Pisces 2

There is an independent image for this degree from 1898, decades before the Sabian set existed. Charubel's book puts it this way: a very long ladder, such as is used by fire brigades. Counting from Pisces's start, this is the second degree, placing it in the sign's first decan. Its decan is ruled by Saturn rather than Jupiter, which colors the degree with something Pisces does not supply on its own. The narrower term division belongs to Venus, a still finer layer of rulership laid across the sign and decan.

The degree symbols themselves date to 1925, when Marc Edmund Jones and the clairvoyant Elsie Wheeler sat in Balboa Park, San Diego, and drew all 360 blank cards in random sequence so that no degree's image could be planned in advance. Jones published his findings in 1953, yet the reading in general circulation since is Dane Rudhyar's 1973 restatement, not Jones's own words, and Rudhyar's text is still in copyright and is not quoted on this page. As the final sign, Pisces gathers what came before it and lets the edges between things blur. What a degree reading offers here is orientation rather than forecast, a way of naming exactly where in Pisces's cycle a person or moment sits.

Charubel's image for this degree is rescue equipment awaiting use: a very long ladder, such as is used by fire brigades. The length is emphasised, very long rather than merely tall, because a fire ladder's whole value is measured in the distance it can bridge between safe ground and a window many storeys above it, and no ladder of ordinary domestic length would do the work this one is built for. Nothing in the picture shows a fire actually burning or a rescue underway; the ladder is simply present, extended or ready to extend, purpose built and evidently maintained by people who expect, someday, to need every one of its rungs.

Read at the second degree of Pisces the image credits the sign, so often associated with drifting and dissolving, with a very different capacity, the engineering of a specific, reliable means of reaching someone trapped above the ordinary line rescue can manage, a long, tested, dependable structure kept ready precisely because compassion without the equipment to act on it cannot actually get anyone down from a burning floor. Pisces's famous sympathy needs exactly this kind of ladder, since feeling for a person in danger is not the same as being able to reach them, and the brigade's preparedness, drilled and equipped long before any fire starts, is what turns sympathy into rescue. The shadow readings are equipment never tested until the fire arrives, and a ladder so admired for its length that nobody actually climbs it. On a natal Neptune, Moon or twelfth-house emphasis this degree tends to mark prepared rescuers, and its counsel is a brigade's own: maintain the ladder before the fire, not during it.