What dates is Pisces?

About February 19 to March 20. Pisces closes at the March equinox, whose date varies between the 20th and 21st, so either day can be Pisces or Aries depending on the year.

Is Pisces ruled by Jupiter or Neptune?

Both, by different schemes. Jupiter, the classical ruler, gives the sign its openness and its faith; Neptune, given the sign after its discovery in 1846, gives the dissolving, the blur and the longing. Most modern rulership tables list Neptune, and many astrologers keep Jupiter in mind.

Is Pisces a water sign?

Yes, the last of the three, with Cancer and Scorpio, and the mutable one. Of the water signs it is the most porous: the feeling has no bank to hold it and goes where the room goes.

Astrology basics · The twelve signs

What Pisces means: the last sign, and the most porous

Pisces is the twelfth and last sign, the final thirty degrees before the March equinox, where the zodiac begins again. Water, mutable, ruled traditionally by Jupiter and in modern practice by Neptune, opposite Virgo. The Sun is in Pisces from about February 19 to March 20, and its house is the 12th: what a person does unseen.

Element: Water
Modality: Mutable
Ruling planet: Jupiter (traditional), Neptune (modern)
Sun in Pisces: About February 19 to March 20
Opposite sign: Virgo
Natural house: The 12th

The sign that closes the circle

Pisces runs from 330 degrees to 360, and its last degree touches zero Aries, where the Sun moves north across the equator and the count starts over. It is the twelfth of twelve equal arcs, reckoned from that equinox, which makes it a sign and not the constellation Pisces; by an irony of the drift the Aries page describes, the equinox point itself now sits among the stars of Pisces, so the sign Aries begins in the constellation Pisces. The sign is mutable, ending winter, and the last water sign.

Pisces dissolves a planet's edges

Pisces gives a planet permeability. The planet's work happens by feel, with the boundaries soft, and with more taken in from the surroundings than the planet can account for. Mercury in Pisces says it in images and loses the thread on purpose. Venus in Pisces is drawn to whoever seems to need it. Mars in Pisces drifts toward what it wants until it is there, and cannot say when it decided.

Sun, Moon and horizon in Pisces

A Pisces Sun gives the last of its cash to the person on the corner, cannot then pay for the bus, and does not call that a mistake. It belongs near water or music, and most of all to the hour after a film when the world has not come back yet.

A Pisces Moon absorbs the mood of the room before it knows whose mood it is, and lets go of it in the bath an hour later with a sad song on purpose. Being allowed to feel something without being asked to explain it is what safety consists of, and the hour alone after a crowd is not optional.

Pisces rising has the kind of face that gets told things on trains. The handshake is gentle, the gaze stays, and the stranger walks off lighter, having said more than they meant to and without any sense that it was drawn out of them.

Virgo opposite, Jupiter and Neptune, the 12th

Virgo faces Pisces across the wheel: the exact and the useful at one end, everything blurred into everything else at the far side, and a Pisces planet is always being pulled toward the Virgo side. Jupiter is the older ruler, the sign's openness being Jupiter's expectation of more turned inward; Neptune, the modern addition, is what a cohort idealized and blurred. Pisces answers the 12th house: solitude, what is given away without credit, what a person keeps from themselves.

See Pisces in your own chartA free birth chart, with the reading, from your date, time and place.

Questions

What dates is Pisces?: About February 19 to March 20. Pisces closes at the March equinox, whose date varies between the 20th and 21st, so either day can be Pisces or Aries depending on the year.
Is Pisces ruled by Jupiter or Neptune?: Both, by different schemes. Jupiter, the classical ruler, gives the sign its openness and its faith; Neptune, given the sign after its discovery in 1846, gives the dissolving, the blur and the longing. Most modern rulership tables list Neptune, and many astrologers keep Jupiter in mind.
Is Pisces a water sign?: Yes, the last of the three, with Cancer and Scorpio, and the mutable one. Of the water signs it is the most porous: the feeling has no bank to hold it and goes where the room goes.