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Introduction: the heavy calendar of the sky and the social fabric

When Astrological Age is mentioned, what is meant is a scale far broader than the birth charts of individual people: the deep, archetypal core of the structures that organize everything in society over thousands of years. In this approach, history is read not as a random sequence of wars, inventions and beliefs, but as long themes that follow a very slowly moving indicator in the sky. The point where these themes intersect is a physical phenomenon related to the Earth’s axial motion: the precession of the equinoxes.

Precession means that the Earth’s axis of rotation wobbles by a tiny angle and that this wobble traces out a cone in the sky over roughly twenty-six thousand years. In NASA’s simple description, the Earth’s axis sways very slowly like a spinning top, and because of this sway, the stellar background into which the Sun falls at the vernal equinox shifts backwards over thousands of years (🔗). (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center) In astrology this great cycle is called the Great Year, and it is accepted that it lasts about twenty-five thousand seven hundred and seventy-two years (🔗). (Wikipedia) When this Great Year is divided into the twelve signs of the Zodiac, it corresponds, for each sign, to a period of roughly two thousand one hundred and some years, that is, to an Astrological Age.

In this scheme, the sign into which the Sun falls at the vernal equinox becomes the “name” of the age, but the direction of motion is the reverse of the sequence familiar from everyday astrology. The shift in the sky goes “backwards” from Leo to Cancer, from Cancer to Gemini, from Gemini to Taurus. For this reason, while it is being debated today that, in terms of the celestial calendar, we are at the threshold of the transition from Pisces to Aquarius, a symbolic ground also arises for reading earlier millennia as the ages of Cancer, Gemini, Taurus and Aries. Among astrologers there is no consensus about the exact dates and transition moments; most of them emphasize that an age does not end in a single day, that there is a “threshold zone” stretching over centuries between two themes (🔗). (Wikipedia)

The framework discussed here tries to build a bridge between astronomical facts and astrological interpretations without confusing them with one another. The precession of the equinoxes is an entirely physical and measurable phenomenon; archetypes, on the other hand, are patterns of meaning that human minds keep repeating at the collective level. Instead of putting forward claims like “This definitely happened in the Age of Cancer”, this text follows how directly certain historical clusters evoke which sign archetype. In other words, the sky provides the timing, the earth reflects this timing in high relief in some places and in shadow in others; the narrative then pursues these echoes.

From this perspective the ages of Cancer, Gemini, Taurus, Aries, Pisces and Aquarius are matched with long themes such as nurturance and home, language and twinning, matter and property, warrior identity, grand belief systems, and finally networks and artificial intelligence. The Age of Cancer is read as the peak of goddess worship and matrifocal cultures; the Age of Gemini is read as a period in which proto-languages and the myth of the Divine Twins become prominent. In this reading, data from archaeology, history, mythology and modern science are used together; examples such as the walls of Jericho, the adjoining houses of Çatalhöyük, the samurai-faced crabs in Japan and the “carcinisation” of crustaceans are brought side by side. Thus the concept of Astrological Age ceases to be an abstract idea of astrology and turns into an interpretive lens placed in front of concrete events.

The Age of Cancer: first shells, mother-bodies and carcinisation

In classical astrology, the sign of Cancer is associated with the water element and carries themes such as family, home, protection, nurturance, the past and memory. The Age of Cancer, placed roughly between 8640–6480 BCE, coincides in the archaeological record with a period when humans put down roots in the soil, established permanent settlements, and when the house and matrifocal figures came to the fore. The shell of Cancer, in this age, turns into both stone walls, earthen ramparts and the body of the goddess.

Tell es-Sultan, or ancient Jericho, located in the Jordan Valley in today’s Palestine, is one of the oldest known continuously inhabited settlements of humankind. UNESCO underlines that Neolithic Jericho, in the ninth–eighth millennia BCE, that is, around 9000–8000 BCE, had a wall surrounded by a ditch and an adjoining monumental stone tower (🔗). (UNESCO World Heritage Centre) This tower, together with the stone stairs inside it, is counted among the earliest known monumental stone structures (🔗). (Wikipedia) Although traditional interpretations see the wall and tower as a defensive system against attacks, recent research points out that they may also have been symbolic structures that brought the community together and affected it. Whatever purpose they were built for, the resulting picture is clear: at the center there is a sensitive “inner world”, and around it there is a rising stone shell that surrounds it. While this shell separates a small Neolithic town on the edge of water from the outside, it protects the granaries, the water source and the people inside.

In central Anatolia, at Çatalhöyük on the Konya Plain, we see another face of the Cancer archetype. In the settlement dated to the seventh–sixth millennia BCE there are no streets; the houses are attached to one another, and the entrances are mostly from the roofs (🔗). (turkishmuseums.com) While the roofs function as both circulation space and the stage of everyday life, the dead are buried under the raised platforms inside the houses (🔗). (Turkish Archaeological News) Thus the home turns into a “dead–living continuity” that encompasses not only the living but also the ancestors. The female figures found inside the houses add to this picture. Some of these figurines, mostly made of clay or stone, were long interpreted as “mother goddess” figures, with their large hips, emphasized breasts and postures (🔗; 🔗). (catalhoyuk.com) In recent years some researchers have suggested that these figures do not necessarily have to be goddesses and may instead represent elderly women of the community (🔗). (Daily Sabah) Yet whether goddess or old woman, they all imply the same thing: a female centrality intertwined with nurturing, watching over and the interior space.

In Mesopotamia, with the Ubaid culture, irrigation agriculture and temple-centered settlements become pronounced in the sixth–fifth millennia BCE. This culture is seen as the core of the urbanization process in the Near East (🔗). (Belleten) In the same geography, Ninhursag, one of the important mother goddesses of Sumerian mythology, appears as “lady of the sacred mountain” in the meaning of her name and as a mountain–earth mother; she is remembered with qualities of fertility, birth and protecting life (🔗). (Wikipedia) The fertility of the soil, the protective power of the mountain and the goddess’s body unite in her. This creates a ground compatible with Cancer’s figure of the mother who both nourishes like the earth and envelops and watches over from above like a shell.

It is possible to see the Cancer archetype not only in Neolithic settlements but also in a much later historical context. The small crab species Heikegani, which lives off the coast of Japan, has reliefs on its carapace that resemble a human face. For this reason this species is called the “samurai crab” and is associated with the spirits of the warriors of the Heike clan, which was destroyed in the medieval naval Battle of Dan-no-ura (🔗). (Wikipedia) In folk belief these crabs are not eaten and are returned to the sea; the face on the shell is seen as the trapped expression of a defeated warrior. In scientific explanations this face-like pattern is interpreted as an arrangement of shell protrusions where the muscles attach and as a kind of perceptual illusion, that is, pareidolia. The scenario, popularized by Carl Sagan, that “fishermen released those that resembled samurai faces and ate the others” is not found convincing by most current studies, because Heikegani is in any case a small species that is not much consumed and similar patterns are seen in other crabs as well. Still, at the mythological level, the “inscription” of a war trauma from collective memory onto the back of a marine shellfish strikingly concretizes Cancer’s triangle of shell–memory–past.

Another motif associated with the Age of Cancer comes directly from biology. While studying the evolution of crustaceans in 1916, the English zoologist Lancelot Alexander Borradaile coined the term “carcinisation” (which can usually be translated into Turkish as “yengeçleşme”) and defined it as “one of the many attempts of nature to evolve a crab” (🔗). (Wikipedia) This term describes how, in the course of evolution, some lineages of lobsters and hermit crabs repeatedly approach a crab-like body plan. The elongated body shortens, the carapace widens and stretches laterally, the abdominal region curls downwards and tucks under the body; the result is a more “compact” body that moves with its legs and carries its shell along. Recent studies also show that carcinisation is not a single, linear process and that some groups can revert to more “elongated” forms again; even so, the existence of different lineages that converge on roughly the same crude plan suggests how advantageous this form is ecologically. (Wikipedia)

When all these examples are placed side by side, the main theme of the Age of Cancer becomes increasingly clear. Human settlements experience a “shelling” that moves from light tents to heavy stone walls; houses stick to each other and become a giant mega-dwelling; the figure of the woman who feeds, gives birth and protects becomes central in the organization of society; a coastal people choose to read the defeat of their ancestors in the pattern on a crab’s shell; even in the evolution of crustaceans, repeated returns are seen toward a body plan that is “broad at the sides, short at the front”. Thus the sign of Cancer ceases to be an abstract astrological symbol; it comes to appear as a recurring pattern on different planes of history and biology through the motifs of shell, home and mother-body.

The Age of Gemini: branching of languages, the Divine Twins and the first networks

After the inward-turning, protective shell of Cancer, Gemini emerges as an archetype that opens outward, makes contact, engages in exchange. Associated with the air element, this sign carries the themes of language, understanding, duality, double vision and movement. The Age of Gemini, placed roughly between 6480–4320 BCE, coincides, from a historical and linguistic point of view, with a phase in which the roots of many of today’s language families begin to take shape. This coincidence does not mean historical certainty; rather, it points to an overlap between the Gemini archetype and a long period in which linguistic and trade networks become more pronounced.

Modern historical linguistics posits that hundreds of languages spoken today across a vast area from Europe to India derive from a common ancestral language of which no written examples survive. This language is called Proto-Indo-European (abbreviated PIE) (🔗). (Wikipedia) Where and when exactly PIE was spoken is debated; but studies in recent years propose that this language emerged about six to seven thousand years ago in a region between the north of the Black Sea and the Eurasian steppes, and according to some views, in a broader hinterland that also includes the Balkans and Anatolia (🔗). (The Guardian) It is thought that PIE speakers were intertwined with communities that carried new technologies such as agriculture, animal husbandry and especially metalworking; therefore their language functioned as a kind of trade and culture language. From this ancestral language the branches of the Indo-European family arise: Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, Latin and, as their descendants, English, French, Russian, Hindi and many more.

From the perspective of the Gemini archetype, this picture is like a single trunk splitting into two branches, four branches, hundreds of branches. PIE is a language that was never written down and has been reconstructed only backwards by comparing its daughter languages. Linguists, for example, compare words like English water, German Wasser and Russian voda and infer their common ancestor as *wódr̥; in a similar way, the fact that the word for “three” takes on similar forms in many Indo-European languages suggests an ancestral form like *tréyes (🔗). (Wikipedia) These words, indicated with an asterisk (*), point to an “invisible language ancestor” whose effects still continue; each modern word is like a different child of that ancestor.

It is possible to see the Age of Gemini not only at the level of language family but also at the level of myth. Studies on Proto-Indo-European mythology trace back to this ancestral culture a “Divine Twins” motif that appears in similar forms in many cultures (🔗). (Wikipedia) In this motif two young male brothers are usually horsemen, and their function is rescuing: to find what has been lost, to pull the drowned from the water, to heal the wounded. In the Indian tradition the Ashvins appear as twin gods associated with dawn, racing in the sky in their chariot. In Greek mythology the Dioscuri, that is, Castor and Polydeuces, are twin heroes who come to the aid of sailors in storms. These young horseman figures, associated with the wind, the horse, travel and liminal situations, form a mythological substratum that recalls the two stars in the constellation of Gemini.

Beyond language and myth, another area that evokes the Age of Gemini is Neolithic trade networks. During the transition to agriculture in the Near East, stone tools made from volcanic glass such as obsidian were carried hundreds of kilometers away. The sources of obsidian are concentrated mostly in central and eastern Anatolia, that is, in certain volcanic regions; nonetheless, tools made from this material are found in the Levant, in Mesopotamia and even on some islands. The earliest evidence of obsidian trade points to the existence of long-distance exchange even among Late Epipaleolithic hunter-gatherer groups (🔗). (archatlas.org) In later Neolithic phases, the circulation of obsidian forms an increasingly complex network among settled villages; these networks are thought to have played a critical role in the spread of new technologies and ideas (🔗; 🔗). (CORDIS)

When goods travel, it is not only goods that travel. Along with obsidian, new words, new counting systems, terms expressing units of goods, stories about gods and ritual practices are also carried from one village to another. In this sense Neolithic trade routes are not only economic but also linguistic and cultural networks. The themes of Gemini related to communication, mediation and trade find their counterparts on earth in this period: stone quarried in one place is worked in another and used in yet another; the human chain in between carries both goods and words.

For the end of the Neolithic, when written records had not yet emerged, there is no direct documentation for multilingual societies; yet in later periods it is known that languages such as Sumerian and Akkadian in Mesopotamia, and Hittite and Hattic in Anatolia, existed side by side in the same city, under the same administration. The simultaneous circulation of two languages in one city requires that the ruling and merchant classes be mostly bilingual. Looking backwards from these known examples, it is not hard to imagine a social landscape, toward the end of the Age of Gemini, in which people carry not just one but two or more languages, and harbor within their minds a small “inner twin”.

Thus the Age of Gemini gains meaning not only through the postulation of Proto-Indo-European as an abstract language ancestor, but also through the reappearance of the Divine Twins motif in the young horse gods, through Neolithic obsidian networks linking villages to one another, and through bilingualism’s becoming an increasingly common mental condition. In the Age of Cancer, human communities that set up their shell and withdraw into it, in the Age of Gemini begin to speak, to give names, to exchange, and to form new bonds through “dualities” both in the sky and on earth. While this transition is seen in the astrological chart as a shift from Cancer to Gemini, in history it marks a long period in which communities that built homes increasingly set out on the road, made their voices heard by others, and constructed a new common space through language.

The Age of Taurus — The Time that Organizes Matter, Money and the Bull-Deity

The Taurus archetype represents the weight of the earth, tangible matter, owning, accumulating and the desire for security. In the narrative of the astrological ages, the Age of Taurus is placed roughly in the 4320–2160 BCE band, and this period is read as a threshold in the ways human communities stored their production surplus, recorded it and finally turned it into “money”. This threshold is not only economic; it also leaves a mark in the collective imagination through the deification of the animal that carries this surplus, namely the bull.

In the Near East, after Neolithic and Chalcolithic experiences, a temple-centered economy begins to be seen with the Uruk period. The temple is not only the house of the god, but also the center where surplus product is gathered and redistributed. The farmer delivers his barley or other products to the temple granaries and, in return, acquires a right recorded on clay tablets and tokens. In this system, which functions as a “unit of account” before money, a certain amount of barley begins to be counted as equivalent to a certain amount of silver; in other words, grain on the one hand and metal on the other become the measure of value. Economic historians working on Mesopotamia emphasize that especially from the third millennium BCE onwards, barley and silver together functioned like a kind of dual monetary system, with one being used more in daily payments and the other more in long-term value storage and long-distance trade (🔗). (Wikipedia) The temple and palace both record and protect this dual standard; thus the basis is formed for concepts such as “debt”, “wage” and “taxation”. Here the Taurus archetype shows itself as a heavy but invisible backbone, in the form of grain piled up in granaries and metal accumulating in coffers.

Another layer that completes this economic transformation is the divinization of the bull itself. In ancient Egypt, the Memphis-centered Apis cult is one of the striking examples of this. Apis is a real bull, chosen according to certain signs and regarded as sacred; it is believed that its body is the earthly manifestation of great gods such as Ptah. The ceremonies held for this animal, which after its death is buried in monumental sarcophagi in the underground galleries at Saqqara, make the bull into the bearer of both fertility and royal authority (🔗). (Encyclopedia Britannica) In the Near East, storm gods also frequently merge with the bull image. In the Baal cult along the Syria–Palestine line, thunder and rain are identified with the bellowing of the bull and its clash with the earth; this directly visualizes the bond established between celestial power and agricultural fertility. Here the bull is not only brute strength, but also the life energy descending from the sky.

In the Aegean world, the Minoan civilization centered on Crete leaves some of the most impressive scenes of the Age of Taurus in mythological memory. In the famous bull-leaping fresco found in the Palace of Knossos, acrobats are seen holding the horns of a running bull, vaulting onto its back with a somersault and dismounting behind it; this scene has been interpreted as both ritual and sport (🔗). (Wikipedia) On the palace walls and seals, bull-horn motifs are repeated; the bull is the central symbol of palace power and island culture. The later Greek myth of the Minotaur is like a condensed, dark version of this visual and ritual universe: a half-human, half-bull monster shut in the depths of the Labyrinth is fed every year with sacrifices. Here the bull is both fertility and a power that must be controlled and locked inside. This myth reveals the shadow side of the Taurus archetype, namely that the power possessed is at the same time a source of fear.

Viewed economically, the association of the Age of Taurus with “money and banking” is not limited to temple bookkeeping. The spread of small pieces of metal, weighed silver ingots and certain weight standards leads value to become a measure that is intertwined with matter but at the same time transcends it. A more advanced stage of this process is seen in the Kingdom of Lydia in western Anatolia. Here, around the seventh century BCE, coins minted from electrum, a gold–silver alloy, and bearing symbols of power and dynasty such as lion and bull, enter circulation. Researchers note that some of the world’s first standard state coins emerged in this region and that this was one of the turning points in the history of money (🔗). (sardisexpedition.org) Thus the heavy body of the bull “condenses” into small stamped metal pieces that fit into the pocket; property and power are now expressed not by heaps that are weighed, but by disks that are counted.

The line stretching from temple granaries to palace treasuries, from bull-deities to the Minotaur and to Lydian coins clarifies the archetypal theme of the Age of Taurus: drawing the boundaries of “what is mine”, recording this and binding it tightly to the material world. The basic structure organizing society is no longer family sharing or tribal solidarity, but an economy of matter that is stored, measured, turned into debt and demanded back with interest. The bull circulates within this structure as the animal that ploughs the field, the sacred body in the temple and the stamp on the metal; in the astrological narrative, the fixity, resistance and attachment to matter attributed to the sign of Taurus are read against such a backdrop behind the historical records.

The Age of Aries — Warrior Kings, Ram’s Horn and Exit from the Labyrinth

The Aries archetype represents the urge to initiate, the energy of attack and thrust, individual courage and warrior identity. In the perspective of the astrological ages, the Age of Aries is placed roughly in the 2160–0 BCE band, and this period is read as the time slice in which warrior kings, imperial powers of conquest and monotheistic belief forms with sharp identities come to the fore. The structure organizing society is now shaped not so much through the silent weight of granaries as through the movement of armies, the pushing of borders and the sharpening of the “us–them” distinction.

At the technological level, lightweight, two-wheeled chariots developed from the Late Bronze Age onwards and later the spread of iron weapons tightly bind military power to political authority. Egypt, the Hittites, Assyria and other regional powers are known for their elite chariot corps; these units provide both speed and psychological superiority. Archaeological and historical studies show that the chariot, as a kind of “mobile platform”, gave archers an advantage and that kings often had themselves depicted on their chariots (🔗). (Wikipedia) This technological superiority turns the Aries quality of “making the first move, going ahead” into collective expression: the kingdom defines itself by the attack power of its army. In the Late Bronze and Early Iron Ages, battering rams used to breach city walls and heavy gates are also part of this universe of war technology; a thick log with a metal fitting in the shape of a ram’s head on its end is swung repeatedly against walls and gates, and in this way the Aries archetype’s quality of “entering first with the head, opening by breaking through the obstacle” is concretized at the level of engineering.

Along with this military revolution, it is seen that the image of the ram and ram’s horn rises in religious symbolism. In ancient Egypt, gods such as Amun and Khnum are sometimes depicted with ram’s heads or ram’s horns; this presents a figure in which creative power and royal authority unite. In the West Semitic tradition, the ram as the animal to be sacrificed is the symbol of both power and substitution. In the Abraham narrative, the motif of the ram sacrificed at the last moment instead of the child turns this animal into a kind of figure of “life that takes the place of another”; the death of one enables the life of the other to continue. In the Aries archetype, the intertwining of aggressiveness and sacrifice in this way is striking: the animal that walks with its head lowered becomes identified with the sacrificial victim that gives up its life when necessary. In the same period, the spread around both the Mediterranean and the Near East of depictions of ram’s-head-shaped battering rams on door knockers, temple decorations and seals places this animal in the collective imagination not only as sacrifice and divine power but also as a force that “opens doors”, that is, initiates a passage to a new situation, even if by force.

In the context of ancient Israel, the ram’s horn has one more special resonance: the shofar. This instrument, made mostly from a ram’s horn, is used both on the battlefield and in the temple. Ancient texts and historical studies show that the shofar was a symbol for the enthronement of kings, the call to war, the proclamation of religious festivals and, especially on important days such as Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, repentance and awakening (🔗). (Wikipedia) Here the ram’s horn literally becomes the “wake up” sound; it calls the community either to battle or to inner reckoning. In the same age, the battering ram going at the front on the battlefield and the sound of the ram’s horn heard from behind work together like two faces of the same archetype: one breaks the stone gate, the other breaks the threshold in people’s minds.

One of the most important organizing forces of the Age of Aries on the political plane is the formation process of the monotheistic Jewish tradition. Historians emphasize that the religion of ancient Israel did not take a monotheistic form for a long time, and that it evolved from a structure that acknowledged the existence of surrounding gods but especially exalted YHWH as the god of Israel into a more strict monotheism. In this evolution, traumatic experiences such as conflicts with the Assyrian and Babylonian empires, the destruction of Jerusalem and the Babylonian exile are decisive (🔗). (Wikipedia) The idea of “One God–one people” carries the Aries archetype’s qualities of “drawing clear boundaries, sharpening identity, fighting if necessary” onto the theological level. God also becomes an actor who fights on the stage of history, leads armies and gives meaning to victories and defeats.

On the mythical face of this age, again the Minotaur story from Crete stands like a symbolic scene of the transition from Taurus to Aries. The myth tells of the bull-headed monster living in the palace’s underground labyrinth, fed with young victims sent from Athens, and of Theseus, who kills it and manages to escape from the labyrinth (🔗). (Wikipedia) The Minotaur can be read as the dark face of the Age of Taurus’s controlled yet still fearsome material power; the labyrinth is the intricate structure of the old palace–ritual order. Theseus, on the other hand, is suited to Aries character: with his individual courage he descends below, kills the monster and, using the thread given by Ariadne, ascends to the sun, where a new political order is possible. As the “hero-king” figure of Athens, he inaugurates the new ram order that ends the old bull order.

At the end of the Age of Aries, when looking at the map of the Eastern Mediterranean and the Near East, one sees successive imperial powers of conquest: Neo-Assyrian, Neo-Babylonian, Persian, followed by Macedonian and Roman dominions. Each is defined by expanding armies, constant campaigns and increasingly centralized power structures. The ideological cement of these structures is belief forms that see themselves as privileged in history and explain victory with righteousness and defeat with divine wrath. In the astrological reading, the qualities attributed to the sign of Aries—“to be first, to be leader, to open the way by fighting”—echo one another in this period in military technology, theology and mythological narratives. The structure that organized the Age of Taurus around accumulated matter here gives way to a world organized around movement, attack and identity.

The Age of Pisces — Faith, Salvation and the Digital Aquarium

The Pisces archetype represents faith, surrender, mercy, becoming a victim and the desire to merge with a wider whole where individual boundaries dissolve. Within the framework of the astrological ages, the Age of Pisces is generally associated with the period starting around the beginning of the Common Era and extending roughly to the 2160s. This time slice is characterized by the birth and spread of the great world religions, the institutionalization of mystical traditions and, in the modern era, the emergence of a “digital aquarium” in which faith and emotion circulate through global networks.

On the threshold of the Age of Pisces, we encounter Siddhartha Gautama, living on the Indian subcontinent, who would later be known as the Buddha. Research places his life roughly between the sixth and fifth centuries BCE (🔗). (Wikipedia) The teaching of the Buddha, shaped around the Four Noble Truths and the Eightfold Path, diagnoses life as “full of suffering” and traces the source of this suffering to desire, its solution to renunciation of desire, compassion and inner awakening. Although he historically lived a few centuries before the beginning of the Age of Pisces, thematically he carries the essence of the Pisces archetype: the world is an ocean of suffering; salvation lies not in learning to swim in this ocean but in understanding the nature of the water.

In the first centuries after the beginning of the Common Era, Christianity emerges in the multi-religious, polytheistic world of the Roman Empire. This movement, shaped around the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, spreads rapidly especially among ordinary people and slaves with its discourse of love, forgiveness and “salvation” (🔗). (Wikipedia) In times of persecution, the first Christians use the fish symbol, ichthys, to identify themselves and mark their meeting places. The letters of the Greek word for fish form an acrostic of the expression “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior”. Simple fish signs carved into catacombs and walls are like the silent signature lines of a community; they carry the underwater, hidden and at the same time unity-seeking nature of the Pisces archetype (🔗). (earlychurchhistory.org) Here the fish is both a symbol of Christ and the secret sign that enables his followers to recognize one another.

In the early seventh century, the birth of Islam on the Arabian Peninsula adds a new dimension to the structuring of the Age of Pisces around faith. The revelations given to the Prophet Muhammad lead to the shaping of a community centered on Mecca and Medina, around monotheistic tawhid, moral responsibility and awareness of the Hereafter. In a short time, this belief system becomes a framework that organizes society on religious, legal and political levels; the concept of ummah points to a new collective identity founded on a bond of faith rather than blood ties (🔗). (Wikipedia) In the Pisces archetype, the idea of individual boundaries dissolving in a divine totality becomes concrete here both in discourses of repentance and surrender and in a faith community with its own internal law.

In addition to these three great religions, many mystical traditions and institutions emerge or gain strength during and before the Age of Pisces. Buddhist monastic communities, Christian monasteries and orders, and Islamic Sufi circles present withdrawal from worldly property and power as the ideal model of a life devoted to God or enlightenment. The monastery, tekke or sangha is a “spiritual island” withdrawn from the noise of the outside world and possessing its own internal rhythm and ritual. The motifs of “withdrawal from the world, inner depth, self-dedication” in the Pisces archetype gain continuity in these institutional structures. These traditions also keep strong the emphasis within religions on mercy, compassion and universality; they seek to show that faith is not only dogma but also a state and a form of relationship.

In the final phase of the Age of Pisces, with technological and social transformations, a new carrier of the flow of faith and emotion appears: social media. From the beginning of the twenty-first century, platforms such as MySpace, later Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and similar bring billions of people together at the same time in a gigantic online space where they watch, comment on, approve or reject one another. Analyses by the World Economic Forum and similar organizations emphasize that a very large proportion of people with internet access are social media users and that these platforms have transformed news consumption, politics, relationship formation and identity construction (🔗). (World Economic Forum) In this sense, social media is a final interpretation of the Pisces archetype: now it is not water but data that flows, yet the perceived environment still resembles a transparent tank. Everyone looks into everyone else’s life, everyone displays their selected frames, everyone lives with the dilemma of being visible to some extent and being tired of being seen.

This digital aquarium can also be read as the “glass terrarium” finale of the Age of Pisces. On the one hand there is the possibility of empathy and solidarity that transcends geographical boundaries; on the other, manipulation, disinformation and emotional fatigue. Even faith communities now exist, discuss, fragment and reunite in online spaces. The dissolution, loss of boundaries and collective affect attributed to the sign of Pisces in the astrological narrative here take on a concrete and technical form: contents scrolling up and down timelines cause millions of people to encounter similar images at the same time and to be swept up in similar waves of anger and joy. Thus the Age of Pisces hands over to the Age of Aquarius the “salvation” question it opened with the birth of the great religions, by transforming it in the age of social media into the question “what do we really believe and where do we get these beliefs from”.

The Age of Aquarius — Electricity, networks, capitalism and artificial intelligence

The Aquarius archetype, in classical astrology, is associated with humanity as a whole, with networks and collective spaces, with sudden ruptures and mental revolutions. As a fixed air sign, Aquarius points on the one hand to a highly abstract and conceptual mental realm, and on the other to the technological infrastructures that bring these abstract designs down into the world. For this reason, in the astrological literature, the Age of Aquarius is frequently mentioned together with technology, leaps in consciousness, social movements and global networks; although there is debate about exactly when the age began, the great majority see the period we are going through at least as the “prologue” of this new archetype (🔗). (Academy of Life Planning)

To understand this prologue, it is necessary to think about Aquarius’s two axes together. On one side is the process of modern capitalism in which capital breaks away from material objects and turns into numbers and signs; on the other is the technological line of electricity, telecommunications, computers and the internet that turns the planet into a single nervous system. In historical narratives of capitalism, the commercial empires, joint-stock companies, exchanges and paper money system that emerged in Europe in the 16th–18th centuries stand out as the turning point at which value was detached from the grain and metal weight of the Age of Taurus and bound instead to abstract information and expectation (🔗). (Swiss Cyber Institute) The pile-and-stock logic of Taurus evolves in Aquarius into a logic of network and flow; wealth now becomes not a granary but the numbers on a screen, a stream of data, the vibration of algorithmic prices.

In the nineteenth century, with the birth of electricity, telegraph and telephone, a genuinely physical nervous system is articulated onto these abstract flows. Electrical impulses traveling through copper cables laid on the ocean floor make near-simultaneous messaging between continents possible; subsequently, radio, television and satellite technologies connect every corner of the world to every other with invisible wave fields. Historians often describe the telegraph as the “grandfather of the internet”; for the first time, information breaks away from the human body and caravan speed and turns into a flow that is independent and can be transported rapidly (🔗). (VentCube) Thus the electrical and networked images of the Aquarius archetype had already settled into world history well before the beginning of the twentieth century.

When one looks at the distinct turning points of today’s internet age, it is seen that most of them coincide with transits of slow-moving planets through Aquarius. Saturn’s entry into Aquarius occurred both at the beginning of the 1960s and again between 1991–1994; the second transit coincides with the period when the modern Web was opened to the public. In 1991 the World Wide Web software developed at CERN was announced over the internet by Tim Berners-Lee, and the web server–browser pair began to transform the internet from a military–academic network into an accessible information space for everyone (🔗). (CERN) Here Saturn represents the force that “sets structure, protocol, standard”, while Aquarius represents the global network that carries this structure; protocols such as HTTP, URL and HTML, which today have become the lifelines of life, were institutionalized in this period.

Uranus’s progress into Aquarius from the mid-1990s overlaps with the explosive phase of the internet. In astrology, Uranus is associated with sudden breaks, shocking innovations and rebellions; when it moves through Aquarius, it expresses this innovation particularly through technology, science and social networks (🔗). (evolvingdoorastro.com) In the same years commercial internet service providers multiplied, competition between web browsers began, email and search engines entered daily life; in a short time thousands and then hundreds of thousands of websites were launched. The swelling of the dot-com bubble at the end of the 1990s and its bursting in the early 2000s can be read as a typical example of this Uranus–Aquarius story: excessive expectation around internet companies, rapidly rising stock prices and then a sharp crash; a sudden uplift and an equally sudden correction.

Neptune’s transit through Aquarius between 1998–2012 determines the emotional and imaginal texture of the digital world. Neptune is associated with the dissolution of boundaries, idealism, illusion and mystical longing; its passage through Aquarius amplifies the collective dreams projected onto technology. In astrological interpretations this period is associated with the rise of social media, the proliferation of avatars and virtual identities, and the dazzling of the internet with its promise of “infinite connection and freedom” (🔗). (The Astrology Place) Historically, too, platforms such as SixDegrees in 1997, followed by MySpace and LinkedIn in 2003, Facebook in 2004 and Twitter in 2006, appeared one after another; social media, at first the toy of certain communities, in a short time became the everyday habit of the masses (🔗). (Landingi) The Neptune–Aquarius combination nourishes the idea of a “digital utopia” as a network dream in which everyone is connected to everyone, identity is rewritten with filters, and reality and representation intermingle.

Jupiter’s transit again through Aquarius in 2009 coincides with the expansion phase of this social network universe. Jupiter enlarges, exaggerates, multiplies; when it moves through Aquarius, it enlarges technological and collective structures in particular. In the same years the spread of smartphones and mobile internet, the number of social media users coming to be expressed in hundreds of millions, and the rhythm of daily life now being determined by notifications can be read as the historical projection of this symbolic movement of expansion. Studies tracking the history of social media describe the late 2000s and early 2010s as “the turning point of the transition from blog and forum culture to fully fledged social networks” (🔗). (Milk & Tweed)

The year 2020 is read as a sharp threshold on both the astrological and historical planes, with the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius. This conjunction symbolizes the permanent transition of a roughly twenty-year cycle into the air element and is discussed in the astrological literature as a “transition into the age of air” (🔗). (Astrodienst) In the same year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the whole world was forced in a very short time to adapt to remote work, online education and meetings, and digital supply chains. Within a few months, practices that had previously been considered “alternative” became the main channel of social life. Whatever the country, for a large part of the world work, school, friendships and even rituals were reorganized inside screens. This transformation made the Aquarius archetype’s theme of “breaking away from physical space and coming together on the network” visible to a degree rarely seen in history.

One of the heaviest signs of the Aquarius Age prologue is associated with Pluto’s entry into this sign. In astrology Pluto is connected with deep transformations, power relations, death–rebirth processes and the emergence of what has been suppressed; it remains in a sign for about twenty years and initiates profound structural changes in the areas it passes through. According to modern ephemerides, Pluto entered Aquarius for the first time, briefly, in 2023, then entered again in 2024 and will continue to move through this sign until the early 2040s (🔗; 🔗). (Astrodienst) Astrological interpretations associate Pluto’s transit through Aquarius particularly with deep power struggles and restructurings in Aquarius-themed areas such as technology, data, surveillance, collective movements, human rights and space exploration (🔗). (People.com)

In this period, leaps in the field of artificial intelligence bring onto the stage in a striking way the Aquarius archetype’s themes of “collective mind” and “human–machine hybrid”. Reports tracing the history of artificial intelligence show that developments in machine learning in the 1990s laid the groundwork for the rise of deep learning and neural networks in the 2010s, and that throughout the 2010s deep learning architectures were decisive in areas such as image recognition, language processing and game playing (🔗; 🔗). (JRC Publications Repository) From 2018 onwards, large language models based on transformer architecture, and from after 2022 user interfaces that open these models to everyday users, took artificial intelligence out of the laboratories of specialists and placed it into everyone’s pocket; in a short time hundreds of millions of people began to interact with systems that can generate text, images, sound and video (🔗). (TechRadar) Major news organizations and scientific debates draw attention, alongside the rapidly increasing capacity of artificial intelligence, to its ethical, ecological and political risks; on the one hand the shaking of job security by automation, on the other the increasing possibilities of surveillance and manipulation come onto the agenda (🔗). (Le Monde.fr)

This picture shows the Age of Aquarius as a kind of abstract and digital sum of the concretized archetypes of the previous ages. The home and shell of the Age of Cancer now continue as digital identities stored in data centers and personal devices; the language explosion of Gemini turns into global-scale translation systems and multilingual networks; the property-and-money archetype of Taurus is carried into financial algorithms and crypto assets; the warrior kings of Aries become cyber attacks and information wars; the faith and surrender themes of Pisces go on living as collective affects spreading through social media feeds and as digital communities. On top of all these older layers, Aquarius offers a new organizing nucleus that increasingly binds the human species to the networks, electrical and numerical infrastructures that carry it.

Conclusion — Weave, cycle and leap between ages

It is healthier to think of the concept of Astrological Age not as a fate calendar dictated from the sky, but as an archetypal map that helps us to read human history. Although this model, which divides time into periods of roughly 2,160 years based on the precession of the equinoxes, is controversial from the standpoint of scientific astronomy, it is a framework that has been used in the astrological tradition for at least two thousand years (🔗; 🔗). (Medium) Instead of making a direct claim of causality, this framework can function as a lens to make visible the idea of “the archetypal core of the structures that organize society”.

Seen through this lens, the Age of Cancer represents the transition of human communities from hunter–gatherer mobility to settled life, the establishment of the first villages and towns, the first “collective shells”, and the peak of mother goddess cults. House, temple and tomb merge within the same spatial weave; Cancer’s nurturing–protective womb becomes concrete both geographically and culturally. In the Age of Gemini, sound enters into these shells; proto-languages form, trade routes and language networks multiply, and the myths of the Divine Twins describe the permeability between two poles of the mind, two brothers, two viewpoints. Humans begin to carry both their own language and their neighbor’s; the mind itself becomes a small interpreting booth.

The Age of Taurus builds the heavy body of earth and matter upon this sound. Temple economies, stock and debt records, bull-deity cults and finally the invention of coin establish an order that concentrates value in certain objects. What belongs to whom and which obligation is transferred to whom is now recorded not only in memory but also in clay, in metal and in ritual. With the Age of Aries, this accumulated matter and order open onto the energy of mobile armies, warrior kings and imperial powers of conquest. The initiating fire of Aries shows itself in many realms, from chariot-based war technologies to iron weapons, from images of a monotheistic warrior God to narratives of a “chosen people”; the killing of the Minotaur and escape from the labyrinth can be read as a mythical scene of the birth of new Aries-like political forms from within the old bull order.

The Age of Pisces offers an answer, through water and faith, to a world wearied by this fire and property. The birth of the great religious traditions, themes of salvation and mercy, the spread of mystical institutions describe a long period in which human communities seek meaning not in material accumulation but in an invisible divine order. The Pisces archetype of dissolution and surrender softens the hard boundaries of earlier ages by releasing the individual into a vast sea of faith. In the last centuries of this age, with the rise of social media, the Pisces theme reappears in the form of a “digital ocean”; a vast aquarium arises in which everyone watches everyone else, emotions spread like waves, and identities become fluid avatars.

The Age of Aquarius, in turn, is emerging as an abstracting stage that reorganizes all this accumulation through the metaphors of electricity and network. As Cancer’s home is carried into cloud storage, Gemini’s language into multilingual artificial intelligence systems, Taurus’s coin into algorithmic financial instruments, Aries’s army into cybersecurity and information warfare, and Pisces’s currents of faith into the algorithmic flow economy, the Aquarius archetype cross-weaves all of them within a “planetary operating system”. Pluto’s long settlement in Aquarius points to a period in the coming decades when the power centers, shadows and breaking points of this operating system will be made more visible (🔗; 🔗). (Astrodienst)

The strength of the narrative of the Astrological Ages comes not from proposing exact dates, but from making perceptible the resonance between historical data and archetypal themes. This long line stretching from the stone walls of Jericho to the dot-com bubble, from the samurai-faced crab to the social media aquarium, from the Divine Twins to artificial intelligence models, is also the history of the ways in which humanity organizes itself. Each age does not completely erase the one before it; Cancer’s shell goes on living in nation-state borders, Taurus’s stock logic in data centers, Pisces’s surrender in online communities. To think the Age of Aquarius means precisely to notice the new networks, new concentrations of power and new risks of fracture being built upon this layered legacy.

For this reason, the Age of Aquarius must be seen not only as a “age of technology” but also as a new era of self-questioning on the scale of humanity. As networks expand, questions such as which data are collected by whom, how which algorithm affects whose life, and with what assumptions which artificial intelligence system is trained will be forced onto the agenda not only of experts but of everyone. To put it in astrological language, the promise of Aquarius is a liberated, egalitarian, cooperative planetary society; its shadow is a network prison that is overly abstracted, reduces the human to a data point, and concentrates control in invisible centers. Which way the curve will bend between these two possibilities will be determined not so much by the symbols in the sky as by the collective decisions and practices on earth.

The map of the Astrological Ages can remain a tool of thought that, while we make these decisions, enables us to look at human history from a wide angle and to remember the archetypal trace each age has left. A civilization that can think together Cancer’s home, Gemini’s language, Taurus’s matter, Aries’s will, Pisces’s mercy and Aquarius’s intelligence may begin to see its own evolution not just as a fate that happens to it, but as a design that can be worked on.