When does the Age of Aquarius Start? Has it already Started?
In order to understand the Age of Aquarius you must understand the Precession of the Equinoxes.
The Tropical Zodiac puts the 0 Aries Point at the moment of the Spring Equinox. This means that in the Northern Hemisphere, the Winter Season Ends and Spring Begins with the Equinox as a Balance Point of Night and Day in Equal Proportions, where there is a gradual increase towards the Summer Solstice of Maximum Daylight Hours. The Theory of the Precession of the Equinoxes is that since the Ancients originally associated the co-incidence of this part of the sky, with this "balancing point" of the seasonal cycle, there has been a considerable "drift" of the Star Constellation of Aries away from the Equinox Point of Zero Aries. Since the Practice of Astrology dates back far into Egyptian, Sumerian or Babylonian times, the Drift of the Equinox Point Away from Aries and into the Star Constellation of Pisces has been associated with the "Aeon" of Christianity. CG Jung considered the Age of Aquarius to be a real phenomenon and that the precession of this Equinox point into the sign of Aquarius marked the dawning of a new era. However in more recent times, a certain degree of skepticism has been cast on this theory overall, at least in terms of it's historical legitimacy? Ancient Astrologers never the less where aware of the problem, and had devised Tropical Astrology as a solution, to keep the Divinatory Signs distinctly separate from the Fixed Stars of the Zodiac, so that they were always strictly anchored to the seasonal cycle, which comes as a result of the "wobble", or rotational tilt of the earth's axis creating seasons.
Regardless of whether or not you believe that the Age of Aquarius is real, if you are to take the concept seriously on it's own terms, it is still an inherently "fuzzy concept" because there is no strict agreement of where the Fixed Stars of the Constellation of Aquarius begin or end. If we are generous about which star to use as a marker for the beginning of Aquarius, it's entirely possible to make 1997 the beginning of the Age of Aquarius, according to CG Jung's Aeon. However if you pick other stars to use as starting points, we could be at least 200-300 years away.
Meanwhile, this is further complicated by the fact that whenever there is any significant transists that feature the sign of Aquarius, (for example the recent ingress of Pluto in Aquarius, or the beginning of a 300 year Air Cycle featuring Grand Conjunctions of Saturn and Jupiter in Air Signs for the next 300 Years...) In the 1960s there was a Stellium of Planets in Aquarius, FWIW this was a significant cluster of planets all in the same sign, but not really the basis for announcing the "Dawn of the Age of Aquarius", yet many where tempted to jump on this bandwagon. Here at Dan's Astrology, we advise against using the pretense towards the Age of Aquarius as some kind of marketing gimmick. But the truth remains: People love the Age of Aquarius.Because this territory is inherently wish-washy, due to a 200-300 year zone of "wiggle room", we can at least agree that by the time the 300 year Jupiter-Saturn Air Cycle has completed, we will definitely be in Age of Aquarius.
Why not just simplify things, and consider the turn of the Millennium to be the Dawn of the Age of Aquarius, making the Millennial Generation, the first Prototypes of the Aquarian Age.
Tell Me More about the 300 Year Air Cycle
What is the significance of the Year 1997 as a potential start date for the Age of Aquarius?
Tell Me More about the Age of Pisces
Regardless of whether or not you believe in these Astrological Ages, we do seem to be in a historical age distinct from the one that preceded it. This is in a large part due to the enromous technological accelleration that happened as a result of the Industrial Revolution, and the Technological Accelleration of WW1 and WW2 in the beginning of the 20th Century. The Millennial Era coincided with the Dawn of the Internet and the Age of Information. In the sense that there is now a whole economy around Data, Information or even the strategic production of misinformation, it's entirely possible that a Post-Industrial Data-Driven society structured around new ideas such as "Cloud Capitalism" is exemplary of the Archetype of a New Astrological Age.
In Carl Jung's Aion he suggests that the Christian Era aligned not only with the Precession of the Equinoxes in Pisces but also apparently a Grand Conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in Pisces in 7 BC. If we are using Carl Jung as a basis for this we can start so see where the fuzzy blurring of boundaries begins to happen between one smaller astrological age and the idea of a much larger one... (the grand conjunctions repeat in signs of the same element for nearly 300 years, but this is categorically much different than the precession of the equinoxes idea which says that just one sign is dominant for a whole millennium).
We are engaging in troublesome territory with the topic of the Age of Aquarius, keeping in mind the association of the End of the Age of Pisces with the End of Christianity or the End of the Christian Era. From a Christian Perspective, this is basically the Apocalypse. Common Apocalyptic Images inlcude emergence of a Beast with Seven Horns and Seven Eyes... this could very well be a reference to the Seven Planets of Traditional Astrology, and with Saturn as the Traditional Ruler of both Aquarius and Capricorn. Considering that Capricorn follows Aquarius in the Reverse order of the Precession of the Equinoxes, it suggests we are in for back to back Saturnian Ages.
These two Saturn Signs, Aquarius and Capricorn, represent the Yin and Yang of Saturn, with Capricorn as the Earth Yin or "Feminine" sign of Saturn and Aquarius as the Yang, Air, or "Masculine" sign of Saturn. The Element of Air suggests Language, Speech, Communication, what is on the tip of your tongue or right under your nose. We live and breathe not just a material world but a world of ideas, beliefs, opinions. If we use the 1997 start date for the Age of Aquarius, it would make sense that the Information Age, where we experienced the accelleration of using phone lines to communicate with verbal speech, clumsily making animal sounds over the reciever to each other at long distances, this was upgraded by highspeed fiber optic cables to the point where we now have instant high definition video streamning and enormous amounts of information in an increasingly connected online world, where "Digital Exhaust" created by this becomes it's own economy. This was originally being marketed to us as "The Information Super-Highway", a structure that allows not only rapid access and delivery but also a strict regime of control and surveillance.
It has also allowed for the Ancient Practice of Astrology to be modernized to such an extent that people like me can simply punch in a Date and have a chart generated, the old practices of having to look things up in an ephemeris have become unncessary, Astrology is now accessible even without understanding of basic math skills.
From a certain modernist perspective, Astrology and Divination is a leftover of some forgotten era of magical thinking, where instead of making decisions through a rational process of logical decision making, you had to consult some oracle who was going to look for signs in chicken entrails. It is maybe counter intuitive to consider the "information age" as the "Age of Aquarius", if the whole Technological Infrastructure of the Information Age relies on a certain Cultural Center of Gravity, where the average person has a certain level of techinical proficiency to be able to keep the Technosphere running.
Instead of lapsing back in to a primitive magical belief system, these old divination systems have been integrated and given new life in 21st Century Cyberspace. However to some it may appear to be a kind of a childish regression to fairytale world of make-believe and magical thinking, perhaps a retreat from the harsh realities of a scientifically verifiable material world.
Divination has always made the claim of having access to the power of prophecy, to see into the future. It's possible that due to the rise of political instability and collective insecurity in the face of global pandemics and various environmental and political disasters, there is a resurgence of interest in Astrology and other forms of divination as a source of guidance in an uncertain world.
It's entirely possible that as the world continues to Modernize, and Technological Development continues to accelerate, the Future may become even more uncertain, as we will be thrown into a new landscape that resembles less and less the convential world we are familiar with. Perhaps in the face of this new frontier of the unknown we scramble for whatever tools or ideas we have on hand to make sense of whatever it is that lies on the other side of this abyss that we call "The Future".
Personally, since the COVID19 Pandemic I have had the tendency to turn my nose up to the idea that the Post-COVID19 world is some kind of "End Times" or "Apocalypse". Apparently to those who experienced WW1 & WW2, those were experienced as the End Times. From this perspective we are already living in the End Times, and personally I don't think some kind of worse-than-averge flu necessarily constitutes and apocalypse on it's own, no matter how strict the lockdown measures were.