Copyright © 2005 Sasha Fenton For some time, astrologers have talked about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, but the actual starting point of this new age still appears to be a matter of opinion. Astronomers tell us that the earth’s orbit moves slightly backwards through the constellations, so the spring equinox moves back through all the signs approximately once every 2,200 years, but there seems to be great difficulty in pinning down an exact date for this. The cusp around this change of signs is said to be so wide that it could occur at any time during the second half of the 20th and the early stages of the 21st century. When asked my opinion by radio presenters as to the dawning of the Age of Aquarius - if it has yet done so - I suggest December 1969, when Neil Armstrong and company landed on the moon. A couple of years before this date, the play called “The Age of Aquarius” opened in London and the hippie movement started on the corners of Haight and Ashbury Streets in San Francisco. The green movement started to catch on, especially after we all saw those photos of our shockingly tiny earth, when seen for the first time from outer space. Popular hatred of war as a means of one country imposing its will and its ideology on others began to take hold. The fear of nuclear disaster intensified as it became more obvious that a few bombs let off in one country would be sure to destroy all the rest. Computers started coming into their own by the end of the 1960s, starting with large mainframe equipment used by the military and government departments. Then computerised card indexes and mini-computers, and finally in the late 1970s, the IBM personal computers and their clones. My first husband, Tony Fenton’s, engineering factory started making metal parts for microcomputers for a company called P.E.T., which brought out models called the Pet and the Commodore in the early 1980s. The Internet was born in 1969 in the USA, it’s progenitor being the Advanced Research Projects Agency Network (ARPAnet), part of the American Defense Department Network, as a nuclear attack-proof means of exchanging scientific information and data. Amazing to think that something as totally negative as war should have given birth to something as magically revolutionary as the Internet! Revolution, change and fast paced modernisation are all very much part of the Aquarian scene. Anything that benefits people as a whole and that is for the greater good suits the Aquarian mood; knowledge and exploration, especially of a technical and scientific nature, also fit. Astrologers in the 1960s wondered whether the Aquarian Age would usher in more totalitarian forms of government or more democracies, but we have yet to see developments in that direction. Larger groups such as the EU (European Union) and the similar one that is forming in the Pacific, centred on Japan, are also very Aquarian. Technology, space exploration and federations seem to be on the cards for the Aquarian future. New ideas, fresh approaches and idealism are opening their doors to us now. We earthlings may be practical and conventional, but the creatures that space travellers are sure to meet as they boldly venture out on the Starship Enterprise will be truly original and eccentric to our eyes. Very Aquarian! | 
