angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
The ‘respectable’ path and the path your soul requires rarely run in perfect parallel. Sometimes they diverge so completely that you cannot pretend you are walking both.
Greetings, fellow travellers,
I know you’re tired. I don’t mean the sleep kind, rather the kind of tired where holding it together has become a secondary job you’re not getting paid for. Saturn’s epochal meeting with Neptune is only weeks away, and during that time, we have eclipses. So acting like the story we’re all sharing still makes sense saps more energy than you’ve got left. I feel it too. We’re all carrying something heavier than we signed up for here, and the universe has conspired to make it all as confusing and mysterious as possible.
Allow me, please, to try and make some sense of things.
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This New Moon takes place near the 29th degree of Capricorn, another final degree lunation, the point at which the full essence of the sign has just about run itself ragged and started cracking at the seams.
Sun, Moon, Mercury, Mars, all clustered at the summit, formulating closing clauses, tightening terms on how the deal ends. If you’ve felt that career bottleneck lately, that sense of the ladder getting crowded while the top narrows to a very finite, limited point, trust what your body’s telling you. We’re living through the hangover of Pluto’s sixteen-year grind through Capricorn, where gaining some status and legitimacy became a blood sport and the ethics of survival trumped over anything resembling moral integrity.
MY TANGO WITH POWER
If you can indulge me, I want to tell you something I’ve never written about before, and I’m sharing this with you now because I think it’s relevant to what we’re all walking through together.
In late 2000, after a couple of years on what one might call a “vision quest”(what the bank manager would have called “long-term unemployed”, and my parents something worse), I decided to do what everyone had been telling me to do for years. Get a real job. Stop embarrassing yourself with that astrology nonsense. Cease pretending that reading charts for strangers constituted a profession that deserved respect, or a bank loan, let alone the basic dignity of being taken seriously when I walked into a room. I was in my prime, I wanted a family, and I had grown supremely sad, disillusioned, tired of being looked at like I was mentally unwell every time someone asked what I did to earn my crust.
So, succumbing to peer pressure, I put my tail between my legs, swallowed whatever pride I had left, and got a job as a forklift driver at a large industrial corporation.
Night shift. The inhumanity of fluorescent lighting. The incessant hum and clamour of machinery that never stopped. The slow erasure, week by week, of everything I thought I was. What was this life?
Oh, here in the shop the machines roar so wildly,
That oft, unaware that I am, or have been,
I sink and am lost in the terrible tumult;
And void is my soul… I am but a machine.
I work and I work and I work, never ceasing;
Create and create things from morning till e’en;
For what?—and for whom—Oh, I know not! Oh, ask not!
Who ever has heard of a conscious machine?
But you know what? It worked. Within a couple of years, I had qualified for a loan, bought my first home, and started a family. The bank manager, who had laughed me out of his office a few years earlier, now returned my calls. My parents relaxed. The neighbours stopped giving me the side eye. I had become, at last, a respectable, hardworking citizen, unlike the grimy, low-life astrologer I had apparently been before.
And because I couldn’t help myself, I started climbing, ascending the heights of all I was worth. Without a formal education in logistics, I joined the leadership group, got a team of my own, eventually ran the entire logistics department. Changed the culture, I did! Managed to bring in automation from abroad that was state-of-the-art for its field. Fought to improve things for the folks who had no voice in the rooms where the big decisions got made. I did everything I could to make life easier and create optimal conditions for the company I kept.
Then I hit the ceiling.
And this is where it gets important, because I need you to understand the distinction. The ceiling had nothing to do with competence. I’d proven myself ten times over. What I discovered was that above a certain altitude, the rules change completely, for there, above the summits, existed a class of individuals bonded not by excellence but by complicity—sealed together by shared secrets, by the bodies buried in the figures of the spreadsheets and corporate restructures, by deals made in rooms I’d never be allowed to enter. Their loyalty to each other wasn’t built on respect. It was built on the threat of mutually assured destruction. Everyone had dirt on everyone else. They were bonded by their transgression. That was the membership fee.
George Carlin saw it clearly enough to make it an entire comedy bit: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.”
They couldn’t initiate me. Not because I lacked capacity, but because I wouldn’t cross that line. I wouldn’t betray the workers I’d come up the ranks with, wouldn’t do the dirty that would make me “one of them.” It was a dark, decrepit place, and once I caught a glimpse of it, I couldn’t unsee it. The club was never about what you could do. It was about what you were willing to do to others, and whether you could live with yourself after.
Sound familiar? It should. Because that’s the very architecture we’re all living under now, scaled up to global proportions.
January 20th marks 00º Aquarius and Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday. The apparatus of concealment is working overtime to keep those files from fully leaking, to protect the names, to ensure the guest lists stay buried, for it would damage the earth to see the connections. But the Aquarius-Virgo eclipse axis bearing down on us promises no sanctity or mercy about their secret clubs and grandiose agendas. A Uranus-squared Aquarius solar eclipse savagely disrupts networks. The Virgo lunar dismantles decades of illusion, bit by bit. In between, we get the first Saturn/Neptune conjunction since the fall of the USSR. Put them together, and you get exposure that spreads faster than any damage control can contain. The reality-thrust is coming. The truth has a way of surfacing when the pressure gets high enough, and the pressure has never been higher. Nor have the stakes for this joyride humanity is on here.
Bill Hicks joked about it too:
“The world is like a ride in an amusement park, and when you choose to go on it you think it’s real because that’s how powerful our minds are. The ride goes up and down, around and around, it has thrills and chills, and it’s very brightly colored, and it’s very loud, and it’s fun for a while. Many people have been on the ride a long time, and they begin to wonder, “Hey, is this real, or is this just a ride?” And other people have remembered, and they come back to us and say, “Hey, don’t worry; don’t be afraid, ever, because this is just a ride.”
And we … kill those people.
“Shut him up! I’ve got a lot invested in this ride, shut him up!
This week, as this anaretic New Moon perfects in Capricorn, Davos convenes under the theme “A Spirit of Dialogue.” The irony would be funny if it weren’t so obscene. Chief ministers and executives are gathering in a Swiss resort to agree on the year’s vocabulary while the rest of us are told to stay away, shut up, and continue to “build trust.” Meanwhile, under growing domestic nervousness, Venezuela, among other vulnerable nations, still sits in the crosshairs. China’s squeezing of industrial supply chains—an April superpower summit looms as a deadline rather than an opening. Iran remains extremely volatile. Europe drifts without direction as Ukraine slowly gets decimated. Everywhere you look: leverage-building that eliminates exits, each coercive step locking in the next escalation. And, as we discussed on our most recent cosmic bus, the astrology of these coming months is incredibly dire.
Merged to the New Moon, Mars and Mercury in late Capricorn square Chiron and Eris in Aries—the wound of the uninvited, the rage of those who played by the rules and got nothing in return but contempt. You can hear it in the way people speak, not about the elites or institutions, because those targets have become so saturated with contempt they feel almost unspeakable, but sideways, at each other, vitriol hurled at the nearest available body, at the person in front of them in the queue or on the screen. The tone has shifted to extremes as people realise there’s nowhere left to go, except surrender to the network of darkness. It carries that raw-nerve snap that comes when someone in a suit tries to explain, with a calm, well-rehearsed face, why your life must keep shrinking so theirs can keep expanding. That’s some serious-grade envy brewing in the collective nervous system, and by the time all this reaches full activation in April, we’re going to find out how folks deal with such grievances, not as a slogan but as a bodily fact: enough. I want my dignity back.
Saturn and Neptune, closing in at the end of Pisces, foreshadow that the anaesthetic is wearing off. Neptune taught us to accept distortion as normal, contradiction as background noise. Saturn’s been slogging like a grand auditor through the swamped-out dreamhouse with a clipboard, tallying up the damage. When they meet at the Aries point, the bubble pops in spectacular style. It’s going to take nothing less than a full-scale alien invasion—whether real or staged- to distract us from the kinds of revelations humanity is about to uncover, at least in the West.
Uranus in late Taurus also trines this Capricorn cluster. Our patience is shot. People are less interested in the narrative being palatable and more interested in being free from this madness. Venus crossing toward Pluto in Aquarius revises who gets valued, who gets access. The old club was at least visible: suits, roles and titles, ladders you could climb. The new club hides in platforms, algorithms, and the ability to sit between your nervous system and reality, deciding what you see, what you fear, and what you call true.
So what does any of this ask of you, personally?
Honest reflection on where you’re still chasing a summit that was never built for your kind of integrity. Where you’ve been shrinking yourself, hoping the gate opens if you just perform a little better. And a sober look at your own shadow too—the impulse to hoard, to look down, to mistake control for safety, and to sell your soul for a buck.
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Here’s what I learned in that warehouse all those years ago: Capricorn gets you as far as honest, earnest effort can take you. Then you hit a ceiling. Beyond it exists a different game entirely, one that asks you to sell pieces of yourself you can never quite buy back, the price of admission to a club that dangles shares in group rewards while quietly robbing you of your agency. The ‘respectable’ path and the path your soul requires rarely run in perfect parallel. Sometimes they diverge so completely that you cannot pretend you are walking both. That is where the real choice lies, and it is never pretty.
The Capricorn mountain remains to be climbed. But in the radioactive aftermath of Pluto’s travails there, the invitation stays withheld. But the strings are showing now. The curtain has been pulled back enough. And more of us can see the architecture for what it’s always been. A system blatantly rigged against the common people, unwilling to do harm.
Choose carefully, friends. The mess is real. But so is your agency within it. And so is the moment of truth that’s coming for those who thought they’d never have to answer.
I’m glad you’re here.
Now here’s your special New Moon Messages:
ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎ | SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓
In this fortnight’s horoscope messages, we take the closing-clause energy of this 29° Capricorn New Moon and locate it precisely in your chart. Where has the summit been for you? Where have you hit a ceiling? Where has “success” started to feel like slow suffocation?
The Mercury/Mars square to Chiron and Eris wants to know what you’re still angry about—and whether that anger has been a tantrum or a compass; sextiles to Saturn-Neptune in Pisces questions what dream you’ve been using as anaesthetic, and what will happen when it wears off. The trine to Uranus in Taurus offers highly-charged voltage: sudden economic disruption as liberation, if you can ride it without breaking the bank.
And Venus kissing Pluto in early Aquarius has begun redefining who gets access to the new “club” and why. Which part of your soul are you expected to sign away for new gains? This is the crossroads between the old hierarchy and the new network logic—and your chart shows exactly where the choice is being made.
Members: click your sign (both Sun and Rising) below to log in and read your empowering message for this lunation.
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ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎ | SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓
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