Almagest

The library · The signs

Pisces

general summary for a strong Pisces placement

What the tradition reads

Pisces is the mutable sign of water, the last sign of the zodiac and the final sign of its serving trio. Its classical ruler is Jupiter, with Neptune assigned as its modern ruler, and the tradition reads Pisces as dissolution rather than definition: a sign that absorbs whatever surrounds it rather than holding a single fixed shape the way earlier signs do. Alan Leo's Astrology For All describes Pisces natives as impressionable, imaginative and difficult even to themselves to know clearly, prone to a kind of self undoing when the personal nature dominates, yet capable, once more individualised, of a deep, quiet, unusually receptive understanding that Leo associates with the sign's reputation for producing mediums and mystics. The tradition credits Pisces with compassion, adaptability and an unusually porous emotional boundary, a sign that feels what is around it almost before it feels itself, though the same porousness can leave it directionless or prone to escapism when it has nothing solid to hold onto. Pisces governs the twelfth house in the natural wheel, the house of the subconscious and of what is hidden or surrendered, and the sign is read as the zodiac's instinct for surrender itself, the letting go that closes one cycle before the next, in Aries, begins again. Its shadow is a self deception that mistakes avoidance for peace; its gift is a compassion that asks for no explanation before it is given.

The story

Pisces has two competing myths behind its two linked fish, and the tradition preserves both rather than choosing between them. In the more common telling, Aphrodite and her son Eros were caught by the sudden approach of the monster Typhon and transformed themselves into fish to escape into a nearby river, the cord binding the two fish together in the constellation's image said to represent the tie the mother and son kept between them as they fled. In a second telling, an egg fell into the Euphrates and was rolled to shore by fish, where doves warmed it until it hatched and Aphrodite herself emerged from it; she is said to have placed the fish that had helped her into the night sky afterward, out of gratitude rather than out of flight. The constellation's brightest star carries an Arabic name, Alrescha, meaning the cord or the well rope, a direct reference to the tie between the two fish in either telling. Whichever version is older, both fix on the same image the tradition reads into the sign: two things bound together, moving in relation to one another rather than alone, which is how Pisces is read as the sign of empathic connection.

Written from

Corpus key sign:Pisces.