Pegasus: The Pisces-Aries Threshold
“Horses, horses, horses, horses. Coming in in all directions. White shining silver studs with their nose in flames. He saw horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses, horses. Oh, pretty boy, can't you show me nothing but surrender? There's a mare black and shining with yellow hair. I put my fingers through her silken hair and found a stair.” I have this collage of Patti Smith lyrics stuck in my head. It's a mash of bits from her song “Land.”
These lyrics are singing themselves into my mind and I know it is because of Pegasus. I've been thinking about the winged horse as I've watched planets slide from the world of Pisces into Aries the last few weeks. Venus just made this move on Friday around midnight my time. If you've been here for a minute, you know I'm a little obsessed with the relationship between the signs that are right next to each other, these thresholds. I’ve already wrote a Pisces-Aries Threshold piece back in 2022 but I have new things to say so I’m writing another.
Pisces and Aries lick and wash each other’s edges in foam and flame. Austin Coppock calls last decan of Pisces “The Bowl of Blood” and the first decan of Aries “The Axe.” Blood is the perfect substance to take us from Pisces to Aries. Blood, a martial fluid, is about 50% water and it is also associated with heat in the body. Blood in a bowl is an offering. It is something Jupiter and Mars, the rulers of these signs, can get together on: the value of sacrifice.
Jupiter asks us what we believe, what we know, what matters, for what and for whom do we offer our time, our energy, our resources, our fears. Who does not get our holy, precious lifeblood? Who does? Why? This is relevant to the questions we might come up with when we look at the south node in Libra right now, which gathers questions about reciprocity.
Mars is the courage to risk. It is the blade that cuts from us what we place upon the altar of our ideals, upon the altar of the worlds we are imagining and forming through repeated action. Mars screams the Jupiter belief, holds the banner high, charges toward. Mars is not satisfied with an ideal that has no body. Mars demands that we see rupture as a needed tool. To act is an assertion of the self into the ecosystem (even if the action is on behalf of others too). The two of them can romanticize sacrifice, romanticize violence, romanticize the disavowal of the self in the name of principles, but they are also both necessary when we have to get some skin in the game — or really, acknowledge our skin is already in the game and what are you going to do about it.
The move from Pisces, from bowl placed, to Aries, the axe swung, also involves a significant increase in speed. It may leave us with a bit of reverse whiplash, feeling waterlogged and finished just as Mars is egging us on to get started. I've been feeling that. The speed of it all will come up a lot in this post. There is a figure who encompasses this threshold, of blood and water, of sacrifice and the ideals that motivate them. We're back to horses, horses, horses.
Across the end of Pisces and start of Aries live the projected degrees of the constellation Pegasus, the daring winged steed and darling of the Muses. Pegasus was born of a decapitation, the axe coming down, emerging not from the womb but the neck of his mother Medusa. The Piscean bowl of fluid is here as Pegasus is a child of the sea even as we imagine him up in the sky, all feather. Medusa is a water deity. Pegasus’s father is Poseidon. Yet he is light and speed, inspiration and battle. He is creative action, unheeding of what may be in his way. He is this move across water and fire. Flowing, bright. Who better to guide us through the ending that is a beginning, the zodiacal wheel “restart”?