Pisces: Aphrodite, Eros and the knot binding two escapes

The last sign of the Western zodiac is also one of the most elusive to see. Pisces covers a vast region of the autumn sky poor in bright stars, and its pattern can only be recognised with patience: two fish swimming in different directions, tied by the tail with a long ribbon that knots at one point. That very knot suggested to the ancients a story of danger and mutual protection.

The flight along the river

The best-known myth, told by Ovid in the Fasti and taken up by Hyginus, is linked to the same episode that explains Capricorn. When the monstrous Typhon attacked the gods, Aphrodite and her son Eros were on the banks of a river, which the sources identify with the Euphrates or the Nile. To escape him they threw themselves into the water, and two fish received them and carried them to safety; in other versions mother and son turned into fish themselves.

So as not to lose each other in the current, Aphrodite and Eros are said to have tied themselves together with a cord. In memory of the episode the two fish were placed in the sky, joined by the ribbon that holds them together. The star marking the knot is called Alrescha, from the Arabic al-rishā', which means precisely “the cord”: a name that carries the ancient image into the astronomy of today.

The fish goddess of Syria

Some ancient authors linked Pisces to the cult of Derceto, a deity worshipped at Ascalon, who according to Diodorus Siculus was depicted with a woman's face and a fish's body. Lucian of Samosata, in his treatise on the Syrian goddess, describes the sanctuary of Hierapolis with a lake of sacred fish that no one was allowed to touch. In these regions, the ancients recall, many abstained from eating fish out of respect for the goddess.

The Babylonian origins of the constellation are complex too. Mesopotamian astronomical lists recognised different figures there, including a swallow and the goddess Anunitu, linked by an element recalling cords. The Greek form of the two knotted fish was therefore the result of a long reworking, in which Eastern traditions and Hellenic myths gradually merged.

The Christian fish and the Age of Pisces

The fish also played an important role in early Christian symbolism: the Greek word ichthys was read as an acrostic of “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour”, and the drawing of a fish appears in the Roman catacombs. This usage arose from a play on letters and not from the constellation, but in later centuries the two symbols were often brought together.

Because of the precession of the equinoxes, the point where the Sun stands at the spring equinox moved from Aries into Pisces roughly in Roman times, and it is still there. This is the source of the expression “Age of Pisces”, widely used in modern astrological culture, which evocatively makes this celestial shift coincide with the spread of Christianity.

Pisces thus closes the round of the zodiac with an image of connection. Two creatures heading in opposite directions remain joined by a thread, like mother and son in the river's current. In astrological tradition the sign has been associated with water, sensitivity and the dissolving of boundaries, qualities that seem to reflect its own celestial nature: vast, faint and hard to grasp.