The range from Einstein to the ranks of junkies queuing at midnight in Piccadilly Circus for their weekly methadone is a pretty broad range.  So is the range from the Fish, that for two thousand years has symbolized the mystery of Christ, to the sad, scruffy, ineffectual figure which Vivian Robson once described in an astrology text as 'the dustbin of the zodiac'.  But this bizarre combination of paradoxical things is typical of Pisces.

In an attempt to understand the real motivations of the Piscean (a thing which is impossible right from the outset, but which one must, irresistibly, try anyway), I once asked a Pisces friend what he thought about it.

'Well,' he replied with a perfectly straight face, 'it's a well-known fact that every Pisces secretly longs to be given the fishing rights to all the dustbins in Oxford Street.'

And there you have it.  Take the dustbin literally or symbolically as you please.  What the rest of humanity discards, ignores or cannot comprehend, Pisces pursues.  In the midst of the waste and wreckage of human dreams and the heights of disappointed fantasies, he will fish….and fish….and fish.

Pisces is ruled by Neptune, who in ancient mythology is represented as the god of the oceans and the underground waterways of the earth.  Dripping with seaweed, brandishing his trident, he is unpredictable in behaviour:  sometimes friendly to sailors, offering them smooth seas and a calm wind, other times strangely inimical, raising destructive storms and calling monsters out of the depths.  The figure of Neptune tells us something about Pisces right away.  This sign is connected with a realm that has no boundaries, no measurable depths.  'From water all life comes,' the Koran tells us.  And nothing less than the source of life itself is the real secret for which Pisces fishes.  No wonder, if he fails, that he reverts to the disillusioned, deluded escapist.

It is sometimes said that Pisces, the last sign of the zodiac, contains a little bit of all of the others.  And watching a typical Piscean, this certainly seems to be true.  No one is as much as a chameleon as Pisces, a natural actor.  The theatre and the film industry are full of fishes, playing their parts.  There is a marvelous fluidity and complexity in Pisces people which can be alternatively enchanting and irritating, for they are so many people that you begin to wonder when the real Pisces will stand up.  The secret is that there is no 'real' Piscean.  He actually is everybody.  And if you think it's easy to live with that kind of empathy and identification with the human race, think again.

It is also said that Pisces incarnates either to serve or to suffer.  This, too, seems to be true in its fashion, although it is a little extreme.  But