45 Fun Facts About Pisces

Which snack got its shape because its Swiss creator's wife was a Pisces?

Goldfish crackers were created by Oscar Kambly in Switzerland; Pepperidge Farm's founder Margaret Rudkin found them on a trip there in 1962 and took the recipe home to America.

Pisces is which sign in the order of the zodiac?

Twelfth: as the last sign on the wheel, Pisces is said by astrologers to have absorbed the lessons of all eleven signs before it, hence its name for empathy.

Which planet, also the ruler of Sagittarius, was the classical ruler of Pisces?

Jupiter: the ancients had only seven 'planets' for twelve signs, so the Sun and Moon took one sign each and the other five ruled two apiece, Jupiter getting the pair on either side of Saturn's.

Which planet rules Pisces in modern astrology?

Neptune was only discovered in 1846, so Pisces had a different ruler until then; astrologers gave it the sea god's planet afterwards, and many still count the older one as co-ruler.

Pisces belongs to which element and modality?

Mutable water: the four mutable signs each close out a season, when the weather is on the turn, and astrologers credit them all with a gift for change and adaptation.

Which sign is opposite Pisces on the zodiac wheel?

Virgo: Mercury rules it, so astrologers call that planet in detriment, at a disadvantage, while it crosses Pisces on the far side of the wheel.

Which of these birthdays falls under Pisces in the tropical zodiac?

February 25: the Sun is in Pisces from about February 19 to March 20, and the edges shift by a day in some years with the leap-year cycle, so anyone born on a cusp needs the exact year to be sure.

Which planet, said to be exalted in Pisces, does Dante show veiling the Fishes at dawn in Purgatorio?

Venus: Dante has just climbed out of Hell, and at dawn on Easter Sunday the planet of love makes the whole east laugh.

Astrologers class Pisces as a 'negative', or receptive, sign; which of these signs shares that polarity?

Taurus: the wheel alternates sign by sign between positive, or yang, and negative, or yin, so every second sign counting from Pisces shares its inward-looking charge.

For about two thousand years the Sun has stood among the stars of Pisces at the start of which northern season?

Spring: a slow wobble of our planet's axis carried the March equinox point into Pisces around 68 BC, and astronomers still measure every star's position from that spot.

Thanks to precession, the astrological sign Pisces now mostly overlies the stars of which constellation?

Aquarius: the signs are pinned to the seasons while the stars drift slowly past them, so after two thousand years each sign has slipped about one constellation out of step.

In the astrological symbol for Pisces, how are the two fish shown swimming?

In opposite directions: astrologers read the pose as a mind pulled between fantasy and reality, though in the sky itself the two star-fish swim at right angles.

Alrescha, the star where the lines tying the two fish of Pisces meet, has an Arabic name meaning what?

The well rope, or cord: Babylonian astronomers already wrote of a fish cord in this part of the sky, a strong hint that the Greeks inherited the tie from them.

Beta Piscium's Arabic name means 'mouth of the fish', as does the name of which bright star in the Southern Fish?

Fomalhaut comes from fam al-hut, 'the fish's mouth', which is where Ptolemy placed the star; faint Fumalsamakah in Pisces got its name the same way, from the western fish.

The star name Revati, borne by Zeta Piscium, comes from the lunar mansions of which astronomical tradition?

Indian: Revati, 'the wealthy', is one of the nakshatras, the star groups the Moon visits in turn each month, and the point of light that carries the name is really five stars bound together.

Van Maanen's Star in Pisces is the closest known solitary example of what?

A white dwarf: when its spectrum was recorded in 1917 astronomers logged it as an ordinary star a little warmer than the Sun, and only later recognised the collapsed core of a dead one.

In the 'zodiac man' of medieval medicine, each sign governs a part of the body; which does Pisces rule?

The feet: the diagram pinned a sign to each part of the body, and doctors consulted it in almanacs and medical books to choose the day for bloodletting or surgery.

A 1917 glass plate of Van Maanen's Star held the earliest known evidence of what?

Planetary material beyond the Solar System: the star's light showed calcium and iron that should have sunk from sight, the dust of shattered rocky worlds, yet nobody read the clue for almost a century.

Messier 74, a face-on spiral galaxy in Pisces, goes by which nickname?

The Phantom Galaxy: its light is spread so thin that amateurs rate it among the hardest of Messier's objects to spot, yet seen face-on it is a textbook spiral.

Pierre Méchain, who found M74 in Pisces, later measured a meridian to define which unit?

The metre: on the Dunkirk to Barcelona survey Méchain was arrested by revolutionaries who took his instruments for weapons, then interned in Spain when war broke out.

Which space telescope's 2022 infrared view of M74 in Pisces laid bare the dusty filaments of its spiral arms?

Webb's mid-infrared camera caught the gas and dust threading the arms, and found the core so clear of gas that the star cluster at the galaxy's heart stood out in plain view.

In 2007 Hubble astronomers reported a ghostly ring of what around the Pisces galaxy cluster CL0024+17?

Dark matter gives off no light, so the team mapped it by the way its gravity bent the images of galaxies far behind; they read the ring as the ripple of two clusters colliding, though later studies have questioned it.

In one telling of the Pisces myth, the goddess of love and her son became fish to escape which monster?

Typhon, in Hesiod a monster with a hundred serpent heads, made war on the gods; Pan is said to have escaped him by turning into the goat-fish Capricornus.

In the Pisces myth as Hyginus tells it, the goddess of love and her son, visiting Syria, leap into which river?

The Euphrates: the river setting hints that the Greeks took the constellation from the Babylonians.

Who was the son of the goddess of love who fled with her and shares the constellation Pisces?

Eros (Cupid): in Ovid's telling mother and son hid among the riverside reeds until a gust of wind in the leaves frightened her into leaping in with him.

In one Pisces myth, fish rolled a giant egg ashore from a river; which birds then hatched Aphrodite from it?

Doves: the fish were set among the stars for their trouble, and Hyginus adds that this is why Syrians would eat neither fish nor doves, holding both sacred.

Which 1960s pop group named an album Pisces, Aquarius, Capricorn & Jones Ltd. after the zodiac signs of its four members?

The Monkees: Micky Dolenz was the Pisces and Peter Tork the Aquarius, but Mike Nesmith and Davy Jones were both Capricorns, born on the same day three years apart, so Jones went in by name.

Which physicist, a Pisces, was born on March 14, 1879, the date now celebrated as Pi Day?

Albert Einstein lived his last two decades in Princeton, New Jersey, which now folds the two occasions into one yearly Pi Day and Einstein birthday party.

Which asterism marks the western fish of Pisces, just south of the Great Square of Pegasus?

The Circlet is a loop of faint stars; one now counted in it, TX Piscium, glows deep red because its atmosphere holds more carbon than oxygen.

Which Swiss psychologist read the Christian era as the Age of Pisces, its two fish standing for Christ and Antichrist?

Carl Jung set the idea out in Aion (1951): the first fish was Christ, the second his dark opposite, and he expected the age that followed to have to reconcile the two.

Which Greek word for fish, a symbol of the early Church, do astrologers link with Pisces?

Ichthys is carved on early Christian tombs and catacomb walls, and the writer Tertullian called believers 'little fishes' born in the water of baptism.

The letters of the early Church's Greek word for fish spell an acrostic meaning what?

Jesus Christ, God's Son, Saviour: Augustine added that the fish suited Christ because he lived without sin in the depths of mortal life, as a fish lives in deep water.

In the 1979 comedy The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, a losing team in which sport rebuilds itself entirely from Pisces players?

Basketball: the Pittsburgh Pythons become the Pittsburgh Pisces and start winning, with the NBA's Julius 'Dr. J' Erving as their star and an astrologer picking the line-up.

John Hill's 1754 constellation beside Pisces shared its Latin name with the Roman shield formation; which animal was it?

A tortoise: Testudo was one of fifteen creatures, a toad, a leech and a slug among them, that Hill slipped between the old constellations, perhaps as a joke on astronomers.

One long-standing explanation for the Star of Bethlehem is which event, seen three times in Pisces in 7 BC?

Two planets meeting: the pair passed each other in May, September and December that year, yet never came closer than about a degree, so they stayed two separate points of light rather than one bright star.

Which tarot card, tied to dreams and illusion, do astrologers pair with Pisces?

The Moon: despite its name the card goes not to Cancer, the sign the Moon rules, but to Pisces, whose dream-world its howling dog and wolf and creeping crayfish are said to picture.

Which two constellations flank Pisces in the zodiac?

Aquarius and Aries: for all its size, fourteenth among the 88, Pisces is so faint between its neighbours that its brightest point of light, Eta Piscium, is only magnitude 3.6.

Eratosthenes made the fish of Pisces the young of one that saved the Syrian goddess Derceto, described by Greek writers as what?

A mermaid: Diodorus says she threw herself into a lake in shame over a love affair and was changed, all but her face, into a fish; the baby she abandoned grew up to be Queen Semiramis.

In 2002 the research submersibles Pisces IV and Pisces V found a Japanese midget submarine sunk just before which wartime air raid?

Pearl Harbor: the destroyer USS Ward's crew said they sank the sub over an hour before the bombers arrived, the first American shots of the Pacific war, but nobody could prove it until the Pisces dives.

Hindu astrology calls Pisces Meena, 'the fish'; in Hindu myth the fish Matsya is counted the first avatar of which god?

Vishnu, in the Puranas' telling, became the fish Matsya to warn Manu, the first man, of a coming flood, then towed his boat to safety by its horn.

Purim falls in Adar, the Hebrew month paired with Pisces, one month before which other festival?

Passover: Hebrew months begin at the new moon, so both feasts fall near a full moon, Purim on the 14th of Adar and Passover on the 15th of Nisan, one lunar month apart.

Astrologers give every sign a two-word motto; which one belongs to Pisces?

I believe: astrologers cast Pisces as the zodiac's mystic, guided by faith and feeling rather than proof, while 'I think' goes to quick-witted Gemini.

Van Maanen's Star packs about two-thirds of the Sun's mass into a ball roughly the size of what?

Earth: matter squeezed that hard weighs about a tonne per cubic centimetre, and the Sun is expected to end up in the same state when it runs out of fuel.

Which former Beatle, a Pisces, recorded the song 'Pisces Fish' for his final album, Brainwashed?

George Harrison died in 2001 before he could finish Brainwashed; his son Dhani and producer Jeff Lynne completed it from his recordings, and it came out a year later.

'Piscine', from the same Latin root as Pisces, is the everyday French word for what?

A swimming pool: the Romans' piscina was a fish pond, and the word passed to baths and basins before the French gave it to pools for people.