Carl Jung and the Age of Aquarius

Photo by Josh Rangel on Unsplash

This post is about Carl Jung, the Age of Aquarius and what leaving the Age of Pisces behind might mean.

What are the astrological ages?

 Approximately every 2160 years, on the first day of spring, the sun rises in a new sign. This is a new astrological age. 

The astrological ages or World Ages move backward through the zodiac.  

The Age of Taurus is estimated at 4300-2150 BCE. It included the Bronze Age, the invention of writing, the Near Eastern bull cults, and civilizations like Sumer, Ancient Egypt, and the Indus Valley.

Aries (circa 2150 BCE-1 CE) was the beginning of the Iron Age. It saw the rise and fall of several ancient cultures including the Akkadian Empire, Vedic India, and Ancient Greece.

The Age of Pisces began on or around 1 CE. It encompasses the rise of the Roman Empire and the West, Christianity, the Inquisition, colonialism, and two World Wars. 

While none of these ranges are exact, the Age of Aquarius is expected to begin on or around 2160. It is predicted to be a time of increased communication, innovation, and humanitarianism. 

I studied astrology and became fascinated by the astrological world ages. To me, this aspect of astrology was more interesting than any individual horoscope. 

So when I saw that my Jungian Dream School instructors had made a video on the Age of Aquarius, I was excited. After watching the video I felt called to learn more about Jung and the Astrological Ages.

Jung and the Astrological Ages

In watching the video, I learned that Jung believed that the astrological ages influenced the collective. He saw the passing age of Pisces as a time of dissolution. He believed that the old energies would diminish and that new energies would be activated in the coming Age of Aquarius. 

Jung wrote about the Age of Pisces and the influence of Christianity in Aion, which I am currently reading. To him, the psychological self was a totality that "must by definition include the light and dark aspects." 

Christianity, in the Age of Pisces, didn't allow for that.

In Aion, Jung talks about the issue with seeing Christ as unadulterated light. For Christians, God couldn't be a paradox. He had to be summun bonum (ultimate good). This caused the early Church Fathers to deny the existence of evil, saying that because there is nothing dark in God. Evil is only an absence of good (a concept called privatio boni).

To Basil the Great, this meant that evil cannot have substance. This is something that has not been borne out in my own spiritual experience. I know that darkness has weight. Metaphorically, it can be brought into the light of consciousness and understood but repression isn't the path to that—in my experience.

Darkness could not be tolerated in the Christian/Piscean age. Laws rigidly divided acceptable conduct from what couldn’t be tolerated. In some instances that worked. In others it was cruel and unnecessary.

The Dream School video

In the video, my Dream School instructors shared Jung’s believe that bringing the entire self into consciousness is superior to killing the bad and vanquishing it into hell. 

I think that's because vanquishing darkness doesn't actually work.

This was one of the problems I had with Christian morality. Extolling virtue and denying vice works for some people but not all. And I don't think it's the best way to deal with things from a psychological perspective, either. 

Dictating a moral code based on dualistic ideas about right and wrong isn’t necessarily effective either. In the video, one of my instructors, Jungian Analyst Joseph Lee suggested that the Aquarian Age might bring about a new ethic based on how the self (what some people think of as consciousness or the higher self) responds to our actions.

This would call for a morality based on dreams and inner work that connects us with self, instead of blind allegiance to religious law.

Joseph went on to point out that this is an individual approach to ethics. It allows for variation and may require a different kind of tolerance. It asks to accept that not everyone will be on the same page.

Aquarius is about humanitarianism but as Joseph rightly points out it is not the humanitarianism of the individual. It is innovative, communicative, and diverse. I think we are already seeing that. But as my instructors pointed out World Ages don't go quietly. This would make the current upheaval largely reactive.

What this means to me

Jung witnessed two World Wars in the course of his lifetime. He had personal visions of Europe covered in blood and, ultimately, as a site of great desolation. He felt that the only real chance for humanity was for people to do the individual inner work that releases shadow and connects with the self. 

Whether this will actually happen in the Age of Aquarius is yet to be determined, but it gives me hope.

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I'm going to be learning more about this topic, so if you're interested please check back or sign up for The Mystic Review newsletter @ MysticReview.substack.com!

You can watch the Dream School Age of Aquarius video in this post: MysticReview.com/2026/04/dreams-tarot-and-age-of-aquarius