Common Cultural Associations
The expression Age of Aquarius in popular culture usually refers to the heyday of the hippie and New Age movements in the 1960s and 1970s. The New Age movement is more accurately a phenomenon and yet seen by many as the harbinger of this future changeover of values associated with the arrival or imminent arrival of the Aquarian age.
Although more rock than New Age in genre, the 1967 musical Hair, with its opening song "Aquarius" and the memorable line "This is the dawning of the Age of Aquarius", brought the Aquarian age concept to the attention of audiences worldwide. However, the song further defines this dawning of the age within the first lines: "When the Moon is in the seventh house and Jupiter aligns with Mars then peace will guide the planets and love will steer the stars". Astrologist Neil Spencer denounced the lyrics as "astrological gibberish", noting that Jupiter aligns with Mars several times a year and the moon is in the 7th House for two hours every day. These lines are considered by many to be merely poetic licence, though some people take them literally. An example is the identification of Valentine's Day 2009 as the "perfect alignment to support our collective manifestation of love and peace and dawning of the Age of Aquarius".
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Famous quotes containing the words common, cultural and/or associations:
“The barriers of conventionality have been raised so high, and so strangely cemented by long existence, that the only hope of overthrowing them exists in the union of numbers linked together by common opinion and effort ... the united watchword of thousands would strike at the foundation of the false system and annihilate it.”
—Mme. Ellen Louise Demorest 1824–1898, U.S. women’s magazine editor and woman’s club movement pioneer. Demorest’s Illustrated Monthly and Mirror of Fashions, p. 203 (January 1870)
“At times it seems that the media have become the mainstream culture in children’s lives. Parents have become the alternative. Americans once expected parents to raise their children in accordance with the dominant cultural messages. Today they are expected to raise their children in opposition to it.”
—Ellen Goodman (20th century)
“Wild as it was, it was hard for me to get rid of the associations of the settlements. Any steady and monotonous sound, to which I did not distinctly attend, passed for a sound of human industry.... Our minds anywhere, when left to themselves, are always thus busily drawing conclusions from false premises.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)