angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
Greetings, fellow travellers,
Here’s the funny thing. I’m sitting down to tell you a story about how we’ve all become sick of hearing stories. The irony hasn’t escaped me. I’ve been wrestling with it for days – going for long walks, staring at walls, wondering if the whole enterprise has finally eaten itself.
We’re storytelling creatures. It’s the very thing that separates us from the other animals – not that we dream, but that we insist on weaving narrative around chaos, just enough so it holds still long enough to digest, then we call it “truth”. We do it compulsively. Even when we’re not sure, we’ll clutch onto any story that can get us there, because the alternative is sitting with raw uncertainty, and nervous systems don’t tolerate that for long. That’s our Sagittarian side – the archer scanning distant horizons, needing to believe the journey has a point, that the arrow is flying toward something.
But there’s also the Piscean side. The dreamer. The one who keeps the door open for the possibility that something magical and wonderful might still happen, even when the evidence says otherwise. Pisces doesn’t need the story to be true exactly – it needs the story to be beautiful, to shimmer with meaning that can’t quite be pinned down. These two energies – the philosopher and the mystic, the truth-seeker and the dream-keeper – usually dance together well enough. Both hate being confined. Both would rather wander than settle. Both carry that slightly incredulous innocence, that wistful sense that surely there must be more than this.
But when they square each other – when Sagittarius and Pisces grind into tension – something curdles. The exuberance turns exaggerative. The idealism turns careless. The person (or the culture) starts holding diametrically opposing beliefs at the same time, and can’t follow any idea through with anything approaching objectivity. The beliefs clash with the environment. Some kind of adjustment is forced.
That’s where we are now. That’s what this late-stage pileup is doing to us.
We talked about it with the Gemini Full Moon – the exhaustion, the relentless propaganda machinery, the sense that the wires behind the pantomime have become too visible to ignore. Under this grinding square between everything Pisces and everything Sagittarius, we haven’t just become sceptical. Scepticism is healthy. We haven’t just become distrustful. Distrust can be earned.
What’s happening now is uglier.
We’ve become so jaded with trying to get to the truth that we’ve stopped asking whether things are true any more. Not because we’re stupid – because we’re tired of the big sell. Every narrative has an angle. Every meaning-maker is running a con. We’ve been lied to so comprehensively, so systematically, by so many people who were supposed to know better, that something in the collective nervous system has simply switched off that little “belief” button inside. We’re a species becoming deeply cynical, and that is a seriously pathological state.
Here’s what nobody tells you about the cynical state: scratch just beneath its surface and you don’t find coldness or callousness. You find grief. The cynic isn’t born. The cynic is what’s left when hope gets betrayed one too many times. That’s the terminal stage – never trusting again. And yeah, from a personal perspective it might feel perversely like wisdom. We think we’ve finally seen through the horseshit. But it’s not like we’ve learned anything. We’ve just stopped looking. Stopped growing.
Oscar Wilde called the cynic “a man who knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.” He meant it as a quip. I’m not sure it is anymore.
And yet.
Maybe there’s something necessary happening here. Maybe you can’t keep the door open for magic when you’re still clutching to decades of fairy tales. Maybe the Sagittarian need for meaning has to break against the Piscean recognition that all meanings dissolve before something new can come through. Maybe this jadedness – this refusal to swallow the next pre-packaged story – is the immune system finally kicking in after years of being fed poison dressed as medicine.
The square demands adjustment. The old beliefs are at odds with the environment and with nature herself. That’s not a bug or a virus. That’s the transit working perfectly, aligned with its cyclical intent.
So here I am, about to do exactly what the heavens warn against – construct a narrative, assign it meaning, ask you to believe it long enough to let it work on you. But then hey… what’s the alternative to stories?
It isn’t pristine objectivity.
It’s paralysis.
We can’t live without narrative. The problem isn’t that we strive to make meaning – it’s that sometimes, for lack of better answers, we mistake the map for the territory. We become convinced it’s the promised land. Then we start killing each other over ideological boundaries, which, in nature, are neither correct nor real.
So allow me, if you will, to tell you about the last thirteen years. How we got here. Why this particular New Moon, thirty-six hours before the solstice, feels like the end of something that’s been unravelling longer than most of us noticed.
Neptune in Pisces, 2012–2025
Neptune formally returned to its domicile, Pisces, between April 2011 and February 2012. If we want to understand everything that’s happened since – culturally, spiritually, technologically – we best start there.
Here’s the thing about Neptune: since its discovery in 1846, it has completed exactly one full orbit around the Sun – finishing in 2011, just before it came home to Pisces. We’ve had precisely one chance to watch this planet run its full cycle through all twelve signs. One lap. And now it’s back where we first found it, closing a loop that began when Marx was writing manifestos, when revolutions were sweeping Europe, when spiritualism and séances were capturing the Victorian imagination, when photography was dissolving the boundary between artistic interpretation and mechanical reproduction.
The last time Neptune transited Pisces – 1848 to 1862 – the world was learning that boundaries were more permeable than anyone had suspected. The Atlantic world convulsed through emancipation: France abolished slavery in its colonies in 1848, Russia freed the serfs in 1861, and the United States slid into civil war over the fault-line that would reshape the modern era. Anaesthesia was discovered – reality could be numbed. Photography spread – reality could be captured and distributed. Pasteur developed germ theory, revealing that invisible organisms permeated everything, crossing membranes we didn’t know existed. The very notion of what was solid, what was separate, what was safe from contamination – all of it was dissolving.
And now here we are again. Same transit. Different technologies. Same dissolution.
Neptune in Pisces is the sea remembering it was never truly separate from the ocean. It might have atomised into vapour, risen as cloud, crossed continents on wind currents, fallen as rain into forests, as snow onto mountains, threaded through villages as runoff, rivered into plains, pooled beside cities, soaked into soil, siphoned into pipes, boiled in kettles, drunk, breathed out, and returned again – a single substance wearing a hundred disguises. That is the Piscean reality: boundaries soften, slacken, then fail entirely. The membrane between real and imagined goes from permeable to transparent to non-existent. This isn’t inherently good or bad. Pisces cares little for Sagittarian morality. It just is. What matters is whether we mistake the fog for truth, the dream for instruction, the feeling for fact.
Think about what arrived in this window.
Smartphones stopped being phones and became portals – little black mirrors into worlds of chosen illusion. The internet stopped being somewhere you visited and became something you carried. Social media shifted from novelty to infrastructure to atmosphere, ignoring borders, breaching boundaries of mind and spirit, binding strangers into ideological shoals. We dove headlong into a global stew, marinating in each other’s certainty, swimming in waters where nobody asks what’s actually dissolved in them.
Then billions of us became the content. Every paranoid suspicion, every spiritual bypass, every pet theory found its tribe, its hashtag, its echo chamber. Conspiracy thinking ceased being fringe because when the centre dissolves, the edges start looking like home. “My truth” replaced “the truth” – liberating for those whose truths had been suppressed, catastrophic for shared reality. Both happened at once, and Neptune never asked you to choose.
Everything went viral. The word itself tells you what we were learning – that ideas spread like contagions, emotions jump hosts, nothing stays contained. Memes mutated faster than anyone could track. Misinformation evolved new strains optimised for engagement, developing resistance to every fact-check.
And then the metaphor became literal. COVID-19 arrived like Neptune’s final exam – a global initiation into permeability, the reality that we breathe each other’s air, share each other’s fate, cannot wall ourselves off however desperately we try. And with it came the fog: the propaganda, the institutional gaslighting, the mantras, the denials, the censorship dressed as care. Trust didn’t just erode. It was systematically demolished by the very institutions claiming to protect us – and we weren’t allowed to say what we were seeing.
The opioid epidemic. Neptune rules intoxication; Pisces rules escape. An entire generation numbing itself to death because existing in a dissolving world exceeded the capacity to bear it. Weed got legalised – not through counterculture revolution but corporate rebranding, soul-sedation made “respectable”. Streaming killed cinema, dissolving the communal ritual into a million private screens. Hollywood died with a subscription fee. Music drowned in Spotify’s infinite scroll – no more albums, no more eras, just content algorithmised into oblivion. Even religion made its comeback, not as spiritual renewal but tribalism in robes, another team jersey for the culture wars.
The borders dissolved too. The great migrations, the refugee crises, waves of humanity flowing across Europe, across the Americas, driven by war and famine and climate collapse. The nation-state – that Saturnian fiction – revealed as precisely that: a story now being rewritten by sheer human movement, by the Piscean truth that lines on maps are imaginary and desperate, homeless people don’t care about your rules or paperwork.
And underneath all of it: the creeping suspicion that nobody was in charge. The experts didn’t know. The leaders became invisible. The stories we’d been told were fairy tales for children who hadn’t yet learned to see.
Thirteen years of the sea rising. Not a flood with a clear beginning and end. A slow saturation – the kind of wet that gets into everything and stops you noticing because you’ve forgotten what dry felt like.
Saturn in Pisces, 2023–2026
Then Saturn arrived.
Saturn entered Pisces in March 2023, and if Neptune’s transit was the dissolution, Saturn’s is the audit. The grand inquisitor walking through the flooded house, asking uncomfortable questions. What’s still standing? What can bear weight? What did you build on quicksand?
Saturn demands structure. Pisces will have none of it. Put them together, and you get a transit that stress-tests every dream, every belief, every institution that claimed spiritual authority during the Neptune years.
The churches that covered up abuse. The wellness gurus who turned out to be predators. The movements that preached compassion and practised cult dynamics. The religions that sanctified obscene intolerance. The governments that ruled by gaslighting and convenient double standards. The conspiracy communities that started with legitimate questions and ended in fantasy. All of it now under tremendous scrutiny: is there substance here, or just fog?
Saturn doesn’t care about your feelings. Not everything that flourished under Neptune deserves to survive. Some of what grew in the dissolution was genuine – real healing, real awakening, real connection to something beyond the ego’s small empire. And some of it was grift. Here’s a way to tell the difference: the five stages of grief move you through denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally toward acceptance. The five stages of grift keep you cycling through the first four forever, monetising your pain, making sure you never arrive anywhere, because arrival would end the subscription.
Saturn’s job is sorting between the two. The process is not gentle. Grief is meant to break you open. Grift is designed to keep you broken.
The imminent conjunction with Neptune – perfecting at 0° Aries in February 2026 – becomes the final assessment. When two planets that have spent three years in tension are about to merge, crossing into Aries together, it becomes the end of an era. When Saturn finally conjuncts Neptune, the pretension is done, the dream is over, and this makes way for the beginning of whatever comes next.
But we’re not there yet. Right now we’re in the anaretic zone – last degrees, everything unresolved coming up for one final pass. Saturn at 25° Pisces. Neptune at 29°. Both edging forwards towards the exit, each carrying the accumulated weight of everything since 2012.
It becomes the confining perimeter for this New Moon. The kind of shoreline it’s blazing against.
The Siege of Meaning
Now drop a pile-up in late Sagittarius into this picture.
Sagittarius is the meaning-maker. The philosopher who stares at the abyss and asks, “What does it mean?” It needs a narrative the way lungs need air. Sun, Moon, Venus, Juno, even Mercury (square the Pisces Node) – all crowded into the last degrees of the sign – represent meaning-hunger so desperate it’s almost feral.
And it’s squaring straight into Saturn-Neptune in Pisces.
It’s the storyteller confronting the ocean. The philosopher trying to build systematic meaning while the ground keeps dissolving beneath his feet. This is why fundamentalism has surged – not despite the Piscean dissolution, but because of it. When the ground turns into liquid, people clutch harder to whatever doctrine promises solidity. Religious fundamentalism. Political fundamentalism. Scientific fundamentalism. Tech or financial fundamentalism. It becomes absolutism. The content of our narrative may vary. But the structure is identical. Absolute certainty as a last-ditch defence against the unbearable experience of not knowing will drive us mad when it’s denied.
No wonder we’re exhausted. The meaning-making function itself is under assault – not from any external enemy, but from the simple fact that the conditions for shared meaning have dissolved, and we haven’t built anything to replace them. In fact, we don’t even have a leg to stand on.
Churches are running out of dogma that can survive contact with lived reality; we see them either crumbling or calcifying into evangelical spectacle and purity tests. Universities are running out of epistemic authority, so they retreat into credentialism and factional capture. Legacy media has exhausted our trust, so they are swapping investigation for tighter narrative control. Governments are running out of legitimacy, so they lean on emergency language, security stunts and blatant propaganda. Courts are running out of the aura of impartiality, so every ruling comes off as a tribal ritual. Science and medicine are forced to retreat into PR-certainty, punished for honest uncertainty. Tech is running out of its neutrality myth, so it is starting to behave more and more like a moral sovereign – deciding what is real, what is allowed, and what constitutes “harm/hateful content”.
And because none of these institutions can admit the underlying condition – drowning in data, starving for shared meaning – they reach for the same blunt instrument: narrow the questions, police the tone, treat curiosity as a threat. They call it unity, but it functions like panic. It cannot restore meaning. It manufactures compliance. And it leaves us more paranoid, more brittle, and easier to steer as, gradually, the sea rises all around our knees.
The Planetary Architecture
The tightest aspect in this chart is the New Moon’s quincunx to Uranus retrograde at 28° Taurus – the awkward angle, the aspect that says your story doesn’t fit what’s actually happening on the ground. Uranus in Taurus is material reality in revolt. Since 2018, it’s been radicalising our relationship to bodies, to money, to food, to the economic infrastructure we assumed would hold. This is the stubborn substrate that doesn’t care about your narrative. Inflation doesn’t care about your ideology. Supply chains don’t respect your timeline. The body keeps its own accounts.
Jupiter retrograde in Cancer rules the whole lunation, filtering truth through belonging. Is it safe? Is it ours? Does it protect my people? These aren’t illegitimate questions – they’re ancient ones, the ones that kept tribes alive. But under stress, they become the only questions. Truth gets reduced to loyalty. Facts become secondary to feeling like family.
Square that Jupiter to Chiron retrograde at 22° Aries, and you touch the wound beneath the tribalism. The identity wound. The courage wound. “My people are under attack” as permanent posturing – not because the threat is always real, but because the wound never healed. From that wound, all kinds of cruelty get justified. Injury loves the rhetoric of righteousness. The victim who cannot grieve becomes the perpetrator who cannot stop.
The Moon is out of bounds. So is Mars. Not hard to frame why emotions are running past ordinary limits, beyond the usual guardrails. Collective feeling-states override individual judgment. Mobs forming not in streets but in feeds, in group chats, in the righteous certainty that we are the good ones and they are the bastards ruining it for us.
People, please… this isn’t the lunation for calm deliberation. Observe how, in the dark of this moon, strong feelings have become veiled in the veneer of moral rectitude. Where are we headed this Solstice, this holiday season? Well, the practice – if there is one – is to feel the feelings fully, let them move through, and refuse to let them write the conclusion for us.
“Delicious Ambiguity”
“I wanted a perfect ending. Now I’ve learned, the hard way, that some poems don’t rhyme, and some stories don’t have a clear beginning, middle, and end. Life is about not knowing, having to change, taking the moment and making the best of it, without knowing what’s going to happen next. Delicious Ambiguity.”
Gilda Radner said those words while dying of cancer. It’s a detail that matters.
Because it’s easy to celebrate not-knowing when you’re young, and the horizon before you seems infinite. It’s something else entirely to find peace with uncertainty when the story you thought you were living has been torn to shreds before you. Radner wasn’t offering us platitudes. She was reporting from the front lines of a living organism that refused to cooperate with her plans.
Delicious ambiguity. Not tolerable. Not acceptable. Delicious.
I keep coming back to that word. This New Moon asks something specific – not just to accept uncertainty, but to find nourishment in it. We are almost dissolved. It’s time to stop treating mystery as a problem to be solved and start treating it as a condition to be faced, accepted… inhabited.
Thirteen years of dissolution. Three years of auditing. And now this – the final Sagittarius New Moon before Saturn and Neptune cross into Aries, before the dream changes shape entirely, before whatever comes next begins. [We discussed 2026 in our most recent episode of Cosmic Bus]
If the Neptune years taught us anything, it is that all certainty is borrowed. The Saturn years are teaching us that, despite the unsteadiness of the matrix, some structures are worth building anyway. The synthesis might be something like faith without dogma. Commitment without rigidity. Acting from conviction while holding it loosely enough to revise when reality eventually intervenes.
That’s the Sagittarius-Pisces gift, when it’s working. The door remains open enough to let the arrows keep flying. But you must stop pretending you know where it’s all going to land.
Thirty-six hours after this New Moon, the solstice arrives. The longest night. The darkest point of the year. You’ll feel the stillness before the turn – that threshold moment where nothing has visibly changed, but something has shifted beneath the surface.
Every culture/tradition that built holy days around the winter solstice understood this: that the light has not just returned, but that it will return, even when you can’t see it yet. Faith in the pits of darkness. Action without proof that justice will prevail. The willingness to plant seeds in frozen ground because you trust the season will turn warm again. The faith that everything will come good.
That’s what delicious ambiguity actually asks of us. This is neither the time for passive waiting nor surrendering to meaninglessness. We must find a way to engage anyway. Commit anyway. Tell the story anyway – even when the map has run out of pointers, and we have to navigate by starlight and gut instinct.
If there is one vow to make under this New Moon, it might be this:
I will not let exhaustion make me cynical. I will not mistake certainty for strength, or ambiguity for weakness. I will hold the story lightly – and tell it anyway.
Friends & travellers, this shall be my last piece for 2025. If you’ve been with me through any of it – the lunations, the transits, the slow-motion tantrums – thank you kindly.
Stay with it. I leave you with these horoscope messages. I’ll see you on the other side.
ARIES | TAURUS | GEMINI | CANCER | LEO | VIRGO | LIBRA | SCORPIO | SAGITTARIUS | CAPRICORN | AQUARIUS | PISCES
In this fortnight’s horoscope messages, I show you where this Sadge New Moon is asking you to make peace with not knowing – and where making peace with that becomes your newfound wisdom.
The New Moon at 28° Sagittarius lands somewhere specific in your chart. That’s where the meaning-making crisis feels most alive for you. That’s where the old story has worn too thin to believe, and the new one hasn’t yet taken shape. Your horoscope message cuts through the abstraction and lands the transit precisely where it lives in your life. What needs releasing. What deserves your faith. Where the delicious ambiguity is actually pointing you.
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ARIES | TAURUS | GEMINI | CANCER | LEO | VIRGO | LIBRA | SCORPIO | SAGITTARIUS | CAPRICORN | AQUARIUS | PISCES
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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.
