Ages

Age of Pisces

Also Known As Piscean Age · Age of the Fish

Cosmological Age

Citation Formats

General Reference

Divinity Atlas. "Age of Pisces." Accessed August 30, 2026. https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-pisces.

APA Style

Divinity Atlas. (n.d.). Age of Pisces. Retrieved August 30, 2026, from https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-pisces

BibTeX

@misc{divinityatlas-age-of-pisces,
  author = {Divinity Atlas},
  title = {Age of Pisces},
  year = {2026},
  url = {https://dev-divinity.interactiveatlas.org/ages/age-of-pisces},
  note = {Accessed August 30, 2026}
}

The Age of Pisces is the zodiacal age conventionally placed between the Age of Aries and the Age of Aquarius, its span estimated at roughly the turn of the era to somewhere in the twentieth to twenty seventh century CE depending on the writer. It is the age most closely tied to Christianity in esoteric literature, on the strength of the fish as an early Christian symbol, most influentially in Carl Jung's Aion, though the exact century of its end is unsettled and disputed.

Facts

Attributions

Tradition

A genuinely older and narrower tradition than the 19th and 20th century zodiacal-ages framework, and distinct from it: medieval Jewish and Islamic astrologers, working from Masha'allah's eighth century theory that Jupiter-Saturn conjunctions mark major change, held specifically that such conjunctions falling in Pisces signaled events of great religious weight for Israel. Abraham bar Hiyya and Ibn Gabirol went further and used the same mechanism to attempt to calculate the Messiah's coming, a use Ibn Ezra rejected. Working from this tradition, Johannes Kepler proposed in 1614 that the triple Jupiter-Saturn conjunction of 7 BCE, which did occur in Pisces, might be the Star of Bethlehem (see the disputed point on The Visit of the Magi, and Kepler's own notable-publication fact). This medieval throughline is centuries older than, and independent of, the Theosophical and New Age popularization of "ages" that the description above describes; most treatments of Pisces-and-Christianity symbolism, on either side of the argument, miss it entirely. 2

Tradition

Carl Jung, Aion 1

Disputed

Proposed Dating

1 to 2000 CE 3

Nicholas Campion's A History of Western Astrology (Continuum, London, 2009) applies the same comparison of methods to the Age of Pisces that it applies across the zodiacal age scheme: an even division of the roughly 25,800 year precessional cycle into twelve 2,150 year shares against a rival method that measures each constellation's actual, unequal width along the ecliptic. Campion's survey finds this particular boundary is the most contested in the whole scheme, because it sits at the transition into the Age of Aquarius, so both the proposed end dates for Pisces and the proposed start dates for Aquarius span several centuries across the astrological literature he reviews, with no single convention commanding agreement among practitioners.

Identity

Symbol

The fish, read through early Christian ichthys symbolism and treated at length in Carl Jung's Aion 1

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The Conventional Span and Jung's Aion

On the standard even division of the Great Year, the Age of Pisces is generally placed beginning around the turn of the era and running, depending on the writer, into the twentieth, twenty first or as late as the twenty seventh century CE, following the Age of Aries and preceding the Age of Aquarius. Its most influential treatment is Carl Jung's 1951 study Aion, which reads the fish as a recurring symbol across the roughly two millennia associated with the age, from its use as a covert identifying mark among early Christians to its appearance as an astrological glyph, and treats the shift toward the following age as a psychological as well as an astronomical transition, part of Jung's broader argument about the changing symbolic contents of the Western collective unconscious.

Jung's study is explicit that it uses the astrological ages framework as a structuring device for psychological and symbolic material rather than as an astronomical claim he was independently verifying, and later commentators have generally read Aion the same way: as an influential work of analytical psychology that borrowed the Age of Pisces concept, not as an authority on when the age itself began or will end.

Fish Symbolism and a Genuinely Open End Date

The fish had already become an identifying symbol among early Christians well before any writer connected it to a zodiacal age: the ichthys, a simple two-arc fish outline, and the Greek acrostic built from the word for fish, spelling out "Jesus Christ, Son of God, Savior," both circulate in the first centuries CE, alongside the Gospel accounts of Jesus calling fishermen as his first disciples and multiplying loaves and fish. The later reading, chiefly associated with Jung's Aion and the wider ages literature Nicholas Campion surveys, treats this cluster of fish symbolism as evidence that the rise of Christianity coincided with the opening of the Age of Pisces, though the fish symbolism itself has an ordinary, well documented origin in the disciples' occupation and in early Christian need for a covert identifying mark, independent of any astrological claim.

The age's end date, and by extension the question of whether the Age of Aquarius has already begun, is the single most contested point in the entire ages literature, with credible proposals ranging across several centuries; this entry states the range rather than adopting any one writer's date as settled. Some writers who divide the Great Year by the true, unequal width of the constellations rather than by an even 2,150 year span place the Pisces to Aquarius transition centuries earlier than the even-division estimates, while others place it centuries later, and no single method has become the field's accepted standard, which is why claims that the Age of Aquarius has already definitely begun, or definitely has not, should both be read as one writer's position rather than an established fact.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Christianity

Jung's Aion reads the rise of Christianity as falling within the Age of Pisces, on the strength of the fish as an early Christian symbol.

Source Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works 9ii)C. G. Jung

Pisces

The Age of Pisces is named for the zodiac sign Pisces, read through fish symbolism in Carl Jung's Aion.

Source Aion: Researches into the Phenomenology of the Self (Collected Works 9ii)C. G. Jung

Belongs to Tradition

Western Astrology

Contained In

The Great Year

The Age of Pisces is one segment of the roughly 25,772 year precessional cycle called the Great Year.

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion

Related To

Mashallah ibn Athari

The medieval Jewish and Islamic tradition of reading Pisces conjunctions as religiously significant descends from the conjunction theory Masha'allah first argued.

Source From Masha'allah to Kepler: Theory and Practice in Medieval and Renaissance AstrologyCharles Burnett and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum (editors)

Succeeded By

Age of Aquarius

This edge names simple succession rather than a contested claim in its own right. The Age of Aquarius's own age-dating fact already carries why no transition date is agreed, in full.

Source A History of Western AstrologyNicholas Campion