Glyph and Origin

The glyph is two crescents facing away from each other and joined by a bar, read as two fish bound together and swimming in opposite directions, an image the constellation itself supports through the long cord of stars linking its two fish figures. Greek myth explains the pair as Aphrodite and Eros, who took fish form and tied themselves together while fleeing the monster Typhon, a story layered onto an older Babylonian tradition of paired fish occupying the same stretch of sky.

Pisces belongs to the Babylonian zodiac codified in Hellenistic astrology, its two fish already distinguished as northern and western in the old Babylonian star lists, and the written form is preserved chiefly through Byzantine copies of Greek horoscopes, the manuscript tradition catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, reaching its settled printed shape only once fifteenth and sixteenth century almanacs, in the line of Regiomontanus's early Nuremberg Kalendarium and Ephemerides, began fixing the zodiac signs consistently in type. Through precession, the same slow axial wobble that has shifted every tropical sign from its namesake constellation over more than two thousand years, the tropical sign has drifted from the constellation Pisces.