Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Pisces is two crescents facing away from one another and joined across the middle by a bar, read as two fish swimming in opposite directions and bound together by a cord. The image is attested in the constellation itself, where a long line of stars, the cord, links the two fishes; Greek myth explains it as Aphrodite and Eros taking fish form and tying themselves together so as not to be separated while fleeing Typhon, and the paired fishes appear earlier in Babylonian star lists. The written glyph is first securely attested in the medieval Byzantine codices. Pisces is mutable water and the last sign of the zodiac, and the glyph stands for what the binding of opposed fishes implies: dissolution of boundaries, compassion, imagination, longing, sacrifice, and the pull between transcendence and escape.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe twelve-sign zodiac was standardised in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE and fixed as equal signs in Hellenistic astrology. Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormTwo crescents facing away and joined by a bar, two bound fish. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Pisces is the twelfth and last sign, a mutable water sign traditionally ruled by Jupiter and in modern astrology associated with Neptune, with the Fishes as its emblem. Paired fish already appear in Babylonian star lists well before Greek astrologers adopted a written shorthand for the zodiac, and the cord binding them together has a basis in the constellation itself, where a long line of faint stars links the two fish figures.
The written glyph now used for Pisces is a later piece of notation, first attested with the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, the ordinary documents catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, copied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition across several centuries, and only fixed into its familiar printed shape during the Renaissance as almanacs and ephemerides put the zodiac into standard type. Pisces's Unicode codepoint, U+2653, closes the run of twelve consecutive zodiac symbols, from Aries at U+2648 onward, that the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, two hundred fifty-six codepoints spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Aphrodite directly: "two fishes; Greek myth explains it as Aphrodite and Eros taking fish form and tying themselves together so as not to be separated while fleeing Typhon, and the paired fishes appear earlier in..."
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Pisces is two crescents facing away from one another and joined across the middle by a bar, read as two fish swimming in opposite directions and bound together by a cord."
This source names Typhon directly: "as not to be separated while fleeing Typhon, and the paired fishes appear earlier in Babylonian star lists."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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