The Water Pourer, and the Age of Aquarius

The figure is a man pouring water from a jar, and the region of sky around it was known in Mesopotamia as the sea, a stretch containing Capricorn the goat-fish, Pisces the fishes, Cetus and the river Eridanus; MUL GU-LA, the Great One, is shown pouring a stream. In Greek myth the pourer is Ganymede, the Trojan youth carried to Olympus by the eagle to serve as cup-bearer to the gods.

The sign is also the source of one of the most widely repeated modern astrological ideas, the Age of Aquarius, in which the precession of the equinoxes is held to move the vernal point backwards through the constellations at roughly one sign every two thousand years, ushering in ages of differing character. The concept is a nineteenth and twentieth century development, given its popular form by Theosophical and later New Age writers; there is no agreement even among its proponents on when the age begins, with published dates spread over several centuries, because the constellation boundaries it depends on are arbitrary.