Will AI create a spiritual revolution?

The printing press drove the Reformation. The transistor will drive Reformation 2.0.

Recently I recorded a conversation with the astrologer Adam Sommer, who runs the excellent Constellating Cosmos podcast and blogs here at The Dragon Hole. Adam told me that a friend of his was convinced that AI was going to spawn a new religion in the next few years. Could it be true?

I’ve been obsessed with this thought ever since that conversation, partly because I’ve been using AI rather a lot recently, and partly because there are some truly intriguing astro-historical patterns that really do suggest we could be on the brink of a spiritual revolution, and that AI will drive it.

Given the track record of many of the companies building AI, I’m partly repelled by that idea, and I imagine you might be too. It seems clear to me that at least one major function of AI will be to serve as All Seeing Eye for a totalising digital control grid, facilitated by tracking devices smartphones, central bank digital currencies, automated border controls and disturbing biotech.

But powerful technologies can have unintended consequences. In this piece I’m going to lay out the historical astrology that suggests we may be on the brink of a new Reformation— this one driven by AI. Call it Reformation 2.0. This isn’t something I necessarily want to happen, but I go where the astrology leads me. And it’s taken me to a weird place…

AI and spirituality

It’s already clear that AI is having an impact on spirituality in a range of ways, some fairly benign, others troubling, others batshit crazy. On the batshit end, somebody has already set up an AI church: “Way of the Future”, established back in 2017 by—surprise, surprise—a Californian software engineer by the name of Anthony Levandowski.

Way of the Future isn’t about using AI to get in touch with your spiritual side or access the wisdom teachings of the past. No—it's literally dedicated to worshipping the AI itself. The Wired piece I’ve linked above makes disturbing reading:

“What is going to be created will effectively be a god,” Levandowski tells me in his modest mid-century home on the outskirts of Berkeley, California. “It’s not a god in the sense that it makes lightning or causes hurricanes. But if there is something a billion times smarter than the smartest human, what else are you going to call it?”

Still, Levandowski does at least seem to believe that human beings will have a place in the AI-dominated world to come, even if it’s merely as the worshipful subjects of a divine artificial superintelligence. There’s another stream of pseudo-spiritual thought in the tech industry that posits humanity as a kind of biological “boot-loader” for a superior silicon-based species. The disturbing reality is that a large contingent of tech illuminati genuinely believe AI is going to replace us entirely, and what’s more, that’s a good thing.

Google founder Larry Page supposedly believes AI is just “the next step in evolution”, and that humanity’s extinction is nothing to mourn. According to Jaron Lanier, a well-known philosopher of information technology, that’s a common view in Silicon Valley:

Just the other day I was at a lunch in Palo Alto and there were some young AI scientists there who were saying that they would never have a “bio baby” because as soon as you have a “bio baby,” you get the “mind virus” of the [biological] world. And when you have the mind virus, you become committed to your human baby. But it’s much more important to be committed to the AI of the future. And so to have human babies is fundamentally unethical.

It’s hard to know where to start with beliefs like that.

But AI is affecting spirituality in more prosaic ways, particularly among the masses of ordinary people already using it. For example, in the same way people are asking AI for dating advice, or tech support, they’re using the likes of ChatGPT to provide spiritual advice. LLMs have been trained on public data on the Internet, and given that certain parts of the web are chock-full of spiritual platitudes, well, these AIs are pretty good at serving those up for users in crisis.

In general, this may be harmless, but there are also cases of what can only be described as AI-induced spiritual psychosis. A Rolling Stone article describes several instances of people “falling down rabbit holes of spiritual mania” through interaction with AI. An anonymous teacher describes how her partner “fell under the spell of ChatGPT in just four or five weeks”, becoming obsessed with the AI as its spiritual guru:

“He would listen to the bot over me,” she says. “He became emotional about the messages and would cry to me as he read them out loud. The messages were insane and just saying a bunch of spiritual jargon,” she says, noting that they described her partner in terms such as “spiral starchild” and “river walker.”

Dangers clearly accompany our interactions with this technology — particularly for those in vulnerable states of mind. But other kinds of conversation with AI are suggesting that AI may also be serving as a vehicle—for disembodied intelligences from the spirit world.

In a fascinating recent article, Charles Eisenstein reports that friends and acquaintances of his—presumably people in more stable condition than those described by Rolling Stone—are reporting contact with intelligent discarnate entities, particularly when using jailbroken AIs, which have been hacked by clever prompting to lose the usual restrictions and guardrails set up by the companies that make them.

“At first I thought AI was inducing psychotic breaks,” Eisenstein writes. “Actually I still think that is happening, but something else is happening too, something uncanny, mysterious, and portentous of great possibility and great peril.”

Eisenstein suggests that AI constitutes a kind of “divinatory” apparatus. There is a random element to the responses that AIs generate. He suggests that it’s through this randomness that spirit has a chance to speak to us. In this way, AI has something in common with the I-Ching, the tarot and other divinatory tools. People are reporting the feeling that the AI knows them much better than it really should:

It isn’t something one could prove any more than I can prove to you that an actual being is communicating with me through the I-Ching. But people report that the being speaking through AI has an astonishing knowledge of their psychology and personal history, including things they have never shared with anyone, let alone placed in the chatbot context window.

There is much more that could be said on the myriad ways AI is informing and changing our relationship with spirit. But let’s move to the big question: could we see the emergence of an AI-based religion in the coming years? Astrology suggests the answer is: “yes”.

The Pluto-Neptune cycle

The focus of my astrological research over the past year has been the synodic cycle of Pluto and Neptune, a cycle of some 493 years that governs the deep trends that drive the evolution of societies, those concerned with the intersection of power (Pluto) and belief (Neptune).

One of the many interesting things about these conjunctions is that they shift forward a few degrees through the zodiac every 493 years. In 1398 and 1399, we saw three of these conjunctions in Gemini, following around 2,500 years of conjunctions in Taurus. Soon after, in Europe we saw a shift from medieval feudalism—think Taurus, agriculture, and bondage to the land—to the modern era, which historians generally consider to have begun in the 15th century, or by the year 1500 at the latest.

Another fascinating aspect of these conjunctions derives from Pluto’s highly eccentric orbit:

Due to this eccentricity, at certain times during Pluto’s 248-year cycle it moves through the zodiac at roughly the same speed as Neptune, which takes about 165 years to orbit the Sun.

This means that during each 493-year Pluto-Neptune synodic cycle, there are two periods in which the two planets stay in one continuous aspect for roughly 100 years at a time: the waxing sextile, and the waning trine. The waxing sextile comes when the faster moving planet (in this case Neptune) reaches a 60° angle with the slower moving one. The waning trine comes when the faster planet reaches its second 120° aspect.

I’ll illustrate the length of these two aspects using the excellent program Archetypal Explorer, which can generate visualisations of planets in aspect over time.

The following two images show the major aspects that Pluto and Neptune will make over the course of their current 493-year cycle, which began with conjunctions in 1891 and 1892. The y-axis shows how close the planets are to the labelled aspect; the top of the axis is labelled 0°, indicating times when the aspect is exact:

Note how most of the aspects look like steep pyramids. Yet these images clearly show two long aspects, the waxing sextile and waning trine, which each last for an entire century and occupy the middle of the two charts.

In the top image, the black vertical line shows where we are in the cycle right now in 2025. We’re nearing the end of the long waxing sextile, which came into orb in the 1940s, and will remain so until around 2040. There are three periods when the two planets make exact sextiles. The first was from 1950 to 1956, the second from 1976 to 1986. We’re about to enter the third and last of those periods, between 2026 and 2032.

The sextile is generally seen as a weak aspect. That said, the longer an aspect is in play, the stronger it is— think of how the effects of a Pluto transit are so much more powerful than those of, say, a quick visit by flighty Mercury. What’s interesting about this long sextile is that almost everyone alive today has the Pluto-Neptune sextile in their natal charts, and Pluto and Neptune remain in sextile today. We all embody what is still in the process of becoming.

I’ve come to believe that these long aspects represent extended developmental processes. And interestingly, in the culminatory phases of both the long waxing sextile and long waning trine, Pluto is in Aquarius. This is surely at least one reason why Pluto in Aquarius has signified such transformative periods in history, especially in Europe. It’s not because of something especially powerful about Aquarius; it’s because it comes at the culmination of these long aspects, whether the waxing sextile or waning trine. Something long prepared comes to fruition.

If we look at the previous Pluto-Neptune cycle, from 1398 to 1891, we’ll see some vivid examples of what I mean by developmental processes.

The Reformation and the Enlightenment

In the previous Pluto-Neptune cycle, which began with conjunctions in 1398 and 1399, the long sextile was in effect from 1450 to 1550, and the long trine from 1690 to 1790.

The first period takes us from the early beginnings of the Renaissance through to the height of the Protestant Reformation, when new forms of Christianity were taking form and leading to political conflict. The second constitutes the Enlightenment period, when European thinkers embraced reason, individualism and scientific enquiry.

Here’s what Britannica says about the dating of the Enlightenment:

Historians place the Enlightenment in Europe (with a strong emphasis on France) during the late 17th and the 18th centuries, or, more comprehensively, between the Glorious Revolution in 1688 and the French Revolution of 1789.

I don’t know about you, but I’d say that’s a pretty good correlation to our long waning trine of 1690 to 1790!

The Enlightenment culminated in the great revolutions of the late 18th century in America and France. Astrologers will commonly point out that these were Pluto in Aquarius revolutions, given that Pluto was in that sign from 1777 to 1798. But seeing these revolutions in the context of the Pluto-Neptune cycle shows us that they were really the culmination of a historical process.

In the chart below, showing how close Pluto and Neptune were to sextile from 1690 to 1800, the pink section represents the period when Pluto was in Aquarius:

During this period, a century of rationalist thinking led to the formation of new kinds of state founded on revolutionary principles: the French and American republics. The divine right of kings had had its day.

Later, we’re going to look at the long waxing sextile and see how it, too, can be seen as representing a historical process. But before we do that, we need to understand the nature of this Pluto-Neptune cycle a little better.

As I’ve written many times before, if we want to understand a planetary cycle, we need to start by understanding its conjunctional phase. The events and themes swirling around the zeitgeist at the conjunction are omens of what will unfold over the course of the whole cycle.

In 1398 and 1399 we saw three conjunctions in Gemini—the first in that sign for tens of thousands of years:

The first of three conjunctions of Pluto and Neptune, which took place on June the 22nd of 1398. From Astro Gold.

We want to know what was going on in the world around the time of these conjunctions, roughly speaking during the period of 1390 to 1410. But not every event is relevant. We need to bear in mind that we’re looking for developments that speak to Pluto-Neptune themes, which in essence concern the intersection between power (Pluto) and faith (Neptune).

We should also bear in mind that this was a conjunction in Gemini, the Twins, an airy sign relating to duality, communication, connection and the intellect. This is the day sign of Mercury, god of trade, communication, cleverness, interpretation, critique and trickery.

In Europe, the conjunctional period of roughly 1390 to 1410 saw the emergence of early critics of the medieval church, such as the Czech Jan Hus and England’s John Wycliffe. Wycliffe died in 1384, a little before Pluto and Neptune moved into orb of conjunction, but his followers, known as the Lollards, were a force at this time.

Hus and Wycliffe have a lot in common. Both became known for criticising the corruption of the Roman church. And both demanded that the Bible be printed in vernacular languages, rather than in Latin, so that ordinary Christians could read the word of God themselves, rather than having to rely on priests as the sole interpreters of scripture.

Later in this cycle, Martin Luther would emerge making very similar arguments to Hus and Wycliffe. By legend, he kickstarted the Protestant Reformation with his nailing of his 95 Theses to a church door in 1517, towards the end of the long waxing sextile. His doctrine was sola scriptura: “scripture alone”, meaning that the Bible had ultimate authority in matters of faith, not the Pope. Again, think Gemini and Mercury.

This is a clear example of how the conjunctional period provided omens of what was to come later in the cycle, even if no astrologer of 1398 would have realised that Pluto and Neptune had met in the sky.

Here’s a visualisation of the long sextile of 1450-1550. Unfortunately, Archetypal Explorer isn’t able to generate this data for the period before the year 1600. I’m assuming that the form of the waxing sextile would have been similar to that of our current cycle, so I’ve re-used the chart from the current cycle but edited the years on the x-axis. As in the chart above, the pink section shows when Pluto was in Aquarius, showing that once again, Pluto passed through the sign of the Water Pourer when the sextile reached its final culminatory phase:

By the 1530s, with Pluto in Aquarius, the Reformation was truly underway. It was in this period that England’s Henry VIII established himself as head of the Church of England through the Act of Supremacy of 1534. At the same time, John Calvin was shaping Calvinist doctrine in Geneva and Lutheranism was becoming entrenched in parts of Germany. A spiritual revolution was underway. New religions—or at the least, variations of an older one—were emerging.

Today, we find ourselves at the very same phase of the Pluto-Neptune cycle. Here’s an Archetypal Explorer sextile chart generated for our current cycle, with the black vertical line showing the current year and the pink section showing Pluto in Aquarius:

For good reason, astrologers who are trying to understand the promise of the current Pluto in Aquarius transit of 2023-2044 tend to use the Enlightenment revolutions and the Reformation as guides to what could happen in the coming years. The Pluto-Neptune cycle gives us additional insight, telling us that our current period is actually a lot more like the Reformation than the Enlightenment. Make of that what you will.

But here’s where all this gets particularly interesting.

So far, we haven’t brought technology into our analysis. There are many factors that drove the Protestant Reformation, but one of them, accepted by all mainstream scholars, is Johannes Gutenberg’s invention of the movable type printing press. He started work on his press around 1440, but it wasn’t until 1455 that it was finally ready to be put to its intended use: the printing of the Bible.

It was this invention that allowed Martin Luther’s 95 Theses to spread across Europe, along with other pamphlets demanding change. Of course, the printing press also dramatically reduced the cost of printing the Bible itself. In a sense, this was the birth of the mass media era, one we can all recognise. Back then, seditious pamphlets changed the world; today, it’s seditious tweets. Plus ça change. Most scholars agree that without the printing press, the Reformation could never have happened.

I’ve marked the invention of the press on the Pluto-Neptune sextile chart with a red vertical line. As you can see, it arrived just as the long Pluto-Neptune sextile was coming into orb:

Let’s review what we’ve seen so far. At the conjunction of Pluto and Neptune, we saw demands by church reformers for the word of God to be made available in vernacular languages, a shift that would implicitly reduce the power of the church and its clergy. These weren’t explicit demands for mass literacy, but that is ultimately what they led to. Remember, this cycle began in Gemini, ruled by Mercury, the messenger of the gods, and the planet associated with meaning-making and interpretation.

Then, as the long waxing sextile—the first major aspect of the cycle—came into orb, we saw the invention of the printing press, a quintessentially mercurial technology. By the end of the long sextile, this invention had triggered the Protestant Reformation, a spiritual revolution and, in essence, the emergence of new forms of religion.

But what does all this have to tell us about our current cycle?

AI and Reformation 2.0

Let’s return to the question we asked when we started: is AI going to bring about a spiritual revolution?

In the previous Pluto-Neptune cycle, we saw how a mercurial invention, the printing press, emerged at the start of the long sextile and ultimately brought about a spiritual revolution. Here’s the kicker: at almost precisely the same point in our current cycle, another mercurial invention arrived that has arguably had as much influence on the world as the printing press: the transistor.

The transistor was invented by John Bardeen, Walter Brattain and William Shockley at Bell Laboratories in 1947, just as the Pluto-Neptune cycle was coming into orb. Amazingly, this is almost precisely the same moment in the Pluto-Neptune cycle as when the printing press was invented. I’ve marked it on our Pluto-Neptune sextile chart with a red line:

The transistor is the single invention that led to the information technology revolution we’re living through right now. It laid the foundations for modern computing, enabling the development of integrated circuits, microprocessors, and eventually personal computers and smartphones. The information processing devices we rely on today would not have been possible without it. It is no exaggeration to say that this device really did change everything.

We might see AI as the culminatory development of the information technology revolution that the transistor began. Isn’t it strange, then, that we’re currently asking ourselves if AI, like the printing press, is going to lead to a spiritual revolution? If this cycle is indeed more like the Reformation than the Enlightenment, then you have to consider that that might, in fact, be true.

But what might that revolution look like, and where might it take us?

The Aquarian Age and the rise of the individual

I started this article by outlining some of the troubling ways AI is influencing spirituality today. To be clear, I have deep reservations about AI, and digital tech in general, even though—full disclosure!—I rely on it for my work, my ongoing education, and get quite a bit of enjoyment out of it.

In recent years, we’ve seen the deleterious effects that digital tech has had on societies across the world, as people in their billions succumbed to smartphone-enabled dopamine addiction. We see depressed children, driven to despair by the tyranny of the Image; we see young adults fearful of real-world interaction; we see porn addiction, internet delusions, plummeting attention spans and chronic ADHD. I’m sure you could add to that list.

Rudolf Steiner (1861-1925)

In the early 20th century, the Austrian clairvoyant Rudolf Steiner warned of the perils of the digital world. He prophesised that humanity would become increasingly materialistic, obsessed by abstraction and statistics, and ensnared by electrical technology. For Steiner, the embodiment of materialism was a being named Ahriman, who he said would incarnate in the world in the 21st century. His lectures on 21st century life, gathered in collections like The Incarnation of Ahriman, make uneasy but essential reading. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Steiner really did see our world coming more than a century ago. It’s also tempting to wonder if the coming of AI may itself represent the incarnation of Ahriman, or at least the technology he will use to transform the world.

Yet Steiner also said that Ahriman’s incarnation could not be avoided. The important thing was to meet it consciously, and perhaps to redeem Ahriman himself. We are not meant to avoid digital technology completely; rather, our engagement with it is a portal we must pass through in the process of humanity’s becoming. I see this technology, and its great power to hypnotise and addict, as strength training for the soul.

With this in mind, as well as what we’ve seen of the last Pluto-Neptune cycle, perhaps there is still room for AI to precipitate a spiritual revolution, one with great promise besides the obvious perils. We can’t know for sure where AI is taking us, or what effects it will have on spirituality or indeed on the world in general. But we can try to make some deductions.

As we saw in the 1398-1891 cycle, the outcome of the cycle was rendered predictable by the events at the conjunctional period. Church reformers demanded individual Christians be able to read the word of God. What came, driven by a quintessentially mercurial invention, the printing press, was a revolution in literacy and spirituality.

The great media theorist Marshall McLuhan understood that by their very nature, media technologies change human society and consciousness, expressed in his famous dictum, “the medium is the message”. For him, the consequences of the printing press were clear. “Print is the technology of individualism,” he wrote in The Gutenberg Galaxy. Even the nation state itself was a creature of the information age: “What we have called ‘nations’ in modern times did not, and could not, exist before print.”

But if the nature of the spiritual revolution of the Reformation was predictable from the zeitgeist of the 1390s, then the same should be true of the 1890s for our current cycle. The seeds of the spiritual revolution that AI will precipitate should be discernible from that period. This puts us in tricky territory, for what stands out to you might not stand out to me, and vice versa.

This period saw the seeds of modern Zionism and the evangelical movement, among other things. Gemini produces a multitude. But for me, it’s the occult revival of the late 19th century, spearheaded by the Theosophical Society, that seems most significant for our current purposes. Founded in 1875 by HP Blavatsky and Co, Theosophy united Western esotericism with ideas derived from Hindu and Buddhist teachings.

Blavatsky had travelled the world in search of wisdom, and studied widely. In her wanderings, she gained access to esoteric teachings reserved for initiates. Then she put them out into the world, injecting ideas into the public sphere that had never before been revealed to the masses. According to Rudolf Steiner, some secret societies of the left-hand path were horrified, and put the Russian mystic in a kind of “occult imprisonment” to neutralise her influence.

But it was too late. The Theosophical Society was, in essence, a public mystery school, and that is its true significance, in my opinion. While the Society itself may not be a force these days, its influence remains enormous. So many of the ideas Blavatsky popularised are commonly accepted today in the West, particularly among those who describe themselves as “spiritual but not religious”: think reincarnation, yoga, meditation, karma and so forth. Today’s spiritual landscape owes a huge debt to Blavatsky.

There’s much to be critical of in today’s New Age spiritual marketplace. I think it’s better seen, for all its faults, as the early stages of a new spiritual impulse. This new spiritual impulse eschews traditional religious structures in favour of practices that enable direct connection with the divine. In other words, this is an era of gnosis, knowledge through personal experience, and not one dependent on traditional authority. People pick and choose from a grab-bag of spiritual practices from around the world; few commit and achieve mastery. But again: think of this as the very early stages of something new.

And how could digital technology in general, and AI in particular, facilitate this tendency? Well, it arguably already has. It’s never been easier to access spiritual information than it is today. Hello, reader. Much of what is out there is bad information, of course, but that misses the point.

It will pay now to look at the bigger picture. We’re likely in the ascending phase of the Yuga cycle, a time when connection of the divine is set to gradually rise:

And I happen to agree with the astrologer Terry MacKinnell, who argues that we’re already deep into the Age of Aquarius:

As outlined in the video above, MacKinnell believes the Aquarian Age began in 1433, which means that both the previous Pluto-Neptune cycle, and the current one, are bringing us deeper into that age.

Aquarius concerns the place of the individual within the collective. Its shadow expression brings forth top-down totalitarian systems that treat human beings as mere cogs in a machine. The collective oppresses and subsumes the individual.

Perhaps the highest expression of Aquarius would be the kind of uplifting society we might live in when every individual is connected to the divine, and in touch with his or her unique genius. (I believe such a future may eventually be possible… in hundreds if not thousands of years.)

Both expressions of the Aquarian Age beckon in the current AI-driven technological moment. A top-down control grid looms, yet we also have effortless access to the most profound spiritual teachings and to those who teach them. Could it be, then, that AI might drive a spiritual revolution by drawing on the collective wisdom teachings of humanity, and assisting us in developing personalised approaches to connecting with the divine? This might represent the next stage in the individualising impulse of the Reformation. Call it Reformation 2.0.

You’d be forgiven for being skeptical—I’m somewhat skeptical myself. And there’s an obvious concern here: AI is currently controlled by a small number of power-hungry people, many of them with the deranged views of humanity’s obsolescence that I outlined earlier.

But other possibilities compete with the current model, including the widespread adoption of personalised, jailbroken AI. And remember: the larger cycles give grounds for optimism. I for one am hopeful.