Piscean Aeon

The Piscean aeon names the two-thousand-year symbolic epoch during which the archetype of the self appeared in the West under the sign of the Fishes and the figure of Christ. In Aion, Jung opens the work by announcing that his “investigation seeks, with the help of Christian, Gnostic, and alchemical symbols of the self, to throw light on the change of psychic situation within the ‘Christian aeon’” (Jung 1951, intro). The aeon is not astrological superstition in Jung’s usage but a periodization of collective psyche: the precession of the equinoxes is read as a synchronicity — “A synchronicity exists between the life of Christ and the objective astronomical event, the entrance of the spring equinox into the sign of Pisces” (Jung 1963, MDR).

The aeon has two halves, corresponding to the two fishes of the zodiacal sign. Christ is the first fish; the second fish has been the long, slow return of what the Christian imago Dei excluded — the shadow, the fourth, the feminine, the earth. Jung reads the twentieth century as the terminus of the aeon: “the sudden activation of the symbol, and its identification with Christ even in the early days of the Church, lead one to conjecture a second source. This source is astrology” (Jung 1951, §128). The Piscean age is thus the container in which the self has been articulated and disarticulated in the West. Its closing, and the transition to the Aquarian, is the psychological task Aion places on the present.

Relationships

• jung-aion
• self
• ichthys-as-self
• antichrist-as-shadow-of-the-aeon
• enantiodromia-of-the-aeon

Primary sources

• jung-aion (Jung 1951, intro and §128, §147)
• jung-memories-dreams-reflections (Jung 1963)