Back to A Different Lens

Ages is counted by this atlas at 17.2 percent debated or debunked, eighth behind Frequencies, Prophecies, Psi Phenomena, Miracles, Gemstones, Language Families and Seven Rays, against a baseline of well under one percent atlas-wide. Unlike Seven Rays, whose fourteen disputes are one finding repeated seven times, Ages splits its ten into two genuinely different kinds of argument.

Four Zodiacal Ages Sharing One Dating Fight

The Great Year, or Platonic Year, is the roughly 25,772-year period in which the wobble of Earth's axis carries the spring equinox backward through the twelve zodiac constellations, each span popularly called a zodiacal age. The Age of Taurus, the Age of Aries, the Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius all carry the same dispute: dividing the Great Year evenly across twelve constellations, the method behind the spans this atlas records, disagrees by centuries with a division that instead matches each constellation's own true, unequal width, and no method commands consensus between them. The worst of the four sits at the Pisces to Aquarius seam: proposed end dates for Pisces, and start dates for Aquarius, span several centuries across the literature, and no professional astronomical or astrological body has adopted an official transition date at all, since precession itself is continuous and offers no natural marker for where one constellation ends and the next begins.

Three Unrelated Ages, Three Unrelated Arguments

The Aztec Third Sun's dispute is a rival-source problem rather than a methodology one: the Codex Chimalpopoca's Legend of the Suns names Tlaloc and a rain of fire ending the age, while the Historia de los Mexicanos por sus Pinturas gives a different sequence of rulers and disasters across the five suns, and the atlas treats neither source as more authoritative than the other. Joachim of Fiore's Age of the Holy Spirit divides a different way again: historian Marjorie Reeves distinguishes Joachim's own careful, revisable calculation of the age's arrival from the firm date-setting of his later followers, who treated the year 1260 as settled prophecy rather than as one output of a complex concordance Joachim himself continued to revise. The Stoic cosmic cycle's dispute is narrower still and about the ancient sources themselves: classicist A. A. Long notes that the ancient Stoics did not agree among themselves on how the cycle's repetition actually worked, and the fragmentary surviving evidence does not settle which position the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus himself ultimately held. Four ages sharing a method, three ages sharing nothing at all: seventeen percent debated, on this type, is two findings, not one.

Where To Read More

• The Great YearCosmological AgeThe Great Year, the precessional cycle the four zodiacal ages divide up
• Age of TaurusCosmological AgeEven division against constellation-boundary division; no method commands consensus
• Age of AriesCosmological AgeCarries the same dating-methodology dispute as its neighbouring ages
• Age of PiscesCosmological AgeThe most contested boundary in the scheme, its own end date unsettled
• Age of AquariusCosmological AgeNo professional body has adopted an official transition date at all
• Third SunPosition 3 in Its CycleRival Aztec sources give a different sequence of rulers and disasters; neither favoured
• Age of the Holy SpiritPosition 3 in Its CycleJoachim's own calculation distinguished from his followers' firm date-setting
• Stoic Cosmic CycleCosmological AgeAncient Stoics themselves disagreed on how the cycle's repetition worked