“The Greater Argument” – The NEW MOON at 0°23′ VIRGO, Saturday, August 23, 2025, 06:06 UTC
“Order is not truth. It is the attempt to make truth bearable.” ~ Friedrich Nietzsche
Greetings, Fellow Travellers,
Month by month, our world grows stranger, the challenges of each lunation bearing little resemblance to those of its counterpart from the year before. With a string of outer planets simultaneously crossing the first degrees of new signs, the cosmos itself seems to be recalibrating, with each lunation pushing us into uncharted terrain of consciousness.
In this terrain, we are suddenly confronted with the sheer vastness of what we do not know. The roles we have been playing, the scripts we have followed, the directors and producers of our once-linear reality are losing their relevance. They no longer provide reliable guidance for how we perceive, discriminate, or labour towards something we might call true or authentic.
The single-pointed solar reality that once offered a central figure to follow and aspire to appears to have splintered into a billion lights. Our task now is to orient ourselves within this network of brilliance, to discover our own guiding light among those in our constellation, to keep moving with dignity, to hold integrity, to remain not only relevant in our own right but also recognisable, distinct, and compelling to those around us. Enter Virgo, and the challenge intensifies: this sign concerns itself with work, with function and application, with the quiet rigour of usefulness. Yet what we see unfolding is a paradox. On one hand, we are being relieved of duty, of skill, and the capacity to contribute in ways that once gave us a sense of purpose. On the other hand, we are simultaneously released from the tedious, numbing labour that enslaved us—labour not only in service to others but to the mere maintenance of our own existence.
The Virgo Element:
Into this precarious edifice creeps an even more unsettling prospect. Since the dawn of the industrial age—and, in truth, long before—our species has sought to make human labour lighter, faster, more expedient. That march of progress has only accelerated, pushed into overdrive during the past three decades as Uranus and Neptune transited Aquarius, hard-wiring the ethos of innovation and reform into our collective circuitry. Now, with Pluto newly in Aquarius, the drive has reached critical mass. Its activation—through Pluto’s dispositor Uranus and its sextile to Neptune in Aries—propels technological change at a near-supernatural pace and in directions even the most imaginative of us can scarcely fathom.
Within a year, the combined force of automation, robotics, and—most significantly—artificial intelligence (AI) could produce outputs so convincingly accomplished that, in many domains once thought immune from machine-emulation, they will be indistinguishable from human work, and in some cases markedly superior. As machine-learning systems replicate not just human logic but human discernment, the number of “cognitive universes” we must hold in mind multiplies: each plausible, yet each unresolved.
The result is not clarity but a whole new confusion—an interim paralysis in which the ability to choose one version of reality over another collapses. To stake a claim in certainty, to place trust in what is real, becomes fraught. Out of fear of error or embarrassment, we risk withholding faith, dedication, and effort altogether. The collective danger is stark: that in becoming so averse to inefficiency, inadequacy, or misstep, we refuse to act at all.
And here is where Virgo stands as arbiter. Virgo does not test with rhetoric but with practice—the down-to-earth, unromantic business of making something work even when it has long resisted working. On the other side, Virgo is not shy about cutting losses. If the method is deemed an abject failure, Virgo will jettison the lot, preferring a clean slate to perpetual fussing with what cannot be redeemed.
The First Virgo New Moon of 2025
The New Moon at 0°23′ Virgo is not your usual monthly reset. In fact, it's not even the only one. But at zero degrees, it’s raw, unfiltered, primordial; at this critical degree of Virgo, it is potently undiluted—shrewdly discriminating, highly adaptable, ruthlessly exacting, built for supreme method and efficiency. Virgo is the zodiac's artisan-engineer, and the lunation’s seed-instruction fuses conscious will (Sun) and instinctive need (Moon) into a single directive: make it real, make it functional, make it work, make it worthy.
At the threshold of this mutable-earth sign stands Regulus, the great royal star now presiding from Virgo’s entrance. Its graduation from Leo to Virgo signals an epochal cultural shift: from pageantry and adulation to functionality and results-centred glory. Here, it crowns the reliably competent and quietly rolls out the guillotine for those coasting on laurels. A rare New Moon here at this critical degree carries a simple verdict—if your method fails under pressure, the crown falls.
All this unfolds against an ambient backdrop we should not sentimentalise: an age in late decline, where “security arrangements”, managed peace treaties and controlled accounts continue to reign supreme; where, under the current Chiron/Eris trans-generational wounds are mobilised into zones of exclusion rather than healed; the undesirable, the unsightly, the so-called “useless class” are quietly corralled and edged towards disappearance through gradual hyperinflation and starvation; official narratives are rationed and policed by the propagandistic power of platform algorithms with a distinctly Plutonic bite and cybernetic filtering. Yes, Mercury’s recent station opposite Pluto has helped both to uncover truths and to intensify denials, but the astro-weather isn’t the subject here—it’s the pressure system beneath it. Virgo’s discernment tightens the human psyche under such skies; the awakened individual grows convinced that order and critical thinking can prevent collapse. An unexamined mind falls prey to groupthink, its actions crippled by descent into lower design or corrosive to the greater order.
On the world stage, after years of human attrition, it is naïve to expect charity from those long excluded from the inner circle. We have all, at some point, felt shut out of a game rigged by the so-called creator “gods” who presided over us; and still, ironically, the terms on offer remain the terms pursued: neutralisation of territories, disengagement from global blocs and the slow, bureaucratic grind of oligarchic control.
And yes, this is the final ordinary lunation before the eclipses: a total lunar eclipse in Pisces on 7 September will be followed by a partial solar eclipse at 29° Virgo on the 21st. Two Virgo thresholds in a single month—0° and 29°—mark the spectrum’s beginning and end. What begins here will not only be felt but measured, tested, counted and verified. Decisions made now will be placed under extreme scrutiny and audited under eclipse intensity later. And the verdict, once delivered, will reshape the furniture of our lives and institutions.
Outer Planetary Geometry:
A Yod That Won’t Let Plans Stay Planned
A classical yod applies upon the lunation itself—both Sun and Moon conjoined at 0° Virgo—at the apex, with the base formed by Pluto retrograde at 1°56′ Aquarius and the Saturn–Neptune conjunction retrograde at 0° Aries. This is a near-sextile base from which both legs cast tight quincunxes to the New Moon.
*Because the outer (transpersonal) planets are linked by a run of sextiles across this period, we face two to three years in which the swifter inner bodies will repeatedly activate this figure, namely from the early degrees of Virgo/Scorpio, with the characteristic effects that follow:
An inconjunct (quincunx) is astrology’s awkward tenancy agreement: two bodies situated in incompatible signs—with neither a common element nor mode to mediate between them—obliged to co-exist across the street from one another, prickled and perturbed by every trait and habit of the other, begrudgingly enduring rather than ever quite reconciling their differences. A yod doubles this discomfort with a 150º stress from both sides. The apex planet(s) must answer two such neighbours at once, a pair who—being in sextile—seem to confer quite nicely with each other while remaining foreign, even faintly hostile, to the apex they are pressuring. You do not “solve” a yod; instead, you must continually adjust under the given load. And yes, that ceaseless adjustment produces something: a third, highly specific way of dealing with things—part craft, part protocol, part hard-edged execution—a measure of exasperation that would not have existed without the tension. In yod seasons, movement precedes certainty; whether we like it or not, we devise odd measures, try ungainly solutions, and iterate; we refine on the fly, and the meaning arrives afterwards when the mechanism finally locks into place.
Let's look at this configuration:
First leg: Pluto in Aquarius. Here Virgo’s analogue ethic—hands-on tools, care of bodies and budgets, the small decencies of upkeep—meets the march of the machines: as if the digital revolution and its AI technocracy are moving in across the street, steamrolling forward with a reformist rationale and a notably cool pulse. Like Virgo, Aquarius is unemotional; unlike Virgo, which sterilises emotion to keep the bench clean, Aquarius detaches to avoid partiality, thereby licensing dispassionate acts in the name of justice, equality, progress and innovation. Neither tolerates stagnation or the status quo, though they approach it from opposite directions. Micro-optimisation meets macro power, which curdles into the moralism of efficiency—tidy reasons to eliminate what is not “putting out”. The danger is not cartoon villainy; it is the quiet reclassification of care as compliance.
Second leg: Saturn–Neptune at the Aries Point. Cardinal fire would normally inaugurate leadership; instead, weeks of conjunction have fermented a contrived leadership crisis. Aries wants to move; Saturn frustrates and withholds permission; Neptune totally blurs the appetite to steer at all, fostering evasion, apathy, piety, or escape. Under a yod, the pair misalign rhythmically—edicts one moment, cant and hypocrisy the next—so mandates harden, melt, and harden again, while the crowd grows weary of being led and the would-be leaders grow faintly disgusted with the very idea of shepherding anyone anywhere. In the vacuum, rhetoric degrades: cover-ups, denial, unverifiable “narratives”, mythic sloganeering, outright grift; none of it compels trust, all of it alienates.
These legs do not cooperate with Virgo’s calm, earthy, methodical approach. Mutable earth at the apex wants practical fixes, evidence, cadence. Fixed air ideologically declares that the system owns and upgrades your tools and the way you operate them (the way Microsoft keeps forcing mysterious ‘upgrades’ onto your PC’s operating system). Cardinal fire shouts “launch now” precisely when Virgo is not ready, not nearly right, not settled in the slightest. For those in the 0°–2° Virgo range, the result is an enormously unsettling scenario, especially for Virgo, who is famous for work-anxiety patterns.
So the third thing that develops? Under this geometry, Virgo acquires a kind of second sight—not mystical, but ferociously practical. Tired of being yanked between subterranean systems’ power and a performative mandate to lead with no authority, Virgo trains its attention until it can smell obsolescence, spot the deceit, and pre-empt failure. The lunation's activation of this point/house in our chart becomes exquisitely predictive about future processes: what will break next, which metric is lying by omission, where a protocol lacks a human seam. We start to sniff out our own potential obsolescence and adjust accordingly. The hands stay on the work; the discernment sharpens; the method simplifies to what survives contact with real conditions. That is the gift pressed out of the strain: a bespoke, living standard—humane, exact, and quietly future-proof—that could only have been forged by enduring two incompatible neighbours without capitulating to either.
The Uranus Square: the shock that tests what works
Uranus in Gemini hits this Virgo New Moon at right angles, like a live wire crossing a careful circuit. It is not malicious; it is unsentimental. Mutable air floods mutable earth with voltage: news flashes mid-procedure, facts arrive without courtesy or bedside manner, and any plan that relied on deference rather than evidence burns off at first contact. Gemini is the switchboard—language, links, data dumps—so the jolt lands through leaks, hacks, whistle-blowers and synthetic “truths” that trend before they can be verified. Virgo’s instinct is to contain the damage, to count and cross-check; the square answers by multiplying data faster than you can calculate and file it, forcing snap judgements that make—or unmake—credibility in an afternoon. With Regulus involved, this could mean a sudden coronation (and, if earned, the beheading) live-streamed and televised. And sitting at the midpoint, Jupiter in Cancer quietly arbitrates, as if the gut itself were weighing in—passing instinctive moral judgement on the rapid-fire exchange between fact and discernment, sanctioning what feels humanly true and casting out what does not.
In institutions, this manifests as policy whiplash and techno-bureaucratic collisions: mid-tier functionaries may seize control briefly; systems glitch under public glare, sometimes after a hack; boards and committees execute U-turns because a thread outpaces a memo. In short, shocks force operational reversals. In relationships and agreements, pre-existing fault-lines snap where they were already brittle; humility in service collides with Uranian refusal to answer to anyone. The test is not simply to move fast; it is to move fast without breaking things.
Aftershocks matter. Once the flash passes, your Virgo side (wherever that lies for you) does not return to “before”; it recalibrates. Planning horizons shorten; loops tighten; batch sizes shrink. Merit quietly redefines itself as reproducibility under pressure. You won’t need much convincing to retire tools that cannot keep tempo and build reversible steps you can defend in daylight. Trust transitions from vibes to process, so you stop volunteering for other people’s chaos and start designing interfaces that protect both you as a worker and the work. This is a case where error becomes an oracle: when something breaks, you update the protocol while the iron is still hot. The craving for instant validation thins, and good stewardship takes its place. The next shock will still be a shock, but it will find you with fewer brittle pieces and a method you can demonstrate, not just describe.
Culture Under the Algorithm: Work Without a Handshake
If you want to feel this lunation in the culture, step, if you will, into the gig economy—that protean market where Virgo’s ethic is both celebrated and strip-mined. The 9–5 routine has all but dissolved; a single week now contains employee, freelancer, content creator, marketer, investor—often in one body. There is an uncanny edge that cuts clean both ways: freedom and flexibility; instability and precarity. As the tools of technology become a superlative enabler, they are at once one's master and overlord—it's techno-feudalism by another name—online platforms and their machine-learning algorithms are the final arbiters, deciding who is seen, paid, or surreptitiously stifled and erased from the wider playing field.
Regardless of who you are or what you do—baker of hotcakes, teacher, computer engineer, or storyteller—you are now absorbed into a metaphysical, boundariless, leaderless domain, where your task is simply to keep a viable profile afloat. Proof-of-work has gone digital, and data-driven portfolios and dashboards replace CVs. Metrics hum like server racks in Silicon Valley: audience engagement, completion rates, customer satisfaction reviews, and time-to-resolution metrics rule 'success’. Virgo’s old test—did you do it properly?—has been displaced by a colder, more impersonal one: did the graph go up? If yes, you’re paid; if not, you vanish quietly from the feed.
The physical marketplace withers as commerce migrates online, and life turns into a game of incremental nudges, overseen by an invisible, seemingly omniscient croupier. Is this the workplace of the future? With a generation born in the 1960s under Pluto conjunct Uranus in Virgo, now approaching the age of institutional leadership, this period looks very much like the tipping point in how things are run.
Meanwhile, culture parodies its own acceleration. The audio-visual arts are awash with oddities and befuddlements. Picture a classic protest hymn resurfacing as an AI-generated cover in the voice of a singer who never sang it, or a familiar scene from a beloved film rescripted, acted, and edited without breaking the cadence of the original director’s style. While it's all eerily plausible, briefly entertaining, it leaves us somehow spiritually empty. The point here isn’t rehashing nostalgia; it’s the absurdity of living beneath an algorithmic sky where distorted realities can be presented with such ease, by anyone, where doomscrolling has become the new liturgy, and where artistic integrity—the simple certainty of true authenticity—has become a luxury item. In the most earthy, physically bound human sense, Virgo’s perennial task becomes sifting intelligent signal from artificial noise, real from counterfeit, useful to useless. On this level, life ceases to be quaint and becomes survival.
Here, the Uranus square plays cleanest. Gemini is the wire—the bilateral circuitry of words and ideas; Uranus provides the voltage. Truth behaves like an unstoppable cascade: unsentimental, exact, and ultimately destructive to anything that relied on deference, denial, or subversion instead of evidence. Like the greatest epistemological hacker, it exposes simultaneous breaches across the greater system: beliefs glitch, inner conspiracies to preserve the sanctity of silence snap, and consensus built on nonsense disintegrates. Quasi-religious fervour, political ideologies, economic orthodoxies, identity movements, even science when it hardens into dogma—under this square, they all evaporate like mist. It feels brutal, yes, but it is also emancipatory. The square does not reward posturing. It forces a phenomenon which, as a result of the stress, rewards proof.
Meanwhile, our geopolitical backdrop resounds in a far harsher, more ruthlessly persistent key. Alternative channels show us daily that “peace” is being administered more as population management; that geopolitical reform is pursued through coercion, cruelty, even outright genocidal control; that whole peoples are shepherded into corridors of compliance while deals are brokered in their absence. This is archetypal atrocity, not gossip. When Aquarius optimises ‘fairness' at scale, it often erases the very texture by which care is felt. Equity appears to arrive in cold, abstracted form, and when delivered through state-of-the-art technology, it effectively ensures that “everyone gets a drink” becomes “no one gets a barman.” The driver of progress dissolves into a sensor array, gradually replaced by the algorithm. Efficiency is real—but so too is the humanitarian cost.
Virgo can live here. It was built to keep the lights on. But even Virgo notices what’s missing: eye contact, discretion, improvisation—the small surplus by which service becomes care. At the gate, the superstar Regulus discreetly updates the criterion of leadership: the noble (sic) laurels go to the maintainer—the one who can write the protocol and still look you in the eye; who dares to get into the muck and get the job done, refusing to delegate their intrinsic task to someone else.
How This Lands (and What to Do Before the Eclipses)
This lunation carries a clean precision yet, eerily, leaves behind a faint hollowness. Systems may tighten, budgets come into balance, routines run smoother—yet the air cools almost imperceptibly. Sleep patterns may stutter into bursts, digestion may twitch, attention wanders restlessly from chore to chore, as if the body itself senses the strain before the mind admits it. True to the yod’s nature, we find ourselves adjusting first and understanding later.
Virgo’s reminder is that errors can be teachers, rest must be built into our method, and boundaries are not luxuries. What endures now will be what holds weight under pressure; what fails will be progressively pared away. Real leadership emerges not through flair and bombastic showmanship but through steadiness—real competence becoming the only charisma that counts. And yes, we can safely predict that heads will roll wherever noisy incompetence has been masquerading as control.
For some, this will mean acknowledging that certain roles are already over—not because they lacked meaning, but because the system has automated their function; the wiser move is to promote the human role in the process, pre-emptively inserting it wherever the machine cannot reach—as prescient contact, master of discretion, accountable presence, creator-being. Machines can be trained to mimic and emulate, to simulate presence, to parody discernment, to approximate care, but they cannot carry consequence; the real thing requires a witnessing consciousness that answers for what it touches. This surpasses sentimentality; it is a god-incepted survival design.
And all of it is rehearsal. Pisces will soon ask us to surrender, and the late Virgo eclipse (opposing Saturn) will conduct the final audit. What is left standing will be what works.
Next: your empowering horoscopes—how the current sky threads through each sign’s house of ordinary miracles, and where the work becomes your way. Your subscription allows you access to this work; your support keeps this work independent and honours the labour it takes to produce. Many blessings on this New Moon. xx
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ARIES ♈ | TAURUS ♉ | GEMINI ♊ | CANCER ♋ | LEO ♌ | VIRGO ♍ | LIBRA ♎ | SCORPIO ♏ | SAGITTARIUS ♐ | CAPRICORN ♑ | AQUARIUS ♒ | PISCES ♓
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This was so powerful and helped with all the energies I’m feeling this week. Every. Word.
Thank you.So helpful.