Pisces
Pisces occupies the twelfth and final thirty-degree arc of the tropical zodiac, from 330 to 360 degrees of ecliptic longitude measured from the March equinox, the point at which the arc closes and Aries begins again. That equinox point itself currently falls inside the IAU constellation Pisces rather than Aries: under the constellation boundaries fixed in 1930 1, precession has carried the tropical zero point about twenty-four degrees west of the stars it once sat against, and Pisces is where that arithmetic currently lands it. This is the concrete case behind the whole tropical-versus-sidereal question, worked through in full at Three Reference Frames and Precession of the Equinoxes.
Names, and what the earliest one says
MUL.APIN and earlier sources name the western fish “the Great Swallow” (Šinūnūtu), a bird rather than a fish, a figure that also absorbs the neck of Pegasus; the bird identification stands on two independent sources 2 3. The northern fish is Anunītu, translated as “Lady of the Heavens,” a goddess of childbirth, whose figure takes in the middle of Andromeda as well 3. Late Babylonian sources give the region a further name, DU.NU.NU or Rikis-nu.mi, “Fish-cord,” which Rogers calls the first clear reference to Pisces as such 3.
The domain table’s MUL.KUN.MES, “the Tails,” names neither figure directly. On John H. Rogers’s account, an astronomer synthesising the Assyriological editions of MUL.APIN and the wider Mesopotamian celestial corpus, the MUL.APIN tablets do not mention the Fishes at all, and the single reference to “the Tails” probably names the Swallow rather than the Fishes; it is this name, not a fish figure, that came to symbolise zodiacal Pisces only later 3. Rogers marks that reading as probable, and the entry keeps his qualification.
The cord is the part of the account most directly continuous with what came after. Whatever the western figure originally was, the device of two things joined by a connecting element persists into the Greco-Roman image of two fish tied together by their tails, and the Greek name, Ichthyes, “the Fishes,” resolves both positions into the same animal, consistent with the broader pattern in which Babylonian celestial figures were adapted as the material moved into Greek astronomy 4.
Correction
Commonly saidThe two fish of Pisces, tied together at the tail by a cord, come from the Greek myth in which Aphrodite and Eros, fleeing the monster Typhon, bound themselves together so as not to be separated.
The cord predates the Greeks. A connecting element joining two figures, DU.NU.NU, is already present in the Babylonian material, before the region reached Greek astronomy in any form this entry can trace 2. The Greek myth supplies a reason two things would be tied together; it does not supply the tying, which was already the constellation’s central device.
What survives across the crossing, again, is the object rather than the story built to explain it: the same pattern documented for the sixth sign, where a Babylonian ear of grain outlasted two renamings Virgo.
For how much of a modern Pisces sketch is a twentieth-century commercial product rather than a Hellenistic or Babylonian inheritance, see The Sun-Sign Column.
Technical attributions
| Domicile | Jupiter |
|---|---|
| Detriment | Mercury |
| Exaltation | Venus, at 27 degrees |
| Fall | Mercury, at 15 degrees |
| Triplicity | Water. By day Venus, by night Mars, participating Moon |
| Bounds (Egyptian) | Venus 0-12Jupiter 12-16Mercury 16-19Mars 19-28Saturn 28-30 |
| Faces | Saturn 0-10, Jupiter 10-20, Mars 20-30 |
Pisces carries the mirror image of Virgo’s row. Venus is exalted here, at 27 degrees, and Mercury falls here, at 15 degrees, exactly reversing Virgo, where Mercury is exalted at 15 and Venus falls at 27. Both pairings are an automatic consequence of how a fall is generated, the opposite sign at the same degree as the exaltation Virgo Essential Dignity. Domicile rulership is Jupiter Jupiter; modern practice reassigns Pisces to Neptune, discovered in 1846, while a traditional-revival school retains Jupiter alone 5. Pisces also belongs to the water triplicity, whose rulership is the most heavily contested cell in the whole dignity scheme: Dorotheus and the Hellenistic mainstream, Lilly’s later table, and a modern re-reading of Ptolemy’s Greek each assign it differently, and the site prints all three side by side Essential Dignity.
The sign and the constellation
Tropical Pisces is a thirty-degree arc. The IAU constellation Pisces spans just over 37 degrees of ecliptic longitude, the second-widest of the thirteen constellations the ecliptic crosses, after Virgo, and more than five times the width of Scorpius Three Reference Frames. Because it is also the constellation the equinox point currently occupies, Pisces is where the difference between the thirty-degree tropical sign and the much wider, unevenly sized IAU region is easiest to see directly: the arc that opens the tropical zodiac and the constellation carrying the same name as this sign overlap by construction at exactly one point on the sky.
Tradition
Held byJohn H. Rogers, Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions, 1998
Rogers offers his own reading of the doubled-back postures the two fish are drawn in, marked explicitly as a suggestion: that Pisces descends from the same pictographic tradition as Aquarius, in which Ea poured two streams, one running south to Piscis Austrinus, the other running east through the region that became Pisces Aquarius. “I suggest that Pisces did in fact come from the ancient pictographic tradition… Perhaps the streams of water were misinterpreted by later copyists, giving rise to the strange postures of the three fishes today” 3.
Gap in the evidence
The date and mechanism by which the Swallow figure came to be represented as a fish in the Greek Ichthyes is not established from the sources available to this entry.
References
- Hermann Hunger, John Steele. The Babylonian Astronomical Compendium MUL.APIN. Scientific Writings from the Ancient and Medieval World. London: Routledge, 2019. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
The current standard edition. Some listings show 2018 for the first printing. Use this and Rochberg 2004 for Babylonian star names and figures, not the popular compilations that circulate on astrology sites.
- Francesca Rochberg. The Heavenly Writing: Divination, Horoscopy, and Astronomy in Mesopotamian Culture: Cambridge University Press, 2004. find a copy (catalogue search) recordpeer reviewed
Indispensable for the Mesopotamian material and for how it reached Greek astrology.
- Eugène Delporte. Délimitation scientifique des constellations: Cambridge University Press for the International Astronomical Union, 1930. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The 88 constellation boundaries, drawn as arcs of constant right ascension and declination referred to the equinox of B1875.0. Chronology: proposed at the IAU General Assembly at Cambridge in 1925, approved at Leiden in 1928, published in 1930.
- Chris Brennan. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune: Amor Fati Publications, 2017. ISBN 9780998588902 recordscholarly
A practitioner-scholar synthesis: comprehensive and well referenced, but not peer-reviewed philology. This site cites it with that characterisation.
- John H. Rogers. Origins of the ancient constellations: I. The Mesopotamian traditions. Journal of the British Astronomical Association 108(1), 1998, 9-28. https://articles.adsabs.harvard.edu/pdf/1998JBAA..108....9R record Accessed 2026-07-30.scholarly
The reference for the Mesopotamian iconography. It traces every zodiacal figure from the early pictograph seals through the boundary stones to MUL.APIN and the Greek sky-map, and it covers precisely the material an edition of MUL.APIN does not: which deity a figure represented, how it was pictured, and on which dated object. Read in full from the scan linked above before it was cited here. Characterise it when citing, as this site does with Brennan. Rogers is an astronomer synthesising Assyriological scholarship for astronomers, not an Assyriologist: his own sources are Hunger and Pingree's MUL.APIN edition, Gössmann's Planetarium Babylonicum, van der Waerden, and Black and Green. The paper is refereed, heavily cited, and explicit that it is offering inferences in places, which it marks with "I suggest" and "perhaps". Those marks are the author's own and should survive into any entry that uses the passage. A companion Paper II covers the Mediterranean and Greek traditions and is not held here.