“When The Crowd Stops Applauding…” FULL MOON at 13° LEO, Sunday 1 February 2026, 22:09 UTC

The hard climb gets you to the summit. The summit gets you to the door. From there, Pluto decides whether you get an invitation to the party…

It stands to reason that anyone still in possession of a soul should be so weary by now that holding it together has become the primary task. In a world where the news cycles faster than your nervous system can metabolise, where even the slightest hopeful development carries a faint aftertaste of dread, any feeling of genuine rest requires an almost total disengagement from the possibility of any outcome whatsoever. Unless you are trained in the art of Tao or Zen, or have utterly resigned from the material aspect of this world in some Diogenesian, Buddha or Christ-like way, I’d wager you’re sweating bullets in your sleep.

I understand. I am also weighing up what I can let go of and what still feels too costly, too painful to surrender.

We’re approaching something massive in the skies. Saturn about to meet Neptune at the Aries point; Uranus stationing, preparing to shift signs; Pluto settling into Aquarius for two decades; eclipses threading through like sutures on a wound that hasn’t even finished opening. People are getting excited, and I understand the enthusiasm. Multiple outer planetary shifts aligning all at once can seduce the astrological community into believing transformation is finally here, that the cavalry is coming, that the old rot will be swept away and something more luminous will take its place.

Ah… the rapture… the quickening… the spritual ascension. It’s like a prayer, really. The kind of wishful thinking that only the scoundrel turns to for refuge when all around appears to be caving.

Here’s the thing about outer planets, and I say this with the weight and weariness of someone who has watched these cycles for too long to anticipate any of it will be a smooth ride: their force is catabolic. It will break us down entirely. Outers don’t simply change one aspect of your life and leave the rest intact. They upend your entire perception of reality, your relationship to others, the inherited customs and beliefs you’ve been living under without question. Often, the transition to the brave new world you dreamed of shows up in the most upsetting, even savage way.

Yes, things probably need to get better. Yes, the mouldy old structures were failing us in ways we’re only beginning to articulate. But the process of transformation is excruciatingly painful in ways the astrology memes on Instagram neglect to mention. This large-scale awakening means discovering that the safety you once took for granted was indeed complacency, that national pride was built upon myth, propped by collective hubris, defended with the blood, sweat and tears of our youth, and that the truths you ignored to stay docile and comfortable were piling up in a dark corner under your bed, feeding the very monster of self-deception who has now grown large enough to devour you. Saturn meeting Neptune blurs the line between meaning and manipulation. Uranus accelerates change past the speed of consent. Pluto demands surrender to forces that have no intention of negotiating your loss and grief. Those sextiles and trines between them make the whole process feel inevitable, which can birth genuine repair, or a very elegant prison passed off to you as progress. I suspect we’re building both, in different rooms, at the same time, and the next few years will reveal which dimension of consciousness we choose to inhabit.

For now, I find myself watching the climbers. Feeling the altitude, the thin air, wondering whether any of it’s been worth the effort. And like you, trying to keep my footing while the mountain reorganises itself beneath me.

That’s where this story begins. And if you’re reading this, you’ve been climbing too.

It’s Cold and Lonely At the Top

I must confess, last week I went down a rabbit hole about climbers. It started with Alex Honnold scaling Taipei 101, which the algorithm decided meant I needed to watch Free Solo again, which led to Everest documentaries, which kept me up past three in the morning staring at macabre footage of frozen corpses in the death zone while the Sun and Mercury crossed into Aquarius, past Pluto. Much as I was intrigued, I found myself wondering what kind of person looks at an eight-thousand-metre vertical death sentence and thinks, yeah, that’s the goal for me.

Honnold is a Leo Sun with Saturn in Scorpio squaring it, which means nobody feels the gravity of guilt and public scrutiny more acutely than those carrying that particular fixed cross. No Sun is more averse to being tarnished than the Leo, whose entire spiritual ethos focuses on upholding integrity, on being seen as golden, as valuable, as incorruptible. And no Saturn corrodes more viciously than Saturn in Scorpio, inflicting a creeping death anxiety into every quiet moment, reminding you that the void is patient and your grip is temporary. That he climbs at all is remarkable. That he free-solos—no ropes, no wiggle room, no second chances—is something closer to metaphysical defiance. His natal Neptune, at the first degree of Capricorn, the final degree of his sixth house, opposing his Cancer Ascendant, is his strongest planet. The dream of reaching the summit meant leaving the comfort zone entirely, repeatedly, abandoning the inner securities that Cancer clings to, ascending into terrain where the body becomes the instrument of something the mind can barely comprehend.

I watched him scale Taipei 101 the same week Neptune entered Aries, and the timing felt like a stellar transmission. Neptune in Aries initiates all humanity into an era I would call a “slow, painful search for a masculinity that can act without apologising for existing.” Honnold embodies that search already: the audacity to act without hesitation, presence without pretence, courage so total it becomes invisible to itself and is at one with the creator and destroyer of all that is. What he accomplished at El Capitan remains, in my estimation, more death-defying than Everest. Everest allows for teams, for oxygen tanks, for the distributed weight of collective risk. El Cap allowed for nothing but Honnold, the rock face, and the absolute knowledge that a single miscalculation would convert him into a statistic. The achievement is the apotheosis of defiance against limitation, the triumph over one’s greatest terror through focus, perseverance, and the sheer will to accomplish a defined goal. It is also, and this carries primordial significance, the symbol of Capricorn itself: the mountain goat ascending impossible terrain by virtue of relentless, methodical discipline.

But here’s what captivated me as the Sun moved into Aquarius and my algorithm kept serving footage of humans risking everything for elevation: it wasn’t the climbing itself. It was the watching. Millions of us observed Honnold’s ascent of Taipei 101 from our living rooms, shared clips across platforms, discussed his technique in comment threads, all from the safety of our couches and the climate-controlled reception centre on the 89th floor where the cameras were stationed. We watched a man who could die at any second, and we called it entertainment.

This is where Capricorn ends, and Aquarius begins. The climb is Capricorn: discipline, preparation, the relentless upward grind, years of training that turn hands into leather and the mind into a single-pointed instrument of ambition. Capricorn endows us with the verve to get to the top. But the top is a door, and behind the door sits Aquarius, and Aquarius decides whether and to which room you belong. The summit is merely the entrance exam. What you did to get there, who you stepped over, what parts of yourself you left frozen on the ridge—that’s the application form. And Pluto, standing at the gate in early Aquarius, has recorded every line, every keystroke, and is about to make you an offer you can’t refuse.

We’ve all been climbing. These past sixteen years with Pluto in Capricorn, we’ve all been ascending something: the career ladder, the new social hierarchy, the credential mill, the desperate scramble for legitimacy in a system that kept moving the goalposts. We’ve all left something behind on the way up. We’ve all looked at the bodies frozen into the mountainside and kept moving, telling ourselves we had no choice, telling ourselves that stopping would only add our own corpse to the scenery. And now, one by one, we’re reaching the summit, catching our breath in the thin air, discovering that arrival is merely an audition; the real test happens at the door.

The Three-Headed Gatekeeper

So you step into the Aquarian clubhouse around late January 2026, and the first thing you notice is that the vibe has shifted. The old Capricorn establishment—the mahogany-lined rooms, the slick Italian suits, the practised handshakes and knowing which fork to use—has been gutted and rebuilt into something sleeker, colder, humming with server noise and the faint ozone tang of too many screens running at once. The walls are glass and steel now. Everything is visible as far as the eye can see. Everything is scanned, recorded, categorised and filed in real time. And there, at the door, having clearly appointed himself permanent security, sits Pluto.

He’s going nowhere. It’s a 20-year sentence, minimum. Old dark-face is cloaked with that tech-oligarch energy now, the kind of man who wears the same black turtleneck every day and speaks softly about “optimising human potential” while his eyes, still and emotionless, alert you to something your nervous system registers only as threat. He holds supreme power over you. Still only at 3° of Aquarius, everyone who enters has to pass him. Everyone who enters leaves something at the door. He doesn’t request permission to indoctrinate you. He knows you’re inextricably locked in, and he logs it, and you walk out lighter in ways you won’t fully understand until much later when you reach for something that used to be yours and find the coffers empty. “It’s in the cloud,” he says.

I passed him myself, somewhere in the blur of recent weeks. I felt the cold brush of his indifferent cyber-scan. I felt something unfurl from my chest, some fragment of my private heart, some trust, some innocence of relishing my long-held secrets or the luxury of being unobserved. Meh… I walked in anyway. What could I do? We all did, didn’t we? The mountain was behind us now, the glory was fleeting, and the only direction that remained was forward… onward and upward, into the humming room, into the network, into whatever this next chapter demands of those who made it this far.

Initiation Rites

The gaping fascination of the global Netflix crowd watching Honnold wasn’t merely collective awe at an athlete operating at the apex of human capacity. Disturbingly, it was also watching a man’s proximity to sudden death, the unspoken thrill that at any moment the family-friendly feed could become a snuff film, and we’d all be there to witness it, together in our living rooms, alone on our phones, consuming human mortality as content.

This is Pluto’s initiation rite into Aquarius: the chill at the entry point, the determination to make witnesses of us all, and more disturbingly, to sever us from the natural human responses that witnessing should provoke.

Over the past two years, as Pluto hovered back and forth over the Capricorn-Aquarius cusp, we have watched mortifying videos go viral that would have been unthinkable a decade ago. Civilians, including children, slaughtered in Gaza, the footage slotting seamlessly between dance challenges and influencer hauls on our kids’ TikTok feeds. The public execution of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson. The attempted assassination of a presidential candidate, the bullet grazing his ear in high definition. The neckshot to Charlie Kirk, captured from every angle in the crowd. And what followed these horrors was neither collective grief nor moral reflection but the crowd dividing into cheersquads, then the outraged backlash against the cheersquads, then communities ripping themselves apart over whose reaction was more appropriate, while the actual violence receded into background noise, another data point in the feed, scarcely investigated, barely processed, already replaced by the next outrage. Most recently, two protesters gunned down in separate incidents by ICE officers, the footage circulating before the bodies were cold, before anyone had time to feel anything that might interrupt the scroll.

This is what Pluto at the Aquarian gate is engineering: a new relationship with death, one stripped of horror, robbed of sacred gravity, dispossessed of the revulsion and pathos that once marked our species as human. The chief criterion for membership in this club is the capacity to bear witness to atrocity while feeling nothing that would slow your participation in the network. Watch the atrocity. Share the atrocity. Argue about the atrocity. Scroll past the atrocity. Stay numb enough to function, numb enough to have an opinion, yet fragmented enough to be divided, clustered enough to belong to a crowd, yet dissociated enough to be ruled.

Pluto is hideous, and he’ll accomplish his agenda incognito when he can. But with Aquarius occupying the top floor of every organisation’s summit, with walls made of glass and steel and transparency built into the architecture, his attempts to operate covertly are becoming absurdly obvious. His efforts to silence, to redact, to manufacture consensus, to keep things dark while standing in plain sight, all splutter under the incessant 24/7 glow of fluorescent lighting and exponentially multiplying camera angles. There have been furious efforts to stem the haemorrhaging of dark insight, laws drafted and rammed through with alarming speed, but imagine being so repulsive that you have to legislate against people calling you a grotesque monster. That’s Pluto in Aquarius trying to maintain mystique in an age of screenshots and digital virality.

Muster and Roll Call

And yet every planet, every asteroid, every luminary that has filed into Aquarius this month has had to pass Lord Dark Helmet at the gate and make their accommodation with whatever shred of dignity remained.

Pallas Athena came through first, back in late December, bringing her particular gift for pattern recognition and strategic vision, the one who sees the chessboard while everyone else sees a conversation. In Aquarius, that tactical intelligence turned collective, began tirelessly networking, oriented toward installing systems in place of individuals. After assisting U.S. forces to remove Nicolás Maduro from presidential power on January 3, Pallas spent the rest of the month helping you see who was aligned with whom, which alliances were genuine and which were self-interest wearing the mask of solidarity. Then she slipped into Pisces on the 24th, mumbled something about needing to feel into things for a while, and dissolved into waters where her designs have gone impressionistic. The room lost its best analyst the moment the games got interesting.

Vesta entered on 11 January and immediately began tightening the screws. Vesta in Aquarius treats devotion as an engineering problem: what serves the mission stays, what wastes energy goes, and all sentiment gets chilled and filed under operational inefficiency. She’s been rifling through your mundane routines like an AI auditor with a devotion-coded flamethrower, interrogating what you’re actually committed to versus what you’ve been continuing out of habit, guilt, or the fear of what stopping might reveal about why you started. The shadow shows up as ascetic pride, the quiet martyrdom of someone who has stripped their life to pure function and mistakes that hollowness for discipline. She remains until 10 March, so the audit continues through the eclipses.

Venus crossed the threshold on 17 January, and you’d think she’d warm the place up, but Venus in Aquarius is the lover who parks you in the friend zone and says “I think we should define our terms” the moment you reach for a hug. She’s been scanning every relationship in the room, coldly exposing where conviviality was leverage and where closeness was self-interest flagging a hashtag. After passing Pluto at the door on the 20th, something shifted behind her eyes, a new knowing about who truly values whom, and she’s been about as forthright about sharing intel as the FBI has been in releasing those Epstein files. She leaves on 10 February, days after the Full Moon, so whatever relational recalibration she’s been engineering, expect the invoice next week.

Then came the rapid escalation, three ingresses in five days, each one passing Pluto at the gate, each one adding voltage to a room already crackling.

The Sun breezed in on the 19th and immediately started interrogating everyone about what future their current behaviour was building toward, one of those annoying questions that also happens to be necessary, the kind that makes you squirm precisely for the reason you already know the answer and would rather leave it unsaid. The Sun, in his detriment through icy Aquarius, turns identity into experiment and ego into hypothesis, useful if you’re genuinely evolving, unbearably partisan if you’re resisting, and he’s been illuminating the network ever since, showing everyone where they actually sit in the structure versus where they’d been telling themselves they sat. He brushed past Pluto on entry and by 2 February (like the groundhog) catches a glimpse of his own shadow, discovering how much of the self was built for audience approval versus how much from actual centre.

Mercury entered Aquarius on the 20th, practically vibrating, already mid-sentence about pattern recognition and systems thinking and how everything connects to everything if you’d only look, speaking like a policy document having a manic episode, upgrading everybody’s rhetoric while downgrading everyone’s patience for small talk. He passed Pluto at the threshold and his words got weightier, more consequential, more likely to serve as propaganda rather than proper dialogue, and since he leaves on 6 February, whatever manifesto you’ve been drafting in the back of your mind, leave the final edits in a blue manila folder by week’s end.

And then Mars shouldered through at 4:16am on the 23rd, and the room tensed in that particular way rooms tense when someone with a grievance and the muscle to back it up walks in looking for answers. Mars in Aquarius is reform energy with a YouTube channel, who, passing Pluto at the gate, began to spruik of revolution, rallying his droogies to hand out pamphlets on street corners, or in shadow expression, hand out black eyes to anyone who questions the pamphlets, pledging some pact about what he’s willing to fight for, die for, and burn. Twenty-four hours later, Alex Pretti, a 37-year-old ICU nurse, was shot and killed by federal immigration agents in Minneapolis, the second such killing in that city within days, and something in the collective body shifted. The footage circulated, yes, but this time the numbing scroll encountered resistance, the crowd hum turned to tremor, the tremor turned to bodies showing up in numbers, a collective refusal to absorb another execution as content, and the government, reading the room for once, backed down. Mars in Aquarius had drawn blood, but Mars in Aquarius had also drawn a line, and whether he proves to be security or liability remains to be seen, yet for one moment the network remembered it was made of humans, and the humans remembered they could refuse.

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The View from the Top

So here we are, all of us who made it, standing in the hum of the server room with our metrics intact and our receipts logged and whatever we traded at the door already fading from memory. The walls are glass. All our digressions and human vulnerabilities exposed, two clicks short of being streamed live. The algorithm curates what you witness and calibrates how much you’re permitted to feel about the witnessing. Membership in this club requires something your grandparents would have found monstrous: the capacity to watch anything, absorb anything, scroll past anything, and still show up tomorrow with your empathy safely in airplane mode.

What did you leave on the mountain? What part of yourself got filed under acceptable losses? What warmth, what softness, what capacity to be moved by beauty or horror or the simple fact of another person’s existence, got edited out of the final version of you that walked through the door?

And on 1 February, rising in the opposite sky like a diva who’s had quite enough of the committee meeting, the Leo Full Moon enters the frame with warmth, with pride, with that unmistakable glint that says she came here to pose one question and she intends to make it personal:

Who among you still has a heart, and what exactly are you planning to do with it?

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The Heart of the Machine

This Sunday’s Leo Full Moon is intense and does not occur in isolation. Bearing the brunt of a hive of planets around the Aquarian Sun, it feels as though this regal sign is being accosted by an army of radical free-agents—like an empress ambushed by anarchists who’ve scrolled too many timelines but haven’t read a history book. Perhaps that’s for the best. But it occurs in a web of minor aspects that most astrologers gloss over, those 45° and 135° angles that operate like hairline fractures in the psyche—easy to ignore until the weight of the whole structure groans like tectonic plates pushing up continents. The last lunation before the eclipses activates the upcoming Saturn-Neptune conjunction, and though we can sense our world about to shift in ways unimaginable, a serious jolt to the system may be precisely what we need to snap our fantastical fancies back into our mortal selves again.

By the sheer force of its polarity, this Full Moon helps you see the contradiction between the “me” and the “we” in your life. Do you see where you’ve been pressed, impressed, consigned, resigned into becoming part of the hive? Do you see where someone’s been too hot, too needy of attention, too hungry for a spotlight they haven’t earned? It’s been gathering steam for weeks. We have love to give—we love our kids, our playmates, our pet projects. But the rest… geez. There’s only so much warmth to go around these days. That long, wet, boundary-fudging, muck-making, delusional bubble-fart formed by Saturn and Neptune at the end of Pisces has drained us all. If there’s five drops left to spare at the top of this summit, let’s not waste them. Let us reserve them wisely for our own. And if we haven’t already, the blessed Aquarius Sun, and a host of other characters, will help to chill those cats riding on our goodwill, our philanthropic kindness, our strategic reticence to bruise their pride. But hey, hogging all of the attention without merit is a setup for a fall, and any fall from that height’s gotta hurt.

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The horoscopes that follow locate where this dilemma is occurring in your own life—which house holds the Leo Moon and her hunger to be loved, which house holds the Aquarian Sun and its insistence on shared contribution over personal whims and feelings of entitlement. This is the oldest fixed-sign argument there is: the monarch who needs to be adored versus the revolutionary who’ll set you free precisely because he loves you. Figure out which one you’re running, and which one’s running you.

Now, if you want to take this really personally, delve into your special New Moon Messages, and don’t forget to leave a “♡” if you liked this report.

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

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