

On the left, you can see the position of the Sun on the northern Vernal Equinox around 4500 years ago. What do you think – did it fall in Taurus or Aries? There is no actual boundary in the sky, but it seems to “lean Taurus.” On the right, you’ll see the Sun’s Equinox position at the turn of the present millennium. As you can tell, it is still very much in the constellation Pisces. 

Case closed? Again, many astrologers are adamant about that claim. Personally, I think that they are taking the International Astronomical Union too seriously. For starters, if we follow the IAU’s lead scrupulously, we’ll need to add a thirteenth astrological sign – Ophiuchus.  According to the IAU’s map, it lies on the ecliptic too. 

Back to our diagram. Note that the constellation Aries is tiny compared to Pisces. The reality is that constellations vary enormously in size. That was true long before the IAU came along. In terms of the number of square degrees of sky it occupies, Virgo is the biggest zodiacal constellation by far, while Capricorn is the smallest. 

• That version of the heavens contrasts sharply with a fundamental principle of astrology: all the signs are equal in size. 

Should we abandon that principle when it comes to the Ages? Should Virgo be vastly bigger than Capricorn? Twelve equal divisions – that is the core of astrological geometry. I have nothing against the International Astronomical Union, but let’s try thinking like astrologers. Let’s take a leap and postulate that there are twelve equal “constellations” up there in the sky and that each one is exactly thirty degrees wide. I put the word  “constellations” in quotation marks because we would no longer be thinking according to the IAU’s boundaries, nor would we be bound to Eurocentric folk traditions about how to arrange these configurations of stars. These new “constellations” would not be our familiar signs of the zodiac either, although they would retain the same names.

TURNING THE PROBLEM ON ITS HEAD

All of this brings us back to our central question: where does our “constellation” Aries begin? We still cannot see a mark in the sky. So let’s approach the problem in a different way.

Let’s return to the very core of astrological practice. Long ago, our mythical astrological grandfather, Hermes Trismegistus, started the wheel turning with these four words: “As above, so below.” He meant that sky and mind reflect each other like two mirrors – and that’s practical astrological theory in a nutshell. But of course that must also mean “as below, so above.” If A equals B, then B must equal A.

• If we can’t answer our question about these “constellation” boundaries by looking at the sky, maybe we can answer it by looking at human history. 

If we posit twelve equal “constellations,” that would mean that each astrological Age would last for one-twelfth of 25,771.5 years. Each one would then be 2147.5 years long. 

So can we use this kind of thinking to figure out when the Piscean Age began? Let’s cut to the chase by simply thinking of Pisces as mystical. That’s only part of what it means, but try this: reasoning from history rather than from astronomy, we might arbitrarily split the difference between the births of the two great Piscean Age mystical Teachers, Buddha and Christ. They were born in approximately (and somewhat conjecturally) 563 and 4 BCE, respectively. 

(We might include Muhammad, but he was not born until much later, in 571 AD, and thus, while he represents another significant Piscean step, his birth does not mark the beginning of the Age.)

Arbitrarily “splitting the difference” between the birth years of Gautama and Jesus, gives us 283 BCE for a wildly hypothetical guess about when the Piscean Age started. That’s totally speculative, but let’s see if it leads anywhere. 

The obvious next step would be to see where that early date would put the start of the following age – the Age of Aquarius. Simply adding 2147.5 years to 283 BCE (and remembering that “AD” started with 1 AD., not 0 AD), would yield the year 1865 for the hypothetical beginning of the Aquarian Age.

Does that check out? We called Pisces “the Mystic.” Limiting ourselves again to one high-level word for Aquarius, let’s say that it represents Genius. One might therefore speculate that the outset of an Aquarian Age would be heralded by some startlingly brilliant, rule-breaking human innovations. Human freedom – and human brilliance – would be in the forefront.

Recall that we arrived at “283 BCE” in very crude fashion. There is no compelling reason to be rigid about that date or the “1865” that derived from it. If we had a good reason to shift it by a few decades, that shouldn’t worry us at all. 

For the start of the Age of Aquarius, I personally like 1903-1905, which is just forty years or so later. That would coincide with the first powered airplane flight – the Wright Brothers taking off from Kitty Hawk on the Outer Banks of North Carolina on December 14, 1903.

Humans learned how to fly! Doesn’t that sound like an Aquarian rebellion against all limitations? Doesn’t that accomplishment ring of human genius? 

I would also add the publication of Einstein's Special Theory of Relativity. That happened on September 26,1905, not long after the dawn of aviation. Albert Einstein – just say the word genius and it takes most people five seconds to free-associate to his name. One could make a case that the Theory of Relativity is the greatest intellectual triumph in human history. 

Should we abandon 1865 and replace it with 1903-1905? In U.S. history, we could make a solid case for the Emancipation Proclamation of 1863 as an Aquarian milestone, but the birth of flight and the intellectual roots of the nuclear age seem to have more universal, global relevance. Slavery was outlawed by other countries much earlier.

1903-1905 is not quite the same as 1865, but with Ages running over two millennia in length, forty years is only a drop in the bucket. 

Want some goosebumps?

• We went from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in sixty-six years. 

Holy cow, doesn’t that sound like the cusp of an Aquarian age? Doesn’t that sound like leaving the dreamy, mystical Age of Pisces and entering the wild freedom and startling brilliance of the Age of Aquarius? 

Again, in all of this, astrologically we are “thinking backwards.” We’re reasoning from “below” in order to try to figure out what might have been going on “above.” We don’t know where the constellations start and finish – that’s our basic problem. So we turn our usual astrological methods on their heads. We look to events on earth to understand the sky. 

A WIDER PERSPECTIVE

Our case goes way beyond airplanes and Albert Einstein – in fact, we have just begun to bring forth the evidence. Think of electricity, automobiles, mass media, the Internet . . . you know the list. You’re living in it. In reflecting broadly on how the 20th century changed the elemental texture of human life, I believe that we can make a compelling argument that the Aquarian Age has already begun. 

Here’s some more support for the impact of these emerging  Aquarian “liberation” values. Comparing the state of society in 1800 versus today, even though we still have miles left to travel, think of the progress we’ve made against the madness, not only of slavery, but also of sexism, racism, and homophobia. Some of us are being dragged feet first into it, but accepting human diversity as a natural condition is fundamental to the Aquarian Age. 

Once again, I make no claim to precision on the exact timing of these astrological Ages. I don't think precision is necessary. All astrologers are familiar with the blurry way that cusps work. For a while, we’re new wine in old bottles. With over two millennia for each stage in the cycle, the transitional times between Ages would naturally reflect elements hanging over from the previous culture and hints of the shape of the next pattern. 

Let’s consider some more evidence. The implications of moving out of the Age of Pisces and into the Age of Aquarius pervade many different categories of human experience. Diving deeper, let’s begin by thinking more carefully about the Age of Pisces. That fading time still has much to teach us. So far, I’ve characterized the Piscean Age narrowly, only saying that it reflects the archetype of the Mystic. That’s true, but it only embodies the highest level of the sign’s range of expression. History amply demonstrates that humans do not always respond at the highest level, so let’s frame the basic impulse underlying Pisces in a broader fashion: 

• Pisces represents the urge to dissolve into something greater than oneself. 

That notion can express itself in many ways ranging from true enlightenment experiences down to a drunk or an addict dissolving into oblivion. It’s all Pisces.

Compelled by a global shift into Piscean values, we’d expect that in the 3rd century BCE mystical spirituality would be on the rise, presumably displacing – or at least tempering – the previous, more violent and warlike, Arian Age. One expression of that principle would be the bumper crop of saints and spiritual masters with whom we’ve been blessed in the last two millennia. We started with Buddha and Christ, but as we weave down the subsequent centuries, we quickly move on to include Muhammad again, not to mention Teresa of Avila, Ramana Maharshi, Padma Sambhava, and so on.  

On a somewhat parallel wavelength, in a Piscean Age, we might also expect to see masses of people “dissolving” into religions – and witness the rise of Christianity, Buddhism, and Islam as the Piscean Age gathered momentum.

PISCES AND THE AGE OF EMPIRES 

What about social organization in general? How would shifting out of the Age of Aries into the Age of Pisces impact the structure of society – and what would we be expecting now as Piscean patterns give way to Aquarian ones? 

Traditionally, the beginning of the Roman Republic is traced to 509 BCE, although there’s considerable blur between history and mythology there. Rome defeated Carthage in 202 BCE and in the following decades began to truly dominate the entire Mediterranean region. Within the next four centuries, people as far removed from each other culturally, linguistically, and physically as what we now call “Turks” and “Englishmen” began to willingly dissolve into something greater than themselves. 

They all called themselves Roman citizens. 

As the Roman story unfolded, it soon became inextricably entangled with the spread of Christianity – once again with its similar underlying Piscean signature.

Meanwhile, Qin Shi Huang founded the first large-scale Chinese empire between 221 and 206 BCE. (Note the extremely close parallel in timing between it and the rise of Rome.) They are two entirely distinct cultures, and yet they embody the same underlying Piscean theme: people becoming identified with something much larger and more abstract as they dissolved into nations and empires. 

A historian could rightfully trace trends and developmental patterns within the Mediterranean world or China that led to the genesis of these unprecedented societies, but how could such a historian explain everybody getting the same idea at the same time despite the enormous distances and cultural differences involved? That work is in the domain of astrologers. 

Turn the hands of time forward as we hurtle toward the end of the Piscean Age and we’re soon faced with the largest empire in the history of the world. As the saying went, “the sun never sets on the British empire.” Perhaps you’ve seen those maps of the world that show every country that Great Britain never invaded? There aren’t many. 

By the way, that sentence about “the sun never setting” – as much as we associate it with England, it did not in fact originate there. It actually goes back to the 16th century and the domain of Emperor Charles V of the “Holy Roman Empire.” His realm included Spain with its vast colonial territories in the Americas and the Far East. That meant that the sun was literally always shining on land the Holy Roman Empire controlled – hence the actual origin of the term.

Vast colonial empires – are they good or bad? Do we approve or disapprove? That’s not the point. The point is simply that as we entered the Piscean Age, human beings felt a distinctly Piscean pull to surrender their individuality to something far larger than anything they had ever surrendered to before. 

• As the Age of Pisces unfolded, if we weren’t ready to surrender to the vastness of consciousness itself, we could at least surrender to a religion, or a national identity – or, failing those steps, to an alcoholic trance.

AQUARIUS THE EMPIRE KILLER

I’m not a big fan of hitching astrology’s star to the shaky notion that we can predict the future, but back in the mid-1970s when I was a younger man and a lot less individuated, I did hazard a bold public prediction – one that struck everyone as pretty dubious at the time. In the pages of a literary magazine called The Sun, in an article entitled The Bright (And Cloudy) Dawn of a New Age, I predicted the collapse of the Soviet Union. To me, the reasoning was straightforward. If the Age of Pisces was all about dissolving our individual identities into something larger, the Aquarian Age was the polar opposite: it was a celebration of human individuality – one that declared war on anything and anyone that tried to suppress it. I knew that principle would apply to people as individuals, but it would also apply to nations.

Back then, I had enough grasp on history to understand that the Soviet Union had been cobbled together, mostly by force, from an incredibly diverse range of cultures. There were essentially European Christian Russians, alongside the “Silk Road” people of Uzbekistan, not to mention the predominantly Islamic cultures of Kazakhstan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

Add Aquarian impulses rising up across the board in those populations and it seemed like something was ready to pop – which it did in late 1991.

Interestingly the collapse of the U.S.S.R. happened as Uranus and Neptune came together. That conjunction happens every 171 years, so it’s a very big deal. More to the point, those two planets are the modern rulers of Aquarius and Pisces and their alignment during the 1990s was a major step in the transition out of the Age of Pisces and into the Age of Aquarius. 

We are currently experiencing another major step in the form of Pluto’s passage through Aquarius. Still, let’s keep perspective . . .

• As ever, cusps are blurry zones. If my guesstimate is correct, we are only a century and a quarter into the Aquarian Age. That’s about 0.5% of the way, with 99.5% still waiting out there to surprise us.

Goodbye empires – and chalk up another piece of evidence in support of the idea that we are already in the Aquarian Age. Depending on who’s counting, there are about 197 independent nations on the planet today. That compares to only fifty or sixty in 1850 as the Age of Pisces was winding down. Other than humanity making it from Kitty Hawk to the Moon in sixty-six years, I can hardly think of a stronger argument for the Aquarian values of the times than the way nations are proliferating, splitting, and diversifying

Not only people, but also countries and ethnicities are feeling the pull to “be themselves.”

By the way, in that article in The Sun I also floated the possibility of the United States of America breaking up – specifically I cited the idea of California seceding from the union. Such an idea seemed far-fetched at the time, but that essay was published half a century ago. Now, with us almost one degree further into the Aquarian Age, the whole notion feels increasingly plausible. How often lately have you seen maps online that fancifully show “Greater Canada” including the states on the US west coast and New England? 

THE ELEPHANT IN THE LIVING ROOM: TECHNOLOGY

I have a dim memory of meeting my great grandfather, George Santley Butler, in New Rochelle, New York, in maybe 1954 or so. He was born around 1870 and he had spent his life in a world so entirely different from the present one that it might as well have been another planet. I don’t need to beat the drum of all the obvious technology-driven changes that have unfolded since the 19th century – cars, airplanes, television, satellites, microchips, virtual reality, and the rest. You can do that yourselves. 

If you’ll forgive a brief rant, given all of those technical breakthroughs, plus the classic “Air sign” mental and intellectual qualities of Aquarius, it beggars my imagination that some astrologers persist in putting their faith in the constellation boundaries created a century ago by the International Astronomical Union. How can they reject the painfully obvious idea that we “crossed a serious cusp” around the turn of the previous century? 

To me, that incapacity represents astrology’s shadow, which is the triumph of theory over experience.

WHO TURNED ON THE LIGHTS?

Perhaps the most viscerally vivid evidence of our entry to the Aquarian Age is simply our relationship with light. Walk into a room illuminated only by candles and oil lamps, and you are instantly transported into a Piscean state of mind. 

Compare that mellow light with the endless glare of LEDs and digital screens and you’ve felt at least one dimension of the cusp of the Aquarian Age – in this case, I would call it an unpleasant one. 

The point is that if you go back a couple of centuries, by necessity people spent at least two or three hours each day immersed in soft light with its meditative Piscean vibration. In that relaxed and dreamy state, they’d speak with each other. And listen. Imagine the conversations – and soul-connections – they would have experienced nearly every day. It’s almost as if they had no choice – they weren’t ready for bed and it was too dark for much of anything else. 

These Ages are so long and human life is so short that it’s difficult to remember what we have lost.

There’s more to the Aquarian technological revolution than electric lights, of course.

• How much has the Internet changed the way we relate to each other? I am in more regular contact with my friends in China and Europe than I am with my neighbors three doors down the street. 

• Most of us carry a little computer in our pockets on which we can access much of the factual knowledge known to humanity. 

• Pharmaceuticals, anyone? Laser surgery? Genetic manipulation? 

As I write these words, I am a couple weeks away from flying to Australia to teach a class. I’m feeling sort of oppressed by the fact that it will take me something like fifteen hours to cross the Pacific Ocean. I smile when I imagine myself trying to elicit sympathy about that long flight from that great grandfather I mentioned. How many months would it have taken him to get to Sydney? Could he even imagine it? I suspect he felt about traveling to Australia the same way I feel about making a trip to Mars – which nowadays is somewhere out there on the far limits of what might actually be barely possible . . . as Australia presumably was to him.

NOSTALGIA FOR THE PISCEAN AGE

Naturally there is a temptation to think hopeful thoughts about the Age of Aquarius as a time of increasing respect for human diversity, not mention a technological wonderland, and to contrast it with darker perspectives on the fading Piscean Age, which brought us so much madness driven by people “dissolving themselves” into nations and religions. 

There’s a baby in the bath water though, and let’s not forget about it. Remember those quiet candlelit nights. More broadly, spirituality – the intuitive knowledge that life doesn’t end here in the material world – came much more easily to many more people during the Piscean Age than it does now. I can only pray that the Aquarian Age doesn’t presage those wisdom traditions going into eclipse, only to be replaced with widespread materialism and empty  existentialism. 

Air is a colder element than Water. 

Nowadays, my hope for the continuance of human spirituality rests far less on “faith” and “religion,” and more on the kinds of objective personal evidence that Aquarius prefers: verifiable past life stories, documented psychic phenomena, and mystical near-death experiences full of inexplicable facts and agreements. Even astrology itself can play a role – with it we can see evidence of meaningful soul-evolution. 

I believe that spirituality will endure simply because it is the truth and truth always ultimately endures. But one point is sure: people will experience spirituality far more individually. We’ll be less likely to dissolve ourselves into religions and congregations. Those trends are already evident.

While I am thinking of reasons to be nostalgic for the Piscean Age, let’s remember that Pisces also represents visionary imagination. Against the backdrop of the Ages, just consider  the fruits of human creativity as they have unfolded since the third century B.C.E. We’ve experienced a two thousand year renaissance in literature, graphic art, and music. For sheer Piscean beauty, how have recent trends in all the arts compared with the Italian Renaissance? 

Still, without Aquarian technology, there would be no film, television, recorded music, or electric rock’n’roll. Like spirituality, art will endure – but what forms will it take? It seems almost certain that technologies – many not yet even imagined, let alone invented – will be a big part of it.

RELATIONSHIPS

What about marriage and similar associations? Here, the fingerprints of the two contrasting Ages could hardly be clearer. As we have seen, Pisces is always about dissolving our individuality into something bigger than ourselves. Is it the Divine? Is it the Roman Empire? Or is it marriage and family? They are all expressions of the same underlying Piscean principle. In each case, this self-transcendance (or self-loss) can be a beautiful thing or an ugly one – but in every instance, it’s pure Pisces.

What has happened to marriage in the last century and a quarter? We all know the answer: it’s a far less stable, less universal, institution than it once was. Under the Aquarian ray, we have now solidly entered the Age of the Individual. People everywhere want to make their own decisions rather than having whatever they have dissolved themselves into make their decisions for them. That includes marriage and family.

It is astrological bedrock that as long as there are humans on Earth, they’ll have Venus and the 7th house in their charts. That means that something like marriage will always exist in some form – but under the Aquarian ray that form is already changing before our eyes.

I was born in 1949 – just in time to catch the last gasps of a society where being single or being divorced was stigmatized. Now, much to the shock of people my age, we’re actually seeing some indications of an opposite prejudice – one that is, in my view, equally misguided.  For example, on October 29, 2025, Vogue magazine ran a story entitled Is Having A Boyfriend Embarrassing Now? While I suspect the majority of heterosexual women would disagree with that notion, the very existence of the article is still a sign of the times. That such a story would have run in a mainstream, female-oriented magazine even thirty years ago feels inconceivable to me. 

Let’s also add one big caveat: a magazine article that tells you NOT to have a boyfriend is just as offensive to Aquarian sensibilities as one that implies that you must have one. In a backwards sort of way, the author reflected a woefully out-of-date Piscean attitude: that everyone should be the same.

More broadly, without getting into tedious detail about familiar territory, we all know that more people are single now than ever before. Even people who marry are tying the knot later in life – and, while no one is likely to include the words “50/50” in a wedding toast, they do hang like ghosts in the air. 

Meanwhile, birth rates are plunging around much of the world.

Pisces favors dissolving into marriage and family, Aquarius doesn’t – or it at least wants to set some boundaries, read the fine print, and maybe have a pre-nup. That’s solid astrology – we’ve known about the Aquarian penchant for independence for a long while. Everyone can write their own editorials about it, but I suspect the old Piscean model of marriage is fading from the world. 

How do we feel about that? Were people happier under that Piscean marital vibration? While we can’t dismiss that idea, I think it would be foolish to assume it. There’s an obvious downside to losing yourself in a relationship. Under Aquarius, people perhaps leave relationships too quickly, while under Pisces, they perhaps tend to remain in them too long.

One major elephant in the living room is of course the impact of feminism on marriage. We used to call it “women’s liberation,” and in this case that outdated term really does telegraph the main point: under the patriarchy, marriage was a key to a woman’s material stability. If she wanted to eat and have a roof over her head, let alone be viewed as “respectable,” she needed a husband. Those days are long gone and with their passing, marriage moved from a necessity to a choice. In truth, there’s something liberating for both genders about that. 

I should add that there’s also something liberating for everyone as we free ourselves from the various social and psychological tyrannies of gender itself.

One final point: breakthroughs in the technology of birth control lie at the intersection of the technical and social dimensions of the Aquarian age. They’re on the list too. A child can be a joy, but no one has ever said that having one enhances your freedom.

THE FUTURE

Astrology predicts the questions we will face, not the answers that we will give. My main practical evidence for it is the monumental, embarrassing error rate of astrologers who do make predictions. I look forward to the day when we stop covering our faces in egg that way. Human beings are not powerless in the face of planetary energies. What happens in our lives – and in the world – unfolds on the interface of astrological forces and human intelligence.

When I think about what the Aquarian Age will bring, I am confident that technology will continue to explode, and that it will do so in unpredictable, life-changing ways. Given what we already see before our eyes, how could it be otherwise? 

People will become more diverse too. Increasingly subtle distinctions in ethnicity, race, beliefs, and sexual orientation will arise. “Identity politics” probably has a big future.

• One result is that culture will become increasingly fragmented. 

On the face of it, that sounds like a negative prediction. It might not be. When I was young, I often heard that “America was like a big melting pot, but Canada was more like a salad.” That “melting pot” is a pure example of Age of Pisces thinking. It also obviously has very little relevance to US society at this point, which is totally fragmented. That Canadian “salad” though – that’s a much more Aquarian idea. 

• Here’s the question on which the human future hangs: does the tomato want the lettuce to change its evil ways and become a tomato too? Or do they revel in the complementarity of their differences?

In a nightmare version of the Age of Aquarius, we see technologically-armed factions increasingly isolated from each other, coldly disposed toward each other, and threatened by anything different from themselves. In that version of the future, we seal ourselves off from each other as best we can. Gated communities abound. Life is lived in bubbles which occasionally feel the need to burst each other.

In the dream version of the Age of Aquarius, we see a celebration of diversity, a technology that serves us all, and a beguiling future of open doors lying before us – think Star Trek, and you’re very close.

Instead of wondering which one of these worlds will appear, think of which one you choose to help create.

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Photo by JJ Ying on Unsplash