Happy Birthday, Pisces! #astrology

I’m a day late in celebrating the zodiac sign of Pisces, but better late than never. Right?

Pisces Girl

Pisces is the 12th sign of the Zodiac and thus represents the end of the human journey through life that starts with Aries. Does that mean every Pisces has absorbed the wisdom of the ages? Not exactly, though there have been some extraordinary people born under this sign, like Michelangelo and Albert Einstein.

Pisceans tend to be creative and intuitive, often artistic, charming, good-natured, compassionate and free-spirited. Not that you won’t occasionally meet a sarcastic, acid-tongued fish. The sign is ruled by Neptune, god of the seas, and as the tides ebb and flow, so does the moods and energy of the Piscean.

The sign’s symbol is that of two fish swimming in opposite directions. Or are they swimming in a circle? Sometimes it can seem that way. Pisceans aren’t generally known for their ambition, but they can be single minded. While it’s all too easy to get distracted by all the pretty coral in the ocean and the sandy beaches and sunlight, salmon are driven to swim upstream to spawn, often against tremendous obstacles.

In her classic book Sun Signs, Linda Goodman says that the fish facing in different directions represents a choice not a dual nature. Pisces will be tempted to swim downstream, after all, it’s easier, but “to swim upstream is the challenge of Pisces — and the only way he ever finds true peace and happiness.”

Pisces constellationI don’t know who came up with the slogan “Go with the flow” but it could be the unofficial slogan for the sign of Pisces. As a mutable water sign, Pisces can be pretty hard to pin down. Conventional wisdom says that the best matches for Pisces are the other water signs of Cancer & Scorpio and the earth signs: Taurus, Virgo & Capricorn. I can see how someone born under an earth sign could act as an anchor for a Pisces, but I can also imagine that the Piscean tendency to go with the flow could be a bit difficult for a more practical-minded earth sign to understand.

In looking at a list of famous people born under this sign, I noticed that it seems to include more than the usual number of creative people. Here are some famous Pisceans:

Edward Albee, playwright
Harry Belafonte, singer
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, poet
Sir Richard Francis Burton, explorer & translater of the Kama Sutra into English*
Frederick Chopin, composer
Grover Cleveland, president
Albert Einstein, mathematician
Georg Handel, composer
Victor Hugo, novelist
Senator Edward Kennedy
James Madison, president
Michelangelo, artist & sculptor
Zero Mostel, comedian
Vaslev Najinsky, ballet dancer
Rudolf Nureyev, ballet dancer
Auguste Renoir, artist
Rimsky-Korsakov, composer
Dinah Shore, singer
Anthony Armstrong-Jones, the Earl of Snowdon, photographer
John Steinbeck, novelist
Elizabeth Taylor, actress
Earl Warren, governor & chief justice of the Supreme Court
George Washington, president

* Richard Burton was the first Western explorer to trace the source of the Nile, so how’s that for a literal example of a Pisces going upstream!

Is there a Pisces in your life?

Linda

Happy Birthday, Aquarius! #astrology #zodiac

Aquarius Girl

Aquarius Girl, license from dreamstime.com

Aquarius, the Water Bearer, is one of my favorite signs. Maybe that’s because the love of my life was an Aquarian, but it’s also because Aquarius is compatible with my own sign of Aries. It’s also one of only two signs represented by a human: the water bearer.

That last part aside, Aquarius is an air sign, and people born under this sign are thinkers. The sign is ruled by Uranus, however, so don’t expect conventional wisdom from an Aquarian. They tend to be free thinkers, but since it’s also a fixed sign, Aquarians are caught between innovation and practicality. How this works out in the individual is represented by other aspects in the chart. For instance, Mercury in Capricorn or strong aspects from Saturn can keep the Aquarian down to earth while Mercury in Pisces or strong aspects from Neptune can send him soaring to the stars. Linda Goodman describes the typical Aquarian as “half Albert Schweitzer, half Mickey Mouse”.

Sheldon Cooper of The Big Bang Theory comes to mind. (Not that he’d ever believe in astrology.)

Aquarius constellation

In any case, being a fixed air sign means Aquarians can be quite set in their ideas and impatient with others who disagree or fail to follow their rapid thought processes. They can also be quite outspoken. My husband’s favorite mantra was, “I never apologize for speaking the truth”. Of course, that was the truth as he saw it! 🙂

In the natal chart, the eleventh house represents friends and Aquarius is the eleventh sign, so many of them have an active social conscience. They know it’s really about us, not just me. That’s why the Age of Aquarius is supposed to usher in an era of peace. We’ve been waiting a long time for that, and I hope it actually happens one of these days.

Famous Aquarians include: Francis Bacon, Helen Gurley Brown, Lord Byron, Lewis Carroll, Colette, Charles Darwin, Angela Davis, Thomas Edison, Betty Friedan, Galileo, Abraham Lincoln, Charles Lindbergh, Somerset Maughm, Mozart, Paul Newman, Yoko Ono, Leontyne Price, Ronald Reagan, Vanessa Redgrave, Norman Rockwell, Franklin Roosevelt, Adlai Stevenson, Oprah Winfrey and Virginia Woolf. Quite an impressive list, I think.

For more on Aquarius, go to https://www.astrology.com/article/zodiac-signs-aquarius-sun-sign.html.

Any Aquarians out there?

Linda