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The twelve sun signs, from Babylonian star lists through Ptolemy to the newspaper horoscope.

Western · sign 12 of 12 · natural 12th house

Pisces

18 February – 20 March, 2025

2 claims about Pisces can be traced to antiquity and are still made today. Everything else on this page arrived later, and each entry says when.

When Pisces actually begins

ingress 202518 February 2025, 10:06 UTC
ends20 March 2025, 09:01 UTC
boundary drift 1925–202518 February – 19 February (35.2 h)

Computed from the Sun’s true ecliptic longitude for this year, not read from a fixed table. If you were born within a day of either boundary, a site using a table may put you in a different sign — and it is the table that is wrong.

What survives from antiquity

These are the only claims on this page that may honestly be introduced with “tradition holds”. Each is attested by an ancient or early-modern source and by a contemporary one.

What arrived with the popularisers

Claims that reach us through Alan Leo, Raphael and Sepharial — the Edwardian writers who turned astrology into a mass-market genre — with no ancient source behind them. These are usually the most familiar things said about Pisces, and the page reference for each is below it.

What the tradition said and we stopped saying

Attested in antiquity, and repeated by no contemporary source in this corpus.

The fate the classical texts predicted

Firmicus Maternus and his contemporaries did not write character sketches. They predicted outcomes, and this is what they predicted for Pisces. Every one of these has been dropped — across the whole corpus, no modern source repeats a single one.

  • a violent deathJulius Firmicus Maternus, Mathesis VIII.17.2

The work

Occupations are the one part of this tradition that demonstrably reaches the present. Character claims mostly do not, and physiognomy does not at all — but the trades the classical texts assigned to Pisces are still being assigned to it.

medicine and healing, the sea — attested in antiquity and repeated today.

Rulership

The classical scheme gave every sign one of the seven visible planets. The outer planets were discovered between 1781 and 1930 and reassigned later, so where a sign has two rulers, both are real claims from different centuries. Neither is the correction of the other.

traditional

Jupiter

attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources

modern

Neptune

modern only · no pre-1929 source5 of 12 core sources

Correspondences

Grouped by what kind of claim each is. Element and modality are agreed by every source in every century; the lucky numbers are agreed by almost nobody. Both appear on every astrology site in the same table, in the same type, which is how one borrows the other’s authority.

structural

Agreed by every source in every century.

element
  • water
attested antiquity → present9 of 12 core sources
modality
  • mutable
first attested 19th c. · no ancient source6 of 12 core sources
polarity
  • feminine
attested antiquity → present5 of 12 core sources
sect
  • nocturnal
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

classical

Classical taxonomy. Largely dropped by modern astrology.

season
  • winter
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
direction
  • north
17th c. only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

dignity

Classical doctrine. Stable, but the outer planets are a modern addition.

exaltation
  • Venus traditional
attested antiquity → present3 of 12 core sources
fall
  • Mercury traditional
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources
detriment
  • Mercury traditional
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel
triplicity ruler
  • Mars
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 supporting source · none in the core panel

mythic

The sign's image. Phrasings vary; the figure does not.

symbol
  • The Fish

contested Two fishes, tied by a cord, swimming in opposite directions — one source disagrees.

modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
guardian deity
  • Neptune
antiquity only · no modern source1 of 12 core sources

body

Melothesia — the sign's part of the body. Ancient, and not medical.

body part
  • Feet
  • Lymphatic system
  • extremities
  • feet
  • lymphatic system
  • toes
  • Veins
attested antiquity → present4 of 12 core sources

accretion

Modern accretion. Sources rarely agree with each other.

stone
  • Amethyst
  • Jade
  • Coral
  • Moonstone
  • Pearl
modern only · no pre-1929 source2 supporting sources · none in the core panel
metal
  • Tin
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
colour
  • lavender
  • sea-green
  • Aquamarine
  • lilac
  • Lilac
  • mauve
  • Mauve
  • purple
  • Purple
  • Sea green
  • Sea Green
  • Sea-green
  • violet
  • Violet
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
day
  • Thursday
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources
number
  • 12
  • 3
  • 15
  • 16
  • 18
  • 21
  • 24
  • 7
  • 9
modern only · no pre-1929 source1 of 12 core sources

The body the old books describe

William Lilly, Raphael and Sepharial all told you what a Pisces looked like. Modern astrology dropped this entirely: across the whole corpus, not one physical description is repeated by a contemporary source. It is reproduced here as what those writers said, in the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, and for no other reason.

stature
short 4middle 1
build
ill-formed 3stout 3small 1
hair colour
brown 1dark 1fair 1
hair volume
plentiful 1
eye colour
blue 1dark 1
eyes
dull 1large 1
complexion
pale 4
face shape
broad 1full 1round 1
nose
short 1
chin
double 1
lips
full 1
limbs
short 3
hands
small 1
feet
ill-made 1small 1
gait
stooping 1
constitution
weak 1
previous Aquariusopposite Virgonext Aries

Bodhastra documents what astrological traditions have said, and when they started saying it. It is presented as cultural history and entertainment. Nothing here is medical, psychological, financial or predictive advice, and nothing here is a claim about what will happen to you.

Every source, listed

Place data from GeoNames, used under CC BY 4.0.