Pisces symbol (♓)
♓ is the glyph of Pisces, the Fishes, the twelfth and last sign of the Western zodiac. Astrologers give its dates as 19 February to 20 March, and in their tradition it is a water sign ruled by Jupiter.
Meaning
♓ is Unicode character U+2653 PISCES: two arcs facing away from each other, joined by a line across the middle. The usual reading, Richard Hinckley Allen (1899) says, is the two Fishes joined, but Sayce thought it the Hittite sign that marks a plural. Pisces is Latin for fishes; the Greeks called them Ἰχθύες (Ichthýes). The glyph is the sign’s shorthand in Western astrology.
Origin and history
Where the twelve sign glyphs came from is not known. Encyclopaedia Britannica says their history is unknown and that they first appear in Greek manuscripts of the late Middle Ages. Allen cites Clerke, who found them in manuscripts of about the 10th century but in carvings only from the 15th or 16th, and Brown, who quotes the antiquary C. W. King: King found the glyphs on no antique work and suspected “Arab sages” had devised them, a view Brown did not share. The two fishes and Sayce’s Hittite plural are both readings of the shape; neither is documented.
Allen thinks the constellation began as a single fish. The scholar Al Bīrūnī wrote that “the name of the sign in all languages signifies only one fish”, and Eratosthenes made it the Syrian goddess Derketo.
The fishes that saved Venus
The Greeks told of a Syrian goddess, identified with Aphrodite, who threw herself with her son Eros into the Euphrates when the monster Typhon attacked. Latin authors kept the story and made Pisces the fishes that carried Venus and Cupid out of danger; Manilius wrote that Venus “ow’d her Safety to their Shape”.
The fish of the early Christians
Caesius, Allen says, read the Fishes as the ΙΧΘΥΣ, the Greek acronym for “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”, a fish being the symbol of the early Christians’ faith; that sign has its own page, the ichthys.
What astrologers say Pisces means
In Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, Pisces is one of the four bicorporeal (two-bodied) signs, which share the weather of two seasons, and it lies toward the spring equinox. It is feminine and one of the two houses of Jupiter, with Sagittarius, signs Ptolemy calls “windy and fecund”. It is Venus’s exaltation, “where the beginning of the moist spring is indicated”, and Mercury’s depression. It belongs to the fourth triangle, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, which Ptolemy gives to Mars, with the Moon by night and Venus by day as co-rulers. Astrology today, as Britannica describes it, makes Pisces a water sign and a mutable one, and lists “artistic, compassionate, escapist” as the traits traditionally attached to it. Britannica adds that astrology is not supported by science: no correlation has been found between birth dates and personality.
See also
Sagittarius symbol (♐), Ichthys, Aries symbol (♈), Taurus symbol (♉), Gemini symbol (♊), Cancer symbol (♋).
Sources
- Miscellaneous Symbols, Range: 2600–26FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+2653
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Pisces, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Pisces
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Aquarius, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Aquarius (on the zodiac signs’ symbols)
- Tetrabiblos, Book I, Claudius Ptolemy, 2nd century AD; translated by F. E. Robbins (Loeb Classical Library, 1940), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), I.11, I.17, I.18, I.19
- Zodiac, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica; last revised by Rick Livingston, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 11 September 2026), Signs and dates; Astrology
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research