The Average Astrologer is Not an Historian
One of the most remarkable aspects of my rectification of the Age of Aquarius commencing in the fifteenth century is that it was not derived from historians. Yet when one turns to the historians themselves, one discovers that they have repeatedly identified the fifteenth century as one of the great turning points in world history. The only comparable century was exactly one age earlier. Centuries that contain the beginning of a new age stand out from the rest.
This convergence of opinion is striking because the historians approach the period from entirely different disciplines and theoretical frameworks. Some write as cultural historians, others as political historians, economic historians, sociologists, or historians of civilization. Some are openly hostile toward astrology. Yet they repeatedly arrive at the same conclusion: around the fifteenth century, something fundamentally new entered history.
The period from approximately 1400 to 1500 AD is frequently described as the beginning of modernity. Look it up in Wikipedia! Aquarius rules modernity, and historians state that modernity arrived with the end of the Dark Ages in the fifteenth century. Most people know about the Dark Ages or medievalism, and the Dark Ages ended with the arrival of the age of Aquarius pioneering modernity.
In Early Modernity, the Renaissance matured, the printing press revolutionized the transmission of information and Humanism increasingly displaced medieval metaphysics. The Atlantic world was opened through the voyages of exploration. Global trade networks emerged. Capitalism acquired its foundations. Scientific inquiry accelerated. Individualism strengthened. Political and economic structures assumed recognizably modern forms.
The British historian Arnold Toynbee regarded the period from approximately 1400 to 1550 as a total transformation of humanity's social habitats. Richard Tarnas described the emergence of the modern self slightly more than five hundred years ago and considered the convulsions of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Scientific Revolution as giving birth to the modern world and modern consciousness itself. Geoffrey Blainey described the late fifteenth century as the most striking convergence of key events that the world had yet experienced. The Columbia History of the World characterizes the period around 1450 as enormously fertile in innovation and a transition from one civilization to another. The Collins Atlas of World History identifies the fifteenth century as a major turning point that laid the foundations of modern capitalism.
Even historians who reject astrology often arrive at similar conclusions. John Landon, despite his vehement opposition to astrological explanations, repeatedly refers to the developments after approximately 1500 as constituting the beginning of a New Age. For Landon, modernity itself emerges suddenly and dramatically during this period.
This agreement is remarkable because these historians are not discussing a single event. They are describing a structural transformation of civilization.
The fifteenth century witnessed the beginning of mass information through printing, the emergence of global interconnection through oceanic exploration, the foundations of modern capitalism, the acceleration of scientific inquiry, the rise of individualism, and the intellectual conditions that would later produce democracy, industrialisation, and modern social movements.
In retrospect, it appears less like an ordinary century and more like a reprogramming of the historical operating system of humanity. Many centuries are dramatic. Some witness revolutions, empires, or technological breakthroughs. Yet most operate within structures that already exist. The fifteenth century is different. It changes the structures themselves. It creates the conditions within which all subsequent centuries would operate. For this reason, historians repeatedly return to the fifteenth century as one of the principal hinge points of world history. They recognize that a new civilization emerged during this period, even if they disagree about the underlying causes.
From the standpoint of my rectification of the astrological ages, this convergence of historical opinion is difficult to ignore. The Age of Aquarius commences in 1433 AD, and historians, independently of astrology, repeatedly identify the same period as the beginning of modernity, the birth of the modern world, and the emergence of a New Age.
The historians did not set out to prove the Age of Aquarius. Yet their observations strongly suggest that something extraordinary happened around the middle of the fifteenth century. Their collective testimony points to a civilizational threshold—a moment when humanity crossed from one historical order into another.
That, in essence, is precisely what one would expect at the beginning of a new age. A new age is not introduced by a bunch of hippies smoking dope, no matter how many times they listen to the song from the musical Hair, “This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.”
The full post is available at: https://terrymackinnell.substack.com/p/the-average-astrologer-is-not-an