Article: Dreaming With Discipline: Astrology for Creative Momentum
Dreaming With Discipline: Astrology for Creative Momentum
The Pisces-Virgo Split: A Problem for Creatives
After all the warnings I’d been given about the occult, it seemed odd that the astrologer’s office smelled like church: mildewed and thick with incense. The knot in my stomach was a special brand of anxiety—Catholic guilt and the misgivings of an eldest daughter.“You’re conflicted,” the grey-bearded man said as he squinted at his computer. Had his mannerisms not been so mundane, I might have thought he was reading my mind.
Muffled traffic hummed outside. Somewhere upstairs, a door slammed shut.
“Pardon?”
“In life, I mean. You’re a Pisces sun, and your moon is in Virgo. Opposing signs. You’re torn between dreaming and doing.”
He was right. I was two years into adulthood and already at a breaking point: exhausted by the stringent discipline I was told led to success, and unyielding to the boundless realm of dreams that naturally called to me—I felt madness lay that way.
For years prior, my tendency to daydream was maladaptive: a warm current to drown in, a beast I summoned to swallow me whole. Life had taught me that I wasn’t safe in my body and I wasn’t safe in my mind. Where else was there to go? I swung between control and collapse, trying to earn security through order, while longing to sink into reverie.
Over the years, I’ve come to realize that this inner split wasn’t unique to me: it’s archetypal. The creatives I befriend often fall into the same pattern. They pour themselves into their careers, only to emerge feeling hollow. Often, this dissatisfaction reflects an internal imbalance between the expansive, intuitive energy of Pisces and the discerning, pragmatic energy of Virgo.
These polarities can be understood astrologically or as metaphors for the tension between intuitive and analytical thinking. Regardless of your belief system, learning to harmonize them is essential for unlocking the momentum you’ve been aching for.
An Old Shame
I don’t check my phone before having coffee. I also typically don’t argue with strangers online. Yet there I was at 6 AM, staring at my screen in disbelief. An artist’s advisor had posted that artists, while wonderful, were hopelessly impractical: they never thought about money and ignored professional opportunities. That’s why, of course, they needed her.
Against my better judgment, I replied that most of the artists I knew weren’t like that. Especially not the professional ones. My comment hit a nerve; she fired back a list of notoriously expensive credentials. Well, that explained it. If all her clients came from the same background as her—wealthy, connected—they could afford to be a little flighty.
Many people feel a sense of superiority when faced with Piscean modes of being: intuition, non-linear thinking, vulnerability. Though these qualities are integral to the creative process, they’re often misunderstood and demeaned, especially when embodied by working artists.
Meanwhile, creatives with a safety net—like the advisor’s clients—can take Piscean traits to untenable extremes, spinning them as charming. Intuition becomes an excuse not to analyze the realities of one’s life. Non-linear thinking manifests as an inability to show up on time. Vulnerability, rather than a display of openness, turns into a chronic need to be saved.
Seeing this advertised as the norm for artists had provoked me into action, fingers clumsily tapping away at a too-small keyboard.
I had spent years rejecting the shadow side of Pisces. In commenting on the advisor’s post, I was trying to outrun the image of uselessness she invoked. Or maybe I was running from the part of myself that still feared she might be right.
My own knee-jerk response reminded me of how counterproductive being reactionary is. The stranger’s words had absolutely no bearing on my life, yet my desire to disprove her overtook my desire for a peaceful morning. I was personally affronted by an impersonal statement.
All I lost was a few minutes of my time. But when you’re constantly reacting against what you don’t want, rather than pausing to clarify what you do, you risk getting stuck. This becomes more than counterproductive. It’s detrimental.
Too many of us try so hard to disprove the stereotype of the flighty artist—fueled by cultural or familial shame—that we abandon the spirit of creativity altogether. In resisting fantasy, we reject vision.
Pisces: Delusional Dreamer & Divine Vision-Boarder
Pisces, a water sign and poet, begins at the end. She doesn’t have a choice, really; it’s simply her nature. In tarot, she appears as The Hanged Man, a figure suspended—Christ-like—a quiet knowing on his lips.
They’ve strung him from his ankles, and his golden hair spills down. But who’s to say which way is up? There is no here. No there. Pisces is not a body suspended in space. Ruled by Neptune and Jupiter, she’s a churning vastness that dreams herself into being.
When I think of Pisces, I think of seafoam: ephemeral, iridescent, and difficult to hold. That strange, dissolving beauty has always felt familiar to me.
My first memory of its draw took place in my grandparents' cabin. My sister and I found a VHS tape with a unicorn on the cover. Lying on the carpet in front of the TV, we listened to the whirring sound of the tape rewinding. Then, the film began.
The first thing I noticed was that the movie was in English, not Italian. I couldn’t read yet, so the cover hadn’t clued me in. An aunt or cousin must have brought it over, where it was left to gather dust until discovered again.
For years, I wouldn’t remember the title or the plot. Still, a single image stuck with me: unicorns emerging from the waves. That scene was my initiation into the Piscean—cyclical, surreal, and drenched with symbolism.
Jupiter: Amplifying What You’ve Got
Archetypes aren’t just abstract ideas. They’re recurring patterns or symbols that appear in myth, art, and everyday life, often shaping our experience of the world without our conscious awareness. By recognizing archetypal patterns, we gain greater self-understanding.
Astrology is a language of archetypes. Each zodiac sign carries a vast universal energy, influenced by its planetary ruler. Pisces, for instance, is ruled by both Jupiter and Neptune. Artists are often drawn to the themes associated with these planets—such as inspiration, imagination, and transcendence—even if Pisces isn’t prominent in their birth charts.
In ancient Rome, Jupiter was worshipped as king of the gods. His presence carried the promise of abundance and divine protection. As a planetary ruler, Jupiter gives Pisces the ability to endure bleak situations. Through him, Pisces can find meaning in the darkness. She does this by transmuting her own suffering into service toward others.
As with all archetypes, Jupiter’s energy can be expressed in a myriad of ways. He can be quietly expansive or bombastic. Known as “The Great Benefic,” he brings good fortune by way of material success, spiritual growth, and happiness.
While few artists would turn these things down, there can be a shadow side to Jupiter’s uninhibited nature. He’s an amplifier: if what’s being amplified is insecurity, the result can snowball into something toxic.
Take, for example, a platform like Instagram. There’s a pervasive belief among creatives that they’re always one post away from a breakthrough. If they could just get more likes, more followers, more eyes on their work—everything would change.
But it’s entirely possible to go viral and have it lead nowhere. No professional growth. No stability. The erratic nature of short-form content often results in short-term rewards.
When you share your work steadily, instead of chasing immediate success, you feel clearer. Rooted. Your focus shifts to the quality of the art itself, and you care less about how it’s broadly received.
You know the creative process is transforming you, and that none of us exists in a vacuum. What moves one person can and will move another.
This is Jupiter’s gift to Pisces: the ability to affect others through authentic expression and be supported by them in turn. When your art does take off, carried by Jupiter’s will, it resonates.
Neptune: Your Visions Need Friction
Jupiter, while generous, only partly shapes the archetype of Pisces. There’s another tide carrying forth her narrative—one that isn’t concerned with clarity or momentum, but with dissolution, enchantment, and mystery: Neptune.
Neptune, named for the Roman god of the sea, is the modern planetary ruler of Pisces. In astrology, he governs dreams, illusions, and the porous boundaries of the unconscious.
Historically, Pisces’ dreamlike qualities were present in her lore, but less emphasized. With the discovery of Neptune in 1846, astrologers found a planetary archetype that more fully embodied Pisces’ intuitive and otherworldly nature.
My fellow painters will know the feeling of an image tugging at you, teasing. When you close your eyes, the picture is perfect, shimmering like a wing pinned to velvet…only you don’t have it pinned at all. Try to get it down on paper, and it disperses—a subtle haze of an idea. Not quite nothingness, but close.
This is the work of Neptune, a planet that heralds muses to Earth, flying on his breath. He is the melody you don’t remember but that plays at 3:00 AM. How can you hear what your mind can’t hold? Your pulse knows the rhythm. It thrums to Neptune’s strings.
Few things are more intoxicating than the fantastical energy of Neptune. Its elusiveness is what makes Pisces so quietly seductive. Think about the very early stage of a romance, when your perception of the other person is still malleable enough to shape them into the answer to your deepest desires. They’re not fleshed out yet. Their flaws and quirks are lost in a Neptunian haze of possibility. The beginning of a project often feels like this: exciting, all-consuming, and a little frantic.
The heady fog of enchantment serves an important function. It lowers our inhibitions just enough for us to jump into the unknown. However, like in a relationship, the initial feeling needs to become grounded in reality. Otherwise, nothing progresses beyond that first, perfect spark. Friction is required to keep the flame lit.
That’s why I bristle when creatives use perfectionism as an excuse not to try. Perfection is such an elusive concept that it’s essentially useless. Materiality is messy, and that’s a gift too. Neptune knows this.
XII: Making Friends With Wild Things
Astrology is the study of cycles: how the planets move through time, and what those movements mean for us. This sense of rhythm is mirrored in the zodiacal wheel: a circle divided into twelve equal segments, one for each sign.
Each zodiac sign is also traditionally paired with a specific area of life. In astrology, these areas are called “houses.” Pisces is associated with the Twelfth House.
Historically, the Twelfth explores the dissolution of worldly attachments, particularly through introspection and solitude. That’s why institutions like prisons, asylums, and hospitals are often linked to it. These are places where people are forced to withdraw from ordinary life.
The Twelfth is sometimes called the House of Self-Undoing. But what if we reframe self-undoing as self-unravelling: a loosening of identity that leads to alternate forms of connection? We don’t just find suffering in the Twelfth. We enter a liminal state where communication with the wild and the imaginal—those deep, symbolic forces that live beyond language—becomes possible.
Artists don’t always forsake society when entering their inner worlds. They harness the power of Pisces to create a different kind of connection: one that might not be social in a conventional sense, but is deeply relational. They become kin to ideas, archetypes, and the more-than-human. To some people, this unraveling of what it means to be “a self” looks like insanity. To me, it looks like fun.
Virgo: Compulsive Critic & Cosmic Caretaker
Between 2021 and 2023, while completing my MFA, I entered a kind of psychic fog. Sometimes, out of nowhere, it felt like my torso had been hollowed out and replaced with a spinning void. My arms jerked around it, frantic, like the legs of a spider that’s been stepped on but refuses to die.
Teaching, writing, painting: it was too much for a body that no longer felt like mine. I was plagued by nightmares—snapshots from the forest reserve where I’d worked before moving. The place that inspired my thesis, now rendered eerie in sleep.
At her worst, Virgo believes accomplishment must be earned through suffering, and beauty only arises from critical self-denial. That’s how I navigated the end of my degree: one brutal day at a time, hanging on by a thread.
Unable to convince myself I’d be okay, I turned to tarot—pulling cards again and again, hoping for something bright enough to breathe hope back into me. The Sun. The Star. Something radiant, flashy. Instead, the same card kept showing up: the Eight of Pentacles.
I’d stand there in my black apron, surrounded by half-painted panels, and stare. The man on the card wore a black apron too. Content at his bench, he silently worked away. What was wrong with me? Why couldn’t I just be grateful for the privilege of being here—funded to make art, living a dream I’d worked so hard for?
Despite knowing better, I felt like the card was taunting me, and I refused to accept its message. Acquiescence came months later, long after I’d clawed my way through my thesis defense, my show came down, and the dust began to settle.
The Eight of Pentacles isn’t concerned with glamour or sudden revelation. Like Virgo, it cares about the process. Devotion. Repetition without reward. Consistency as reverence, not a test of character.
I had longed to glimpse a sparkling future. Instead, I received a map of how to get there. That’s the hidden magic of Virgo, an earth sign and priestess of refinement: She sanctifies the process. Where Pisces opens the channel for inspiration, Virgo tends to craft.
Her gift is in the willingness to return: to the page, the canvas, the practice. Again and again. Earth moves slowly, after all. When Pisces dissolves into mist to merge with the divine, Virgo draws moisture from the air and waters the garden. Once she does, petals unfurl, shimmering with dew.
Mercury: Your Body Knows the Strategy
I don’t remember a time when my thoughts weren’t racing. As a child, I would swing my arms in tandem with their awful tempo, my mother singsonging, "Elisa, are you trying to fly away?"
Sometimes I was.
As I got older and learned to pluck my useless feathers, the flitting didn’t stop. It became a leg, always in motion; a hand scrawling butterflies in the margins of textbooks, and a simmering unease that boiled over into rage.
When you think of a scatterbrain, you think of someone airy. Not me. Even empty space weighed too heavy on my skin. This restless momentum was framed as mythic rather than medical. A predisposition, not a disorder. The movement was at home in me; I just wasn’t at home in my body.
My innate restlessness is why I’ve always felt a connection to Mercury, Virgo’s planetary ruler. In mythology, Mercury is often cast as a trickster, but his mischief is deliberate. He is strategy in motion. Under his influence, Virgo becomes watchful, strategic.
One of Mercury’s ancient titles is “interpreter” or “translator.” When channeled through Virgo, Mercury offers us a way to bridge vision and execution: to translate the dream into actionable parts.
Anyone who speaks multiple languages knows direct translations lack resonance. A good translator treats their task as an art form. Likewise, structuring a creative practice isn’t a rigid formula: it’s an intuitive act. There’s no one-size-fits-all roadmap. You have to stay anchored in your vision, then transmute it into aligned action, without getting trapped in the details.
Finding the right strategies begins by dropping into your body and treating its sensations as data. This is how Mercury works through Virgo: he invites us to observe our reactions with curiosity. What feels expansive? What feels constricting? That’s where your strategy begins. Not from an abstract plan.
Mercury is a messenger, and our bodies are always communicating. The language each body speaks may differ—shaped by trauma, illness, or circumstance—but the more fluently we learn to listen, the sooner we can translate vision into form.
VI: Feeding Your Familiars
The Sixth House is Virgo’s domain, sitting opposite the Twelfth on the zodiacal wheel. Where the Twelfth harbors wild creatures, the Sixth rules over the domesticated. Where the Twelfth calls for release from the body, the Sixth demands its care. Daily rituals and the responsibilities they support are all Sixth House matters.
These topics might feel less glamorous than the mysticism of the Twelfth House, but glamour isn’t the point. The magic of the Sixth lies in the daily grind: the relief of finally sending the email you’ve been avoiding, rewashing the laundry that sat damp for too long, or flossing your teeth before bed.
Ordinary daily maintenance may seem unremarkable, but much of what we call folk magic lives in the mundane.
For me, it's as simple as putting on a mano cornuto every morning: a pendant meant to ward off the evil eye. Many others do the same without thinking of it as magic at all—no more esoteric than slipping on shoes before heading out of the house.
Sometimes the closer we are to something, the less mysterious it feels. Can there be wonder without mystery? I think so, in the form of reverence. Reverence for the familiarity of my husband’s hands as he clasps the chain around my neck, reverence for the sandals you slide on before leaving, and the feet that carry you on your path.
Our daily rituals often centre the animate and inanimate beings we share our lives with. In folklore, a familiar is a spirit that helps a witch in her work. Historically, pets or barnyard animals were often suspected of being familiars. While this was due to propaganda, it’s true that mundane tasks—like feeding a household pet—can carry spiritual weight. In tending to the mundane daily, we are also tended to.
For artists, the Sixth House reminds us that magic lives in repetition. Creativity isn’t just a flash of inspiration; it’s built through small, sustained gestures. Taking a sip of water, wiping the dust from your desk, showing up when the spark is dim: these are the acts that make art possible. Visions may belong to the Twelfth. Devotion belongs here.
A Gnarled Beginning
Before I studied archetypes, I lived them. I know now that my Pisces sun is in the Twelfth House: water within water. I like to think that’s why I’ve waded through so many of the archetype’s shadows. It’s easier, sometimes, to frame our experiences as fate. But if I’m honest, I don’t credit divine will for what can be traced to human malice.
Not every creative person grows up believing there’s something wrong with them. But that was true for me, and for many others I know. I carried a knot in my stomach, and over time, I grew around it: gnarled and twisted, like a tree shaped by silent storms.
Maybe the nature of your gnarling was different. Your remedy will be too. Change rarely arrives all at once. More often, it’s a slow series of tangible shifts, the kind that are barely noticeable until you look back and realize they’ve shaped the past five years.
In memoirs, authors always point to the moment that saved them: where they were, what they were doing. I can’t. All I know is that sometime around twenty, I accepted I was alive, despite having flirted with death since childhood. And if I was going to stay alive in this body and mind—so often deemed deficient—something had to give.
I quit my retail job, where I spent hours surrounded by fast fashion, grating pop music, and the endless chorus of my own ‘Bonjour, hi,’ echoing each time a customer walked in. Instead, I sent a cold email to a forest reserve, offering to do any work they had to give me. I was still in undergrad for visual art, and the nonprofit typically hired environmental science students from their affiliated university. For me, they made an exception. I never found out why.
Each morning, I drove down a potholed road lined with pines before taking my post in the gatehouse. I kept watch there, part guard, part administrative assistant, noting who came and went. The cottage smelled of damp wood and mouse droppings. Occasionally, something would die under the floorboards, and the scent was unbearable. Even then, I preferred it to the burnt plastic smell of freshly steamed polyester. The odour felt more meaningful: a reminder that I was real.
The role came with the usual grievances of any public-facing job, but after work, I had a ritual: walking in the forest with my camera, gathering inspiration from the material world. Those walks, and the photos taken during them, added texture to my once diffuse inner landscape. This softly began to surface in my work. By the time I left the reserve for grad school in Toronto, I was painting differently. Seeing differently.
You can’t just think your way into transformation. We don’t always unravel the ache inside us by dissecting it. Sometimes, we do it by making the next best decision available to us. Just one at a time: steadily, repeatedly. Mine was as small as changing part-time jobs. Yours may be even smaller. This is how you craft a world your dreams can survive in.
Sacred Structure: Your Practice Is Your Magic
For many of us, the idea of “structure” carries a metallic clink. It feels imposed, not inherent. Like typing in your employee login two minutes before a shift. A manager looming nearby, eyes fixed on the screen in case it doesn’t load in time. You know the rules: one minute late, fifteen docked from your pay.
Ecosystems are living structures, composed of defined, interrelated parts. The boundaries between components may blur, but there’s still an internal logic—a crooked spine that keeps the forest standing. Humans didn’t invent structure. We’ve just made it unintuitive.
Pisces and Virgo exist on what’s called an axis in astrology. They could be considered opposites, but they’re more like siblings than strangers. If Pisces harbors intuition, Virgo is the mycelial network: transmitting that spark through the undergrowth, allowing the roots of trees to feed.
Using our understanding of both archetypes, we can create ritual scaffolding that helps our creative practices gain and keep momentum. Like in nature, that momentum might look different depending on the season. That’s what distinguishes human-made work from the rote consistency of a machine.
An Internal Tyrant
The months after finishing grad school were largely a whirlwind. Or they would have been, if a whirlwind could be fossilized in mud. All freneticism, no movement. There were no accolades left to chase, no eyes silently judging… and I felt awful.
Standing still, I had to accept the reality: my shortness of breath wasn’t from running to meet deadlines. It was the way my thoughts had learned to drive me. They had become just another man, face flushed, neck bulging, stomping on the gas to shut me up.
Some of us take a sick pride in how cruel we can be to ourselves. Somewhere along the way, our rightful joy in our accomplishments gets tangled up with the method we used to get there. Too often, we’ve arrived by way of the stick, not the spark. In true Virgo fashion, I accepted that cruelty was no longer pragmatic. I wasn’t this tyrant I had internalized, and I no longer needed him to survive.
I had already met gorgeous wild things, in my dreams and in the woods—felt what it was like to be undiluted by fear or expectation. In my newfound free time, I began to investigate the symbolic logic of what I’d lived through. These occult theories became personal structures: frameworks to live by, not rules to enforce. The structures became a new life.
Held, Not Bound
In astrology, Virgo is often associated with the imagery of the virgin or maiden. This symbolism doesn’t necessarily connote literal chastity, but rather someone who is untethered from any other. A person who is self-contained.
Art and beauty are often devalued, even as they’re endlessly demanded by consumers. That’s why artists must cultivate the ability to discern external noise from their true values.
Self-containment is accomplished through sacred structure. I see cauldrons everywhere: time as a cauldron I can pour into, my body as a cauldron inspiration moves through.
Virgoan parameters create room for the Piscean aspects of my nature to flow. The studio is a watery realm, a vessel that contains my process.
I guard my containment fiercely, mostly from myself. This means putting my phone out of sight so my attention isn’t diverted, and setting a visual timer on my desk, so I can see how the minutes move when I’m not gripping them so tightly.
My task is to be as present as possible—to follow the Piscean siren call of inspiration, even when I feel heavy with the dust of the mundane. When the call doesn’t come, I show up anyway. My presence isn’t a demand. It’s a quiet invitation.
A Vision With a Spine
Those who dismiss creativity as frivolous lack the conviction to see their own dreams through. As an artist, you unearth bones in the depths of your unconscious and fashion a new spine. It’s anything but airy. Neptune sends you an impulse on the breeze, but Mercury makes it tender flesh.
The creative process demands structure, not rigidity. We understand this intuitively, but the belief that progress requires mindless adherence still gets in our way. A dream can’t be forced into blooming. Jupiter asks you to sing the vision hymns instead.
The soil of your work may be watered with sweat and tears, but the sacrifice must be freely given. Creativity is not a cruel divinity. Conversion under duress doesn’t count.
A sacred structure and a tyrannical one both demand commitment: thirty minutes of writing before you head to work, or ten minutes of planning a new drawing. But in a sacred structure, there is no damnation. No punishment for clumsy words or wandering thoughts. You showed up, and you’ll show up again.
Progress Moves in Circles
We’re taught to see progress as a straight trajectory. An arrow thrust onward. Another line to add to a resume. But creative momentum rarely moves that way. It doubles back, halts, flickers, and transforms. It’s more spiral than ladder. More tidal wave than a well-worn path.
This back and forth can feel like failure, especially when the years come and go with seemingly nothing to show for them. But to have a creative vocation is to be countercultural. Time moves differently for us, because we’re courting inspiration. Sure, we could grit our teeth and get on without her. But then our art wouldn’t breathe.
Creative work is about relationships. Your connection to the process, and your connection to yourself. Progress hinges on your ability to keep trying, even when motivation is low. Momentum comes from the steady sureness of your effort, like water meeting land. The tide’s movements shift throughout the day, and still, we don’t doubt its power.
This is how I made peace with the cycles of my own process: by working in dialogue with seasonality, not against it. Through moon phases, tarot pulls, and the hours of light in a day, I sought external markers to remind me that everything waxes and wanes. Some weeks, I move fast. Others I recede. Momentum doesn't disappear in stillness. It recalibrates.
When we fight this cyclicality, we stall our own growth. The Twelfth House is that of hidden enemies, and sometimes your biggest enemy is yourself. The dreams you chase might be threaded with old shame, half-buried memories, or fears you haven’t named yet. They manifest in your waking hours, interrupting your daily rhythms. You resist, and resist some more.
Creativity is reclamation. An exorcism of what no longer belongs, and a retrieval of what always has. The sensitivity you were told to stifle? The tendency to obsess over a single sentence or brushstroke? These can be gusts that fan the flame of your desire. What haunts you can fuel your most honest work. But only if you name it.
Virgo loves to clarify. In the light of day, she lays your shame on the table, separating the wheat of your longing from the chaff. What do you really want? What are you willing to leave behind to get it? She knows that devotion is more sustainable than pressure. That the soul responds to gentle coaxing, not brute force.
Creative success demands your patience and participation. Not perfection. The Virgo–Pisces axis asks you to stay in tension, to gather what you’ve learned from dreams and nightmares alike, and to weave them through the unique tempo of your life until the cadence carries you.