Recalling the Threshold
I have a distinct memory of anticipating Pluto’s first ingress into Aquarius in March of 2023. It was only a day or two after the spring equinox, and although I knew the transit would be brief (Pluto would soon turn retrograde and return to Capricorn), I had been looking forward to this moment for years. Ever since I began studying generational astrology in the early 2000s, I’ve made a practice of paying close attention whenever Pluto crosses the threshold into a new sign.
Over the years, I developed the habit of treating these threshold moments almost like an astrologer’s field notes. A planet’s first entry into a new sign rarely tells the whole story, but I have found that it often reveals something essential about the character of the cycle that is beginning, offering the first clues about the broader themes that will continue unfolding over the years ahead. I’ve learned to pay attention to those early signals without rushing to conclusions, allowing history itself to reveal their significance over time.
The question I carried into March of 2023 was a simple one:
What might Pluto’s first steps into Aquarius reveal about
the twenty-year journey that was just beginning?
As I watched Pluto cross that threshold, another story was beginning to unfold. ChatGPT-4 had just broken into the mainstream in a way that earlier versions had not. Artificial intelligence was no longer a niche conversation taking place among the hoodie-clad Silicon Valley tech elite. Almost overnight, it seemed to capture the public imagination. And a lot of people began asking a question that had suddenly become impossible to ignore:
What happens if this technology really is as transformative as it appears to be?
The simultaneous arrival of Pluto into Aquarius and the public emergence of generative AI immediately caught my attention. Together they seemed to express the character of an emerging archetypal shift. I had witnessed Pluto’s ingress into Capricorn sixteen years earlier and spent the intervening years observing how that cycle gradually unfolded through culture, politics, economics, and technology. By 2023, I had developed enough confidence in that way of working to pay close attention whenever the background frequency of history seemed to be changing channels.
The First Shockwave
The reaction to GPT-4 was immediate and intense. Artificial intelligence suddenly became the subject of conversations across every corner of society, provoking equal measures of excitement and curiosity, anxiety and speculation. People began experimenting with the technology for themselves, posting conversations with chatbots on Reddit, generating surreal images of people with seven fingers, writing useful little utility apps, and discovering new creative possibilities almost daily.
One moment the technology seemed almost miraculous, and the next it was confidently hallucinating facts or failing to count how many R’s are in the word “strawberry,” a mistake that quickly became an internet meme. And that’s when I started paying closer attention, not only to the tech, but also our collective response to it.
Because the emerging possibilities seemed to capture the public imagination almost immediately. Every new demonstration promised to expand the horizon a little further, and it became increasingly easy to imagine AI reshaping nearly every aspect of modern life. People envisioned breakthroughs in medicine, scientific research, education, software development, and the creative arts. For many, generative AI quickly became a symbol of progress itself, carrying with it the familiar hope that this latest technology would finally solve the problems left behind by every technology that came before it.
A second, very different conversation emerged almost as quickly. On March 29, 2023, just days after Pluto’s first ingress into Aquarius, the Future of Life Institute published an open letter titled “Pause Giant AI Experiments,” calling for a six-month pause on the development of AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. It was signed by Elon Musk, Steve Wozniak, Yuval Noah Harari, and thousands of researchers, technologists, and public intellectuals. The letter quickly became an international news story and shifted the conversation in a new direction.
Of course, the pause never happened.
But the public conversation did intensify as governments and institutions began searching for ways to respond. Congressional hearings were convened, inquiries were launched, and discussions about regulating artificial intelligence quickly moved into the political mainstream. The frontier AI companies presented themselves as responsible stewards of the technology while simultaneously lobbying governments and arguing that the industry was best positioned to regulate itself.
By then, Pluto had already begun its retrograde journey back into Capricorn, and looking back, those months feel like the final expression of an old pattern, with established hierarchies attempting to contain a technological force that was already reshaping the world around them.
In hindsight, what fascinated me most was the growing polarization surrounding AI. The technology seemed to invite increasingly expansive visions of humanity’s future while simultaneously provoking equally compelling visions of its decline. As those competing narratives gathered momentum, I found myself less attracted to the arguments themselves and more to the deeper pattern they appeared to express. It was becoming increasingly clear that the conversation surrounding AI was revealing something larger than the technology itself.
I had a growing sense that I was watching one of the
first unmistakable expressions of Pluto’s journey through Aquarius.
The Paradox of Aquarius
I often say that Aquarius is one of the most misunderstood signs of the zodiac. It is typically associated with technological innovation, objective truth, and collective fellowship. And while those associations are certainly meaningful, they only hint at something much deeper. Part of the challenge of understanding Aquarius is that it serves two masters. In the traditional astrological system, Aquarius belongs to Saturn. In modern astrology, it is co-ruled by Uranus. Rather than choosing one over the other, I have found it far more instructive to hold both together and explore the creative tension that emerges between them. This is the quintessential Aquarian move.
The reason I find this symbolic pairing so fascinating is that Saturn and Uranus represent a genuine threshold in both astronomy and mythology. Saturn is the outermost planet visible to the naked eye and, for thousands of years, marked the boundary of the known cosmos. It became associated with structure, order, limitation, and the accumulated wisdom of tradition. Uranus, by contrast, was the first planet discovered through the technology of the telescope, extending human perception beyond Saturn’s familiar boundary and opening an entirely new frontier.
I sometimes think of them as representing the transition between the old gods and the new, borrowing a phrase made popular by Game of Thrones. It captures something essential about Aquarius, which seems to stand with one foot in each world. Even the symbol of the Water Bearer suggests this liminal quality, standing at the boundary between land and water, carrying something from one domain into another.
Looking back at those first months of Pluto’s journey through Aquarius, I found myself seeing the same symbolic tension expressed almost everywhere I looked. The techno-optimists envisioned a future of unprecedented creativity, abundance, and human flourishing. Others saw the very same technology as a pathway toward surveillance, social disruption, and even extinction. Governments moved toward regulation while technology companies pushed for greater freedom to innovate. Everywhere I looked, Saturn and Uranus seemed to be expressing themselves simultaneously, preserving and disrupting, stabilizing and accelerating, each insisting upon its own vision of the future.
But Pluto’s movement into Aquarius was only part of a much broader cosmic transition already underway. Neptune was preparing to leave Pisces and enter Aries for the first time in more than a century, while Uranus was approaching its own ingress into Gemini. Together, the three outer planets were shifting from Earth and Water signs into Fire and Air, marking a profound change in the elemental quality of the times. If the previous era had been shaped by questions of stability, material systems, and emotional integration, the years ahead seemed destined to unfold through movement, communication, networks, ideas, and technological innovation. The atmosphere itself felt like it was changing.
Around this time, I also found myself making a distinction that has become increasingly important in my own thinking. People have been talking about the Age of Aquarius for generations, yet my own sense is that the astrological age still lies centuries in the future. Pluto’s ingress into Aquarius marks something different. I began referring to this period as the Aquarian Era, a historical chapter defined by Pluto’s twenty-year journey through the sign. Technology will almost certainly become one of its defining expressions, although I suspect AI represents only the first unmistakable signal of a much larger transformation that will continue revealing itself over the next two decades.
The more clearly I recognized the character of the new era,
the more important another question became:
How did I want to participate in it?
[End of Part 1]
Aquarian Era. I like it! This simmers down the debate on when we enter the Aquarian Age and makes the timeline less linear.