Aeon switches
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Here's a little exercise I did with the Astrological Ages. Much of the info is from Wikipedia. The dates are rough estimates.
10,600 BC to 8,400 BC – Leo (Aquarius)
A “Golden Age”, intensely solar. Intense global warming, sea level rise (300 ft), earliest carved oil lamps.
8,400 BC to 6,200 BC – Cancer (Capricorn)
“The Age of the Great Mother”. An age of sea navigation, pottery, early domestication of animals. Widespread mother goddess worship.
6,200 BC to 4,100 BC – Gemini (Sagittarius)
“Age of Communication, Trade”. Development of writing systems. Adoption of the wheel for transportation.
4,100 BC to 1,900 BC – Taurus (Scorpio)
“Age of Agriculture”. Calf worship, the use of the bull for agriculture and architecture. The death-fixation of Ancient Egyptian religion.
1,900 BC to 200 AD – Aries (Libra)
“Age of War”. Ram worship, the rise of the Israelite people, the period of Judges.
200 AD to 2,400 AD – Pisces (Virgo)
“Age of Christianity”. Christian fish, “fishers of men” proselytizing, virgin god.
2,400 AD – 4600 AD – Aquarius (Leo)
Global warming, sea level rise. Age of technological visionaries? (The water bearer, bringing salvation/life/spiritual truth to the masses?)
You can see the shift from the Aeon of Isis to Osiris happen sometime between 6,000 BC and 4,000 BC. The Age of Cancer is still part of the Aeon of Isis, but the seeds of the Aeon of Osiris have been planted, in the form of domestication of animals, building of early cities. The Age of Gemini expands on this with the shift to written communication. By the Age of Taurus, the shift is complete.
Similarly, we can see the Age of Pisces straddling the Aeon of Osiris and Horus. Christianity still dominates, even though people are slowly but surely rejecting the Osiris Aeon's dying redeemer symbolism, and shifting focus to the Child God in so many ways--the spriritual/psychological emphasis on the "divine child within", the emphasis on Baby Jesus over Dying Jesus, the focus on nurturing and protecting our children, etc.
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To repeat: I think any attempt to link the Astrological Ages to the Aeons in any sense at all is an error that will lead to misunderstanding both of them.
Coincidences can be fun, of course. It's important to realize that this is all they are.
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@Jim Eshelman said
"To repeat: I think any attempt to link the Astrological Ages to the Aeons in any sense at all is an error that will lead to misunderstanding both of them.
Coincidences can be fun, of course. It's important to realize that this is all they are."
Well, I think that's one of the things we're trying to get a look at.
I went through puberty in the 80s. Van Halen didn't cause it, but they were a part of it. You know? lol.
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I'm not sure when to really mark the beginning of the Aeon of Osiris. I tried to mark a wide possible beginning date based on reference to some speculation in old threads. I notice Av went back a little further based on what he thinks the beginnings of that aeon might look like.
But the discussion question for anyone interested is... What kind of historical markers* would* you look for to signify the beginnings of the large scale emergence of the Ruach in humanity?
If nothing else, let the following chart disabuse you of any thinking that the Aeons and the Astrological Ages are in any way aligned.
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@Jim Eshelman said
"To repeat: I think any attempt to link the Astrological Ages to the Aeons in any sense at all is an error that will lead to misunderstanding both of them.
Coincidences can be fun, of course. It's important to realize that this is all they are."
I hear you, and I wasn't intending to link the Ages with the Aeon in a causative sense.
I thought it was interesting, because looking at the Astrological Ages, I would guess that the Isis-Osiris Aeon shift happened sometime in the Age of Gemini or Taurus. And I've noticed elsewhere that you estimate the Aeon Shift happening sometime around 5,000 years ago, in the Age of Taurus.
A shift in Aeons is an organic thing, where a force for change builds up, reaches a tipping point, and spills over. And the Astrological Ages are like steadily shifting background motifs. I was trying to describe how the two different phenomena play against each other and overlap.
I can see how it might muddy the waters for some, but I hoped it would help understand apparent incongruities, such as why we have Christianity around in this Aeon of Horus (answer: because we're still solidly in the Age of Pisces).
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@Aion said
"I'm not sure when to really mark the beginning of the Aeon of Osiris. I tried to mark a wide possible beginning date based on reference to some speculation in old threads. I notice Av went back a little further based on what he thinks the beginnings of that aeon might look like.
But the discussion question for anyone interested is... What kind of historical markers* would* you look for to signify the beginnings of the large scale emergence of the Ruach in humanity? "
In this thread, Jim suggests that the tipping point might be where half of the population is farming rather than hunting/gathering, and suggests around 3,000 BCE
www.heruraha.net/viewtopic.php?f=86&t=6153&start=25#p39871 -
That's what I've been pondering.
Society-building. I recently had to take this course where it was emphasized that what truly separates humanity from animals is our ability to build societies. The idea was that in a society, some people make bread, some people make clothes, some people guard the walls, but everyone works together and has their own individual needs met.
To me, that speaks of Osiris in that there is a laying down of the self for the sake of the functioning of the whole - a sort of death and rebirth, a conscious transmutation of drives, if you will. There are rules, and systems, and hierarchies, or else you can go back out into the wilds and chance it there.
That's what speaks to me about it anyway.
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I will admit it's tempting to try to line it up with the astrological ages... Push that date a little further back so that you have whatever impetus for the Aeon of Osiris occurring at the end of Gemini, right before the fixed sign of Taurus - assume a pattern with the Aeon of Isis and do the same thing at the end of Virgo, right before the fixed sign of Leo...
But what before Isis? And based on what other than my own pattern-making ability projected onto an uncertain and (therefore) malleable historical record?
Anyway. These are the things I wanted to ponder.
Thanks.
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Ah, so you consider Christianity and Thelema the two, matched Piscean religions. Got it
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I think it's tricky to separate the Osirian from the Piscean elements. The self-surrender, slavery, faith, and salesman/preacher/smooth-talker motifs of Pisces pair pretty well with Osirian symbolism.
I guess the question I grapple with is, "What is both New Aeon and matched to the age of Pisces?"
Christianity and Islam are the two largest Piscean Age religions. I guess Thelema has a couple centuries to catch up and make it into even the top 10 list. But to catch on in this Age, I would think it would need to incorporate Piscean symbolism. It seems most of the Piscean religions are monotheistic. Maybe it won't catch on until the Age of Aquarius. Or maybe it will influence another religion that is timed better to the Age of Aquarius.
Or maybe Thelema isn't really a religion, and it doesn't matter, because the religious symbolism is just like clothing that changes with the seasons.
Apart from all the confusion I might be engendering, it helps distinguish between the Astrological Ages as rotating symbol-sets that dominate the cultural flavor, and Aeons as big shifts from one stage of consciousness to another.
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@Avshalom Binyamin said
"I guess the question I grapple with is, "What is both New Aeon and matched to the age of Pisces?" "
That's one of the basic reasons I think it important not to relate the two in any way. One can say the same thing about any other astrological phase or factor, but this particular one lasts two millennia so it's a little, uh, bigger.
If you want to pursue that line anyway, I think the key is in remembering that it's not just the Pisces Age but, rather, the Virgo-Pisces Age. What possible connection could Yod and Qof have to an aeon centered on Will and Love...?
More broadly, we still have a lot of drama going, and also find in Thelema deep connections to idealism, vision, and even pure religion at the mystical and magical level. (There remains a predominant tendency in humanity to equate all this stuff with both magick and mysticism. For the next four centuries, this is still the strong flow in humanity.)
Even more broadly, Virgo-Pisces is the science-religion polarity.
But I'd rather have the sign of the hawk than of the fish... In time...
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Interesting, thanks.
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@Jim Eshelman said
"Ah, so you consider Christianity and Thelema the two, matched Piscean religions. Got it
"What? Oh because Thelema began in Pisces?
Actually, I was going more along the lines of a prophet-of-the-next appearing at the cusp kind of idea - maybe kind of like the difference between the Queen of Swords and Libra - that kind of idea... only backwards.
Anyway, it's not my favorite theory. Too many holes I can't fill. But there's always the temptation to try to fill holes.
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I don't buy the cusp idea. In the Sidereal zodiac, there is no evidence I've ever seen of even one second of cusp bleed. It's a hard, sharp line.
And, for all we know, the entirety of the Horus Aeon will be in the Age of Pisces. Maybe yes, maybe no. Maybe thousands years, or maybe we'll have wrapped up this evolution in the next half millennium,
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Yeah..., I know. But the mind has to have the freedom to confirm some dead ends for itself. The reason I don't like this theory is that there IS no stage before that of being born to the Mother. I mean, maybe some fully unconscious "in utero" kind of thing, but... That's not only kind of irrelevant from a "levels of consciousness" perspective, but it also could easily be subsumed into the Isis Aeon. The Isis Aeon is simply the most Primitive.
The other reason is that the Prophet began the New Aeon himself. He wasn't prophesying the future of Aquarius. He was talking about now, or even then, with its warlording 40s and Cold War 80s, IMO.
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Jim,
When you cite these dates for Astrological 'ages' are you using the Tropical or Sidereal system? Because sidereal is much more scientifically accurate, as it accounts for the precession of the equinoxes.
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Think about it... since the definition of the ages is the time that the vernal equinox passes through a sign, and since the Tropical system places the vrenal equinox permanently at 0 degrees Aries... how could one ever calculate the ages in the Tropical system?? In the Tropical system, the vernal equinox will never be in Aquarius.
I've given the dates many places, and don't want to take the time to recalculate them when you can look them up elsewhere on this site and solunars.net. The ones that are easy to remember: the Age of Aquarius will begin in 2376 AD. The Age of Pisces began in 220 AD (and that number 220 has been important in the mysteries ever since!).
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Thanks for responding , Jim. It's just that I find it hard to visualize such things in my mind so I had to ask, even if it sounded like a stupid question. Also, someone on #Hermetics on undernet IRC said something about you devising a new type of astrology or something. Is this true?
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Nope, I didn't do it... it's the work of those who came before me. See <!-- w --><a class="postlink" href="http://www.solunars.org">www.solunars.org</a><!-- w --> for more information.