The twelve ages
of the Earth

Planetary Symbolism

The Sun is the principle: energy, heat, light, the very source of life. No living form yet, only the power that will make life possible. It is planet number 1, the beginning of everything.

Geological Content

The Earth forms by accretion around 4.54 billion years ago. What follows is the Hadean eon, an infernal phase: oceans of magma, meteoritic bombardments, an incandescent planet. The primordial crust solidifies progressively; water appears already in this phase, giving rise to the first oceans. True continents arrive later: the first stable cratonic nuclei emerge only around 3.5–4 billion years ago. The age of the Sun is that of a planet that ignites and cools just enough to host liquid water: the cradle, not yet life.

Planetary Symbolism

Eris marks the first appearance of life: microscopic forms, asexual reproduction by fission, the formation of oxygen, the "wind" that spreads life. It is number 2, and prepares the sexuality that will arrive with Haumea.

Geological Content

Prokaryotes appear — bacteria and archaea, single-celled organisms without a nucleus. Life remains unicellular for most of this very long age. The decisive conquest is chemical and atmospheric: cyanobacteria invent photosynthesis and, by releasing oxygen, trigger the Great Oxidation (~2.4 billion years ago), which transforms the Earth's atmosphere forever. Throughout this age, reproduction occurs by duplication: no selection, no choice, only proliferation. The transition toward multicellular organisms matures on the boundary between the end of Eris and the beginning of Haumea.

Planetary Symbolism

Haumea is the first "sexual" planet, the feminine self, the strategy of quality: selection, choice, receptiveness, protection. Opposite to Pluto (the masculine self, quantity), it introduces the combination of genetic heritage in place of pure duplication.

Geological Content

Eukaryotes appear — cells with a nucleus (~1.8–2 billion years ago) — and with them the great invention: sexual reproduction. For the first time life does not merely copy itself, but mixes and selects. The plant life of this age is marine: algae and early complex photosynthetic forms. Toward the end, multicellular organisms establish themselves firmly (the Ediacara fauna, ~600 million years ago). Haumea is the epoch in which life learns to choose.

Planetary Symbolism

Pluto is quantity, the widest possible dispersal of the seed, the exuberant multiplication of forms. It is the masculine opposite of Haumea. Note: sexual reproduction already begins with Haumea; Pluto's role is not the invention of sex but the proliferation of living forms — which makes its theme of pure quantity even purer.

Geological Content

It opens with the Cambrian explosion (~540 million years ago): in just a few million years, almost all the major animal groups known today appear. This is followed by the conquest of the land — first plants, then arthropods, then the first land vertebrates. It is the age of animal life multiplying and spreading everywhere: Pluto sowing without measure.

Planetary Symbolism

Neptune is water, dissolution, metamorphosis, great catastrophic transformations. It presides over profound changes in the Earth's surface and oceans.

Geological Content

It opens with the greatest mass extinction ever — the end-Permian (~252 million years ago), which wipes out roughly 90% of marine species. The age of reptiles follows: dinosaurs dominate the land, great reptiles populate the seas, and the supercontinent Pangea slowly fragments into today's continents. The age closes with a second cataclysm: the end-Cretaceous extinction (~66 million years ago), which sweeps away the non-avian dinosaurs. Water, continental drift, dissolution and rebirth: Neptune's domain.

Planetary Symbolism

Uranus is the sudden break, the flash of ingenuity, the innovation that erupts. It marks the moment when the ancestor of humanity begins to modify the surrounding environment.

Geological Content

After the disappearance of the dinosaurs, mammals diversify and occupy all the empty spaces. Primates appear, then hominids. In the very last fraction of this long age arrive the first stone tools (~2.6–3.3 million years ago): technology erupts into biology. Uranus is the flash of the tool — a sudden event that changes forever the relationship between the species and the world.

Planetary Symbolism

Saturn is the limit, the law, time, the father, structure. It is the age in which consciousness appears: the human being reflects on itself, and the Authority that decides and settles conflicts is born.

Historical Content

Homo sapiens appears (~300,000 years ago). In the Palaeolithic, articulated language, symbolic art (cave paintings, ritual burials, ornaments), and self-awareness mature. The age closes with the Neolithic revolution (~12,000 years ago): the invention of agriculture and animal husbandry, the first stable villages, and with them the first form of organised authority — those who keep the stores, who distribute, who judge. Saturn is the entrance of the norm into the human world.

Planetary Symbolism

Jupiter is expansion, abundance, power, magnificence. Humanity becomes master of the temperate lands and builds the first great political structures.

Historical Content

From the Neolithic we move to the first cities and first states, then to the great empires of antiquity, in chronological order:

• Sumer and the Mesopotamian city-states (from ~3500 bc): the first cities, cuneiform writing, the first law codes.
• Ancient Egypt (dynastic from ~3100 bc to 30 bc): three thousand years of continuous statehood along the Nile.
• The Akkadian Empire (~2334–2154 bc), often regarded as the first true empire in history.
• Babylon and Assyria (2nd–1st millennium bc); the Code of Hammurabi, ~1750 bc.
• The Achaemenid Persian Empire (~550–330 bc): the largest empire the ancient world had yet seen, from the Aegean to the Indus.
• Alexander the Great and the Hellenistic kingdoms (336–30 bc).
• The Roman Empire (Republic from 509 bc, Empire from 27 bc to 476 ad in the West; the East continues as Byzantium).
• Chinese dynasties: the first unification under the Qin (221–206 bc), then the long Han dynasty (206 bc–220 ad), a great power contemporary with Rome.
• The Maurya Empire in India (~322–185 bc).

It is the Jovian age par excellence: vast structures, wealth, monumentality, humanity's dominion over the temperate zones of the planet.

Planetary Symbolism

Mars is war, assertion, aggression, mistrust, the desire to impose oneself on neighbours and enemies. Conflicts lasting decades, religious wars, violent expansion.

Historical Content

This is the epoch of the clash between powers and faiths:

• The Crusades (1096–1291): the long series of religious wars between Christendom and Islam over the Holy Land.
• The Mongol expansion (13th century): the largest contiguous empire in history, from Genghis Khan onward.
• The Spanish Reconquista, concluded in 1492.
• The Age of Discovery and colonial conquest (from 1492): European expansion into the Americas, Africa, and Asia.
• The European Wars of Religion (16th–17th century), culminating in the devastating Thirty Years' War (1618–1648).
• The Ottoman Empire at its peak (15th–17th century) and the great empires of the early modern period.

The same period also contains the Renaissance and the scientific revolution. Man attempts to dominate natural space with science and technology. Politics and economics become instruments for dominating the world. Violence remains the dominant thread: wars, conquests, expansions. Art and science too are at the service of power, not the reverse. Culture is an instrument of domination, not of harmony — except for a few enlightened individuals who prepare the following age, that of Venus.

Planetary Symbolism

Venus is love, harmony, beauty, the sentiment of compassion. The need for universal rules, for peaceful coexistence, and the exaltation of Art are born.

Historical Content

The nineteenth century is the century in which a new humanitarian sentiment matures:

• The abolition of slavery: British Empire (1833), United States (1865), Brazil (1888).
• The first humanitarian conventions: the founding of the Red Cross (1863) and the first Geneva Convention (1864), the first attempts to give universal rules even to war.
• The great flowering of the arts: Romanticism in music, painting and literature; then Realism and Impressionism.

It is significant that this compassion is born in reaction to a new cruelty: it is also the century of the harshest industrialisation, of the exploitation of workers and children. Venus as the need for harmony and compassion against the harshness of one's time.

Planetary Symbolism

Mercury is movement, commerce, communication, speed. But also the adolescent attitude: impulsiveness, bravado, scant interest in the morality of behaviour. It is a step back from Venus's compassion, generating violence once more, joined by indifference toward one's neighbour and toward the environment.

Historical Content

The twentieth century embodies Mercury literally:

• The transport revolution: the mass automobile, the aeroplane (first flight 1903), ever larger ships, the Moon landing (1969).
• The communications revolution: telegraph and telephone, radio, television, the first computers. Finally the Internet, which prepares the age of the Moon, the last.
• Mass journalism and propaganda.
• Political "adolescence": totalitarianisms, the two world wars (1914–1918 and 1939–1945) with their unprecedented industrial violence, the arms race of the Cold War, and the first great damage to the environment.

Mercury is brilliant and immature together: the puer who runs fast but does not always know where he is going.

Planetary Symbolism

The Moon has no light of its own: it reflects. It is the dream, childhood, image, the mirror. It can be infantile, regressive, taking refuge in the imaginary. It is the age in which reality is known only through an image, and no longer directly.

Historical Content

This is probably the age we are living: difficulty in engaging with reality, refuge in dreams, in artificial or exotic paradises. The screen — of the smartphone, of the computer — becomes the only space in which to have confrontations and relationships. Reflection rather than one's own light: the world known through an image, no longer directly. The Moon closes the spiral in the narrowest circle, the innermost and most gathered point: the exact opposite of the solar fire from which everything had started.