angstoic.com Astrologer, Ang Stoic
The annular solar eclipse occured on February 17, with the full, 2-minute “ring of fire” phase visible only from a remote, 383-mile-stretch across western Antarctica/Davis Sea.
Greetings, fellow travellers,
We are, without question, living through epic times. Somewhere in your bones, you already know it, even if the mind keeps dithering for reasons to look away. Even you zoomers, those of you too young to remember anything different, can feel the massive cogs crunching: the tectonic quality of this moment, the shaky ground shifting beneath serpentine power structures that swore they would loom over us eternally, the slow-dawning recognition that the world you inherited was pre-distorted to ensnare you into a fail before you drew your first breath.
I’ll be honest, this public newsletter has been difficult to write. By the time you read it, I’ll be relieved to have it out and to stay offline for a while. The past couple of weeks have been heavy on the soul, but I needed to steady myself and show up with a report. This is a distinctly awful pressure point for all humanity, and it matters that we keep pushing through till we get to the other side.
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For the first time in the long, messy chronicle of human affairs, ordinary people are each lifting the lid on the underbelly of power, finding out there is ultimately nobody in charge; that everyone is scrambling for the most shameless self-interest, and we are leaned on by psychopathic bullies, gangsters, and narcissistic nonces, all proppeled by a shady, unnamed force that keeps consignng the worst people to play the biggest roles. And by use of these strange black toys in our hands, which serve our liberation and our surveillance with equal vim and vigour, we are uncovering enough to confirm what our nervous system has long suspected and the rational mind has laboured strenuously to deny: that everything of consequence has been distorted, obscured, misrepresented and manipulated by a dark, invisible hand with a systematic thoroughness that beggars belief. Our attention, our physical energy, our youth, our personal history, our creativity, our capacity to make decisions with full agency and flair; these have been treated as commodities to be hijacked, corralled, throttled and harvested by those who possess enough power to steal us from our parents’ bosom and point us in the direction of indentured service to another. Our precious life force, siphoned so gradually, we eventually mistook the haemorrhage for ageing, illness and fatigue.
And now, only weeks since a procession of planets crossed over Pluto, as if to prove the cosmos has a penchant for bringing the grotesque to light, six million Epstein documents have begun to surface into the collective bloodstream; chaotic, half-redacted, victims left exposed whilst perpetrators get scrubbed. A global network of systematic depravity so total, a cabal as old as Mount Sinai, a syndicate so embedded in the machinery of wealth, politics and epistemological influence, that even the most preliminary exposure has sent the most powerful individuals on the planet scrambling for cover whilst the rest of us reel with a disgust that goes far beyond the appalling conduct of any single predator. What the files reveal is the perversity of the system itself; the fact that it produced this, protected this, profited from this, and expected us to keep scrolling. The world feels like it is unravelling rapidly, and the reason it feels that way is that the superficial notions holding up our semblance of reality, the civility, the institutions, the social contract, the “Big Club”, were threaded through with rot so thorough that even partial exposure threatens to bring the whole edifice down. This is the cosmic curveball that eclipses hurl at us. Everybody knew. And the question that will define this period is what we do with that knowledge now that it is no longer deniable.
So here we are. Humanity, en masse, appears to be waking up. And though that awakening carries a thrill, let nobody mistake it for reassurance. What we find when we finally look behind the curtain is hardly what we had hoped for, and the impulse to close it again is strong. The things streaming through in the past fortnight, since the crowd stopped applauding, have been frightfully grotesque. But for those of us who have the stomach to witness, the hand refuses to move. Our eyes have adjusted. And whatever comes next will be built by people who refused to look away.
That is where this eclipse finds us.
Burning Ring of Ring of Fire
Eclipses are the year’s big hitters. They reveal major things about us, our collective plight, the way we are evolving as a sentient species. The transits provide context, but it is the flavour of the four or five lunations a year that skate so close to the Lunar Nodes, close enough to darken the skies and bloody the Moon, that reveal to the astrologer what kind of spiritual zeitgeist we are moving through.
As we dawn into the Age of Aquarius proper, with Pluto now a permanent resident of this ideologically tumultuous, fixed-air domain, it is fair to say that this first of three North Node Solar Eclipses (all three annular) is an inaugural blast announcing that we have well and properly arrived into the revolutionary Age. Of course, there are two Total South Node eclipses in Leo, too. No, it is not the apocalypse. You should be so lucky, since at least that would mark a clean break.
Eclipses are extraordinary lunations, each carrying the full pelt of a New or Full Moon but ushering in a blast of cosmic and karmic influences transmitted through the fate-related portal of the nodal axis. And even though this axis is still in the last throes of regressing back into Aquarius from Pisces, the occurrence of this first eclipse at the anaretic degree, that definitive, white-knuckle moment where a sign exhausts its resources and either delivers a clean, functional design or collapses into complete dysfunction, tells us we are at the precipice of a revolutionary inflection point. The old Aquarian ideal (networks as liberation, technology as equaliser, progress as inevitable) has reached its tolerance limit.
What we thought was a wider sharing was us uploading our minds into a voraciously data-hungry, lopsided surveillance apparatus. Like a one-sided mirror, the vision of unity and equality we were sold has become the narcissistic cage we are trapped in. We have become a sick little society of status-obsessed people trying to brand our way out of a societal collapse, each of us more or less some kind of micro-celebrity in our own content-creating tragedy, simultaneously discovering the emptiness of being stuck in an echoing feedback loop inside hyper-niche subcultures or extreme ideologies, adhering to them only for their narrative, even when that narrative is batshit crazy.
The fact that this eclipse is annular rather than partial or total carries its own specific weight. Partial eclipses merely graze the edge of change; hints, warnings, peripheral disruptions. Total eclipses black out the Sun completely, plunging everything into obliterating darkness so something entirely new can emerge. But annular eclipses leave a ring of fire visible around the darkened disc. The old vision remains in place, but now you can see its edges, its limits, the luminant forces that encircle it. We are still operating inside the system, the social contract, the network, but the system is no longer invisible. Its borders are incandescent. Its terms are exposed. The cost of remaining grows unbearable whilst the exit remains unclear.
And given that all three North Node Aquarius Solar Eclipses (2026/2027/2028) will be annular, this suggests a prolonged period where the Aquarian vision persists whilst being systematically dismantled from within. The platforms keep running. The narratives about our future continue. But with each successive eclipse, more of the ring of fire becomes visible: increased surveillance, tighter control, more algorithmic sorting dressed as progress, more collective coercion presented as community. We shall remain inside this burning perimeter for the next two years, watching the vision we were promised consume itself whilst new structures begin forming in the heat. The files will keep surfacing. The institutional rot, the geopolitical ruptures, the economic shocks; all of it will intensify before it resolves. These are cosmic curveballs, and they will keep coming.
We are at the first of these instalments; perhaps the most confronting, for reasons that should by now be clear.
Resistance from the Capital
Uranus at 27° Taurus squares this eclipse with a tight, grinding orb of barely over a degree, and the friction is enormous. Taurus is fixed earth; the sign that digs in, refuses to budge, treats continuity as sacred and change as existential threat. Uranus has been grinding through this terrain since 2018, destabilising everything we thought was solid: money, value, resources, food systems, housing, bodily security, the ground beneath our feet.
And Taurus is Uranus’s fall; the sign where this planet operates at its weakest, most frustrated, most non-cooperative. Revolutionary impulse meets immovable resistance. The need for radical change collides with the survival instinct to hold ground at all costs. The result is abrupt, explosive release after long periods of stubborn denial. Fixed signs cling, then snap. Institutions deny to the last gasp, then come crashing down overnight.
The square to this Aquarius eclipse drags the vision out of abstraction and into the realms of embodied consequence. What is about to transpire is the reality. We cannot theorise our way out of economic collapse. We cannot idealise our way past material rupture. The networks and share markets can promise liberation and prosperity, but Uranus is certain to destabilise any resources not backed by real, tangible stocks we need in order to survive. Both sides of this square will portray their compulsion as virtue. Aquarius calls coercion “ethics,” groupthink “community consensus,” ideological conformity “progressive-minded,” and feels morally evolved whilst behaving like a Pluribus-coded machine. Taurus calls fear “prudence,” inertia “stability,” hoarding “common sense conservatism,” and insists he’s being practical whilst resisting necessary evolution. Uranus, the dispositor of Aquarius, eventually short-circuits both of these masks by forcing the cost of hanging onto something unsustainable into plain view. We’ve discussed the financial implications at length in our last cosmic bus, but this is a change forced through crisis rather than choice, and it is coming whether the system is ready or otherwise.
The Minor Chords
No Solar eclipse operates in isolation. Aside from its Lunar partner two weeks later, threading through it are smaller aspects: minor chords to big players that colour the atmosphere, subtle little pressure points that shape how this moment imbues the body and the psyche.
Saturn and Neptune, only days from their Feb 20 conjunction at 0° Aries, hit the eclipse by a mere semi-sextile (30°); a small, irritating angle like a gear that doesn’t quite catch, forcing us to correct our intention mid-motion. This aspect highlights our most peculiar idiosyncrasies, our strongest self-preoccupations as we struggle between idealistic and materialistic tendencies, whilst feeling utterly depleted. It’s hard to reflect on the shitshow escalating over the last several years. It is the realisation that everyone around us is a fucking weirdo. Even mild irritation has eventually rubbed us so raw that the incongruity of one another’s realities and shared dreams has become unbearable. By now, all we want to do is dissociate. The Aquarius eclipse (systems, networks, social contracts) nudges into Saturn-Neptune in Aries (apathy, listlessness, absence of creative spark, inactivity or impotence through emotional depression) through a narrow channel.
What does this mean? It means that the maelstrom of collective events, personal, communal and geopolitical, now pressurise us into feeling inhibited, burdened, even disgusted by the presence of others; a period of common suffering, mourning, antipathy, even hostility. The world shifts, our relationships shift, and we are forced to take a new stand whilst feeling completely drained, often before we feel ready.
The Piscean fog phase is ending (I have written extensively about this conjunction in this article), and what replaces it is a harsher honesty that manifests as heat, resentment and anger whilst our reserves are dangerously low. What used to pass under unprecedented tolerance now registers as an insult to our time, our intelligence, our nervous system. The proneness to merge that Pisces demanded evolves into a need to return to screeching self-interest, intentionally collapsing our radius of concern, ceasing to care about the shit. The body stops bargaining, not out of cruelty, but sheer survival instinct when there is nothing left to give.
Repulsion is information. Impatience is information. The feeling of wanting to vent, even violently, is information. The question that will define the weeks ahead is whether we treat those signals as guidance or keep overriding them until resentment hardens into a personality.
Saturn in Aries wants to congeal anger and drive into disciplined action and personal responsibility. Neptune in Aries wants a living ideal, a cause, a holy vision with blood, sweat and tears in the game. Together, our belief ceases to be a mere spiritual aesthetic and begins to demand action. This is the stuff of religious wars, or at least conflict over fundamental understandings of what is worth fighting over. The question is whether we have the energy for it.
Then there is Jupiter in Cancer throwing a sesquisquare (135°) to the eclipse; too much mother-caring in the wrong direction, like opening the milk carton to fill a glass and flooding the entire kitchen floor. The overflow looks like protection instincts gone overboard, welfare turned into suffocation, support turned into codependency, loyalty turned into enabling. It is the friend who keeps lending money to the same hapless loser whilst their own bills pile up. The temptation is to soothe the collective crack by crawling back into the womb of Cancer: family concessions, nostalgia, sentiment, the warm bath of “we have been through so much together, how could I let you suffer now”, whilst the house and farm are halfway burned down. The Aquarius eclipse shuts that soppy shit down like a cold bucket of ice. If you are still overpromising resources based on bleeding-heart soppiness and false hope, doubling down on failing plans, knocking yourself out trying to prop up someone weaker, then the only real rebellion left is to choose something that has depth. Saturn-Neptune in Aries will demand that you cut ties with whatever drains your capacity for deep, local, personally interesting action, even when (especially when) you are already weak and running on empty. Denying this will make you sicker, poorer, more depressed.
And threading through the wider sky like a chorus of backing vocals you only notice on the third or fourth listen: Pallas Athena conjunct Venus at 8° on the Pisces North Node, bringing fated collaborations and strategic compassion, though the shadow is falling for someone on mere wishful thinking or future potential rather than caring enough to let them loose; whilst Ceres closes her conjunction to Chiron and Eris at 24° Aries, dragging the ancestral care wound into visibility. Old transgenerational stories around feeling neglected, having to mother everyone but ourselves, feeling perpetually unchosen, denied care; it all spikes to the surface now so it can finally be lanced and healed. The pent-up rage transforms into good self-care instincts, the right to take up space becomes fiercely non-negotiable, and the boundary we have needed to draw for months becomes a necessary, undeniable, overdue stance in the days and weeks to come.
What This Eclipse Demands
Ok, let me keep this brief, because I’ve covered this intensively in your individual horoscope messages. The first Aquarius eclipse of 2026 is here to show us the ring of fire around the vision we were sold, albeit abruptly and at great cost to our stability, given the square to Uranus. The Epstein files, the technofeudal enclosures, the hollowed-out institutions still wearing their Sunday best; it all glows hellishly inside that ring now, lit up, undeniable, exhausting to look at. Our vision for the future persists, but you can see more transparently the perilous costs it entails. We are still inside the system, but the system is no longer invisible. Its borders are burning.
And here is what that demands: stop worrying about the world collapsing. You could not help it, even when you had your strength, despite having a relatively substantial stake in it. Work to reclaim your interior life. If you have no quiet place inside your own head, the noise from outside will eventually move in and start charging you rent.
For a start, be cool. Stop trying to keep up. You cannot. Nobody is keeping up. It isn’t possible. Even the people who look like they are winning are merely better at faking it in the face of its wholesale spiralling disintegration.
Find things that carry weight. Nature carries weight. Physical bodies carry weight. A conversation where nobody looks at a screen for an hour carries weight. These are the things that do not glitch when the signal gets weak.
Maybe the eclipse is managing our expectations more than warning us. We spend so much energy being outraged that things no longer make sense, as if making sense were the natural state of the universe. But the universe has always been a perpetually chaotic dance, impossible to decipher without deep study. We had a few decades in which we convinced ourselves we were in an ancient library, where all the secrets were ours.
I do not suggest the world is broken. It’s just becoming rapidly unfamiliar. It is shedding the skin of the twentieth century, perhaps of the last twenty centuries, and that process is messy and uncomfortable in ways that are felt in the body as much as in the mind. The work, the actual job of being a mortal being right now, is learning how to live without a coherent narrative. This involves finding a way to stay human as the environment becomes increasingly synthetic and rapidly more artificial. Do not expect the world to return to “normal”. Normal was a phenomenon defined locally and subjectively. This is the cosmic ride. The trick is to look out the window of the bus, see the flaming hoops and the glitching sky, and realise that even in the middle of all this absurdity, you can still choose what you pay attention to.
Yes, it is becoming increasingly more absurd, dark, and incoherent. Fine. Do not let it take your soul with it.
Two weeks after this Solar Eclipse, on 3 March, a total Lunar Eclipse at 12°54’ Virgo occurs as the follow-up; a South Node eclipse that pulls energy out of habits, routines, obligations kept alive through anxiety rather than real value. Virgo forces implementation: do you have the practical scaffolding to sustain whatever this Solar Eclipse initiated without collapsing your health, your time, your sanity? If you do not make room, the season is sure to make it for you.
Act small. Act real. Act local. Determine which behaviour most aligns with your life and your stated values, and do it daily. Stick to a code, live it. Saturn-Neptune in Aries wants a principle you (and only you) can enact; a platitude to recite will no longer do—others will see right through your shit, it will induce them to strike against you. Reduce fragility. Build on areas of redundancy. Ensure you possess fewer points of failure. Less dependence on one person, one income stream, one plan, one story. Make sure you know how to do something useful besides scroll that stupid phone for hours. Can you fix a fence? Can you grow food? Do you know the people on your block? Will you have each other’s backs when things come apart?
And ffs, stop looking for a hero. History shows that those figures usually burn more of the house down tying to keep themselves warm. The hero of the Aquarian age is the boring, gruelling work of small groups of people deciding to act with integrity when it would be easier to act a slimy snake in the grass.
For now, let the silence happen. And remember to take special care of yourself.
Hopefully, you hold it together till spring.
Now here’s your special Solar Eclipse Messages:
ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎
SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓
In this fortnight’s horoscope messages, we locate precisely where this 29°Aquarius Eclipse hits your chart – where the ring of fire is burning, where the vision you’ve been sold- or bought into – is revealing its costs, and what decisive action the coming weeks demand of you.
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