You know you're a Pisces. Do you know which Pisces you are?

What is a Pisces really like?

Pisces is the twelfth sign of the zodiac: a water sign, a mutable sign, ruled by Jupiter (Neptune in modern astrology). The Sun is in Pisces from February 18, 19 or 20 to March 19 or 20. What any one Pisces is really like depends on the rest of the chart: the Moon, the rising sign, Venus and Mars.

Pisces is one of twelve. What is the zodiac, and where did the twelve signs come from?

What it is

Your sun sign is the slice of the zodiac the Sun was standing in on your birthday. The zodiac here is a measuring tape, not a picture: the Sun's yearly path cut into twelve equal slices of 30°, counted from the spring equinox. Pisces is the twelfth slice, and the Sun crosses it from February 19 to March 20. ¹

It isn't the constellation. When the Babylonians matched twelve star patterns to twelve equal slices, the dates and the stars lined up. Earth's axis has wobbled since, so on the same dates the Sun now stands in front of different stars, and astronomers count thirteen constellations on its path, not twelve. Western astrology keeps its slices tied to the seasons, not to the stars. ¹

Pisces is a water sign and a mutable sign. Ptolemy grouped the signs in triangles of three, 120° apart; Pisces's triangle is Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, the one later astrologers called water. The modes come from the seasons: mutable signs fall in the last month of a season, when it is already changing. ²

A ruling planet is the planet a sign is said to belong to, its "house" in Ptolemy's word. Tradition gives Pisces to Jupiter. ²

A sun sign is one placement out of many. The Moon, the rising sign and every planet sit in signs of their own, which is why two people with the same sun sign can seem to have very little in common.

This is the short version for one sign. How the zodiac was built, and its whole history, is on the master page: What is the zodiac, and where did the twelve signs come from?

Pisces in the old books

The traditional portrait of the sign, the same for everyone born under it.

Pisces, in the old books, is Jupiter's watery house and the last of Ptolemy's bicorporeal signs, two fish tied together at the end of the year. The portrait is the deep and the dreamy: kind, imaginative, sympathetic, impressionable, quick to feel what's in a room and slow to say no. ²

The old writers' caution is the drift. A Pisces is said to swim two ways at once, to escape into music or daydream when life gets loud, and to give more than it can spare. The mutable mode is read as surrender to the current, and the books suggest a Pisces is better off choosing which current.

That's the bare sign, the same for every Pisces born. A Capricorn Moon or a fiery Mars can give the gentlest Fish a surprisingly firm grip.

Where Pisces comes from

Era by era, with sources. More in the Reading Room.

Ancientc. 1000–450 BCEBabylonian astronomers built the zodiac out of eighteen reference star groups over about a thousand years; by around 450 BCE it had settled into twelve equal zones along the path of the Moon and planets. ³
AncientBabylonian eraBabylonian astronomical texts call this sign Zibbātu, a name found as far back as the Neo-Assyrian period. ⁴
Ancient410 BCEThe earliest known horoscopes, from Babylon and Nippur, date to this year. ³
ClassicalRoman eraPseudo-Hyginus (2.30) says Venus and her son Cupid came to the Euphrates in Syria. When the monster Typhon appeared, they threw themselves into the river and became fish, and the sign remembers them. ⁵
Classical2nd century CEPtolemy, working in Alexandria, writes the Tetrabiblos. It gives each sign a ruling planet, groups the signs in triangles of three and sets out the angles between signs that astrologers still use. ^6,2
Classical2nd century CEPtolemy gives Pisces to Jupiter and counts it among the bicorporeal signs. His map of the world ties it to Phazania and Garamantica in North Africa, and to Lydia, Cilicia and Pamphylia. ^2,7
Medieval12th centuryThe Persian astrologer Abu Ma'shar (died 886) is read in Latin across Europe; the University of Edinburgh holds a 12th-century Latin copy of his introduction to astrology. ⁸
1800s1846Neptune becomes the first planet found by mathematics: Le Verrier works out where it should be, and Galle finds it on his first night of looking. Ptolemy's scheme had given Pisces to Jupiter. ^9,2
1800s1890The first number of Alan Leo's Astrologer's Magazine goes on sale in July 1890. Annual subscribers get a free horoscope with a short reading: astrology by post, for ordinary readers. ¹⁰
1910s1917Alan Leo is fined for fortune-telling at the Mansion House on 16 July 1917. He dies that August, working on a system of astrology without predictions. ¹⁰
1930s1930–1937R. H. Naylor's horoscope for the newborn Princess Margaret runs in the Sunday Express on 24 August 1930 and becomes a regular column. By 1937 it is organised by the twelve sun signs, and newspapers on both sides of the Atlantic follow. ¹¹
1960s1968Linda Goodman's Sun Signs is published: a whole book built on the twelve sun signs. ¹²
1980s–90s1980–1999Computers take over the arithmetic. Astrodienst in Zürich, whose founder had been writing astrology software since 1979, starts selling colour birth charts in 1980, goes online in 1996 and adds free daily horoscopes in 1999. ¹³
2010s2016NASA publishes a short explainer: the Sun crosses thirteen constellations, the Babylonians picked twelve to fit a twelve-month calendar, and "we didn’t change any zodiac signs". ¹
Today2024A Pew Research Center survey finds that 30% of US adults consult astrology, tarot or a fortune teller at least once a year, mostly for fun, with whole astrology cultures on TikTok and other platforms. ¹⁴

Worked out, not guessed

Calculated facts only, worked out the same way the machine does it.

Venus never gets more than about 47° from the Sun, so a Pisces's Venus is always in one of five signs: Capricorn, Aquarius, Pisces, Aries or Taurus.
The Moon changes sign every two and a half days. Without a birth time and place, most birthdays could belong to either of two Moon signs. (91.1% of birthdays from 1950 to 2029, once every time zone on Earth is allowed for.)

Every Pisces reads this page. Only your card knows you.

Your card is worked out from the day, the minute and the place you were born: your birth chart, your love chart, your numbers and the sky you arrived under. This is what it covers.