_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
The Light in Life and Death: Pisces
Let go of fear
and rest in the arms
of the One
who has always held you,
the One who holds
atoms and empires
and oceans
and stars.
Let go of fear
and watch what happens next.
~Larry Robinson, excerpt from Rise and Fall
Here at the late phase of winter, skies are painted varying shades of undefined grey, with early tree buds emerging, and ourselves moving through the other-worldly waters of Pisces—with the Sun, the North Node (our compass), and four other planets now there. The sign is known for its elusive, mystical nature, its access to deep dreaming and creative imagining, and its pull to compassionate service. Its deep receptivity is enhanced by practices that connect us with the knowing within, finding its flowering through music, poetry, and the arts. But there is its shadow side.
The poem excerpt above was shared in a recent public dialogue about Life and the Meaning of Death between the poet and a psychologist friend of mine at Sebastopol’s HopMonk Tavern. I woke up today, ready to serve as muse for the Pisces archetype, to the shocking news that this friend had died suddenly, of pneumonia, less than a month after the event. A remarkably fearless man himself, who had many times willingly stared death in the eye, I take his sudden departure as a signal that we too must let go of fear, and “watch what happens next.”
This may indeed be a time of dying from one way of life, into another. Those of us of a certain political persuasion in this moment of truly radical uncertainty, here in the US and across the globe, are wracked to varying degrees by the ultimate Piscean challenge of surrendering to undoing and unknowing, of letting go of the givens of life we have relied on and cherished. Death—loss, endings of any sort—is our ultimate fear.
And as the last sign in the zodiacal round, Pisces is one of two archetypes that preside over illness and death—the other being fellow water sign Scorpio, ruled by Pluto. But while Scorpio-Pluto’s means of effecting death and transformation are prone to intensity and violence, Piscean letting go is more a gentle yielding to the tide of dissolution. (With Pluto now prominent in early Aquarius, opposing Mars on and off until April, we’re actually getting a whopping dose of both.)
An example of the Piscean letting go process is the onset of dementia as slow gateway into the life-death transition. Memory loss for any of us can be viewed as a type of Piscean release of the mind’s vigilance, something which I have been noticing quite a bit lately, both in myself and others. Faltering memory in general seems a potent sign of a time in which ‘forgetting,’ along with the positing of alternative truths, have become dominant strategies, and where words and concepts are lost in the blur of rapid delivery through too many channels (as Jupiter in Gemini is known for).
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Call to Healing
With Pisces’ own ruler Neptune having been at the anoretic (supercharged) 29th degree of Pisces for four months last year, returning there for the month of March, and then again from October through the end of January ’26, there has been and will be a marked emphasis on the Neptune-Pisces ‘dissolver’ effect. No wonder the memory waivers! Neptune here is more than exceedingly prone to both delusion and brain fog.
This overemphasized Neptunian energy also conjures past karmas, bringing to the fore unresolved issues that had been locked away. In these next couple of months as the Pisces-Neptune energy continues to surge, we are asked to be with old triggers and difficult feelings as they arise, and practice moving through and letting go of griefs and resentments. In this way, Pisces offers the capacity not just for creativity and compassion, but for deep healing.
This may all seem quite heavy: death, memory loss, karmas rising to the fore—and it is! But these can be reframed as necessary portals of the dying, or hospicing phase of life that must be faced in order to be ‘born’ into a new, paradoxically stronger yet gentler, orientation to life. Because the systems as we’ve known them are going to continue to crumble, requiring that we develop new ways to meet life. Pisces also bears the powerful gift of creative imagining – all things find their beginning as an idea or an ideal, and this archetype holds the power of manifesting our dreams and positive visions.
Meditation practice, of whatever form, is valuable in a time like this, as it nourishes us from the place inside that transcends the dramas of outer life. Also valuable is working directly with our triggers. Psychiatrist and consciousness researcher, David R. Hawkins, presents a “Letting Go” technique (in his book of the same name) that involves taking the time to sit attentively with the discomfort in the body when a disturbance arises, and breathing attentively into the place where we feel it, without thought or story about the why. The practice is of pure Presence with the sensations, which typically dissipate within 5-20 minutes. True to the Piscean realms, the mind isn’t needed as we meet and release difficult feelings. We can name them if we must, but the real work is in simply being with them in their rawness, and so dissolving them.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Surrender
The call to surrender that Pisces asks for is of the deepest possible allowing, such that our places of rigidity—our earthly forms and attitudes—are unmade, in order to be remade. This is tough, particularly with Saturn—the planetary impulse that disciplines us to rigidly hold to our material structures—still in ephemeral Pisces. We may feel as if trying to hold the banks of the river intact while the waters of undoing cascade wildly through them, threatening our stability.
It’s hard not to see the signs that the banks are crumbling, which is why we must double down on inner work. On a recent walk in a favorite park, I noticed many fallen trees, and numerous treetops broken off by winds or infestation, leaving ½ size wan trunks, with the odd woodpecker still pecking away. On the bike trail, I’ve noticed a proliferation of homeless encampments and their attendant trash. Even on my own street, I’ve twice in a week had to pick up tossed bottles of Cinnamon Fireball whiskey. Indulging in addictive substances is indeed one go-to coping method for escapist Pisces!
Death/birth thresholds are heightened moments in time, and that’s where we sit right now astrologically and in the earthly cycles in the coming weeks and months. It’s important to remember that as with a birth, in the transition to death there can be a sense of celebration, and a great blessing of light. To counter the darkness that pervades any time of dying, it is our task to find and celebrate the light, wherever we may find it. It can surprise us, like the moon in the trees..
As the last of the signs of the zodiac, Pisces also presides over the fertile, hidden waters of gestation that precede the birth phase of Aries. Death and birth are partners in the endless cycle associated with the Eleusinian Mysteries tended by Greek goddess Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who was abducted to the Underworld by Hades (aka Pluto), and thenceforth became his Queen, having to spend 1/3 of her time in this world below.
These days we face multiple systemic deaths, and many of us, the loss of loved ones as well. Our response can be to till the ground, both inwardly and outwardly, in preparation for a new way of life that is purified (a Piscean principle) from the dross of old mindsets, delusions, and expectations, and simplified as much as possible. This approach partakes of Pisces’ polarity partner, Virgo, who shares the impulse to purify and simplify.
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Hospicing Modernity
Vanessa Andreotti, social systems academic and author of Hospicing Modernity (a title that tells volumes), speaks beautifully to the death processes of our times, as signified by Pisces.
As we stand at the precipice of endings—of species, ecosystems, organizations, and systems themselves—the work of hospicing is to move beyond fear and embrace the deep transitions ahead with wisdom. To be stewards of this time, we must develop the practices and capacities to tend to these endings, not with urgency or control, but with a kind of stillness that invites the birth of new ways of being. Endings are not failures; they are part of a cycle that requires presence, reverence, and humility.
The qualities Andreotti invokes here speak to the Feminine ways of being. To this end, Mars is abiding in nurturing, yin water sign Cancer until mid-April, urging us to keep our energies focused on and ‘assert’ our Feminine capacities of listening, receptivity, stillness, and tending of life. This requires the integration of opposites, to take (masculine) Mars action on behalf of (feminine) Cancer receiving, which is an artful work. Without it, the off-centered manifestation of Mars in Cancer can show up as hypersensitive reactivity to our unmet childhood needs.
Positively embraced, Mars in Cancer reflects an enhanced ability for Presence, attending to the needs and rhythms of our bodies, of the Earth, and of our loved ones. One method for growing this capacity for attentive embodiment is through Qi Gong, which brings the powers of attention, listening, and imagining into physicality, where we synchronize our breath, our movements, and our inner focus, with an awareness of the landscape enfolding us.
Underworld maturation
Depth psychological astrologer/educator Safron Rossi offers valuable insights about the initiatory changes available when one submits to the processes of death and letting go, as was required of Persephone in her journey in the Underworld. In her book, The Kore Goddesses, Rossi writes,
Persephone doesn’t remain Hades’ scared, mewling hostage. Instead, a spiritual alchemy takes place, and she comes into her power as Queen of the Underworld. And she doesn’t merely accept the rules set out for her. She transforms the underworld, making it a softer and more hospitable [my emphasis] place. She looks kindly upon the shades that inhabit it and vows to care for them for eternity. She even successfully lobbies Hades to make exceptions to his otherwise ironclad rules, thereby humanizing him in the process.
This is an important point. Hades certainly ripped her from her old life kicking and screaming, but he didn’t kill or consume her. Instead, her entry to the underworld served as a spiritual initiation that allowed her to access her own power and become who she was always meant to be. She didn’t lose herself. As we all know, Persephone is still able to return to her young, innocent Kore self. But it was only after she came to terms with the darkness that she was able to command it and inhabit it at-will.
In effect, Persephone’s descent to Hades becomes a key inflection point in her life, one in which she joins light and dark, to achieve a more potent and effective Wholeness. Her abduction forces her to rise to a new level of maturity, to bring her powers of the nourishing Feminine to bear upon the extremities of the ‘dark Masculine’ as exemplified by Hades.
This concept is something Sharon Blackie, myth and fairytale specialist, and author of If Women Rose Roote, wrote of recently when discussing this idea of hospitality (akin, of course, to hospice.) She writes, “Hospitality, in a fairy tale, is a duty to the wider community of the world: it’s the act of welcoming and providing for strangers. It’s the act of welcoming in what’s Other.” What’s Other right now may be absolutely what we feel we do not want, but in the spirit of joining with what is, rather than resisting, as Persephone does in the Underworld, we might consider how we can become ‘hospitable’ to our difficult times. No short order.
Rossi’s suggestion that Persephone “transforms the underworld, making it a softer and more hospitable place,” evokes for me something I’ve been noticing lately, which is a softer, gentler light moving through my relating, whether with long-time friends and loved ones, or acquaintances in the marketplace. It’s almost as if our kindest, most loving selves are rising up in counterbalance to the ‘wickedness’of the day. May the rising continue!
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Earth-Body Awareness
As ever, but particularly now, at this time of death-birth midwifery, it is vital to nourish our connection to our landscapes: to the elements, the weather, and our land, sea, and sky neighbors, through our senses, and through coaxing the mind’s Silence. These are a great balm and remedy for the watery emotions brought forth by Piscean confusion and unravelling. Staying grounded in the riches of physicality warms and stirs the creative cauldron of rebirth that is not something we can know with the mind.
The Earth’s knowledge of this part of the yearly cycle—of the invisible fertility that happens under cover of darkness, poised to spring into new life—becomes strikingly evident at this time in the Northern hemisphere, when naked grey branches suddenly burst into sweet color and form, offering small miracles of soft pink plum blossoms, daffodil trumpets, and delicate magnolia petals. It is vital that we witness and celebrate the Earth’s persistent reappearances, and offer the love she deserves. May her unfoldings inspire our own.
____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
Pisces New Moon Astrology
In its association with spirituality, Pisces is the archetype of faith in powers larger than ourselves—the powers of the hand of Creation imminent in all of Life, known and felt from a place inside. Faith can be understood as a deep knowing, cultivated through inner listening. It invokes a trust that rebirth will come, after a prolonged winter, or a surprise abduction to the underworld, such as innocent Persephone knew. It invokes a trust that madness and destruction won’t in the end win the day, that eventually, the powers of Light and Love will reemerge, as they do each Spring.
Implicit in this trust is a deep capacity for Patience, a specialty of Saturn, now moving through Pisces. Patience is a key ally at this time because, as I discussed in my Aquarius blog, we are peering into what grief specialist and psychotherapist Francis Weller terms the time of The Long Dark.
In addition, we need Courage to face and engage with the grief and healing work at hand. Not a minute too soon, courage and the forcefulness of Action are poised to take center stage in May, when both Saturn and Neptune transition into Mars-ruled, intrepid Aries. The shift of both of these planets simultaneously into pioneer/warrior Aries from nebulous, go-with-the-flow Pisces will be significant!
Saturn will stay in Aries for 2 ½ years, while Neptune, aside from retrograding back into Pisces this fall, will effectively stay in Aries for 14 years. Leading up to this shift, Venus now in Aries turns Rx on March 3, calling for review and deep reflection on past relationships and their dynamics. During this 6 week Rx, shortly after the Spring Equinox, she will conjunct the Sun (called “cazimi”), and emerge from her ‘underworld descent’ as the morning star.
This will mark the start of a new Venus Star Point in Aries (more on this next month), further emphasizing the Aries theme of new beginnings. It is important in these months preceding the Aries burst to be holding in our hearts and minds the visions and sensations of what we feel needs birthing, as Pisces/Neptune offers great potential for manifesting what we envision within.
At the February 27 Pisces New Moon both Saturn and Neptune remain in Pisces, along with Mercury and the North Node, making a very watery Piscean imprint, especially as Mars in Cancer will be in a harmonious trine (to varying degrees of closeness) to all of these. It’s up to us to choose to slow down, ‘turn off’ (the media), tune in, and invite reflective listening into our bodies, minds, and hearts. Without a concerted (Saturnian) effort to do so, we fall prey to Pisces’ lower octave qualities of distorted thinking, confusion, and addictive coping behaviors.
Saffron Rossi reminds us that the water element, being fluid, has the power to influence our perspective. “We find our necessity in the way in which we think about our lives,” she writes. This month’s watery lineup offers us an excellent opportunity to loosen the scaffolding of our thinking frameworks, tap into the creative powers of intuition, and open to possiblity. Being of compassionate service, and deepening in our care and understanding of others are also important—but we must be ever mindful of holding boundaries. Pisces struggles with boundary-setting, given its tendency to merge with and overflow into what it touches. Over-giving (aka rescuing), or playing victim are extremes to be guarded against.
Pisces naturally rules the 12th House in the zodiacal chart, and is ruled by farthest-out planet Neptune, hence it operates at a significant ‘remove’ from ordinary daily life. Its secret chambers include those of the musician and filmmaker, the mystic and monk, the nurse, the writer, and the artist. So we too may at this strongly Piscean moment feel called to remove ourselves from the ordinary fray, to keep ourselves for the creative, generative work within, as taskmaster Saturn asks that we do.
Peace, Beauty, Prayer, and seeking the Ideal are strong themes of this archetype, offering us the possibility of transcendent moments of higher knowing and being when opening to its influence. This is a potent time for those about the work of consciousness change, which is important for the Whole. It is said that our own spiritual practice belongs to the world’s, given that we are all parts of the one great interlocking time-space web of life.
To open this channel, I recommend settling into the vast, nourishing spaces between the notes of J.S. Bach as played by Icelandic pianist Vikingur Olaffson.
May you go softly yet boldly through your life transitions and undertakings, and be blessed with new understanding, new visions, and new light.
___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
