Age of Pisces

The Age of Pisces frames the novel’s celestial references as both an astronomical matter and a symbolic one: the book locates its nineteenth-century sky in an age of shifting signs, mirrors, and hidden things, and asks readers to distinguish that sky from popular astrological convention.

Astronomical basis

The note to the reader says the book’s stellar and planetary positions were determined astronomically, taking account of precession, the gradual shift of the vernal equinox. It describes the equinox as the astrological equivalent of the Greenwich meridian; in southern latitudes, the corresponding seasonal point is the autumnal equinox. Whereas the equinox formerly occurred with the Sun in Aries, the first sign, it now occurs with the Sun in Pisces, the twelfth.

This shift changes the calendar implied by the zodiac. Each sign, the note explains, occurs approximately one month later than popular information would suggest. The correction is presented not as a rejection of popular knowledge but as an insistence on the material conditions of the nineteenth-century firmament, against an account that the note says defies those conditions.

Symbolic meaning

The note ventures that adherence to the mistaken popular chronology might itself be called Piscean. It associates the Age of Pisces with mirrors, tenacity, instinct, twinship, and hidden things, making the age a compact statement of the novel’s celestial sensibility. The language is deliberately conjectural: the note proposes a symbolic correspondence rather than claiming that the astronomical shift proves a particular human character.

The book’s astronomy and its symbolism are thus joined without being collapsed into one another. Precession supplies the concrete reason for dating the signs differently; the Piscean qualities offer an interpretive vocabulary for the age those calculations disclose. The note closes by affirming faith in the influence of the infinite sky, giving the celestial framework both a measured basis and a sense of mystery.

Function in the book

By foregrounding its astronomical method, the note prepares readers to treat the novel’s planetary positions as deliberate features of its historical setting rather than as decorative astrological convention. Its correction also establishes a productive tension between what is popularly assumed and what the nineteenth-century sky is said to show. The Age of Pisces names that tension while gathering the note’s motifs of reflection, pairedness, and concealment into a single emblem.