The sign and its names
Meena means a fish, and the sign is drawn as two fish swimming in opposite directions. Pisces is the Latin plural for fishes. It is the twelfth sign. In Devanagari the Sanskrit name is written मीन.
Element, quality and ruler
Pisces is a water sign and a dual sign. The four elements each hold three signs 120 degrees apart, and Pisces shares water with Cancer and Scorpio. The water signs are the fourth, eighth and twelfth of the twelve. The three qualities repeat around the circle, and Pisces shares dual with Gemini, Virgo and Sagittarius. The dual signs close each run of three: the third, sixth, ninth and twelfth. These are traditional labels for sorting the signs.
The ruling planet of Pisces is Jupiter. Jupiter also rules Sagittarius. Jupiter also rules Pisces. It has more than 1,300 times the volume of Earth, and its four largest moons can be seen with a small telescope.
The nakshatras in Pisces
Pisces covers sidereal longitude 330 to 360 degrees, which is exactly nine padas, or two and a quarter nakshatras. The nakshatras with a part inside it are: Purva Bhadrapada (pada 4 only); Uttara Bhadrapada (all four padas); Revati (all four padas). Their ruling planets are Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury. Pisces ends the zodiac, and Revati, the last nakshatra, ends at its last degree, where the cycle starts again at Aries. Its opposite sign is Virgo.
The Moon takes about two to two and a half days to cross a sign, so a moon sign of Pisces lasts that long each month. The nakshatra the Moon is in narrows it down further. Use the nakshatra finder to see both for your birth.
Moon sign Pisces and Sun sign Pisces
Your Vedic moon sign, the rashi, is the sidereal sign the Moon was in at birth. Your Western sun sign is the tropical sign the Sun was in. They are different measures, and the sidereal zodiac sits about 24 degrees 13 minutes behind the tropical one in 2026.
For Pisces the dates show it. In 2026 the Sun is in sidereal Pisces from 15 March 2026 to 14 April 2026, and in the Western Pisces from 18 February 2026 to 20 March 2026. Only about 5 days of those two ranges overlap, so most people with a Western sun sign of Pisces have a Vedic sun sign in Aquarius, and a moon sign in any of the twelve. The moon sign changes every couple of days, so the moon sign calculator asks for your birth time and place.
The padas of Pisces and the navamsha
The nine padas inside Pisces take nine navamsha signs in a row. They start at Cancer and run on to Pisces, then the next sign, Aries, starts again at Aries. That is how a single degree of the moon sign points to a second sign in the D9 chart, which is read for finer detail.
Counting from Pisces
Vedic readers often count planets by their distance in signs from the moon sign, called the position from the Moon. With a moon sign of Pisces, the count runs: Aries is second, Taurus is third, Gemini is fourth, Cancer is fifth, Leo is sixth, Virgo is seventh, Libra is eighth, Scorpio is ninth, Sagittarius is tenth, Capricorn is eleventh, Aquarius is twelfth. The sign opposite Pisces is Virgo, and the two signs in a trine with it are Cancer and Scorpio.
Sun in Pisces: Meena Sankranti
The Sun enters Meena in mid March. It starts the Tamil month Panguni and the Malayalam month Meenam, and it closes the sidereal year.
Calculated with the Lahiri ayanamsa and whole sign houses; every setting is on the method page. Last checked 2026-10-04.