Pisces

Mutable water, ruled by Jupiter and Neptune

Mutable water finds its way round anything and takes the shape of whatever holds it. The tradition reads Pisces as receptive, imaginative and compassionate, the sign most open to other people’s feelings and least defended against them. Cancer, cardinal water, is read as protecting, and Scorpio, fixed water, as holding deep; Pisces lets feeling spread and dissolve. The reading gives it empathy, artistry and a spiritual turn, and also evasiveness, confusion about where it ends and someone else begins, and a habit of escape.

The traditional ruler of Pisces is Jupiter, which also rules Sagittarius; in water Jupiter is read as faith, charity and forgiveness. Modern astrology adds Neptune, read as longing, imagination and dissolving boundaries, and both are used. Venus is exalted in Pisces, traditionally at 27°, read as love at its least conditional. Mercury is both in detriment and in its fall here, the one planet to have both debilities in a single sign, read as precise thought at sea. The decans are Saturn, Jupiter and Mars as faces, or Jupiter, the Moon and Mars through the water signs.

Pisces as Sun, Moon and rising sign

The Sun in Pisces

A Sun in Pisces is read as a self with soft edges: someone who takes in the atmosphere around them, is moved by music, stories and other people’s troubles, and often finds themselves through art, care or belief. The tradition describes a gentle, intuitive, adaptable person, generous with sympathy and at ease with ambiguity. Its other side is drift, avoidance of hard decisions, and a tendency to disappear into other people’s needs.

The Moon in Pisces

A Moon in Pisces is read as deeply sensitive, absorbing moods like weather and needing quiet, imagination and time alone to recover from them. It comforts itself through music, daydreams or water, and is read as instinctively kind. The same reading describes a porous emotional life that finds it hard to say where its own feelings stop and someone else’s begin. The Moon spends about two and a half days in Pisces.

Pisces rising

Pisces rising is read as a soft, receptive manner, sometimes described as hard to pin down, with Jupiter, or Neptune for modern astrologers, ruling the chart. Pisces is the natural sign of the twelfth house, solitude and what is hidden. At northern latitudes it is one of the fastest signs to rise, under an hour at the latitude of London, so it is one of the least common ascendants there; at the latitude of Sydney it takes nearly two and a half hours.

Pisces is late winter in the north, the thaw before spring, and late summer in the south. It ends at the March equinox, where the zodiac starts again with Aries. Being last, it is often read as the sign that gathers up the other eleven, which is the tradition’s way of explaining its breadth of sympathy. The Sun spends just under thirty days in Pisces.

The fishes

The fishes are two, tied together by a cord and swimming in different directions. In the Greek and Roman story they are Aphrodite and her son Eros, who became fish to escape the monster Typhon and tied themselves together so as not to be separated. The glyph shows the two fish as arcs joined by a line. The reading takes the double pull: towards the world and away from it.

Pisces and Virgo across the wheel

Opposite Pisces is Virgo, mutable earth to Pisces’s mutable water. The axis is read as the whole and the detail, faith and method: Pisces accepts what is beyond fixing, Virgo sets about fixing what can be fixed. It runs through the twelfth and sixth houses, retreat and daily work. Planets across it are read as the tension between surrender and service, each sign supplying what the other lacks.

The sign and the constellation

The constellation Pisces is faint, a long V of stars with a small ring called the Circlet marking one of the fish. It matters for another reason: the March equinox point, where the tropical zodiac begins, now lies within its borders. The Sun is in front of Pisces from about 12 March to 18 April, most of tropical Aries, and during the sign Pisces it stands mostly before Aquarius. Sidereal Pisces starts about 14 March. The page on signs and constellations shows the three systems together.

Common mix-ups

Because the equinox point sits in the constellation Pisces, Pisces is sometimes taken for the first sign; the tropical zodiac still starts with the sign Aries, at the equinox itself. The Age of Pisces and the Age of Aquarius describe that point drifting, not anybody born in February or March. Births on 18 or 19 February, and from 19 to 21 March as the equinox arrives, need the time and place to be sure of the Sun’s sign, which a birth chart works out.

What this page claims

This page sets out how Western astrology reads Pisces and where each part of that reading comes from. It describes a vocabulary rather than a person, and it predicts nothing about anybody born with the Sun, the Moon or the ascendant in Pisces.