Both 2025 and 2026 are hosts to significant movements through the sign of Pisces. Not only does the Sun enter Pisces in February, but last month, the north node of the Moon entered the sign, setting us up for a year and a half of eclipses on the Pisces-Virgo axis. This is also the year that Saturn and Neptune, two slow-moving planets, sing their swan song in Pisces before moving into Aries. As if that weren’t enough, Venus, which is finishing up its usual visit in Pisces at the beginning of this month, will return to Pisces at the end of March due to its retrograde.
Pisces is the 12th and last sign of the zodiac. Amongst astrologers it is causally and euphemistically called, “the dustbin of the zodiac.” After a planet has traveled, learned, and developed through the previous 11 signs, Pisces is where the whole collection of experiences culminates and gets dumped. However it’s not just accumulated waste that gets tossed into the Pisces ocean, the residue of all that was deeply felt, imagined, and believed permeates those waters as well.
The zodiac signs in Western astrology are divided into four elements: fire, earth, air, and water. Pisces is a water sign. Along with Cancer and Scorpio, Pisces represents the realms of emotion, intuition, and receptivity. When you run your hand under the faucet, you can definitely feel it. You can feel its temperature and pressure, you can see what it looks like and hear what it sounds like, but you can’t grasp it. This is the experience of working with the water signs. Pisces is particularly unfathomable because it contains the entirety of an experience—nothing is left out. To Pisces, perfection is wholeness. It’s a place where nothing is parsed, only included. One of my favorite examples of this is expressed in a cringey astrology joke: What did Pisces say to the hotdog vendor? Make me one with everything.
The exquisitely sensitive nature of Pisces is legendary. When something is formless or lacks defining boundaries, it can easily adopt the character, the emotions, and actions of whatever’s near. This quality is the source of many tropes about Pisces and states of longing and compassion; compassion literally means “to suffer with.” But, yearning for union and sacrificing for redemption are only part of the Pisces experience. Pisces, like the oceanic Neptune and Poseidon who are its kin, can be a force of nature. The crushing weight of water has the power to erode mountains and carve shapes out of the densest material. Metaphorically, that is one of Pisces’s primary jobs, to dissolve anything that gets in the way of making contact with god, the sublime, and the eternal. It’s also Pisces’s job to dissolve the ego structures that keep us from connecting with each other, nature, and our inherent capacity to heal.
Pisces is also tasked with removing the structures that separate us from our own subconscious minds and all forms of “the muse.” Painting, music, poetry, dance, films, dreams, and imagination all reside in this mystical realm. In Pisces’s search for ecstasy and escape from the harshness of 3D reality, it can turn to substances and behaviors that “help” it transcend the all too prosaic and painful aspects of life. Sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll belong in this realm just as much as abstinence, asceticism, and social media. Anything that blunts the discomfort of living in a decaying body and all the psychological torments of death and loss are Pisces territory.
The fact that there is so much planetary activity in this sector of the astrological landscape speaks to a year of dissolving boundaries, rethinking our relationship to spirituality and religion, martyrdom for social change, and attempting to regulate water. Individually and collectively, we may try to disentangle ourselves from situations we’ve become too enmeshed with, or, allow ourselves to melt into our relationships with less concern about our individual welfare. We are all individuals with distinct histories and perspectives, but this increased amount of Pisces activity will demonstrate how we’re all woven into the same fabric of reality.
Pisces can idealize a perfect world. No other astrological sign feels the pain of the gap between that ideal and what the material world will allow more than
Pisces. Its symbol is two fish swimming in opposite directions. One fish swims towards the pain, ready to swallow it whole. The other swims towards transcendence, in search of bliss. Such is the agony and the ecstasy of Pisces.
