Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Aquarius
Printed in the Winter 2026 issue of Quest magazine.
Citation: Grasse, Ray "Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Aquarius" Quest 114:1, pg 19-22
By Ray Grasse
Though a critical and box office failure on its release in 1927, Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis has since come to be regarded as not only technically groundbreaking but prophetic in some ways. In addition to its depiction of a future society split by enormous class divisions, its story involves a robot, created by a mad scientist, that’s given the features of a beautiful woman, and which is used to manipulate the working masses toward destructive ends. It’s an early film depiction of artificial intelligence, or AI, and one that’s all the more striking because of the future time frame in which its story is set: the mid-2020s. In other words, right now!
Since that time, the subject of AI has become nearly omnipresent in cinema, television, and literature, leading many to muse over both the perils and promises of this rapidly evolving technology. As it so happened, when Richard Smoley told me the theme of this issue of Quest would be “Intelligence: Human and Artificial,” I had just watched Lang’s film yet again several nights before and was struck by how timely that film has now become.
Is humanity on the verge of a profound change as a result of AI? It certainly seems that way. Our lives have been changed in virtually every respect by computers, which now infuse every part of our lives—ATMs, credit cards, movies, the Internet, YouTube videos, our smart phones, cars, appliances, and so on. One way or another, these are all made possible by computers—that is, artificial intelligence.
But all this raises another, very different question: why is this happening right now? In other words, is the timing of this development simply a matter of chance, the result of blind historical forces—or there something deeper and more esoteric responsible?
I’d like to approach this question from a perspective I’m personally familiar with: astrology. In that spirit, I’d like to suggest that we might draw some useful insights from a doctrine known as the “Great Ages,” a broad perspective that suggests that roughly every 2,100 years, there is a seismic shift in the archetypal dynamics of history and of human psychology. According to this doctrine, we’re said to be moving from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. While the exact timing of this changeover is debated, it’s safe to say there is considerable overlap involved in any such transition, and that we now find ourselves straddling the divide between two great epochs. While it’s beyond the scope of this short piece to explain all the astronomical and astrological dynamics involved in this process (for that, I’d refer readers to my book Signs of the Times), even a basic overview of some essential principles can help shed some important light on the extraordinary changes taking place in our world.
From the Era of Water to an Era of Air
To a great extent, the deeper significance of any astrological age can be understood by looking at the underlying “element” it represents, since each element symbolizes a particular mode of consciousness. There are four of these in all—earth, water, fire, and air—each of which is repeated three times throughout the zodiac.
For the last two millennia, we have been under the influence of the “watery” Age of Pisces. Simply put, humanity has been perceiving both the world and itself largely through the lens of emotion, and alongside that, feeling-based beliefs. The Piscean influence has been neither all good nor all bad. Destructively, it’s resulted in an era characterized by dogma, persecution, self-abnegation, and an ethos of escapism to a heavenly realm beyond this one. In its more constructive side, that same watery emphasis has ushered in a newfound dimension of soul, an awakening of conscience, and an era of profound artistic creativity.
In contrast, the emerging epoch of Aquarius is ushering in a phase governed by the element of air—a far more mental mode, concerned with thinking and communication. This suggests that the emerging Great Age will be one where the mind and information, rather than emotion and interiority, reign supreme. Terms like the “information superhighway” and the “information revolution” are two examples of that emerging shift, while the modern separation of church and state is yet another, as our rational minds begin disengaging from the more dogmatic and emotional concerns of the old order.
Whereas the previous Great Age witnessed great sea explorations, the emerging Aquarian era is already associated with a startling rise in aviation technologies and space travel, as humans quite literally learn to master the air realm. The media also employs distinctly Aquarian metaphors reflecting this elemental shift when it says that a show goes “on the air,” or when a broadcaster “takes to the airwaves.”
The Three Faces of Air
Critical toward understanding the deeper significance of Aquarius is realizing that there are actually three different air signs: Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius. This relates to the fact that the principle of mind expresses itself through three distinctly different—and increasingly broad—contexts.
Gemini, the first of the three air signs, relates to the principle of mind in its most personal and common form, such as one might employ when talking to friends, family members, or neighbors, or when calculating an equation like 2 x 3 = 6.
Libra’s focus is somewhat broader, and more concerned with the interpersonal mind, as when a teacher or lecturer speaks before a class or audience. It’s still “mind,” but of a more interactional nature.
Aquarius represents the broadest and most collective form of mind: mentality and intelligence applied to large-scale social interactions and universal truths and principles. Some simple examples of Aquarian disciplines would include such areas as science, sociology, technology, or engineering.
Take science, for instance. Properly understood, science isn’t just about one person’s opinions or subjective emotional beliefs, but about ideas that can be confirmed by colleagues and peers and thus have more objective value. Similarly, technologies like television, smartphones, and computers result from the pooled efforts and thoughts of many thousands—perhaps even millions—of individuals. While many different religions or denominations debate the nature of God or heaven, as occurred in the Piscean Age, there is comparatively broad agreement amongst scientists around the world as to how electrons, gravity, rocket engines, or computers operate. Our ideas around such things are all a result of the Aquarian collective mind.
Grasping the Big Picture
In short, the rise of computers and AI can be seen as mirroring a tectonic shift in humanity’s evolution, a shift astrologers refer to as the Age of Aquarius and what psychologists like Carl Jung might describe as the rise of the “mental function.” This cultural transformation holds extraordinary potential to change our lives in dramatic ways, but it’s important to understand both the constructive and destructive possibilities of that shift.
At its most positive, it’s likely that we’ll continue to witness an extraordinary expansion of our mental horizons, in part through developments like space travel, the Hubble Telescope, genetic technologies, archaeology, neuroscience, cinema, television, and of course AI systems like ChatGPT and GROK—all funneled through the technology of the Internet, which has virtually become the exoskeleton of the new collective mind. As a result of these developments, the average high-school kid now has access to information about the world that even Copernicus and Aristotle couldn’t have imagined. It’s an extraordinary democratization of knowledge.
In turn, this wave of collective intelligence and pooled knowledge is making possible forms of mental creativity that didn’t really exist previously. As one way to frame this, we might think of the way each historical epoch has ushered in its own unique brand of “genius”: in the Age of Taurus, an earth sign (c.4000‒c.2000 BC), we saw extraordinary achievements in stone that still mystify experts, exemplified by the monuments and sculptures of ancient Egypt. The Age of Aries (c.2000‒c.1 BC), a fire sign and associated primarily with will, saw great military geniuses like Alexander the Great and the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The Age of Pisces (c.1‒c.2000 AD) saw the birth of great mystical geniuses like Meister Eckhart, Zen master Dogen, and Hildegard of Bingen as well as creative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Bach.
I’d suggest that the Aquarian Age will likely see the emergence of innovative or scientific geniuses in the spirit of Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. On a more philosophical level, it’s giving rise to synthesizing thinkers like Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Jean Gebser, who focused their attention less on the beliefs or ideas of any single religion than on the deeper principles and mythic archetypes underlying all of them. We see a similar Aquarian-style focus, incidentally, with groups like the Theosophical Society, the Unitarians, and Baha’i, all of which likewise advocate a more synthesizing and nondenominational approach to spirituality and religion.
The shared knowledge made possible through modern telecommunications and AI has expanded research possibilities exponentially, but it’s even possible we’ll witness a quantum leap in our mental abilities through such factors as genetic augmentation or machine/mind interfaces that upload knowledge or skills directly into our brains, as in The Matrix. (“Whoa,” as Neo, the hero, famously said in the original 1999 film, “I know kung fu!”)
The Dark Side
To no one’s surprise, these developments also pose considerable dangers that are both psychological and existential in nature.
The most obvious of those has been treated countless times in science fiction films and books in which computers and AI are shown overtaking and outsmarting their human progenitors—the proverbial “rise of the machines” scenario exemplified in James Cameron’s Terminator films or Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Incidentally, try moving each of the letters in “HAL” up one step in the alphabet and see what you get.)
Alongside this is the potential threat posed by nefarious human interests who would use AI to control the masses, as in our opening example of the robot in Metropolis. Indeed, the fact that the movie’s robot is made to look beautiful and alluring in order to manipulate those toiling masses offers an interesting analogy to our own predicament. We have willingly given ourselves over to technologies not only for the conveniences they provide but for their tangible beauty, from the allure of big-screen TVs to the sleek design of today’s cars, buildings, and smartphones. It may be that, like those suffering workers in Metropolis, we’ve succumbed to a form of technological Stockholm syndrome, where we have willingly given ourselves over to our AI “captors.”
Yet there is a more symbolic way to understand such developments: to interpret the potential dangers posed by these technologies as symbolizing the danger of being “overthrown” by certain states of mind.
What do I mean by that? Here’s an analogy. One of the classic mythic symbols of earlier times was that of a brave hero-figure doing battle against a fearsome dragon. Animals are clearly more of a symbol of instincts and emotions, which speaks to the fact that the initiatory challenge of the past was largely that of mastering our fears and emotions in order to simply survive. Today, however, we now see stories of humans doing battle against computers, like the astronaut Bowman contending with the AI personality of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey; or Neo fighting the various AI “agents” in The Matrix.
To my mind, that speaks to the fact that the “dragon” humanity now faces (especially now that basic survival needs have been met for most of the world’s population) is a far more mental one, involving the challenge of not letting a life of the mind eclipse the integrity and needs of the soul. That potential danger is aggravated not only by our world’s increasing reliance on science, data, and pure business, but in even more omnipresent (and subversive) ways, through the simple reality of citizens glued to their cellphones—swiping, swiping, swiping. What becomes of the soul when the entire world becomes filtered through these tiny mechanical screens?
What is the solution to these potential problems? How shall we tame the high-tech dragon of an overly mental and mechanical existence? It doesn’t necessarily mean renouncing AI and all of our technological conveniences altogether, I’d say, so much as taking care not to let these things completely dominate and control our lives. That may simply mean reducing our reliance on machines and time spent on computers, cellphones, and television, and spending more time in nature or in communion with other humans (as well as animals).
I think we can draw another important clue from Kubrick’s 2001. How did the astronaut ultimately overcome the threat posed by AI and the computer HAL? Essentially, it was by climbing inside and deprogramming it, bit by bit—or byte by byte, as it were. In much the same way, one approach to dealing with the potential tyranny of the hyperrational mind is by “unplugging” it—periodically taking time to reflect, meditate, and just sit in silence. By stopping the world, the world and its enticements can begin to loosen their grip, and we can start to reconnect with the life and needs of the soul. In that way, the otherwise fearsome dragon of the rational mind becomes an ally rather than an existential threat. One might even then begin solving that other great challenge posed by the emerging age: grasping the profound difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Ray Grasse is an astrologer and writer who worked on the editorial staff of Quest magazine and Quest Books throughout the 1990s. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods: The Further Teachings of Shelly Trimmer (reviewed in Quest, fall 2025). His website is www.raygrasse.com.
Artificial Intelligence in the Age of Aquarius
Ray Grasse
Though a critical and box office failure on its release in 1927, Fritz Lang’s movie Metropolis has since come to be regarded as not only technically groundbreaking but prophetic in some ways. In addition to its depiction of a future society split by enormous class divisions, its story involves a robot, created by a mad scientist, that’s given the features of a beautiful woman, and which is used to manipulate the working masses toward destructive ends. It’s an early film depiction of artificial intelligence, or AI, and one that’s all the more striking because of the future time frame in which its story is set: the mid-2020s. In other words, right now!
Since that time, the subject of AI has become nearly omnipresent in cinema, television, and literature, leading many to muse over both the perils and promises of this rapidly evolving technology. As it so happened, when Richard Smoley told me the theme of this issue of Quest would be “Intelligence: Human and Artificial,” I had just watched Lang’s film yet again several nights before and was struck by how timely that film has now become.
Is humanity on the verge of a profound change as a result of AI? It certainly seems that way. Our lives have been changed in virtually every respect by computers, which now infuse every part of our lives—ATMs, credit cards, movies, the Internet, YouTube videos, our smart phones, cars, appliances, and so on. One way or another, these are all made possible by computers—that is, artificial intelligence.
But all this raises another, very different question: why is this happening right now? In other words, is the timing of this development simply a matter of chance, the result of blind historical forces—or there something deeper and more esoteric responsible?
I’d like to approach this question from a perspective I’m personally familiar with: astrology. In that spirit, I’d like to suggest that we might draw some useful insights from a doctrine known as the “Great Ages,” a broad perspective that suggests that roughly every 2,100 years, there is a seismic shift in the archetypal dynamics of history and of human psychology. According to this doctrine, we’re said to be moving from the Age of Pisces to the Age of Aquarius. While the exact timing of this changeover is debated, it’s safe to say there is considerable overlap involved in any such transition, and that we now find ourselves straddling the divide between two great epochs. While it’s beyond the scope of this short piece to explain all the astronomical and astrological dynamics involved in this process (for that, I’d refer readers to my book Signs of the Times), even a basic overview of some essential principles can help shed some important light on the extraordinary changes taking place in our world.
<A>From the Era of Water to an Era of Air</A>
To a great extent, the deeper significance of any astrological age can be understood by looking at the underlying “element” it represents, since each element symbolizes a particular mode of consciousness. There are four of these in all—earth, water, fire, and air—each of which is repeated three times throughout the zodiac.
For the last two millennia, we have been under the influence of the “watery” Age of Pisces. Simply put, humanity has been perceiving both the world and itself largely through the lens of emotion, and alongside that, feeling-based beliefs. The Piscean influence has been neither all good nor all bad. Destructively, it’s resulted in an era characterized by dogma, persecution, self-abnegation, and an ethos of escapism to a heavenly realm beyond this one. In its more constructive side, that same watery emphasis has ushered in a newfound dimension of soul, an awakening of conscience, and an era of profound artistic creativity.
In contrast, the emerging epoch of Aquarius is ushering in a phase governed by the element of air—a far more mental mode, concerned with thinking and communication. This suggests that the emerging Great Age will be one where the mind and information, rather than emotion and interiority, reign supreme. Terms like the “information superhighway” and the “information revolution” are two examples of that emerging shift, while the modern separation of church and state is yet another, as our rational minds begin disengaging from the more dogmatic and emotional concerns of the old order.
Whereas the previous Great Age witnessed great sea explorations, the emerging Aquarian era is already associated with a startling rise in aviation technologies and space travel, as humans quite literally learn to master the air realm. The media also employs distinctly Aquarian metaphors reflecting this elemental shift when it says that a show goes “on the air,” or when a broadcaster “takes to the airwaves.”
<A>The Three Faces of Air</A>
Critical toward understanding the deeper significance of Aquarius is realizing that there are actually three different air signs: Gemini, Libra, and Aquarius. This relates to the fact that the principle of mind expresses itself through three distinctly different—and increasingly broad—contexts.
Gemini, the first of the three air signs, relates to the principle of mind in its most personal and common form, such as one might employ when talking to friends, family members, or neighbors, or when calculating an equation like 2 x 3 = 6.
Libra’s focus is somewhat broader, and more concerned with the interpersonal mind, as when a teacher or lecturer speaks before a class or audience. It’s still “mind,” but of a more interactional nature.
Aquarius represents the broadest and most collective form of mind: mentality and intelligence applied to large-scale social interactions and universal truths and principles. Some simple examples of Aquarian disciplines would include such areas as science, sociology, technology, or engineering.
Take science, for instance. Properly understood, science isn’t just about one person’s opinions or subjective emotional beliefs, but about ideas that can be confirmed by colleagues and peers and thus have more objective value. Similarly, technologies like television, smartphones, and computers result from the pooled efforts and thoughts of many thousands—perhaps even millions—of individuals. While many different religions or denominations debate the nature of God or heaven, as occurred in the Piscean Age, there is comparatively broad agreement amongst scientists around the world as to how electrons, gravity, rocket engines, or computers operate. Our ideas around such things are all a result of the Aquarian collective mind.
<A>Grasping the Big Picture</A>
In short, the rise of computers and AI can be seen as mirroring a tectonic shift in humanity’s evolution, a shift astrologers refer to as the Age of Aquarius and what psychologists like Carl Jung might describe as the rise of the “mental function.” This cultural transformation holds extraordinary potential to change our lives in dramatic ways, but it’s important to understand both the constructive and destructive possibilities of that shift.
At its most positive, it’s likely that we’ll continue to witness an extraordinary expansion of our mental horizons, in part through developments like space travel, the Hubble Telescope, genetic technologies, archaeology, neuroscience, cinema, television, and of course AI systems like ChatGPT and GROK—all funneled through the technology of the Internet, which has virtually become the exoskeleton of the new collective mind. As a result of these developments, the average high-school kid now has access to information about the world that even Copernicus and Aristotle couldn’t have imagined. It’s an extraordinary democratization of knowledge.
In turn, this wave of collective intelligence and pooled knowledge is making possible forms of mental creativity that didn’t really exist previously. As one way to frame this, we might think of the way each historical epoch has ushered in its own unique brand of “genius”: in the Age of Taurus, an earth sign (c.4000‒c.2000 BC), we saw extraordinary achievements in stone that still mystify experts, exemplified by the monuments and sculptures of ancient Egypt. The Age of Aries (c.2000‒c.1 BC), a fire sign and associated primarily with will, saw great military geniuses like Alexander the Great and the first Chinese emperor, Qin Shi Huang. The Age of Pisces (c.1‒c.2000 AD) saw the birth of great mystical geniuses like Meister Eckhart, Zen master Dogen, and Hildegard of Bingen as well as creative geniuses like Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Bach.
I’d suggest that the Aquarian Age will likely see the emergence of innovative or scientific geniuses in the spirit of Einstein, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. On a more philosophical level, it’s giving rise to synthesizing thinkers like Joseph Campbell, Carl Jung, and Jean Gebser, who focused their attention less on the beliefs or ideas of any single religion than on the deeper principles and mythic archetypes underlying all of them. We see a similar Aquarian-style focus, incidentally, with groups like the Theosophical Society, the Unitarians, and Baha’i, all of which likewise advocate a more synthesizing and nondenominational approach to spirituality and religion.
The shared knowledge made possible through modern telecommunications and AI has expanded research possibilities exponentially, but it’s even possible we’ll witness a quantum leap in our mental abilities through such factors as genetic augmentation or machine/mind interfaces that upload knowledge or skills directly into our brains, as in The Matrix. (“Whoa,” as Neo, the hero, famously said in the original 1999 film, “I know kung fu!”)
<A>The Dark Side</A>
To no one’s surprise, these developments also pose considerable dangers that are both psychological and existential in nature.
The most obvious of those has been treated countless times in science fiction films and books in which computers and AI are shown overtaking and outsmarting their human progenitors—the proverbial “rise of the machines” scenario exemplified in James Cameron’s Terminator films or Stanley Kubrick’s depiction of the computer HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey. (Incidentally, try moving each of the letters in “HAL” up one step in the alphabet and see what you get.)
Alongside this is the potential threat posed by nefarious human interests who would use AI to control the masses, as in our opening example of the robot in Metropolis. Indeed, the fact that the movie’s robot is made to look beautiful and alluring in order to manipulate those toiling masses offers an interesting analogy to our own predicament. We have willingly given ourselves over to technologies not only for the conveniences they provide but for their tangible beauty, from the allure of big-screen TVs to the sleek design of today’s cars, buildings, and smartphones. It may be that, like those suffering workers in Metropolis, we’ve succumbed to a form of technological Stockholm syndrome, where we have willingly given ourselves over to our AI “captors.”
Yet there is a more symbolic way to understand such developments: to interpret the potential dangers posed by these technologies as symbolizing the danger of being “overthrown” by certain states of mind.
What do I mean by that? Here’s an analogy. One of the classic mythic symbols of earlier times was that of a brave hero-figure doing battle against a fearsome dragon. Animals are clearly more of a symbol of instincts and emotions, which speaks to the fact that the initiatory challenge of the past was largely that of mastering our fears and emotions in order to simply survive. Today, however, we now see stories of humans doing battle against computers, like the astronaut Bowman contending with the AI personality of HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey; or Neo fighting the various AI “agents” in The Matrix.
To my mind, that speaks to the fact that the “dragon” humanity now faces (especially now that basic survival needs have been met for most of the world’s population) is a far more mental one, involving the challenge of not letting a life of the mind eclipse the integrity and needs of the soul. That potential danger is aggravated not only by our world’s increasing reliance on science, data, and pure business, but in even more omnipresent (and subversive) ways, through the simple reality of citizens glued to their cellphones—swiping, swiping, swiping. What becomes of the soul when the entire world becomes filtered through these tiny mechanical screens?
What is the solution to these potential problems? How shall we tame the high-tech dragon of an overly mental and mechanical existence? It doesn’t necessarily mean renouncing AI and all of our technological conveniences altogether, I’d say, so much as taking care not to let these things completely dominate and control our lives. That may simply mean reducing our reliance on machines and time spent on computers, cellphones, and television, and spending more time in nature or in communion with other humans (as well as animals).
I think we can draw another important clue from Kubrick’s 2001. How did the astronaut ultimately overcome the threat posed by AI and the computer HAL? Essentially, it was by climbing inside and deprogramming it, bit by bit—or byte by byte, as it were. In much the same way, one approach to dealing with the potential tyranny of the hyperrational mind is by “unplugging” it—periodically taking time to reflect, meditate, and just sit in silence. By stopping the world, the world and its enticements can begin to loosen their grip, and we can start to reconnect with the life and needs of the soul. In that way, the otherwise fearsome dragon of the rational mind becomes an ally rather than an existential threat. One might even then begin solving that other great challenge posed by the emerging age: grasping the profound difference between knowledge and wisdom.
Ray Grasse is an astrologer and writer who worked on the editorial staff of Quest magazine and Quest Books throughout the 1990s. He is author of ten books, most recently In the Company of Gods: The Further Teachings of Shelly Trimmer (reviewed in Quest, fall 2025). His website is www.raygrasse.com.
This is the 150th anniversary of the founding of the Theosophical Society, which took place in New York on November 17, 1875.
Let’s put away our cell phones, tablets, automobile keys, plane tickets, and other modern conveniences for the moment. We can wander back to the late nineteenth century. The year is 1875, only a decade after the end of the Civil War and Lincoln’s assassination. Current legislation includes the Civil Rights Act of 1875 (legislating equal access for all races to all public facilities), the Resumption Act of 1875 (restored the gold standard‒based currency), and the Page Act of 1875 (prohibiting entry of women and contract laborers from oriental countries). The Second Sioux War is raging, and Billy the Kid is at large. In New York City, the Art Students League and the Coaching Club (promoting the ability to drive a coach with four horses) have been founded.