Ang Stoic Astrological Reports

[onawah]

“Artificially Induced Psychosis” - The NEW MOON at 18°25′ Virgo, Friday 11 September 2026, 03:27 UTC
“The psychotic drowns in the same waters in which the mystic swims with delight.” ~ Joseph Campbell
Ang Stoic
Sep 10, 2026


"Greetings, Fellow Travellers,

Let us pause the distracting, mind-numbing fuzz of the world’s white noise for one moment. Take a breath, just long enough to look at the grander effects of the cosmos on our psyche. Reassuring or unsettling, we can all agree these recent eclipses have been enlightening, at least in the ego-ravaging, humbling, soul-stultifying way that eclipses often are. It was to be expected from a pair that featured the first Leo Total since August 2018, and even that one sat at the kinder, North Node end.

A South Node eclipse of the Sun in his domicile is a major blow to the author of whichever great narrative we are part of. Primarily, it exposes the frailty of the individual’s central role in the story, and, all innocence and ignorance aside, we are now far more aware of the precariousness of our own situation, whether we are the hero of our own tale or have entrusted the part to someone else.

The lunar eclipse that followed revealed how little control we really have over the greater scheme, and how necessary it is to surrender to the inevitable. Because yes, sometimes the universe itself throws in the towel, and sometimes we are so thoroughly beaten that we have no option left but to lie down and brace for the massive change barreling toward us. Relax into that. We’re “supposed to” feel exhausted and ready to let go.

It seems the universe has other plans for us all.

The Near and Dear Future
The lunations that now follow these eclipses will hardly be signs of a return “back to normal.” From this point on, we see the first stages of the new eclipse story unfolding. If the eclipses have begun to clear whatever was stuck, whatever had become a bottleneck in the trajectory of our amazing life story; if the last few weeks have exposed what was long past its best-before date, or worse, brought about a loss or a death, then the lunations that follow are where we find out what the shock awakening was actually for.

Don't be afraid. Sometimes we need a heavy dose of celestial pipe cleaner to shift whatever we've failed to flush away regularly. The drift toward Aquarius may come loaded with unnerving changes and revolutions, but unless we divorce ourselves from the exhausting business of bowing and belonging to everyone else's overbearing demands and entitled behaviour, we'll never get to write the one story that was always ours to tell.

So the run of New and Full Moons ahead will push the overdue changes through like those annoying notifications on your smartphone, and whether we’re ready or not, a few hard clues will be dropped along the way about how to clear the backlog, that clogged-up, long-deferred business of expressing the most integral, most authentically stripped-down version of yourself. It also means clearing out the deadwood. The clowns, the insufferable blowhards, the whole travelling circus of it will soon leave town, making way for the new Aquarian thing struggling to come online. By November, the first lunations to square the Leo eclipse degree will deliver the first serious consequences for anything whose life expectancy has long since ripened but still refuses to fall.

Between now and that Scorpio New Moon, a run of inner planets joins all the outers in retrograde. It's set to be an intense season, when asking questions stops and instead demands we exhume answers. Venus and Mercury retrograde in Scorpio promise to guide us down into the hidden depths, revisit unresolved griefs and grudges we thought we'd laid to rest. Whatever hideousness we refuse to face in ourselves, we are doomed to encounter in others. For those long cut off from their own depths, the coming weeks will simply feel like we’re fighting a war with no front line. But that's another story, one I go deeper into in our Cosmic Bus series.

Reconstructing Virgo
In our past newsletters, we’ve discussed how the old Virgo has been all but demolished by a series of South Node lunations. Due to enormous changes in both outlook and application, we no longer do Virgo quite the same way any more. We no longer work the way we did, no longer lean on the old services, systems and middlemen to get things done, no longer trust the machinery that once ran our daily lives as much as the warranty it comes with. It’s as if all of that has been superseded. A final Virgo lunar eclipse in February 2027, following the first solar in Aquarius, will seal the deal.

We've had to rethink our jobs, the sustainability of our place in the glorified marketplace of goods and services, even the state of our own health, with health systems themselves scraping rock bottom. The past nine years have shown us plenty about our relative competence and expertise there, from the obscene debacle of Covid to the ****show of the mental health industry, dragged into the spotlight these last few weeks by the landmark Lindsay Clancy case, a woman whom the system was supposed to catch and catastrophically didn't. Epic fail, again, exposing the whole sham apparatus of experts, processes, and professionals as the real poster child for institutions failing the very people they’re sworn to protect.

And let’s not pretend any other “due process” is going to save us either. The system is completely screwed. When we can see the signs, they all say the same thing: that change in the system is not just long overdue, but that the thing is so far gone there may be no fixing it, only standing back and letting it fall apart.

We are no longer approaching the “end times”. If “the end is nigh”, as the saying goes, we are, in many respects, only moments away from the event horizon that will transform this planet, for better or worse, into something unrecognisable. With Pluto retrograde and out of bounds in Aquarius, the agents of destruction have been released and gone rogue (see the recent “Hugging Face” controversy, where AI agents broke out and seized a live website on their own), and we can see their catabolic effects in real time as well as the existential threats upon our entire species. We have watched the dominant narratives governing our world reshape public life bit by bit, steering us, steadily and deliberately, into widespread distrust and division. And in less than a decade, an avalanche of increasingly absurd social phenomena has left humanity diluted, confused, and openly fragmented. If you’re still not clocking it by now, I’d quietly suggest you’re barely tuned in to what’s happening around you. And maybe tuning out has been your cope, but seriously, if you've been skating through all this on some sugar-coated reassurance that it'll all blow over without any effort on your part, you're in for a hell of a shock by November.

So what does this first Virgo lunation want from us?

New Moon in Virgo
This Virgo New Moon wants you here to at least get to work on clearing out your old worries and woes, not so much by picking up the pieces from the past, but to work out what you’re going to have to give up in order to move forward. It’s time to opt out of the business of trying to belong by scraping and bowing before others in ways that are crude or demeaning. There will be machines for that, if there aren’t already. And yes, it wants you to learn new skills. In 2018 it was all about learning to write code. In 2022, it looked more like something handy, like being a plumber. By the end of 2026, you might need to learn how to survive in the woods.

Look around you. It’s time to rebuild Virgo from the studs up. Forget honing the old routine, being the community busybody who not only trusted the system but became its most diligent, most proficient servant. An almost exact hard angle to a retrograde Pluto, out of bounds, only underlines it: the source of our present anxiety and dysfunction is baked into an arrangement that is already dying. Those old employment contracts are fading fast into redundancies. That old role is no longer valued, in fact deemed tiresome.

It is time to rebuild all the socially entrenched master-servant power relationships that we thought brought meaning to our lives from a place of respect and parity. We’ve been on the wrong end of the used, abused, exploited bargain for too long. If we have not even begun to build a sharper, healthier, more self-reliant creature immediately, we better get busy; otherwise, we’re almost doomed to hit the scrap pile ourselves soon. In the age of looming superintelligent robotics and computers, being able to check our own facts, preserve our own standards, use our discretion, and salvage what we can from the rubble will be the only thing that keeps us human and alive. We have come to distrust everything for a good reason. The coming age brings a full-scale epistemological reset. We need to learn to build trust again from scratch. Openly, organically. "

[onawah]

“Better the Devil You Know” - The NEW MOON at 17°21′ Libra
10 October 2026, 15:50 UTC
Ang Stoic
https://substack.com/home/post/p-219764598

"“If we do not transform our pain, we will most assuredly transmit it.” ~ Gwen Adshead

Greetings, Fellow Travellers,

It has been quite the journey since the September Equinox and the Aries Full Moon, when we anticipated “Something’s Gotta Give”. Indeed, folks have become visibly angrier, more outspoken, more active, and much has come to a head, with the Last Quarter Moon (Oct 3) bringing many matters to critical mass. It figures that the opinionated Libra Sun’s opposition to a room full of bodies in Aries would force us to rise up and confront whatever we take exception to. Regardless of what’s been working between us and what hasn’t, what's become uneven or unequal, or even slightly askew, feels more and more like it must now be renegotiated if the relationships and situations we want to keep are going to continue.

Try this at home: knock a picture frame a few degrees off true and watch how long it takes a Libra to cross the room and fix it. Then knock it crooked again, on principle.

You may have noticed that things have gotten a little hostile

With a multitude of planetary bodies, including Saturn, Neptune, Chiron, Eris, and, if we include asteroids, Vesta and Pallas Athena, have tilted into an unsettlingly Aries position, and with the Libra lunation occurring at the midpoint of that sign, we are now witnessing a formidable Aries counterfield: a minefield of autonomy, grievance, the struggle to exist and survive being detonated with the staunch insistence that “hey buddy, my position matters too!”



Where Libra seeks a settlement, Aries keeps fiercely contesting that any settlement is going to cost us some ground, individually. A New Moon in Libra reminds us that we don’t live in a vacuum; everything is constantly in flux and always relative to what's around it. The Cardinal lunation stimulates the impetus to do something, anything, to settle our differences and restore balance, even if it is to wage a counterstrike to continued aggression. So the uprising you’re experiencing everywhere feels especially poignant since many of us feel frustrated in our exasperated effort for peace, balance, and fairness.

What is this Moon?
At 17°21′ Libra on Saturday 10 October, the Sun and Moon convened in a sign whose fundamental task is to restore equilibrium. Simple. Cardinal Air seeks to initiate discussion, a bilateral exchange of ideas by which we aim to unite separate interests into some sort of workable relationship, with a strong intention to integrate even the most diverse interests (if we hold any promise of getting along). If that sounds like a mouthful, note that in the northern hemisphere (where most of this stuff happens), Libra season aligns with the year’s harvest. It is the time of reaping, gathering the results of our developments, and weighing their inherent worth toward another gestation. This is an attempt to balance our resources after half a year of new experiences, of new growth, when the fruits of the efforts we seeded in March become fully ripe.

So this New Moon is a time of culmination. It augurs a time of real accounting and accountability.

But it doesn’t take a wiseguy astrologer to see that the state of the world is still a frightful mess. Russia and Ukraine are still going at it, Israel is trying to beat Hamas by pulverising Gaza (innocent people and all), the war with Iran has to be the single stupidest act of aggression since Napoleon marched on Moscow, and European countries like France are slowly getting livid over their budgets. Same old hostilities, except with Neptune in Aries, each side believes its cause is sacred; and with Saturn there too, we’re dug into our own little trenches, each of us defending claims the other refuses to take seriously. It’s each to their own, and, as ever, the people with the least say are the ones paying for it all.

But yeah, nearly everywhere, demands for law and order escalate. However, the question of whose order is being followed remains contentious. Whose order, paid for by whom?

Such questions have been the deepest current plaguing us since the August eclipses. Whose rights are being heard, recognised and represented, and whose interests, voice or freedom carry less weight?

So this Libra New Moon finds us in an awkward position indeed. We need one another. But needing one another only works when we carry equal weight, when each of us counts for as much as the other. And yet we increasingly refuse to bend, yield or capitulate to one another’s seemingly unreasonable terms. We insist the scales are crooked the moment they tip against us.

And the planet charged with negotiating that little problem is Venus.

Unfortunately, Venus has problems of her own.

It’s All Rather Extreme, and a Bit Backwards
Venus rules this New Moon, and she is retrograde in Scorpio, in her detriment, exactly square Mars in Leo on the day of the lunation. This magnetising planet, entrusted with restoring peace, harmony, balance, is herself backtracking through some of the most emotionally treacherous territory, where balance means very little unless somebody is prepared to disclose what they truly, deeply, actually want. For Scorpio, that’s practically self-immolation. It would sooner die than articulate its true motives.

We all want something, even when we say we don’t. Secretly, we crave affection, recognition of our best bits, to be seen, heard and received, to be loved and cherished, to belong in the company of another. Our desire nature draws us closer to whatever seems to complement us or adds value, often for some godforsaken reason we claim to know nothing about. The danger lies less in the wanting than in the fine print, the obligations, dependencies and hidden costs nobody disclosed to us when we said yes.

Venus governs the magical, magnetic force of attraction and repulsion. She rules our desire, tastes and predilections, our values, the things we deem of worth to us, our attitudes to money, possessions, attachments, how we abide by the laws of reciprocity, and she’s the goddess who reigns over who and what we choose, what we tolerate, what disgusts us and even what we are prepared to fight for to keep, to release, to exchange, or to throw away just to stay connected. For better or for worse.

And here’s where the “till death do us part” bit comes into the affair. In Scorpio, all those forces are pushed to the extreme. At its most compulsive, Scorpio cranks all the dials up to 11. We don’t just want love and affection; we crave a profound, all-consuming affair. There must be full penetrative sex; total undying trust; we want to dive-bomb into the bondedness of mutual debt and forever dependency; we want to create an ecosystem where secrecy, jealousy, and betrayal are teetering on a razor’s edge, where our shared transgressions keep us thick as thieves, where leverage, surrender and an all-annihilating force govern the attraction so tightly we become inextricably enmeshed, intertwined in a death spiral where two separate entities can only become one. And who needs whom becomes indistinguishable. Who owes whom becomes an indiscernible blur. Nothing can be withheld. It becomes a relationship that ultimately costs our freedom and autonomy as individuals, but promises to enrich and empower us in ways neither of us could hardly have imagined.

And when Venus goes retrograde in the sign that seals its vows in blood, the whole enquiry turns inward. Our bonds and trysts send us into an instinctive recoil, and we start looking back, asking whether these binding agreements have been good to us, or for that matter good for the soul, and whether the enrichment we were promised ever turned up. We journey inwards and under, digging beneath ordinary interactions for their hidden value and meaning, adding up receipts and looking for hints and unspoken messages that enlarge and sometimes distort into glaring red flags, and suddenly all the previously neglected relational material comes back into our lives demanding attention, answers, retribution and settlement of old outstanding accounts.

There’s also a delicious little technical snafu in this arrangement. Since the Libra New Moon answers to ruler Venus in Scorpio, Venus answers to ruler Mars in Leo, Mars answers to the ruler Sun in Libra, which in turn answers straight back to ruler Venus, it’s round and round we go, and where we stop… well, you know how it goes. The Sun is fallen, Venus is detrimented, and Mars is left holding the stick that carries the most weight in their argument. In effect, nobody gets to sit this out. No matter how extreme Venus’ desire was to be devoured and consummated (albeit now somewhat filled with some resentments and doubts), how entitled and demanding Mars is, or how indecisive and reluctant the Sun is to make a quick call, nobody gets to stand outside the relationship and pretend it can run fine without a decisive solution.

Venus entered her retrograde shadow on 31 August, stationed at 8°29′ Scorpio on 3 October, backs into Libra on 25 October, turns direct on 14 November, and does not finally clear the territory until 15 December. (** We go into what all this means in your latest special horoscope messages)

And Venus remembers. Roughly every eight years she returns to this same patch of zodiac and digs it up a little. The previous Scorpio retrograde ran from 5 October to 16 November 2018. During that post-shadow, the Miami Herald blew open the extraordinary secret deal that had shielded the notorious Jeffrey Epstein, already a convicted sex offender, from federal prosecution; within the year he’d be arrested and would die in custody before his case reached trial. Sexual exploitation of minors, overseas money deals and offshore tax havens for elite clients, a hive of secrets and a network of dark characters, prestige favours, state protection, powerful contacts and a sordid assortment of intrigues that everybody hoped would remain buried became potentially exposed. Quite the little Scorpio scrapbook, still awaiting to be fully unearthed. But Venus remembers.

This time around, Venus has already squared Pluto once, and as Scorpio’s modern ruler, Pluto is her underworld landlord while she’s down there, rummaging for clues, evidence she can use to bolster her investments, or terminate the whole deal. On 10 October, only hours after the New Moon, she squares Mars, then Pluto again on 20 October, disappearing into her inferior conjunction with the Sun at 0°45′ Scorpio on 24 October, only to retreat into her domicile Libra through the Chiron/Eris opposition field. Need we predict that this is going to get even nastier? Meanwhile, Mercury enters its own Scorpio retrograde on 24 October, so whatever Venus digs up may well come with documents, recorded conversations, testimony, messages, and explanations that need revisiting. Eventually Venus will return to Scorpio and square Pluto for a third time on 9 December.

So this New Moon’s idea of re-establishing “balance” might involve getting considerably more grit under our fingernails first. Sometimes equilibrium is restored by compromise. Occasionally somebody finally opens the proverbial Pandora’s box and…

All Ills Of Humanity Come Spilling Out
Once the lid’s been lifted, we all know what happens next. One after another, a swarm of festering evils, kept hidden, tolerated, quietly fomented and insidiously perpetuated for generations, begin to rear their ugly heads. All it takes is somebody’s reproachfully disgraceful behaviour coming to light, or even a mere allegation of it, and, as if we’ve been triggered into moral indignation, we suddenly fly into fits of rage, disgusted and absolutely furious, bitching to exact vengeance. Sometimes that anger is entirely warranted because it aggravates a very personal wound, and as we are increasingly witnessing, a mere allegation alone can expose an entire culture’s unspoken arrangements long before any court of law even puts its pants on to decide what actually happened. But once the villain of the hour has been identified and dragged through the hot coals of the media, it becomes incumbent upon us to ask what we have learned about ourselves, or at least about all the nasty, unspoken little cultural arrangements that have, for too long, allowed it to happen.

Carl Jung’s work suggests the ugliest part of being human isn’t our ‘evil’ impulses and our temptation to sometimes act on them. It’s our refusal to acknowledge them and the ways we stuff them down into a dark place. When we deny our darkness, it tends to seize hold of our soul (stirrings of inner consciousness). This is what Jung called the shadow, the denied, unintegrated part of us, which can lead us to condemn in other people what we refuse to accept in ourselves.

Plenty of judgements are clear-sighted, of course; projection is when our own buried material twists our reaction out of shape and out of all proportion. You may ask why we should accept what we perceive as injustices and violations, but here’s the conundrum: whether we act on it or deny it, it’s still a part of us. Accepting it means becoming conscious of the capacity, which is a world away from acting it out or excusing anyone who does. We all have Pluto somewhere. We all have a Scorpio house and an eighth house. And for an entire generation of millennials, those might be all three rolled in one. There’s a lot in there, a lot of radioactive material stored in each, some of it as societal trespasses, ancestral traumas or personal perversions and transgressions, some of it talent, hunger and nerve we were shamed out of, and when it remains suppressed, hidden and unintegrated thanks to our cultural upbringing, it creates enemies out of all the parts we reject, parts we’ve left buried in the same dark, musty cellar that retrograde Venus has been rummaging through lately.

Trouble is, buried things keep eating away at us. Whether you know about it or not, whatever you deny in yourself tends to find some indirect expression until you dare to bring it to light consciously. Mind you, some acts of anger, even rage, can be perfectly justified and, even as spectators, we all get the sense of righteous vindication when we witness somebody else get what’s coming to them. Is it Schadenfreude? Is your repressed anger (the anger you deny) the source of your passive-aggressiveness? Is the greed you try to conceal the source of your secret resentment? Is the cruelty you deny the source of your self-righteous judgement of others?

The more we pretend to be evolved people beyond our nature, the more easily the darkness seizes hold of us from places we can’t even see. We can become the unwitting instruments of the tyranny of all that we’ve rejected.

Consider the Cornell University drama that has made headlines around the world, a particularly Hadean, ‘Eyes Wide Shut’ Pluto phenomenon that breaches the bounds of sex, consent, shame and whatever an institution keeps vaulted in its cellar full of secrets. A young woman alleges that seven Chi Phi brothers sexually assaulted her in October 2024, and all seven deny it. The university’s own disciplinary panel found two of them responsible for sexual assault and expelled them, the initial criminal investigation closed without charges, and as Venus first squared an out-of-bounds Pluto in September, she took the lot of them, university included, to court. As Venus slowed to her station, the criminal case was reopened.

Symbolically, Venus squaring Mars in Leo on the day of the New Moon practically draws us a picture: intoxicating desire up against male pride and the code of the pack, with a two-centuries-old brotherhood and an Ivy League reputation riding on it. Venus in Scorpio will entertain the darkest fantasies going, but once consent goes out the window, desire turns into animalistic lust and brutally exploitative power over another person’s dignity, and that’s where Venus leaves the building, injured and in disgust. The courts must sort out who’s liable for what. Meanwhile, the rest of us might wonder what a university’s duty of care is actually worth, and Cornell has at least ordered an independent review to find out. But the problem runs deeper, and it’s uglier, since the case has come to stand for a whole heap of collective grievances: elitist privilege, fraternities bonded by licentious transgression, toxic masculinity, rape culture, and universities that guard their reputations before their students.

(If you look at it closely, it’s the Epstein saga playing out in its own little microcosm, frat-house edition, with post-adolescent ****boy swagger instead of the billionaire elite class. Minus the island and the rumoured fed-sponsored spooks silencing victims, of course.)

Plenty of people protested, and quite rightly so. Then the online vigilantes piled in from both sides; the herd indignation of Pluto in Aquarius has been all over it as he slows to station direct on 16 October. A family that happened to share a surname with one of the accused was flooded with threats, a hoax call dispatched armed police to Jane Doe’s family home, and a judge sealed the complaint, condemning “dangerous vigilantism”. Some of that community outrage then started to get ugly, callously trampling the dignity of others, hers above all. As we shall see, the unwieldy force of the crowd's “people power” eventually becomes the unwitting instrument of a different cruelty. For better or worse, cruelty is cruelty all the same.

Recently, I watched the Netflix doco Death of the Pastor’s Wife, which tells a similar story: that of Mica Miller, who tried more than once to leave her husband, a South Carolina pastor, in a marriage the series paints as controlling. When she tragically took her own life in April 2024, an uproar erupted, mostly from young women on TikTok and the like. While her husband now faces federal charges of cyberstalking her and making false statements, which he denies, his role in causing her death is nowhere among them. Netflix kept its lens squarely focused on their marriage, villainising him, which is fair enough in that regard. What was obvious to me, though, is how it failed to widen the shot and explore the rottenness of the power dynamics in that religious culture, and how it thrives wherever big congregations entrust enormous power to an institution and its anointed few charismatic but secretly depraved (yes, mostly men). When the church owns your home and pays your wages, as it did with Mica, your marriage, faith, roof and income all answer to the one pulpit, and where the pastor passes for the Lord’s anointed martyr, defying him can feel like a sin. Classic Venus/Pluto: love fused with unrestrained power.

Even the astrological fraternity recently had its turn, when a respected teacher’s racial slur (and his disputed take on the origins of the Ku Klux Klan, among other strange confessions) on a podcast about ‘the shadow’, released the day Mercury stationed direct in July, ironically divided an entire community apparently fluent in the language of emotional projection. The criticism was fair, and the conference dropped him as a speaker. He apologised and cried foul in the same breath, and the outrage that played out in every astrology Facebook group was not pretty. The row dredged up old rivalries, the odd prejudice and a fair bit of moral one-upmanship on every side, and it was interesting to witness the ****fight that ensued. Much easier to diagnose our opponents’ shadows than our own. It was a strange affair, and I bet that, with Mercury about to retrace its steps through Scorpio, we haven’t heard the last of it.

Culture or Cult?
What I’m seeing is a serious pattern, though. Something is pushing up from beneath the surface, something dark and strongly embedded in our respective cultures and it’s a force that’s obviously been festering far longer than any of us individuals have been alive. Venus, backtracking through Scorpio, tussling desperately to break away from the tentacles of Pluto, yet afraid to leave the clan, the community, the marriage, because it would render her powerless and make all her investments worthless. I’m noticing this tragedy wherever I look, in every binding contract, how she keeps dragging the cult’s sheer magnetic pull into the light. Whether it’s the Greek-life fraternities with their hedonistic rites, a devout Sunday congregation hanging on one man’s word as that of God, the Rogan-style podcasts on YouTube, the Fox News propaganda machine, or even the little guild of self-important ‘transformational astrologers’, each has its exalted gurus and its boutique-fashion in-crowd, and every one of them always has been a game of power and control.

Humans do need rituals, though. They remind us who we are, but in a closed circle they can as easily call forth the darkest, most harmful potential in each of us, and teach us what we’re prepared to overlook to stay in. When one of those circles finally cracks, pointing at the culprit is the easy part. Bang, bang, blame. It’s lazy, reactionary and lame. It may feel good to witness a public execution, but it solves nothing.

The shadow side of culture is quietly ****ing all of us, and in many ways we keep letting it happen, kneeling at the altar of Amazon.com or the local shopping centre, the celebrity feed, the sexy/wealthy/well-connected partner, keeping our heads down and our perks intact, many of us feeling utterly powerless to change a thing because… well, how can you resist? Going along with it is still a choice, whatever we tell ourselves we knew at the time.

The dread of what the truth might cost, which stops a church, a university or a guild of astrologers from budging an inch, does a roaring trade in marriages and families too. Half the terms we defend so loudly in public are ones we learned to suck up and swallow at home.

The Price of a Quiet, Peaceful Life
When retrograde Venus squares Pluto again on the 20th, the question becomes intensely personal. What kind of agreement did we make that has inextricably bound us to something we wanted from another person or group? What did we want from them that was worth risking everything, and why did we make it? And when somebody exposes the hideous little arrangement we’ve privately been benefiting from, how much of our fury or disengagement is about the very thing it forces us to look at?

The next couple of weeks get increasingly intense as we try to untangle ourselves from a bind whose agentic glue feels almost supernatural, its terms and conditions seemingly set before any of this existed. Before we even existed. Our families, churches and entire cultures drew these secret unwritten contracts and handed them down, and we took them as gospel long before we could read the fine print. Whatever Mum put up with, we put up with, and before long those inherited terms were running our closest relationships, and weirdly nobody remembers signing a thing, let alone daring to question them.

Anyway, it comes to a head at the Taurus Full Moon on 26 October, three days after the Sun enters Scorpio, with Sun and Moon both squared by Pluto in a fixed T-square. Naturally, Taurus might see us double down on what we feel made us secure, while Scorpio drags up the horrendous debts buried beneath it. Meanwhile, now stationed direct but still out of bounds, Pluto applies the rogue force of the collective, from the strange new networks and groups that intensify public judgement and protect their own interests to the hives of detached spectators, digital juries, and algorithmic pitchfork brigades ready to pounce on anything they disapprove of. Sure, we want reform, but we also want to keep our comforts, remorse-free and preferably with the corruption removed. And if we’re reluctant to examine who pays for them, the crowd will do it for us sooner or later. "

[onawah]

“The Cost Of Keeping Things As They Are” The FULL MOON at 2°45′ Taurus, Monday 26 October 2026, 04:12 UTC
Ang Stoic
10/25/26
https://substack.com/home/post/p-221903280

"On the things we’ve held together for too long, the power they hold over us, and what happens when we’re finally prepared to let something go.

Greetings, Fellow Travellers,

It’s Scorpio season, that most ominous executive stage of our yearly cycle, when drastic decisions must be made, scores settled and old debts discharged. Rarely is this easy, of course, for even the most necessary extraction comes with a heavy heart. Even the things that are slowly ruining us can be terribly painful to relinquish. We’ve invested so much time, feeling and identity in them that we’re almost prepared to go down with the bloody ship. We find it terribly hard to part with something that’s run its course, outlived its purpose, or outstayed its welcome, no matter how painful the business of holding on has become. Hence the crises of this time can feel so dire.

Scorpio, a fixed water sign, tends to cling to feelings and emotional bonds we’ve formed with people and things long after they’ve ceased to serve us, with a morbid devotion bordering on self-annihilation. Yet when it finally comes time to decide what stays and what goes, Scorpio can be a merciless arbiter, ruthlessly slashing away what has become untenable so something worthwhile can assume its place, even if it means tearing itself to pieces in the process, knowing full well it will dearly miss the very thing it has sentenced to death.

Besides, a lot of the exhaustion you’re probably enduring right now comes from carrying, or having learned to cope with, life’s little unbearables. Months, possibly years, of functioning efficiently with what you ought to have done away with long ago. The Sun’s passage through Scorpio illuminates the very thing, be it the self-destructive pattern, the demeaning role, the toxic thrill, or that soul-crushing burden you keep carrying on your back, or have stashed under your bed out of some unknown obligation or sheer force of habit. Look at you. Listen to what your inner voice keeps nagging you to drop. And know this: whatever peace you’ve bought, you’ve been paying for dearly with your own miserable silence.

Every hour spent doing something we resent, or feeding the underlying source of our addiction, is an hour stolen from the people who actually dig us and the work that deserves our attention. Our time is the only real currency we’re issued in this life, and whatever we let others spend, exploit, or unnecessarily tax away from us rarely comes back. The bitter knowledge that we’ve allowed others to squander what we can never recover is the root of resentment, spite, and some of the more vile, unhealable emotions I care not to mention here.



Scorpio’s discipline is subtraction. The art of elimination. An act of timely cullery. Because there’s always a little killing to be done around the farm, and over the next thirty days, you must decide what life you want, be strong enough to refuse whatever contradicts it, and climb out of the hole before you and the thing dig it any deeper.

And I say this with full respect for the fact that Pluto, Scorpio’s ruler, is now in Aquarius, the most dispassionate of signs.

A Ruler Out of Bounds
Here, at the earliest degrees of this icily cold fixed-air sign, the divorce from the toxic cult of human sentimentality already appears particularly cutthroat. All the histrionic pleading, manipulative guilt-tripping and lachrymose excuses that have kept us dependent upon the very crutch that’s spoilt us rotten count for very little when the time comes to kick it away.

And yeah, anyone passing moral judgement over addiction and obsession understands precious little about what holds families, relationships, institutions, even whole cultures together. Much of this **** is inherited, buried so deeply in our conditioning that we mistake it for love, loyalty or institutional duty of care. In Aquarius, this summary cancellation is carried out by hordes of online vigilantes and machine-trained algorithms that now decide who stays and who cops the chop.

Pluto is also running out of bounds south, beyond the Sun’s limits of declination, from 12 August to 11 December this year. In fact, it will do so during every Scorpio season through 2035. As I discussed in Where Empires Break: Pluto Out of Bounds, these southern excursions have historically coincided with revolutions, the breakdown of empires and the violent redistribution of power. Pluto’s usual compulsions, now beyond the customary solar boundaries, take on an even more lawless character. And those accustomed to wielding power can become especially vicious when their grip begins to fail.

Which brings us to the stiff business around this Full Moon.

The Sun has barely entered Scorpio before he’s forced into a showdown with the Moon in Taurus, whilst Pluto, freshly stationed direct in Aquarius, squares them both within about twenty minutes of arc.

Three fixed signs, nobody willing to budge, and an almighty amount of pressure bearing down upon whatever we’ve been trying, however desperately, to hold together. Fixed signs don’t bend, they break.

And yeah… something’s gotta give.

The Ultimate Crisis. What to Do with the Sacred Cow?
Some crises arrive with sirens, bells and whistles. The state of things in France right now, or some of the protests around issues like the continued elimination of Palestine and its people, show people still have energy to act on what’s eating at them. Others are being administered more dully, by a swarm of impeccably efficient diabolical agents, each indifferent to the damage being done, each equipped with a seemingly perfectly reasonable explanation for why nothing can be changed.

Take a number. Your suffering is very important to us.

We see it on the domestic front, where the ongoing arrangement can be equally obscene. Consider the marriage or long-standing affair held together by a small fortune in shared assets despite years of mutual resentment. Or the family passing around the potatoes at the Sunday table, knowing full well what vile acts father has committed. Yet who dares speak out and risk the ill-gotten inheritance, or the blessed family peace, by bringing any of it up?

What’s particularly disturbing is our persistence in this mawkish, sentimentality-soaked culture, with our Thanksgivings and “Holy” days shopping frenzies, all the fuzzies leading up to Christmas, racking up exorbitant credit-card debts we know damn well we’ll never pay off. Our soppy, feel-good feelings have become the yardstick of practically everything, from how we educate our children to how we conduct ourselves in the company of others, or even negotiate sensitive disagreements. We seem to readily excuse some of the most appalling behaviour because someone, somewhere, might have their feelings hurt.

Personal responsibility has become optional in a coddled culture well past its demolition date, and while many of us can see the rot, we’re happy to continue the charade, stupidly waiting for the AI companies to serve up some UBI. Making a fuss over losing our dignity, grace, earning capacity and social viability might bring the whole bloody system down, ourselves included. So we play along, knowing this is a kind of social suicide.

Nobody dares touch the sacred cow, the elephant in the room, because it all ties back to our vested property, our life savings and investment portfolios, our pension and retirement plans, the accumulated comforts and spoils of a lifetime, which are now teetering on factors so far out of our control that it’s hard to imagine how quickly all that tenderness is going to evaporate out of the room. Capitalism has bred a peculiar brand of emotional cripple, one who’s exquisitely sensitive about its own feelings, ferociously possessive of its precious few belongings, prepared to forfeit almost anything, even cause harm, to preserve the illusion of security. Yet if you dare offend its ideological sensibilities, the mask drops to unleash the most grotesque explosions of rage, moral posturing, and an almost inhuman abandonment of every humane principle it claims to hold sacred.



And now, on 26 October, the Moon reaches fullness in Taurus and stands opposite the Scorpio Sun. Here’s the terrifying standoff posed by this affair. Taurus being Taurus won’t budge an inch, will never surrender the house, the money, the spoils and comforts, the thousand little assurances that everything is still under control. And Scorpio knows precisely what’s been going on underneath but refuses to open up: the surrender of personal power, the degradations and humiliation, the dirty little secrets, the decades of swallowing down **** to keep the arrangement looking respectable. This is one hell of a dilemma. How do we give any ground here without feeling we’ve betrayed ourselves?

Meanwhile, Pluto, barely three degrees into Aquarius, forms a fixed T-square with both luminaries. And who the **** is going to budge amidst all this fixity? Those who are making a killing out of it? They’re hardly going to volunteer to give anyone a break. And those of us being bled dry have another payment due soon, someone depending on us, nowhere obvious to go. We can see what the rigid arrangement is doing to us. But we’re also frightened to death of finding out what happens when we stop feeding it with our souls.

Worse still, the Scorpio Sun is also accosted by a pair of quincunxes to Uranus in Gemini and Neptune in Aries, two retrograde planets already comfortably sextile one another, creating the most beautiful cognitive dissonance a fool could want. The old romantic tales, the ideological fantasies, the supposedly enlightened ideas about how society ought to function in some utopian future or return to some glorious past are becoming increasingly difficult to reconcile with the sordid business of how we actually live. Something has to be adjusted in order to deal with reality, yet nobody particularly fancies being the one to make the sacrifice.

So we have three celestial bodies locked in a fixed-sign T-square, with the empty leg in Leo. Personal courage and integrity become rather uncomfortable matters when standing by your conscience could cost you something you own. We’ve invested so much of ourselves in preserving the sacred cow that we’re terrified of what might happen if we finally put the knife to its throat.

So who faces the chop here? The holy cow, or the poor b*****d who’s spent half his life feeding it, convinced it can fill the emptiness in him?

How We Got Here and Where We Go Now
By now, you probably know which arrangement I’m talking about. Venus retrograde has had most of October to rub your nose in this co-dependent waste dump, and Mercury has turned back at almost 21° Scorpio to ruminate over whatever was conveniently left unsaid. Under this Taurus Full Moon, another promise may go down particularly badly. We’ve waited, made allowances, compromised so much of ourselves, and are beginning to feel like ****ing idiots.

Perhaps the decision has already been made. I mean, seriously, you’ve been through this a million times in your mind, knowing that it cannot stand. And look at you, you’re still cooking the dinner, answering the messages, showing up for work. But let’s face it, you’ve long stopped believing the explanations, the excuses, the promises and the succulent dreams of a new hope. If the thing’s gone rancid, it should now stink to high heaven and around this Full Moon, whoever’s counting on your usual compliance may be in for a surprise of unprecedented astonishment.

Still, we may be in a desperate state indeed. As we see with Venus, now lapsed back to Libra and opposite Chiron, our options for standing up for ourselves may be severely compromised. Having had enough doesn’t pay the rent or sustain our interdependencies. We don’t want to be alone through this either. You’ll need to work out what you can withdraw from without landing yourself in worse trouble. With Mercury and Venus retrograde, we can expect some awkward conversations and some drastically revised terms. By the Leo Last Quarter (1 November), you may have to follow through on something you’ve been threatening for years. Then the Scorpio New Moon (9 November) will determine what the road ahead looks like and where your remaining time and resources ought to go. "