First Decan of Pisces (0°–10°)

Saturn's face at the start of the fishes' sign

The first decan of Pisces covers 0°–10° of the sign, the opening of mutable water. In the Chaldean order the face belongs to Saturn. In the triplicity scheme, which gives each sign's first decan to the sign itself, it belongs to Pisces and so to Jupiter, the classical ruler, with Neptune as the modern co-ruler.

Saturn has no rulership or exaltation in Pisces, a sign that dissolves boundaries, and Saturn is the planet of boundaries. As face lord, though, it holds a minor dignity, enough to build something here. Jupiter, domicile lord of Pisces, takes the triplicity claim as well and brings faith, generosity and breadth of sympathy. Neptune, for modern readers, adds imagination and the pull toward the transcendent.

The pairing gives Pisces a shoreline. The sea of feeling and imagination is still there, but Saturn insists on form: a discipline, a practice, a structure in which longing can take shape. Astrologers read this face as the place where dreams meet patience, and where people learn to leave behind what has become empty and go looking for what is real.

The laden traveller and the Lord of Abandoned Success

Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy, printed in 1533, gives this face a well-dressed man carrying burdens on his shoulder. He reads it as travel, change of place and care about earning wealth and clothing. His face images come largely from the Picatrix, the Arabic manual of astral magic that reached Latin readers in the thirteenth century, where each face's figure was a design for a talisman.

The load is Saturn's, the fine clothes are Jupiter's, and the road is the mutable sign moving on. The Golden Dawn's Book T, from the 1890s, calls the card of this decan the Lord of Abandoned Success. Put together, the images describe someone who has prospered, is still carrying what that prosperity brought and sets out anyway. Agrippa's man worries about wealth and clothing on the road; the Golden Dawn's traveller has left them behind. The face sits between the two, weighing what to keep and what to put down.

From a star of the night clock to Pisces

In Egypt the decans were thirty-six star groups whose dawn risings marked the ten-day weeks of the year and whose risings through the night told the hours. Each was a god, and each disappeared for about seventy days a year, spent, in the Book of Nut, in the house of embalming before rebirth on the eastern horizon. When Hellenistic astrologers combined Egyptian decans with the Babylonian zodiac, this one became the first ten degrees of Pisces. The Egyptian lists vary from monument to monument, and no single star group can be assigned to it with confidence. The idea of a star that sinks into hiding and returns suits the last sign well. The Sun crosses this face roughly from 19 to 28 February.

The Eight of Cups: Saturn in Pisces

The Golden Dawn gave the Eight of Cups to this decan: Cups for water, the Eight for the first face of the mutable water sign, Saturn for its Chaldean ruler. In the Rider-Waite deck a cloaked figure with a staff walks away from eight cups stacked neatly on the shore and climbs toward the mountains at night. Above him the moon shows both a crescent and a full disk.

Saturn in Pisces is the limit inside the dream, and the card turns it into a decision. The cups are arranged, the work is done, and still something is missing, so the figure goes. In readings the Eight of Cups speaks of walking away, disillusionment, a search for deeper meaning and the end of an emotional chapter. In the Golden Dawn's wider system it stands between The Universe, for Saturn, and The Moon, for Pisces. One is the completed cycle and the other the uncertain night road, which is exactly where the traveller is heading.

A Sun or planets in the first decan of Pisces

With the Sun here, born roughly between 19 and 28 February, you tend to combine a rich inner life with a serious streak. You feel strongly and imagine widely, and you also know that dreams need structure to survive. Many people with the Sun here are drawn to creative or spiritual disciplines, to practices with rules and repetition that give the imagination a vessel.

Saturn as face lord brings patience, and also a tendency to melancholy. You may carry other people's sorrows, or your own, longer than you need to. Jupiter's double claim brings faith and kindness. You may have a history of walking away from situations that looked successful from outside but felt empty from within. The risk is leaving before something has had time to grow, or drifting from place to place without arriving.

Several planets in this decan give a chart depth and seriousness, suited to art, music, healing and contemplative work. Saturn placed here sits in its own face, while Jupiter here holds both the sign and the triplicity rulership.

Working with the first decan of Pisces

Give your imagination a regular container: a daily page of writing, a set time for music or prayer, a weekly class. Saturn here turns longing into work when the work has a shape. Before you walk away from something, wait one full lunar month and see whether the feeling holds; this decan can leave too early.

Notice which burdens you carry for others and set one of them down. When melancholy comes, give it a form, a drawing or a walk by water, rather than letting it spread. If you read the Tarot, lay out the Eight of Cups and ask what you are looking for in the mountains, then name one step toward it you can take in daylight. The late February days when the Sun crosses this face suit letting go of a role or habit that has run its course.