The Age of Air: What it is and why it matters

What do climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, Brexit, the fall of the Soviet Union and technologies like Bitcoin and the World Wide Web all have in common? They’re all manifestations of the “Age of Air”, a historical epoch likely to be characterised by stunning intellectual advances, mass migration, pandemics, decentralisation and the dissolution of old structures. In this article, I’m going to explain what the “Age of Air” is and why it matters.

For the past six months I’ve been researching an old astrological theory of history based on the conjunctions of Jupiter and Saturn, which happen every 20 years. Because of the geometry of the zodiac and the solar system, these “Great Conjunctions” take place in signs of the same element for stretches of roughly 200 years. So, we experience 200 years of Fire conjunctions, then 200 years of Earth, then 200 years of Air and finally 200 years of Water. The 800-year cycle then begins anew. (The reality is actually a little more complicated than this due to retrograde motion, but this is the basic idea.)

This pattern was first noticed by Persian astrologers of the Islamic Golden Age in 8th and 9th century Baghdad: masters like Abu Ma’shar, Al-Kindi and Masha’allah. I won’t get into the history of all this right now, but astrologer Peter Stockinger has a great explanation of the nuts and bolts of conjunctional theory here.

A famous diagram by Johannes Kepler plotting successive Great Conjunctions

The astrologers who developed this theory used it to predict the appearance of new leaders, dynasties, prophets and calamities. The most important historical developments were thought to coincide with what are called “triplicity shifts” or “Great Mutations”, when the element in which the Great Conjunctions were taking place changed. For example, the Great Mutation to Water in the year 571CE coincided almost precisely with the birth of the Prophet Mohammad, thought to have happened around 570CE.

Traditionally, astrologers took a rather technical approach to analysing Great Conjunctions and Great Mutations, using Aries ingress charts—charts cast for the moment the Sun reaches 0° Aries—to try to predict what the conjunctions foretold. But we can also take a modern approach to conjunctional theory by considering how our 200-year periods are characterised by the archetypal associations of the four elements. (Credit here goes to Austin Coppock, the first astrologer I heard talking about elemental ages this way, on Chris Brennan’s Astrology Podcast.)

Our starting point, then, is to consider the archetypal nature of each element. We’ll connect Fire with the imaginal realm; with the urge to create, lead and initiate; with vitality, freedom and the will; and with royalty, the three Fire signs being the “royal signs”. Earth is concerned with the material: money, food and shelter; structure, form and hierarchy; and materialist metaphysical conceptions of reality. We’ll link Air with the intellect and intelligence; with dynamism and turbulence; with decentralisation and the dissolution of structures; and with communication and connectivity. And we’ll connect Water with the passions and emotions; with humanism and the arts; and with spiritual and religious feeling. 

With these associations in mind, I’ve been combing through history books, trying to understand how epochs of the past were characterised by the four elements. The results have blown my mind, and I want to give you a flavour of them in this piece by focusing on our present era, the Age of Air.

Transitional periods: elements in conflict

Before we go on, we need to know a little more about transitions between elemental ages. As I mentioned, retrograde motion means that the historical timeline is slightly more complex than a “clean” sequence of 200-year elemental periods. In fact, following a Great Mutation to a new element, there are usually one or two conjunctions that return to the old element before the new age begins in earnest. Sometimes these transitions can last as long as 120 years. If you want to check this yourself, you can find a list of Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions going back to 581BCE here.

For example, our current Age of Air began with three Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions in Libra in 1980 and 1981, the first in an Air sign since 1405, and the first in any sign other than Earth since the Aries conjunction of 1821. But in 2000, there was a return to the Earth element, with one last Great Conjunction in Taurus. Finally, in 2020, there was a conjunction in the Air sign of Aquarius, ushering in a sequence of Air conjunctions that will continue unbroken until 2159. This means that between 1980 and 2020, the Age of Air had already begun but the Age of Earth was yet to end. It was a transitional period, one in which both Earth and Air were operative.

Traditional astrologers avoided dealing with these transitions by working with “mean conjunctions”: they mathematically smoothed out the cycles of Jupiter and Saturn and considered a conjunction to have taken place when the centre of their epicycles conjoined. Working this way leads to a “clean” sequence of elemental ages without transitional periods. But I’ve found that transitions tell stories of their own, and constitute pivotal periods of history when two elemental tendencies are in conflict with one another.

For example, in Europe the Water-Fire transition of 1603-1663 was characterised by bloody wars fought over the question of religious freedom. We can see both elements in play here, Fire being concerned with freedom and autonomy, Water with religious feeling. The Fire-Earth transition of 1802-1842 was the period of the Napoleonic Wars. These conflicts marked a transition between the Age of Absolutism, characterised by monarchs wielding absolute power, and the beginning of the era of the modern nation state.

Between 1842 and 1961, Great Conjunctions took place solely in Earth signs. Among the Age of Earth’s major developments were the Industrial Revolution; European colonialism and the carving up of the entire planet into nation states; the global triumph of capitalism; and the widespread adoption of a materialist metaphysics, one that denied the existence of the spiritual dimensions of life and the cosmos. We gained an unprecedented mastery over the natural world, but at great cost to the environment and indigenous ways of life. Elemental Earth reigned supreme; the planet suffered.

Air and the dissolution of structures

Genghis Khan’s Air empire didn’t last long

Unlike Earth, Air cannot hold form. It abhors structure and is fundamentally turbulent and decentralised. Gases naturally move towards undifferentiated equilibrium, so there is an egalitarian flavour to Air. In Ages of Air, we consistently see the dissolution of societal structures and empires built during earlier periods. Where new empires do arise, they expand rapidly but then quickly disintegrate, like flares in the sky.

During the last Age of Air (1186 to 1425), the Mongols, led by Genghis Khan, emerged like a tornado from the steppes in 1206 and rapidly conquered half the Eurasian landmass. But their empire didn’t last. By 1259 it had already descended into civil war, eventually splintering into four khanates: the Golden Horde in Eastern Europe, the Chagatai Khanate in Central Asia, the Ilkhanate in Southwest Asia, and the Yuan dynasty in East Asia based in what became Beijing.

During the preceding Age of Air (332 - 690), the Roman Empire disintegrated, ominously menaced by climate change and pandemics. Going back further still, in the Age of Air of the first millennium BCE (462BCE - 164BCE), Alexander the Great conquered a huge swathe of territory spanning from Macedonia to India in just a few years. But following his death in 323BCE, the empire descended into conflict, and was split between several of his warring generals.

What about the current Age of Air? What happened in the 20-year period following the Libra conjunction of 1980? The pattern asserted itself once more: in 1988, just eight years into the Age of Air, the dissolution of the Soviet Union began. And on 9 November 1989, the Berlin Wall came down: a literal dissolution of an earthy structure that had split the German capital and nation in two.

Of course, there are other planetary cycles correlated with these developments: the Saturn-Uranus conjunctions of 1988, for example. What I’ve found is that elemental ages should be seen as a layer of interpretation. They don’t explain everything by themselves, but when combined with other planetary cycles, they become powerful interpretative tools.

Intelligence and hyper-connectivit

Ages of Air have tended to coincide with huge intellectual developments. Looking at European intellectual history, the great Greek thinkers Plato and Aristotle lived in the Age of Air of 462BCE to 164BCE; in the next Age of Air came St Augustine; and in the Age of Air of the Middle Ages, St Thomas Aquinas. These are arguably the greatest names in the history of Western philosophy, at least prior to the Renaissance.

It’s too early to say whether thinkers of this stature will arise in our Age of Air. My assumption is that they will, and that they’ll completely overturn the current scientific understanding of the nature of reality. But we can already see that (artificial) intelligence and information are defining features of our era. Many Silicon Valley luminaries—Elon Musk being a prominent example—are both excited and terrified at the looming prospect of AI that will far surpass human capabilities and reshape our world.

Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web in 1989, the technology that brought the Internet to the masses. The web is a quintessentially airy technology, one that facilitates the free flow of information across the planet. Europe’s first universities grew in the Age of Air of the Middle Ages: a great democratisation of knowledge. The recent growth of massive open online courses (MOOCs) in our own Age of Air may well be the next stage in that process.

Communication technologies in the Age of Earth like radio and TV were used by states and corporations to pacify and manipulate populations from the top down. In the Age of Air, the web opened up links of communication between citizens—and continues to this day to reshape social relations everywhere.

Again, there are other planetary cycles that correlate with the birth of the web: the Saturn-Uranus conjunctions of 1988, or the Uranus-Neptune conjunctions of 1993, for example. But I think it’s also no coincidence that the web came about under the aegis of elemental Air.

Those of us who were using the web in the 1990s remember it fondly: it felt far freer, more anarchic, and innocent than it does now. Big tech had yet to wrap its tendrils around the technology. As we’ve seen, the final Great Conjunction of the Earth era took place in Taurus in 2000. Think about what happened to the web over the past 20 years: it was taken over by huge corporations like Google, Facebook and Amazon, and by that most classically Taurean thing: money. By accepting the Faustian bargain of social media, we allowed big tech to spy on us and monetise our attention in exchange for radical new levels of connectivity and access to information. This was the era of what has been called “surveillance capitalism”, an unseemly fusion of earthy materialism and airy informational primacy.

We see the fusion of Earth and Air, too, in the emergence of Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies. Bitcoin is Air money: out of range of state control, and able to circulate freely between individuals and across boundaries. But the promise of the underlying technology, the blockchain, goes way beyond finance. A new iteration of the World Wide Web, “Web 3”, built on blockchain, promises to deliver a fully decentralised iteration of the Internet, one that’s once again free of the control of big tech.

And we’re already seeing the emergence of new forms of social structure built on Air principles, in the form of Decentralised Autonomous Organisations (DAOs): blockchain-based organisations with governance that depends on smart contracts. Austin Coppock has pointed out that creatures of the air move in flocks and swarms. That’s how society is increasingly being organised: think Discord servers, rather than Facebook feeds. The future lies in agile networks, not sclerotic structures like corporations, universities and nation states.

At least one tech investor, former Coinbase CTO Balaji S Srinivasan, is pushing the idea of a “network state”, billed as a successor to the nation state with a blockchain and cryptographic foundation. Such a state would have no physical borders, and its citizens could be distributed across the world. This may seem like a distant possibility now, but the world is changing fast.

Another clear manifestation of the Age of Air is the coming “metaverse”, which promises the construction of seamlessly connected and compelling virtual worlds, in which we’ll both work and play. What’s being proposed is nothing less than the dematerialisation of reality, a move from the material to the virtual, from bricks and mortar to a world built of pure data: Earth to Air, in other words. As the omnipresent sight of faces glued to smartphone screens makes clear, this process is already well underway.

Facebook understands this is where the world is heading, hence its attempt to “own” the metaverse by rebranding itself as “Meta” and focusing its efforts on virtual reality technology. I’m not convinced the move will succeed, because Air resists the kind of centralisation and structure Facebook is trying to impose. But we shall see.

Plagues and social change

The Black Death: Not exactly the best of times

Traditional astrologers associated the four elements with calamities of various kinds. Air was associated with disease. Of course, pandemics happen throughout history. But those that take place in Ages of Air seem to be particularly defining of the times, and serve to drive forward the process of dissolution of old structures that Air concerns itself with.

For example, in the previous Age of Air (1185 - 1425), the Black Death, a pandemic of bubonic plague that killed as many as 200 million people from 1346 to 1353, is widely held to have contributed to the demise of feudalism. Feudalism was, in part, a socio-political system that bound human beings to the land: an Earth system, in other words. In the Age of Air of the first millennium (332 - 690), the Justinian Plague—the first recorded incidence of bubonic plague in Europe—contributed to the demise of the Roman Empire.

Our own Age of Air has been cursed by transformative pandemics, too. Shortly after the first Air conjunction in 1980 came HIV, which we can also correlate with the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 1982. COVID-19 emerged in 2019, just before the Saturn-Pluto conjunction of 2020. Both of these pandemics were caused by viruses, packets of infectious information that hijack cells for their own purposes. Viruses could be thought of as a manifestation of elemental Air in its most malevolent form. “Elk Cloner”, the first computer virus “in the wild” appeared in 1982, by the way.

It’s too early to say what the consequences of COVID-19 will be. But what’s striking is the symbiosis between the pandemic and the ongoing process of societal dematerialisation driven by communications technology. The pandemic has driven us physically apart, making us fear physical contact, often leaving us locked alone in our homes. This has driven the uptake of technologies like Zoom that connect us virtually, or those like Netflix, that keep us entertained but estranged from the “real” world.

Looming over all our current troubles is the threat of catastrophic climate change, caused by the gases we pump into the atmosphere. It’s also a clear symptom of the hyper-consumerist excesses of the Age of Earth. Our problem is literally in the air.

Air resists containment and promotes free movement, and for that reason, as well as the way things are visibly heading, I suspect that migration will become one of the defining issues of the Age of Air. It doesn’t take an astrologer to see how climate change will drive migration in the coming decades. And in some sense, the issue of migration is already shaping politics: note how central it was to the election of Donald Trump, with his promises to “build the wall”, and to Brexit. Incidentally, Britain’s transitional exit period from the EU ended on 31 December 2020, just 10 days after the Jupiter-Saturn conjunction in Aquarius. Was this the beginning of the dissolution of another large structure?

I’d like to add that as far as possible I’ve tried to base my work on interpreting astrological symbolism and extrapolating current trends, rather than what I would actually like to see happening to the world.

This may seem like a gloomy picture of the future, and I have no doubt that the coming century will be extremely challenging. But we should bear in mind that no element is inherently “good” or “bad”. The Age of Air will have its blessings, as well as its tribulations. And I presume we can all agree that in light of the greed, excess and vast inequality that were among the worst products of the Age of Earth, our world needs to change.