Age of Aries

On the standard even division of the Great Year, the Age of Aries is generally placed at approximately 2000 BCE to the turn of the era, following the Age of Taurus and preceding the Age of Pisces. The constellation carries additional technical weight in Western astrology because the zero point of the tropical zodiac, the reference degree from which all twelve tropical signs are measured, is still called the First Point of Aries even though, owing to precession, it now lies within the constellation Pisces rather than Aries itself, a mismatch that is itself indirect evidence of how far precession has moved the equinox since the point was named in antiquity.

Nicholas Campion's History of Western Astrology notes that Hellenistic astrologers who developed horoscopic astrology in Ptolemaic Egypt worked within, or shortly after, the conventional Age of Aries window, and situates the astrological tradition's own origins inside the very age later writers would attach ram symbolism to, though the astrologers who systematized horoscopic technique in this period left no record of thinking of themselves as living in an "Age of Aries" in the later sense. The mismatch between the tropical zodiac's First Point of Aries and the constellation Pisces it now falls within is sometimes offered as an informal, everyday demonstration of precession's reality, independent of any position on when the associated zodiacal ages begin or end: it shows that the sky has visibly shifted against the fixed reference frame of Western astrology since the system's Hellenistic founders fixed the zero point roughly two millennia ago.

Writers within the zodiacal ages framework point to ram symbolism clustering in sources roughly contemporary with the proposed Age of Aries window: the Egyptian god Amun, depicted ram-headed or with ram's horns, rose to particular prominence as a state god through the Middle and New Kingdoms, and the Genesis account of Abraham and Isaac has a ram, caught by its horns in a thicket, substituted for Isaac as the sacrificial offering. As with the comparable reading of the Age of Taurus, this is an interpretation applied after the fact by writers working within the ages scheme, not a claim that Egyptian or Israelite sources make about themselves in relation to a precessional cycle.

The proposed end of the Age of Aries, conventionally set near the turn of the era to make way for the Age of Pisces, is subject to the same uncertainty that affects every age boundary in this scheme: an even 2,150 year division and a constellation-boundary division do not agree, and different modern authors have proposed dates for the Aries-to-Pisces transition that vary by more than a century. Ram symbolism of this general kind was in any case widespread across the ancient Near East well beyond the proposed Age of Aries window, from earlier depictions of ram-headed deities in Egypt to ram imagery in Mesopotamian art, which is part of why mainstream biblical and Egyptological scholarship explains these sources on their own historical terms rather than through a precessional reading that only entered circulation many centuries later.