By Dorian Grimault, astrologer · Published · updated
Pisces is the 12th and last sign of the zodiac, running from about February 19 to March 20, a Water sign of the mutable mode. It is the sign of sensitivity and imagination: empathy, intuition, an openness to the world that lets everything in. It had Jupiter as ruler until modern astrology gave it to Neptune, and it holds the only case in the zodiac where one planet is in both detriment and fall. Here is what tradition says about it, what AstralPro calculates, and how the sign appears for Camille Morel, AstralPro's sample chart (fictional data), who has no natal planet there.
Pisces closes the zodiac, at the end of winter. Ptolemy (Tetrabiblos, book I, chapter 11) counts it among the “bicorporeal” signs which, set between two seasons, share their properties: this is the mutable mode. Vettius Valens (Anthology, book I, chapter 2) calls it feminine, moist, bicorporeal and in conflict with itself, because one of the Fish is northern and the other southern. Lilly (Christian Astrology, book I, chapter 16) makes it a sign of the watery triplicity, cold, moist, feminine, nocturnal, “the house of Jupiter, and exaltation of Venus”.
The image of the two fish swimming in opposite directions has fed the modern reading of the sign: a pull between dream and reality, between giving oneself and the need for protection.
You work through intuition and imagination. You absorb other people's emotions, you perceive what goes unsaid, and your inner life spills beyond the merely concrete.
In love, you dream of a bond where boundaries fade and you give without counting; the trap is idealizing the other person to the point of no longer seeing them as they are. At work, you bring what numbers cannot replace: art, music, care, psychology, the helping professions. Your lesson: set boundaries and keep one foot in the concrete.
Ptolemy (chapter 17) gives Pisces to Jupiter, along with Sagittarius: two “windy and fecund” signs, in trine to the houses of the luminaries. Lilly makes it Jupiter's night house (book I, chapter 9). Since the discovery of Neptune in 1846, modern textbooks have assigned the sign to that planet, and AstralPro follows this choice: Neptune in Pisces is in domicile, and a house that begins in Pisces has Neptune as ruler.
Jupiter, for his part, no longer has anything in this sign: no domicile, no exaltation, no triplicity. Ptolemy (chapter 18) leaves the Water triangle to Mars, related to it through his house of Scorpio, with Venus by day and the Moon by night as co-rulers; AstralPro uses Venus by day and Mars by night. A Jupiter in Pisces is read as peregrine, where tradition saw him at home.
Ptolemy (chapter 19) explains the sign's two other dignities through moisture. Venus, moist by nature, increases her power in Pisces, where the beginning of the moist spring is heralded, and has her exaltation there. Mercury, being drier, is exalted in Virgo, the sign of the dry autumn, and has his depression in Pisces. Lilly puts the exaltation of Venus at 27° Pisces and her fall at 27° Virgo.
Lilly says the same of Mercury in his chapter 13: detriment in Sagittarius and Pisces, fall in Pisces. Mercury in Pisces is therefore in both detriment and fall, the only overlap of its kind in the table, and AstralPro checks it when the engine starts up. The engine gives only one word per planet, read in the order domicile, detriment, exaltation, fall: the Dignity column of your positions table will show “Detriment”.
By element, Pisces points to the three Water signs: from 0° to 10°, Pisces, sub-ruler Neptune; from 10° to 20°, Cancer, sub-ruler the Moon; from 20° to 30°, Scorpio, sub-ruler Pluto. In chapter I, the decan paragraph of a planet in Pisces names one of these three sub-rulers, for example “In the 2nd decan (sub-ruler Moon, Cancer)”. In al-Biruni's Indian table (Book of Instruction in the Elements of the Art of Astrology, 1029, §451), the same sequence gives Jupiter, the Moon and Mars, the traditional rulers.
The Chaldean faces close the loop of the planetary order: Saturn, Jupiter and Mars, the last face of the zodiac going to Mars, who opened the first one in Aries. Al-Biruni (§449) describes this path in the order of the planets, from highest to lowest, and Lilly assigns the same degrees in his chapters on Saturn, Jupiter and Mars. The report does not use these faces for the decans.
Camille Morel, AstralPro's sample chart (fictional data), has no natal planet in Pisces. Yet the sign holds an angle: her Imum Coeli (IC), cusp of the 4th house, is at 0°15' Pisces. The House cusps table therefore gives Neptune as ruler of the 4th house, and Neptune is at 18°56' Capricorn, in the 2nd house, peregrine, with Saturn as dispositor: the domain of the 4th house is read through that position. The asteroid Vesta adds to it, at 2°04' Pisces, in the 4th house.
The sign takes up most room in chapter II, Draconic Chart. By subtracting the position of the North Node (243.01°), five of Camille's bodies move into Pisces: the Sun at 18°54', the Moon at 24°08', Mercury at 3°36', Venus at 3°29' and Pluto at 22°16'. The natal Scorpio group thus reappears in its entirety in the other Water sign that closes the zodiac, except for Jupiter, which moves into Aquarius at 27°49'. In the natal chart, the sign works through a cusp; in the draconic chart, through the bodies themselves.
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