Pisces · Rat
Mosquito
“Small, patient, and impossible to ignore for long.”
The Mosquito is the Ancient Zodiac sign for a Pisces born in the Year of the Rat, the point where the Pisces sun meets the Rat moon.
The Pisces-Rat, known as the Mosquito, is persistence in a very small package. Pisces brings sensitivity, intuition, and an attunement to other people that verges on the uncanny. The Rat brings resourcefulness, timing, and an instinct for the opening. Together they make someone easy to overlook, hard to dismiss, and extraordinarily good at finding the way in. A mosquito locates you from up to thirty metres by following the carbon dioxide of your own breath upwind, then fine-tunes on body heat and skin chemistry, which is why some people are chosen and others are not. Only the females bite, and not for food: they live on nectar like the males and need blood solely to develop their eggs. Every one of them is a pollinator, and in the far north they are one of the main ones. Pisces-Rats read atmosphere with startling accuracy and act on it quietly. They persist where louder people give up, they find the unguarded route into a problem, and they are motivated far more often by providing for someone than by ambition. The risk is being felt more than seen: this much persistence, applied without announcing itself, can register to others as pressure they cannot locate the source of. The name fits because the mosquito is the least respected animal in the world and one of the most effective. It hunts by sensing what you exhale, it will not be waved away, and everything it does is for the next generation rather than itself.
Mosquito Birth Dates
You are the Mosquito if you were born in one of these stretches, when the Sun was in Pisces during a year of the Rat.
- February 19 to March 20, 1912
- February 19 to March 20, 1924
- February 19 to March 20, 1936
- February 19 to March 20, 1948
- February 19 to March 20, 1960
- February 19 to March 20, 1972
- February 19 to March 20, 1984
- February 19 to February 19, 1985
- February 19 to March 20, 1996
- February 19 to March 20, 2008
- February 19 to March 20, 2020
- February 19 to March 20, 2032
Some of these are short. A lunar year opens at Chinese New Year rather than on 1 January, so where that boundary falls inside Pisces it cuts the window in two, and the days on either side belong to different signs.
Pisces
“Two fish, one cord, and they are swimming apart.”
Pisces is mutable water ruled by Neptune, the last sign, and it inherits something from all eleven before it. The boundary between itself and everyone else is thin to the point of not being there, which produces real empathy, real imagination, and a tendency to absorb whatever is in the room and mistake it for weather of its own. It is the most artistic sign and the most porous. The constellation is two fish tied together by a cord, and the knot is the whole point. Aphrodite and Eros, fleeing Typhon, took fish form and bound themselves so they could not be separated in the water, which is why the two fish are always drawn swimming in opposite directions with the tie still holding. The star at the knot is called Alrescha, the cord. The sign is also where the sun now sits at the spring equinox, having drifted there over two thousand years, so the year quietly begins in Pisces while every chart still calls that point Aries. A Pisces is the one who understood what you meant rather than what you said, who makes things, who forgives faster than is sensible. They are intuitive, funny in an oblique way, and much tougher than the softness suggests. The cost is the cord: pulled in two directions at once, giving until there is nothing to give, and escaping into something, work or fantasy or a person, rather than saying no.
Polarity: negative · Modality: mutable · Element: water · Ruler: Neptune
Rat
“Won the race without swimming a stroke of it.”
The Rat opens the cycle, and it did not get there by being the strongest or the fastest. It got there by thinking about the problem differently from everyone else in it. This is the sign of resourcefulness, timing and quick assessment: alert to opportunity, thrifty by instinct, and comfortable in situations that reward wit over force. The story is worth telling exactly. The Jade Emperor called a race across a wide river to decide the order of the years, and the Rat, who could not swim it, persuaded the Ox to let it ride along. The Ox agreed, being the kind of animal that agrees, and swam the whole distance carrying a passenger. At the far bank, with the finish in sight, the Rat jumped from the Ox's head and landed first. Twelve years of the calendar were decided by one animal working out that the race was not actually a swimming contest. Rat people are quick, charming and highly observant, with an eye for the opening nobody else noticed and a strong instinct to provide for their own. They are excellent in a crisis and rarely without a plan. The cost is the jump: an ability to see the advantage so clearly that it gets taken before the question of whether it was fair has been given much of a hearing.
Polarity: yang · Direction: north · Element: water
Zodiac Interplay
Polarity: Moonrise
Quiet on the surface, engine running underneath.
You do not announce things. You go away, think it through, come back with it finished, and let the work do the talking. People tend to underestimate you exactly once - usually right before you hand them something they could not have built.
Modality and Direction: Riverstone
Shaped by the current, still very much a stone.
Adaptable energy on northern ground. You bend to circumstance without losing your shape, which makes you the person a plan can survive contact with: you will change the route, never the destination.
Elemental Cycle: Fathom
No floor found yet.
Water doubled, all the way down. Your intuition operates below the level of argument - you simply know how something is, and you are usually right long before you can explain why.
Resonant. Water meets water: one phase, doubled. Neither half tempers the other. There is nothing in this sign pulling the opposite way.
Mosquito Best Matches
- Mosquito and Spider: Total Eclipse, 98 out of 100
- Mosquito and Harpy: Total Eclipse, 98 out of 100
- Mosquito and Lobster: Total Eclipse, 95 out of 100
Mosquito Hardest Matches
- Mosquito and Satyr: Night Crossing, 33 out of 100
- Mosquito and Pegasus: Night Crossing, 34 out of 100
- Mosquito and Albatross: Night Crossing, 35 out of 100
Other Pisces Signs
The eleven other signs a Pisces can be, one for each remaining year of the Chinese zodiac. Same sun, different moon.
Other Rat Signs
The eleven other signs someone born in a year of the Rat can be, one for each remaining sun sign. Same moon, different sun.
