Pisces

Origin and myth

The constellation of the Fishes was known to the Babylonians as MUL.KUN, the Tails, and was associated with the goddess Atargatis, who was sometimes depicted with a fish's lower body. The Greeks identified the constellation with the story of Aphrodite and Eros, who turned themselves into fish and tied themselves with a cord to escape the monster Typhon. In Hellenistic astrology, Pisces was assigned to the twelfth and final sign of the tropical zodiac, the closing of the cycle before the spring rebirth in Aries. The classical rulership belonged to Jupiter; Neptune was added only after its discovery in 1846.

The Christian era is sometimes called the Age of Pisces, because the spring equinox precessed into the constellation around the time of Christ's birth. The fish became the early Christian symbol of the faith, the Greek word ichthys spelling out a creed acrostically. Pisces is therefore tied to two thousand years of religious imagery: the dying god, the suffering servant, the saviour who walks on water and feeds multitudes with fish. Mythically, Pisces is the sea itself, the maternal water from which all life emerges and into which it returns. The two fish bound by a cord represent the soul's simultaneous longing for transcendence and incarnation.

Traits and shadow

Pisces energy is empathic, imaginative, and porous. With Neptune as modern ruler and Jupiter as classical ruler, the sign dissolves the boundaries that earlier signs have built. You are likely to feel other people's emotions as your own, to dream vivid dreams, and to find the artificial structures of modern life draining. The mutable water modality means Pisces flows around obstacles, takes the shape of its container, and must work consciously to keep its own outline. Mystics, artists, healers, musicians, dancers, and those who serve the most vulnerable are classical Pisces archetypes.

The shadow of Pisces is escapism, victimhood, and the loss of self in someone else's sorrow. Unintegrated Pisces can drift through addictions, fantasies, or relationships that erase the boundary between rescuer and rescued. The two fish swim in opposite directions, suggesting the constant pull between transcendence and immersion in pain. Healing for Pisces comes through the discernment of opposite Virgo, the embodied steadiness of Taurus, and the conscious practice of inhabiting the body, especially the feet, which Pisces rules. Daily form, rhythm and selfish-seeming protections are medicine.

In practice

In your natal chart, the house containing Pisces shows where you dissolve, where you serve and merge, and where boundaries are always negotiable. Pisces on the Ascendant gives a soft body, dreamy eyes, and a presence that adapts to its environment. Pisces on the twelfth house cusp doubles the natural theme of solitude, contemplation, and unconscious depths. The Sun in Pisces describes an identity formed by sensitivity; the Moon in Pisces describes emotional life lived through the imagination and through deep empathy. Neptune in Pisces is the planet in its own sign and intensifies the mystical signature.

In synastry, Pisces is classically compatible with the other water signs Cancer and Scorpio, and with the earth signs Taurus and Capricorn, which give it form. Oppositions from Virgo ask it to remember the body. To work with Pisces energy, dream consciously at the new moon in Pisces, return to a creative practice you abandoned, or use the daily horoscope as a daily check on the deeper currents.

Symbolic depth

In alchemy, Pisces governs the stage of projectio, in which the completed elixir is cast upon ordinary matter to transmute it, the work returned to the world. In the Kabbalistic Tree of Life, the sign is assigned to the path of Qoph, the Moon in the tarot, which is Pisces' major arcana correspondence in the Golden Dawn system. The Moon shows a path between two towers under a moon, with a crayfish emerging from the water and dogs howling, an image of the unconscious depths the soul must cross. The minor arcana decanate cards 8, 9 and 10 of Cups fall in Pisces, charting the stages of disillusion, joy, and emotional fulfilment.

Jung read Pisces as the archetype of the mystic and the savior, the soul that has dissolved its individual outline into the larger sea. The two fish bound together suggest that this dissolution is never simple: even at the threshold of liberation, the soul is double, longing both to disappear and to remain. Many of the great religious traditions of the past two thousand years are deeply Piscean: faith, surrender, devotional love, the imitatio of a suffering servant. To work with Pisces is to learn that compassion without boundaries is not love but drowning, and that the body itself is the boat that carries the soul. Continue through the glossary to begin the wheel again.

Also known as

• Fishes
• Pisces (Latin)
• Ichthyes (Greek)
• Atargatis
• Fische (German)