Pisces (Meena) sign in Vedic astrology: traits and lord

In Jyotish, every sign (rashi) is classified along several axes at once: element, pace, gender, guna, direction, and whether it is strong by day or night. The hero table collects Pisces's answers to all of these in one place, so you can compare it row by row with any other sign.

The element rows group signs into fire, earth, air and water. P.V.R. Narasimha Rao (PVR), author of Vedic Astrology: An Integrated Approach, glosses water as having 'a flexible state', against fire which 'transforms the state of things', earth's 'a constant and solid state', and air's 'a varying state'.

Pace splits the twelve signs into movable, fixed and dual. PVR describes movable signs as tending 'to move and to be dynamic', fixed signs as tending 'to be stable and constant', and dual signs as 'stable sometimes and dynamic sometimes'. Pisces is dual (dwiswabhava), so it mixes both tendencies.

Guna (a quality of nature) comes in three: sattva, rajas and tamas. PVR glosses sattva as purity and truthfulness, and Pisces is a sattva sign.

PVR notes that 'Out of the two rasis owned by a planet, one is a day sign and one is a night sign.' In PVR's list Pisces is Jupiter's day sign, so it is read as strong in the daytime. Other texts differ: Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS) chapter 4 says of Meen, 'This Rāśi is strong at night.'

The remaining rows are simpler labels: Pisces is an even (female) sign, its direction is north, and it rises with both head and feet.

Brihat Parashara Hora Shastra (BPHS, R. Santhanam's translation), chapter 4, describes Meena in verses 22 to 24 as: a pair of fish, one tailed with the head of the other; strong at night; watery; mostly sattva; denoting resoluteness; a water-resorter; footless; of medium build; ruling the North; rising with both head and back; and ruled by Jupiter. BPHS closes by saying the twelve signs are described like this 'to evaluate gross and specific effects'.

Light on Life (Hart de Fouw and Robert Svoboda) gives the symbol as 'The symbol for Pisces, two fish swimming in opposite directions', which matches BPHS's note that Meena 'resembles a pair of fish'.

PVR's indications for Pisces (section 2.3) list places and things such as oceans, seas and hermitages. They also list qualities such as emotional, timid, honest, irresolute, talkative and intuitive.

PVR frames these as traditional associations: signs stand for situations that develop in one's life and influences that enter it, while planets stand for people. B.V. Raman cautions that such descriptions 'are only general in nature and should not be applied hastily'.

A sign's lord is the planet that owns it, and in any chart the lord of the sign sitting in a house is that house's lord. Pisces's lord is Jupiter, which also owns Sagittarius.

The dignity table shows how each planet fares in Pisces. Venus is exalted here, deepest at 27 degrees of the sign, and Mercury is debilitated here, deepest at 15 degrees. Each planet is debilitated in the 7th sign counted from its exaltation sign: Mercury is exalted in Virgo, the 7th sign from Pisces, and Venus, exalted here, is debilitated in Virgo.

The lunar nodes (Rahu and Ketu, the north and south nodes, two shadow points on the zodiac) are treated differently by different texts. BPHS chapter 47 reports that some sages give Pisces to Ketu as its own sign, while PVR's Table 6 gives Pisces as Ketu's moolatrikona. Skybond's engine gives the nodes no own sign or moolatrikona at all, which is a convention choice rather than a verdict on any text.

Kalapurusha means time personified: the zodiac imagined as one great body, with each sign mapping to a limb. BPHS chapter 4 and PVR both place Pisces at the feet of this body, which PVR describes as Lord Vishnu's body.

This limb mapping is a teaching image for how the zodiac hangs together as a whole. Texts differ on some details of the mapping, and Skybond presents each text's view as its own rather than picking a winner.

Each year the Sun enters sidereal Pisces on 14 or 15 March and leaves on 13 or 14 April (IST, True Chitra Paksha ayanamsa). In Skybond's computation for every year from 2000 to 2050, the entry date falls between 14 and 15 March.

Western (tropical) sun-sign dates differ because of the ayanamsa (the offset between the two zodiacs), and the Vedic sun sign is often one sign earlier than the Western one. Neither frame is the more accurate one; each system is read within its own frame.

Time to rise is a separate matter. B.V. Raman, in Hindu Predictive Astrology chapter 5, lists Pisces among the signs of short ascension for places north of the equator (he notes the order reverses south of it), so as the ascendant (lagna) it takes less time than average to rise.