When the moon is in the seventh house…
It’s astounding how many people can sing you the chorus of this song without even knowing that it comes from Hair. What is the Age of Aquarius, exactly?
The Age of Aquarius has its roots in both astrology and esoteric Christianity:
“You are probably familiar with the term New Age, and you may have heard or read about the dawning of the Age of Aquarius. This simply means that we are leaving one age (Pisces), and entering into a new one (Aquarius). This happens every two thousand years – the last one coinciding with the arrival of Christ.
What does this have to do with you? Well, it has quite a lot to do with you and everyone else on the planet. For a start, if you haven’t already undergone any changes, you might be feeling the urge to change now, or you may be witnessing changes around you. Either way, you will certainly be aware that life on planet Earth seems to be going off the rails in one way or another…
Under their combined influence, friendship with an agenda disappears into true fraternity, into pure unity. Then we can prepare ourselves for unity with the universal spirit. . . . In the Age of Aquarius, we break from the past to invent the future we desire in our society and in our person. The answers we find will be wholly new ones, totally original ones, but they require a thorough examination of what has been and what we wish to come. All our institutions as we know them must adapt to this new reality.” – Shri Mataji
This is the mindset of the Tribe: there is a genuine and potent sense of optimism, but perhaps more imprtantly of personal responsibility towards instigation of change. It is not, however, simply a change that happens for a few individuals or even a large group: the Age of Aquarius, once achieved, will be a complete paradigm shift across all of humanity. At the same time, the members of the Tribe are still inexorably tied to the the age prior, with all of its institutions, among them segregation, conservatism, patriotism, the American Dream and, perhaps most importantly, the institution of war.
As Maria Barron notes, for the recent Broadway revival, James Rado wrote a new verse for Aquarius, suggesting that perhaps we have not yet entered the Age of Aquarius:
As our hearts go beating through the night, we dance into the dawn of day
To be the bearers of the water, our light will lead the way
We are the spirit of the Age of Aquarius
Perhaps this, then, is why we are still fascinated with this show, why last year’s revival went on to win a Tony and recently struck an unprecedented Equity deal in order to send the entire cast to the West End. Just over a year ago, the world witnessed as the power of youth as a young, grassroots movement led to an historic election. Even this feat, however, was still accomplished in the shadow of a war that was–and remains–both far away and close to home. This song opened the very first production of Hair just over forty years ago. When we sing it in 2009, perhaps we want to think of it not simply as a window into a youth generation past, but instead as an expression of our own generation’s desire–and fight–for significant, lasting change.
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