19 February to 20 March · Mutable Water · ruled by Jupiter
The tarot cards of Pisces
Mutable water, and the sign of The Moon.
Pisces is mutable water: dissolution, imagination and the difficulty of telling where you end. The Moon is its trump, and the correspondence is exact. Both concern the territory where perception stops being reliable and something true is nevertheless going on.
The decans are the late Cups: the Eight as walking away from something that was fine, the Nine as having what you asked for, the Ten as the whole picture arriving. It is the deck's most emotionally complete run and the only decan sequence that ends somewhere unambiguously good.
Traditional rulership gives Pisces to Jupiter, used here. Modern astrology gives it Neptune, which the deck attaches to The Hanged Man.
The trump
The Major Arcana card that carries the sign itself.
The three decans
Each sign covers thirty degrees, divided into three ten-degree decans. One numbered card each, and they run in order through the sign.
The court card
The figure who carries the sign. Court attributions vary more between traditions than any other part of this system, because the Golden Dawn courts straddle two signs rather than sitting inside one.
The other eleven signs
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
Pisces in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Pisces. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Pisces on Memento Astra