There is this idea that the current, or at least coming, age of mankind is symbolized by the sign of Aquarius, and there are many diverging interpretations with regards to what it means. I'm not very involved with Astrology so my take isn't worth much, but I still find it valuable to articulate it to myself at least.
The first thing to note is that I focus on the seven traditional "planets", or celestical bodies for our ancestors considered the sun and the moon to be planets too. These seven planets can be ordered in terms of the Chaldean order, by the speed of motion as viewed from Earth, and those are: 1) Moon 2) Mercury 3) Venus 4) Sun 5) Mars 6) Jupiter and 7) Saturn.
These seven planets are what gives us the names of the 7 days of the week, and this correspondence is apparent in French for some of them: 1) Monday = Moon 2) Tuesday (Mardi in French) = Mars 3) Wednesday (Mercredi) = Mercury 4) Thursday (Jeudi) = Jupiter 5) Friday (Vendredi) = Venus 6) Saturday = Saturn 7) Sunday = Sun
As a side note, if you dig into Hermeticism, one of the key idea is that of correspondences between various systems, and in particular, there is a common correspondence between the Tree of Life and the 7 traditional planets. The Tree of Life contains 10 spheres (or sephirots) which symbolize the path of manifestation, from the Absolute at the top, to the "mundane" plane of material reality at the bottom. The 7 traditional planets and the Chaldean order are relevant here because you can associate all sephirots, excluding the top 2, to respectively Earth as the last sephirot, and then the 7 traditional planets in the Chaldean order, to go all the way to Saturn.
The whole thing about Hermeticism is not very important, all we need to concern ourselves here is the symbolism of Saturn, the last planet in the Chaldean order. In this system, Saturn is the gate of time, and because it's the last planet, it's also associated with Death, a recognition of our own mortality and our finite time on this planet. As a result, Saturn is a strict teacher, one that cuts through all of our bullshit so that we may grow.
You might have heard of the dreaded "Saturn return", an event that happens (roughly) every 29.5 years when Saturn returns to the exact spot as it was when you were born. I don't know enough about Astrology to know the specific details of the relevance of the event, but by and large, you can imagine that coming back in contact with the planet which symbolizes time and death is not pleasant for most people, who are incredibly unconscious and in denial of their own mortality.
Why is Saturn so important? Because in the traditional system of Astrology, the sign Aquarius is associated with the planet Saturn, not Uranus. I do not know what Aquarians are like in general, but as an Aquarian, I relate a lot with the idea that they would be ruled by Saturn, because this is definitely how I feel about Life and those around me. Most people are utterly lost in a sea of confusion, they have no idea what's important, and they implicitly believe that they will live forever by the way that they are consistently surprised at people's death—Did you hear that he died? How surprising! I thought he would live forever.
I don't know whether Death is good or not. But I know that he(she?) is a very strict teacher. The lesson is the important part at the end of the day, which is of course the love and the clarity about what matters. It's very to become complacent in life, to lose track of what matters, and to take those around us for granted. Death cuts right through this whole confusion, and we realize when we lose someone just how much time we wasted on trivial matters, and how much we love people.
A mature person doesn't wait until someone around them dies to tell them how much they love them, they embody their love, probably because they keep death close to them. This is why we have this image of occultists putting a skull on their altar, because they want to be reminded of their own death, they want to stay with what matters, not the endless sea of distractions of those around them.
And so you can now guess at what my interpretation of the age of Aquarius is. I believe in Spengler's views of societal collapse, that we are now entering the Winter of our civilization, and that there is nothing we can do to reserve this trend. If we were mature as a collective, we could decline in a more controlled way. We could put whatever energy fossil fuels still provide us with to create more lasting infrastructure, we could steer culture towards the kind of activities which really bring us fulfillment, such as relationships, participating in a community, individual and collective spirituality, and meaningful work.
We could, but we won't, because as a collective we are incredibly immature. Not just on a spiritual level, this should be obvious by the fact that even people in their 30s and 40s are in many ways still teenagers spiritually speaking, but also mentally. The collective attention span is reaching unprecedented lows due to how many people have their attention constantly hijacked. How can someone who is unable to sit in silence for even a few minutes look at the totality of their life with clarity and maturity? They can't. Which is why the coming decades will be incredibly painful.
Our collective realization of death, and the limitations of not just technological progress, but also the mind trying to control the body, will not be evenly distributed, but at least they have a possibility of being realized at scale due to the sheer pain of the coming failures of the modern world. I don't know how the modern world will break down, but considering how much energy we need to sustain anything, most of which comes from non-renewable fossil fuels, we can expect that firstly, the internet and global supply chains will break down, which is already a huge blow to most modernized people who are utterly reliant on both of them to even eat.
We can also expect that food will be difficult to come around, as local agriculture has been consistently moving towards big multinationals, due to the pressures of the market and of regulations, on top of our dependence on complex machinery and fertilizers (which also come from fossil fuels) to maintain industrial agriculture.
And perhaps we can also expect a lot of finger pointing and internal violence, as people will do everything they can to secure whatever shred of power they can in a chaotic world. I don't think something as extreme as Mad Max will come into reality, but it is not that crazy to imagine that there could be organized gangs looting cities and whatnot, considering the costs of maintaining social order.
In other words, I expect the Age of Aquarius to be an incredibly painful but important collective lesson. Just like most people die while clinging as hard as they can to life, mobilizing tons of medical resources just to stay "alive" a few more years, which is to say strapped to a hospital bed and plugged in to all kinds of devices that don't even allow you to feel your body, most people will not face the collective death with grace, all the contrary.
But this is an opportunity for growth. What can the people who manage to look at all the atrocities head-on, accept them, and still believe in the good of other people and the Universe at large build together? Death is not a popular teacher, but sometimes it is the only one we have, because we can never run away from its lessons.
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2025-12-29