Pisces. ♓︎
Aphrodite and Eros, tied tail to tail so flight would not part them: love’s knot at the end of the zodiac.
By the ZOD Culture Editorial Team · The Twelve, a series read as literature
Dates
Feb 19 to Mar 20
tropical reckoning
Element & quality
Water, mutable
the year dissolves
Ruling planet
Jupiter
Neptune, in the modern scheme
In Babylon
DU.NU.NU
‘the Fish-Cord’
In Greek
Ichthyes
‘the Fishes’
Brightest star
Alpherg, η Piscium
a famously faint sign
The fishes are an escape in progress. When Typhon burst upon the gods in Syria, Aphrodite and Eros leapt into the Euphrates and became fish; and so that the current could not separate mother from son, they tied their tails together with a cord. The knot is the point of the picture: flight, with the one unbearable outcome ruled out.
Ovid adds that Syrian communities would not eat fish afterwards, out of respect for the rescue, which suits a story that was probably Syrian to begin with: the fish was sacred to Atargatis long before the Greeks reassigned it to Aphrodite. The zodiac ends with a borrowed goddess, swimming.
Babylon saw two fish here as well, tied by a cord: the ‘fish-cord’ of the tablets, knot and all, which Greece inherited intact. The sign sat at the end of the Sea, the sky’s watery quarter, where the year dissolved before beginning again next door in Aries.
Faint, but consequential. The western fish’s head is the Circlet, a modest ring of stars; Alrescha, ‘the cord’, marks the knot where the two lines meet. And somewhere in these dim reaches sits the vernal point, where the Sun crosses the equator each spring: what astronomers still call the First Point of Aries has lived in Pisces for two thousand years, the zodiac’s quietest scandal.
Sources: MUL.APIN I · Ovid, Fasti 2 · Catasterismi 38 · Hyginus, Astronomica 2.30
Pisces, in Pictures
the fishes across three thousand years of imagesthe fishes · louvre
march folio · musée condé
seal impression