You might know, of course, that nothing is all light.  With all those beautiful aspirations and longings for purity, devotion and goodness, mercy, compassion and self-sacrifice, there's bound to be a pretty big wallop of a shadow downstairs.  It's always like that, of course.  And the basic law of life - that everything comes in opposites - is nowhere truer than of the sign of Pisces.

Remember that we said Pisces knew no limitations?  This is certainly true of his aspiration.  Nothing less than union with the divine, the source of life, will suit.  Whether this is achieved through religious longing, creative expression, or heroin is not so important as the experience itself.  Right?  Right for Pisces, at any rate.  And the dark fish knows no limits either.  His name is Power.

In ordinary situations, Pisces tends to be the victim.  We can meet this figure in many Pisceans - they are the ones who are taken advantaged of, used, bled white for money and sympathy, held in bondage through their sympathy, made to feel obligated through their tendency to feel guilty for everybody else's sync.  It is almost inevitably the Pisces who stays with the violent husband, nurses the schizophrenic wife, raises the retarded child, supports the ailing mother, gives up this, that or the other thing to help somebody else.  It is sometimes very hard to tell whether these are the noblest or the silliest of human beings; and whether they are truly saints, or wield a tremendous power through making the other guy feel hopelessly obliged.  Nobody has quite as much power as a martyr.  Maybe it's a little of both.

In The Iceman Cometh by Eugene O'Neill there is a character named Harry:  an ordinary sort of man with the usual array of vices and virtues.  And Harry has a wife who, although we don't know whether Eugene O'Neill practised astrology, must surely be a Pisces.  Harry's wife forgives him for everything.  No matter how abusive he is, no matter how badly he treats her, she never raises her voice in anger, or rebels, or shows a little bitchiness herself.  She always, always forgives.  And of course it makes Harry worse.  If you make anybody feel guilty, then they will resent you, then they're going to treat you even more badly the next time.  So Harry's treatment of his wife goes downhill, from bad to abominable.  Soon he is beating her, bringing other women into the house, and other favorite pastimes of the Right Bastard.  And Harry's wife does the natural Piscean thing:  she forgives.  She understands.  She has compassion.  She makes Harry feel so guilty, so terrible, that of course at the end he has to kill her.  He simply has to.  That's why saints are always martyred.  Saints they may be; but they make the rest of us feel blacker.  And anyone who poses as a saint is shirking his share of common evil, and reaps it triplefold.

There is an interesting moral in Harry's story about Pisces.  For one thing, it shows how much power this 'powerless' sign can wield.  For another thing, it shows how much power Pisces often wants.  Outward passivity is a dangerous animal, since the will has to go someplace.  And every so often you see it break out, and encounter strange Pisceans like Attaturk and Julius Caesar, who, unlimited as always, must conquer the world.

Many Pisceans have this kind of secret fantasy.  Feeling as