Pisces

The image

Two fish, swimming in opposite directions, often connected by a thin cord or ribbon. Pisces is the twelfth and last sign of the zodiac, falling at the end of winter, the dissolution point before Aries’s new beginning. The energy is watery, boundary-less, devotional, sometimes lost. The two fish are crucial: they swim in opposite directions because Pisces lives in the tension between the dissolving and the holding-together.

The figure in the psyche

Pisces is the principle of dissolution — and, paradoxically, the principle of compassion. After Aquarius’s clear systemic vision, Pisces is what happens when the boundaries between things, between selves, between the personal and the universal, become thinner than the conventional psyche admits. Jupiter-ruled in traditional astrology and Neptune-ruled in modern, Pisces carries the mystical, the empathic, the addictive, and the redemptive — all of them adjacent, all of them risky.

Liz Greene reads Pisces as the sign of the mystic and the addict, often the same person at different stages. The capacity to feel the larger field — the suffering of others, the unity of life, the dissolving of the small self into something larger — is real. It is also dangerous. The same permeability that allows compassion allows possession.

When the energy is present

You notice Pisces in yourself in moments of deep empathic resonance, of artistic surrender, of devotional feeling, of unaccountable sadness that turns out, on examination, to belong to someone else in the room. The Pisces gift is the porous capacity to receive — what others are feeling, what is happening in the field, what the unconscious of a situation is carrying. It is also the deep relationship with the imaginal, the mystical, the unseen.

In refined form, Pisces is the compassionate mystic with intact self. The therapist who can feel the client’s grief without taking it on. The artist whose work reaches the mythic registers. The contemplative whose dissolution into the larger is recoverable. The friend whose presence is balm precisely because they do not require you to be different than you are.

In distorted form, Pisces becomes the dissolver who cannot reconstitute. The empathic person who has lost the self in others’ feelings. The addiction — to substance, to relationship, to the next altered state — that is using Pisces’s gifts as an escape route. The romantic confusion, the failure of agency, the perpetual sufferer who has confused suffering with depth. Or, on the hardened side, the refusal of Pisces altogether — the person who has decided that all this softness is dangerous and has armoured against feeling.

The work

If Pisces is strong in you, the work is return. The dissolution is real and valuable. The risk is that the return becomes harder than the leaving. Mature Pisces can enter the larger field and come back to be a specific person in a specific kitchen on a specific morning. The two fish, after all, are tied together.

If Pisces is weak in you, the work is permeability. Building the capacity to feel with another, to enter the imaginal, to surrender — sometimes, deliberately — to something larger than the small self. A life without Pisces is often a competent life that has missed most of the music.