So the Sun has turned its ship to the ocean, towards Pisces. Boy has it been a long trek, and such a cold, hard place midwinter could be, so frozen, so difficult to swallow, no matter how necessary and potentially transformative. But now towards Neptune’s world it moves, mutable, moving water, and mist and thaw. And by Pisces’ older ruler, Jupiter, the greater benefic, the kingly, paternal, generous and expansive. He brought us into winter with the archer, he’ll take us out of it with the fishes. As we travel on, it starts to seem like goat hearted midwinter never really happened, and Summer an elusive promise, with the increasingly welcoming no man’s land of the melt.

The myth often referenced to Pisces is that of the escape and rescue of Aphrodite and her son Eros from the attack of the monster Typhon (or  Typhoeus), in which they turned into fish and were aided in their escape by other fishes. The fishes of Pisces have their tails joined by a golden cord so they will not lose each other.

Defeating Typhon falls to Jupiter (or Zeus in the Greek myths), who as we have said has rulership of Pisces. A similar über monster is defeated repeatedly by the god Sutekh in Egyptian mythology, an event which was traditionally celebrated in January. In Norse mythology it is another thunderer, Thor, who subdues both the monster serpent, and the frost giants. So there are some interesting resonances in the winter myths, with monsters and rescues, but the fatherly thunderer spell defeat for both the monster of the deep and the frozen chill, and rescues our love.

If any sign is associated with the widest, deepest and most mystical aspects of love, it is Pisces. It undoes and dissolves structure, rigidity and separation. It is the ocean of dream, illumination, imagination, romance, the mystic’s vision, the merging with  the greater reality. Its modern ruler Neptune is the Agape to Uranus’ Thelema.

So Jupiter leads us out of the freeze of Winter, and reminds us that our secret fire has a meaning and a purpose, one that only we can find for ourselves, but whose nature is love. His generous spirit fills the sails of our world, heading our boat for brighter and warmer climes.

Statuette of Jupiter – by Siren-Com (Own work) [CC-BY-SA-3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons