Age of Aquarius

In the 1920s, Jung devoted himself to the study of gnosis—which he had encountered earlier, in 1912—and alchemy. It was Jung, more than anyone else, who rescued the ancient Hermetic pursuit from intellectual oblivion. Another Hermetic practice he employed was astrology, which he began to explore seriously around the time of his split with Freud. Jung informed his closest associates that horoscopes were part of his therapeutic practice, but in the dark days of World War II, he discovered their broader application. In a 1940 letter to H.G. Baynes, Jung describes a vision he had in 1918 in which he saw "fire falling like rain from heaven and consuming the cities of Germany." He felt that 1940 was a decisive year, noting that the year arrived "when we entered the meridian of the first star in the sign of Aquarius." He called it "the warning earthquake of the New Age." He was familiar with the precession of the equinoxes, the apparent retrograde movement of the sun between the signs of the zodiac. Acting as a backdrop for the sun during the vernal equinox, each sign gives its name to an "era"—called a "Platonic month"—which lasts approximately 2,150 years. In his strange book "Aion" (1951), Jung argued that the "individuation" of Western civilization as a whole fulfills the template of "Platonic months" and represents a kind of "precession of archetypes." Fish symbolism surrounds Jesus because he was the central symbol of the Age of Pisces, the astrological sign of the fish. Earlier ages—Taurus and Aries—were characterized by bull and ram symbolism. The coming age is the Age of Aquarius, the water bearer. In a conversation with Margaret Ostrowski-Sachs, a friend of Hermann Hesse, Jung admitted that he had kept this "secret knowledge" to himself for many years and revealed it only once in "Aion." He wasn't sure if he was "allowed" to do so, but during his illness he received "confirmation" that he was.Although the occult scholar Gerald Massey and the French esotericist Paul Le Cour had already spoken of the coming Age of Aquarius, Jung was certainly the most prestigious mainstream figure to speak of it, and it was through him that the idea became a staple of the counterculture of the 1960s and 1970s. This was largely due to his comments on the subject in his book Flying Saucers: The Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky (1958), in which he suggested that UFOs were simply mandalas from outer space. During his crisis, Jung encountered the image of the mandala, the Sanskrit "magic circle," as a symbol of psychic wholeness, and suggested that "flying saucers" were grand archetypal projections, created by the psychic tensions generated by the Cold War that had erupted between Russia and America. The Western world, he argued, was in a state of nervous breakdown, and UFOs were the only way to relieve the stress. Jung wrote prophetically: "My conscience as a psychiatrist demands of me to fulfill my duty and to prepare those few who will listen to me for the coming events that are associated with the end of an era... As we know from the history of ancient Egypt, there are symptoms of psychic changes that always appear at the end of one Platonic month and the beginning of the next. These seem to be changes in the constellation of psychic dominants, archetypes, or "Gods," as they are called, that bring about long-awaited changes in the collective psyche. This transformation began with the transition from the Age of Taurus to the Age of Aries, then from the Age of Aries to the Age of Pisces, the beginning of which is associated with the rise of Christianity. We are approaching this great change as we enter the Age of Aquarius..." Ten years later, the band The Fifth Dimension (whose first name was the cosmic character of Mystic Sixties) released a hit in the hippie musical "Hair" containing traces of Jungian ideas, and millions of people around the world believed they were witnessing the "dawn of the Age of Aquarius."