The Official Dawning of the Age of Aquarius - it’s NOW!
When the sun rises on the morning of Dec. 22, after the long and dark Solstice night, we will see the first light of the Age of Aquarius, and a new 2000-year epoch will begin. We are privileged to see this. Only a few beings living on this planet were here 2000 years ago, at the birth of the Piscean Age. The sequoias, bristlecone pines, cedars and redwood trees bore witness to that. On Tuesday morning, the long-heralded Age of Aquarius will have officially begun. This alone is worthy of a pause and consideration. But contained within this dawn are 3 other significant cycles that directly shape and effect our lives on Earth. Like Russian matryoshka dolls one is nested in the next, and they all begin at this threshold of the Winter Solstice.
There is an astronomical and astrological event in our evening skies that initiates these 4 cycles, which range in duration from 1 to 2000 years. The conjunction of the planets Jupiter and Saturn in the zodiac sign of Aquarius is the catalyst, and is visible just at dark, in the southwestern sky, near the horizon, now and thru the New Year. Without going into too much “Astrology-speak” I’d like to introduce the players so you can appreciate the rare opportunity we have. I will be using broad strokes as I describe the planets, signs, etc.
The planet Jupiter is the largest in our solar system, and brings with it an enormous sense of confidence, optimism, faith, generosity, and opportunity. We see the big picture. It makes things big, larger than life. This can be great----we feel inspired, but it can also make mountains out of mole hills. Under Jupiter’s influence we can expand, but many time people leap before they look.
Saturn is one of the slower-moving planets, and brings to us the principles of discipline, hard work, self-reliance, and responsibility. It rules structures, especially large social ones, and always asks us to be practical. Saturn invented the concept that you have to repeat something 10,000 times to master it, and likes being the authority. He can be isolating, judgmental, dissatisfied, and lonely. But his too is a gift of faith, not inspired, but earned thru efforts that have been tested and are true.
These two planets meet every 20 years, and when they do a new focus and agenda is opened for us humans, and the rest of the beings on this planet. We have a new vision of possibilities and new structures to build, or sometimes, old ones to dismantle and replace. Jupiter and Saturn are a great team. They bring us the vision and hope as well as the diligence to make our vision real. They offer us the hard work miracles, the disciplined growth that works through the challenges and gets it done.
On Dec. 21, they will meet in Aquarius and embark on building the values held by that sign. First and foremost, Aquarius is about personal freedom: the freedom to pursue individuality, claiming its own uniqueness, authority, and value. It is the great liberator or the rebel, just depending where you sit. It wants equality and justice for itself and everyone else, too. It is It can be eccentric, and conformity is its bane, as is” the same old, same old.” It has genius, mad or brilliant, that comes from the ability to see and think outside the box. Innovation is one of the gifts Aquarius offers, truth another. Technology is in its wheelhouse. It serves humanity but isn’t always comfortable with its own humanness. It can be stubborn, cold, alienating, and adolescent, being different for differents sake. It holds within it the tension between the individual and the collective.
As the planets meet on Solstice night, we begin the annual cycle of light and dark on our planet. These tides of light and dark have been marked and honored across time and cultures, all over the world. Here in the northern hemisphere, darkness has reached its depth, and we celebrate the time of lengthening days. My Celtic ancestors would gather with their entire tribe or village, around a fire to keep company through this longest night, and to sing to their Goddess whom they envision as laboring through the night to deliver the Sun Child at dawn. The return of spring and green times was promised, and they pondered what they wanted to plant, tend, and harvest in the year ahead.
This Solstice night also begins the 20-year cycle of Jupiter and Saturn in Aquarius: we are given the task and the opportunity to bring to our cultures and social structures a balance of attitudes and behaviors that respects each individual within the framework of the collective. One needs to look no further than the headlines to see the Aquarian agenda. COVID has highlighted the impact that one individual has on the whole. Politics as well has shown us the effect of hyper-individualism. George Floyd’s murder ignited our society to look at the institutional racism, economic disparity, and social injustice we live with. And it is not just in our country, these attitudes exist throughout the entire world. Our climate crisis shows how we have objectified and systematically disregarded the natural world at the peril of our own species’ survival. We have marginalized our planet. What we call “resources” indigenous peoples across the globe call “family,” treating trees, animals, rocks, and water like dear and respected relatives. Aquarius urges us to create a balanced, accommodating unity, including all by embracing diversity as a strength and a resource of innovation. Then from this unity, we each embrace our responsibility to the wellness of the whole.
This conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius is also the beginning of a 200-year cycle of the planets meeting in the zodiac signs associated with the air element. Astrology divides the signs into four elements: Earth, Air, Fire and Water, each element having its own qualities and purpose. So, what does air signify? Air is the mental and intellectual element of the zodiac: thinking, speaking, writing, communication in all forms. We pay attention to air. Air is laden with information. Our physical air is, too. Think of an owl’s hoot, a car honking, the cool mist of a waterfall, a chain saw’s buzz, a good lecture, the heat from a bed of coals. It connects our inner world with the outer world. And vice versa. We live in an ocean of air shared with all beings on the Earth. Your next breath my contain oxygen from a tree 3 miles away, and carbon dioxide from a whale’s exhalation 2 days ago. Air can be a sweet caress, and delightful “aha” or powerfully destructive, like a tornado. It can get lost in its own reverie, like a bee in a field of wildflowers, jumping from thought to thought, forgetting to come down to earth and tell the hive about the flowers’location. Air and ideas move things. Our focus in the next 200 years will be to develop the innovations, insights, communication, and connections that can rebalance our human social structures and deal with the consequences of global warming. This is without allowing our technology to rob us of our basic humanity, or degenerate into a big brother- type of homogenization of our lives. The best parallel is to look at the last 200-year cycle where Jupiter and Saturn met in Earth signs. It began in 1802, just as the industrial revolution was beginning to find its feet. They had harnessed water, fire, steam, coal and iron to create the machines that revolutionized how people worked and lived, and still continue to do so until today.
The dawning light of the Age of Aquarius will reveal a world not filled with” harmony and understanding” as the song predicted, but a world and global society crippled by the polarity of racism, sexism, religion, social injustice, economic injustice and disparity, politics, and hyper- individualism. All of these are the eternal shadow of our human nature. But light and shadow are a bonded pair, and these polarities, these “traditional values” we overtly or unconsciously participate in can be transformed. Aquarius’s job is to FREE THE LIGHT! -- the light within each one of us. Every one of us is called to do our inner work to break down this matrix. It is literally killing us and the planet that sustains life for billions of others including the non-human beings. Within Aquarius is the balance between the individual and the collective. Like a coral reef, each polyp is needed to maintain the health and beauty of the whole system.
Under Aquarius the individual is empowered like no other time. And truly one person can do so much. The powerless feeling one is too small to matter will no longer hold.
As I look down the long road of the future, I cannot see the end of this 2000-year journey. I know only that we are the ones here, beginning to seed the future. It is for us to clear the land, to turn it and to prepare it. It is for us to plant the sequoias that will be here 2000 years hence. Let us sow something majestic, that will sustain many with its food, shelter, and oxygen. We will need to be patient. It will take a few years for the seed to quicken and emerge. We must be persistent in tending this life, watering, and protecting it, and pulling out the weeds of our human nature, so that we might entrust it, as our legacy, to those who come to carry this work forward.
I invite you to pause this holiday season and take a moment to consider the portent threshold we stand on. Individually, let us roll up our sleeves and do our work, inner and outer, in the part of the world within our reach. Collectively, let us envision our hopes for our world, bring forth our hearts’ longing, and sing, maybe to the Goddess, and to each other, our songs of light and courage as we plant the sequoias and the crops of the future in the very fertile soil of this pivotal time and “let the sun shine, let the sun shine in…..”