“The Hill You Die On”: NEW MOON at 28°11′ SCORPIO, Thursday, November 20, 2025, 6:47 UTC

Every life has a hill worth dying on. The trick is recognising it before you waste yourself defending the wrong one.

Greetings Fellow Travellers,

It’s been a whole month since I’ve posted a Substack—mainly because my workload for both clients and subscribers has become quite consuming. I figured I needed to focus on priorities, lest I burn myself out. But another reason, perhaps harder to admit, is that I fear that with so much coming to a head in our lives and in the world at large, I’d need to work around the clock to do these broader-audience newsletters any justice.

We have long crossed the Rubicon, the threshold of tolerance, the tipping point. We are now between worlds. Those of us prepared to take the odyssey into the next level of existence are already milling around with strange ideas and horrifying concepts, each mustering to their respective camps, arming themselves with whatever supplies and internal instruction are necessary to accomplish the great crossing. Others are either oblivious or bogged down in the crossroads of despair.

Whether we realise it or not, Scorpio season marks our approach to the moment of truth—and leading into it, we are saying goodbye, perhaps for the final time, to those people, places, behaviours, patterns that, much as we loved them, are holding us back from accomplishing what the full transition requires: a new life, one with more meaning. We need at least that much to survive and prosper.

When the light stops doing us favours.

That’s how you know Scorpio season has properly arrived. Whatever you’ve been avoiding—in yourself, in others, in the arrangement you’ve been tolerating—steps out from behind the shadows and lurks ominously, as if it’s about to crawl on you. The Scorpio Sun behaves less like a bright, illuminating light and more like a seething-hot cauldron over which alchemists toil, throwing salt, sulphur, quicksilver, vitriol, antimony, lead filings, dragon’s blood, pulverised obsidian, and whatever volatile tincture they believe will force a hidden essence to reveal itself. Concentrated heat. Directed purpose. The kind of intensity that melts through pretence and exposes the raw nerve, with little pomp or ceremony.

What impurities rise to the surface now aren’t new to us. It’s what our gut knew all along while our mind practised its clever little denials. Motives become readable. Weak seams tear under intense pressure. The bonds we thought were solid turn out to be noxious, interdependent habits dressed up as loyalty pacts. The preservation of privacy becomes a power unto itself. The less we say, the more we observe, and we discover which connections can withstand scrutiny and which were always just hanging by a thread of mutual convenience, waiting to expire.

This is the brutal annual review of things we believed were vital to our existence but can no longer justify themselves. Winter is approaching. It’s a harsh, unforgiving season, because if it saps your life-force, it’s gone. Scorpio’s unavoidable death sentence is handed down in silence. Only those that can survive the ultimate test are allowed to come with.

The Fixed-Sign Standoff

By late November, the pressure generated by fixed water intensifies. Mercury, having briefly tasted the liberating fire of Sagittarian truth, reverses course and burrows back into Scorpio’s underworld. When it meets the Sun near the 28th degree, unexpressed thoughts become fully weaponised. Language carries a toxic, corrosive subtext. Every undisclosed detail, every unfinished investigation, every redacted document, omitted fact, and conversation you’ve been putting off—all of it converges on a single pressure point: something demands closure. Whether it’s you, them, or the machinery operating in the background, the motive toward an ending becomes unmistakable.

Meanwhile, Uranus has slipped back into Taurus for the final time, reactivating seven years of hard-won stagnation and immobility. Every refusal to be domesticated, every insistence on bodily and financial autonomy, every fierce claim to self-determination begins pulsing with that unmistakable electrical edge.

Here’s where it gets interesting—and by interesting, I mean potentially explosive.

Scorpio wants total merger on its own terms. Full control. Taurus ain’t going nowhere. Doesn’t care for your progress. It’s happy the old-fashioned way. Fine where it is on the farm. It values its empirical sovereignty, the right to exist unperturbed within one’s own skin. When the Sun and Mercury consolidate in Scorpio while Uranus electrifies Taurus, any lasting stalemate must make way for biological necessity. Neither yields. The result is structural: jarring hairline fractures erupt into irreversible decisions—the kind of split that bypasses anger completely and awakens the rage of transgenerational survival instinct.

The clash happens in the body. In the bank account. In the power lines of your most intimate relationships. In the way you speak about yourself and refuse to be spoken for—refuse to be told what matters on terms you never agreed to. Two fixed imperatives collide—totality versus inviolability—and something breaks. It’s a hard press, but usually any pattern that’s been slowly suffocating you longer than you’d care to admit will unceremoniously snap. These two fixed signs seldom yield. The loss is unrecoverable.

And underneath this opposition, a Grand Water Trine is pooling—Jupiter in Cancer, Saturn in Pisces—creating an almost dangerous fluency of feeling. Emotional intelligence amplifies into something bordering on prophetic, but the danger is mistaking that seductive flow for permission. Water this deep and wide can drown you before you realise you’ve stopped swimming.

The Hades Moon

Just as this opposition peaks, the Moon enters Scorpio—the sign of her fall—in the small hours of November 20th.

The Moon hates it here. Scorpio denies her every lunar comfort: safety, the ease of moderation, the luxury of cyclical rest. Instead, she is stretched to the extremes of her volatility and must operate under relentless pressure, where every feeling becomes a form of exposure, where her emotional body is forced through treacherous territory with zero interest in offering comfort or kindness.

When the Pluto-ruled Moon joins the Sun-Mercury conjunction, something dangerously unhinged occurs. Like setting out on the year’s most treacherous night—heavy skies, black as pitch and bereft of stars, roads glazed with black ice, hungry wolves circling the treelines, desperate bandits with nothing left to lose. The emotional underworld stops cooperating and starts issuing commands. You feel it in your bones before you can actually put words to it: something’s gonna turn nasty… there’s a drop in the barometric pressure of the soul, a psychic fissure splitting the hours wide open. The body knows something irreversible is being decided.

A bad moon rising only negates, never negotiates.

The intention formed here emerges from parts of you that cannot be reasoned out of themselves. It’s refusal masquerading as agreement; a biological stance that others will experience as disturbing, disruptive, threatening—especially in relationships where power must be shared or values must be preserved.

That’s the violent nature of this lunation: the fundamental refusal to pretend we’re anything otherwise. The refusal to be kind when your own kindness has been weaponised against you. The refusal to maintain someone else’s comfort at the cost of your own integrity.

Either you betray yourself to maintain peace, or you disrupt the peace to maintain your position.

What Actually Dies

Let’s be clear about what this season is actually killing off, because it’s not what the Instagram astrologers tell you.

It’s not your “old self”—that marketing palaver designed to sell you transformation as a product. It’s not your trauma either. That stays, unfortunately, although it might loosen its grip a little. It’s not even your ingrained psycho-sexual patterns—those fuckers have nine lives minimum.

What dies is your tolerance for the half-life. The ennui. That unbearable numbness of being.

The gormless relationship that’s 70% functional but makes you feel 30% dead inside. The bullshit job that might pay well but corrodes your soul in daily increments. The family dynamics where love and manipulation share the same syntax. Those besties that require you to perform a version of yourself you outgrew fifteen years ago. In fact, any internal narratives that keep you small, grateful, accommodating to the external—as if your life force was a renewable resource instead of finite currency.

Scorpio season kills your ability to tolerate the deterioration and decline. It shows you exactly the hill you’re willing to die on.

The Shadow Qualities Nobody Mentions

Every sign has its shady side, but Scorpio’s shadow is all pumped up and ready to be sold as wisdom and power. Let’s identify these properly:

The compulsion to test loyalty through an intentionally staged crisis. The psychological operations. The way the need for intensity to fill that gaping black hole of abandonment becomes addiction, how you mistake intoxicifying chaos for exhilarating aliveness. The secret scorekeeping, the emotional surveillance, the way you keep track of every slight while feigning that you’ve transcended petty concerns. The uncanny knack for finding everyone else’s weak spots while fortifying your own beyond any hope of genuine intimacy. The way you weaponise vulnerability—theirs, not yours, then store it in your catalogue as arsenal. The gaslighting tactics.

And perhaps most insidiously: the way you mistake suffering for significance. As if witnessing, exhibiting, or inflicting pain was the only reliable currency, the only proof that something actually matters.

These shadows will never transform through just “positive thinking”. They transform through being caught in the act, called out without flinching, held accountable without being demonised. Scorpio season hands us the mirror. Whether we look is entirely our call, because our Scorpio side is where our ego clings to its greatest overestimation of itself.

The Clean Power Alternative

In its highest expression, this season offers something rarer than transformation: the ability to call it for what it is, without flinching.

Do you dare voice the desire without apology? Can you state the non-negotiable terms of your shared existence without flinching? Will you choose repair over revenge—not out of timidity, but from the supreme confidence of someone who knows exactly what they’re capable of and therefore has nothing to prove?

I know. It’s complex. We’re obstinate creatures. But we must learn to yield a little, quietly, when the moment demands it. Turn toxic secrets into compost rather than bioweapons. Convert from prehistoric fossil fuel—all that inherited sludge of grudge and grievance—to something cleaner. Solar power. Self-generated heat. Use this pressure to build the next cycle instead of revenge-fantasising about the last.

Clean power looks like this: knowing what you want, saying it once, meaning it completely, then acting in alignment regardless of who approves. Without explanations. Without justifications. Without performative intensity to mask your anxieties about inadequacy and scarcity.

The Sun in Scorpio doesn’t need to convince anyone. It simply burns at the exact temperature required for the operation at hand. At New Moon, it incinerates all residual cellular toxicity retained by the Moon—clears the slate so we can face the extraordinary changes that lie immediately before us.

The Actual Instructions

Stop pretending you don’t know what needs to go. You know. You’ve known for ages now. The only question is whether you’ll act on that knowledge or spend another year negotiating with reality.

Stop asking for permission to protect your life-force. Permission was never required. And stop slipping into petty deceit just to pacify the creature riding your spine. Feeding the monkey only makes it hungrier; it will never thank you, and it will never leave you stronger.

Stop mistaking intensity for intimacy. One is theatre—adrenaline, spectacle, self-immolation. The other is presence: steady, unguarded, and impossible to fake.

And finally: stop treating “transformation” like a spiritual bypass. Sometimes, the most evolved thing you can do is admit that some things simply need to end. There’ll be no lessons here. No silver linings. No gratuitous social media posts ranting about growth. Just the clean cut, the closed door, the silence where the bullshit used to be.

That’s Scorpio season’s gift—not transformation as product but as process. Not the digital butterfly emerging from the analogue chrysalis but the moment the embodied caterpillar surrenders to dissolution, trusting that what comes next will be worth the temporary annihilation.

What comes next, for you specifically, depends on where this pressure lands in your chart.

ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎ | SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓

In this fortnght’s instalment of horoscope messages, I cut straight into the marrow of your situation—the Scorpio–Taurus dilemma playing out across your axis of power and possession, and the heavier machinery shaping it. Jupiter and Saturn–Neptune are locked into a Grand Water Trine, amplifying emotional intelligence into something almost prophetic—but also dangerously seductive if you mistake intensity for truth. Uranus sits at the apex of the resulting Grand Kite, the release valve, forcing breakthrough where you’ve tolerated stalemate for years. Venus and Mars sharpen the relational field, exposing where desire strengthens and where it corrodes. And the square between Jupiter and Eris presses on the larger cultural wound—our inheritance of conflict, contested identity, and weaponised truth.

These forces will define the terms under which you choose, shed, or secure what matters next. A full guide for setting intentions under this pressure is included—clear, unsentimental, built for this exact threshold.

Members: click your sign (both Sun and Rising) below to login and read your empowering message for this lunation.

Not a member yet? Sign Up Here

ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎ | SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓

Book a one-on-one consultation with Ang
and gain invaluable insight into your unique astrological chart, helping you navigate life’s twists and turns with confidence and clarity.

Services Offered:

• Comprehensive Chart Reading
• Shamanic Life Reading
• Transit/Progression Update
• Solar Return
• Relationship Synastry/Composite
• Relocation AstroCartoGraphy
• Electional Chart Reading
• Mentoring & Guidance Program

Ang Stoic is renowned not just for his searing accuracy, but for his empathetic, personalised approach and deep astrological expertise, guiding clients through major life transitions—career changes, relationship upheavals, Saturn returns, midlife crises, and other pivotal phases. With his penetrating insights and warm, supportive style, he empowers you to transform challenges into opportunities for growth and self-discovery.

Get more information and book your session here.