Rachel Caldwell's Ocean Queen

Every sign has its stereotypes and misconceptions, but Pisces is a sign where the type doesn’t always fit well, especially with men. You know what type I’m talking about: the evasive, fickle, impressionable, hopeless new age space cadet who will lie straight to your face and is probably nursing an addiction of some kind. To be sure, there are some Pisces who fit the stereotype. But that kind of rigid thinking doesn’t work in Pisces-land.

Would it surprize you to learn that the late Steve Jobs, one of the most brilliant design innovators of our time, a man renowned as one of the world’s top business executives, famous for his intense and demanding leadership style, was a Pisces sun? Does this sound like someone unfocused, weak or out of touch with reality? Someone who doesn’t know anything about loyalty, commitment or power?

The first time I realized that the Pisces sun can make for an incredibly charismatic leader was when I learned one of the most driven girls in my school was a Pisces. It was a total WTF moment. She seemed nothing like the weak and effacing Pisces stereotype to me. She was competitive, suffered no fools, and always lead a team.

The thing you need to remember is that Pisces represents a permeable and fluid energy that can be channelled into a myriad of ways so that the placements of other planets will affect the expression of the Pisces energy. Pisces suns can be masterful adapters, soaking up influences like a sponge, making them formidable opponents. Who makes a good leader, fighter and strategist? Someone who is stubborn as a bulldog, narrowly focused and who single mindedly pursues their vision? Maybe. But what about someone who has no attachments, who is open to all angles of perception and is able to adapt accordingly? Brute strength, brute intellect, and bruteness overall, can only get you so far.

So when reading the chart of a Pisces sun or with strong Piscean signatures, consider certain placements, especially Saturn’s placement, the strength of Mars, and that of the ruling planet. Also consider which planets aspect Neptune and who is stronger. Let’s check out Steve Jobs’ chart (it has an AA Roden rating but do read this page regarding the accuracy of data – Jobs was adopted and is therefore, a complicated case).

Click image to enlarge

Firstly, the ruling planet, Mercury, is in scientist-inventor Aquarius (no surprize there), squaring heavyweight Saturn. (As an aside, here’s another so called “afflicted” Merc aspect that clearly does not indicate a weakened quality of mind.) Mars is dignified in Aries, with a badass trine to Pluto and forms a grand cardinal cross with Neptune, Jupiter/Uranus and Venus. In fact, Jobs has 6 planets in cardinal signs. Saturn aspects the hell out of a bunch of other planets. And yet, despite clearly being driven, Jobs’ life was heavily coloured by the drifting nature of the Pisces sun: dropping out of school, crashing in other people’s living rooms, visiting India in pursuit of spiritual enlightenment. Jobs notes, “Bill Gates’d be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger.”

My Pisces sun partner has Pluto conjunct his Scorpio ASC among other robust placements for key planets Mars (chart ruler) and Saturn. Far from the Pisces beta-male stereotype, he is an intimidating man with a commanding prescence, both physically and intellectually; men, even when older, physically larger or in a position of authority, instinctively defer to him, while women proposition him on a regular basis. He told me that even as a child, he was always the leader of the group. Yet his life path is very much characterized by the drift of Pisces. In his teens, he discovered his strategic mind possessed a natural business acumen, so he dropped out of high school to live the bling life much to the chagrin of his parents. But just like a Pisces, he abandonned that after reading philosophy. He quit business, sold his souped up car to amass a philosophy library, picked up ancient Greek, French and German and spent the next years of his life drifting through the world, some days flush with cash and others so broke he would sleep in the local parks and landromats of foreign countries like a displaced hobo.

You could easily mistake my partner’s drift for a lack of committment but it takes a different kind of committment to be able to leave behind your previous life to drink in something new. And in fact, with his Scorpio placements, he possesses a profound (Scorpio) loyalty that knows no bounds (Pisces). For underneath that scorpionic ferocity and fixity lie the sensitivity and openness of the twin fish, everywhere and nowhere at once. He’s a former boxer who cries when he reads poetry. He’s an ESL dropout who went on to receive acceptance letters from top ranking philosophy PhD programs in the English speaking world. Is that fickleness or evasiveness? Or is it just the vastness of the human condition slipping through our false boundaries?