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Pisces
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Pisces, the two Fishes, closes the zodiac and the winter, the last stretch before the equinox starts the circle again. It gathers up what came before, and inclines toward compassion, imagination, spiritual feeling and an easy sense of connection with others. Pisces often senses more than it can explain, and is drawn to music, art, dreams and service. Its gift is empathy and vision; its difficulty can be drifting, losing itself in other people's needs, or escaping when the world grows too harsh.
Element, mode and polarity
Pisces is a Water sign of the mutable mode. Water makes it feeling and intuitive; the mutable mode makes that feeling fluid and receptive to every influence, flowing around obstacles rather than meeting them head-on. It is feminine (receptive) and nocturnal. Its fellow Water signs are Cancer and Scorpio; its fellow mutable signs are Gemini, Virgo and Sagittarius.
Rulership and dignities
- Domicile: Jupiter in traditional astrology, its night house (Sagittarius is the other). Modern astrologers give Pisces to Neptune, and many read both.
- Exaltation: Venus, traditionally at 27° Pisces.
- Detriment: Mercury, whose home Virgo lies opposite.
- Fall: Mercury again, opposite its exaltation in Virgo — the only planet in both detriment and fall in one sign.
In a chart
Planets in Pisces tend to work through sensitivity, intuition and imagination rather than force or plan. The Sun here often finds itself through helping, creating or a spiritual path; the Moon absorbs the moods around it; Venus, exalted, inclines toward devoted, forgiving, idealistic love. Mars may act on instinct or for others' sake rather than its own. Mercury, debilitated twice, often thinks in images and impressions and may find precise detail hard going, while gaining a poetic, intuitive mind. The house with Pisces on its cusp is often where a person is generous, impressionable and sometimes unsure where they end and others begin. With Pisces on the Ascendant, Jupiter (and, for modern astrologers, Neptune) becomes the chart ruler, and the person often seems gentle, dreamy and kind.
The tradition
Ptolemy counts Pisces among the bicorporeal signs and, with Sagittarius, gives it to Jupiter. He places Venus's exaltation here because, being moist, she grows stronger "where the beginning of the moist spring is indicated", and Mercury's depression for the opposite reason. Lilly calls Pisces of the watery triplicity, Northern, "cold, moyst, flegmatick, feminine, nocturnal", "the house of Jupiter, and exaltation of Venus", common or double-bodied, and — in his blunter phrase — a sign of little outward action. It governs the feet. Its places are grounds full of water, springs where waterfowl gather, fish-ponds and rivers full of fish, moats, water-mills and places where hermitages once stood; in a house, near a well or pump. Its colour is a white glittering colour; among its countries and cities Lilly names Portugal, Normandy, Alexandria, Reims and Compostela. Lilly gives the Water triplicity to Mars by day and night.
In the tarot
The Golden Dawn's correspondences, which most English-language decks follow.
Major Arcana: The Moon
Its three decans: Eight of Cups (Saturn, 0°–10°), Nine of Cups (Jupiter, 10°–20°), Ten of Cups (Mars, 20°–30°)