This whole ridiculous journey started when I ran into my cousin, Brenda, at the grocery store last week. She was going on and on about how she was planning her “Pisces season retreat.” I just stood there, holding a bag of oranges, blinking at her. I knew Brenda was born May 15th. May. We all know May is Taurus territory, maybe Gemini if you catch the very tail end. I thought she was joking, trying to pull my leg.
I asked her straight up, “Brenda, what are you talking about? You’re a Bull. You’re stubborn and grounded, just like May babies are supposed to be.” She got this seriously smug look and pulled out her phone. She showed me a screenshot of some obscure online calendar, probably something someone whipped up in 1998, insisting that May was part of the Pisces range. She insisted her family had always followed this chart and that the typical astrology dates were “modern fabrications.”
My blood just started boiling. Not because I care that much about what constellation she identifies with, but because I absolutely hate when people cling onto misinformation just because “Grandma said so.” That whole incident fueled my investigation. I drove home immediately and kicked off the project: Figure out why anyone, anywhere, thinks you can be born in May and still be a Pisces.
The Great Calendar Hunt: Unpacking the Confusion
I opened up every browser window I had. I pulled up the standard tropical zodiac dates first, just to confirm the baseline. February 19th to March 20th. Done. May 15th is squarely Taurus. No argument there.
I moved on to the usual suspects that cause date confusion. I searched specifically for the sidereal zodiac, the one that accounts for the precession of the equinoxes—basically, the one that shifts everything back almost a full sign because the Earth has moved over 2,000 years. I found five different sidereal calculators online, because even those guys can’t agree. I plugged in May 15th, 1988 (Brenda’s birthday). What did I find?
- Calculator 1 (Vedic): Aries.
- Calculator 2 (Lahiri Ayanamsa): Aries.
- Calculator 3 (Fagan/Bradley): Aries/Taurus cusp.
- Calculator 4 (Modern Astronomers): Still Taurus, or maybe the very start of Gemini if you count the Ophiuchus zone, which most systems don’t even use.
Not a single system, even the ancient messy ones, pointed to Pisces. Pisces had long finished its run by the time April even started in the sidereal system. My original hypothesis—that Brenda was following a shift caused by a different star chart—was immediately debunked by my own actions.
Tracking Down the Source of Brenda’s Bad Data
I called Brenda back and demanded she send me the name of the source she was using. She mumbled something about the “Aetherian Spiritual Guide to the Stars” or something equally vague. This is where the real digging began. I had to find this book, or at least a reference to it.
I spent the entire evening tracking down scans of obscure 20th-century astrology texts on archive sites. I sifted through dozens of pages of charts that looked like they were drawn up with crayons and magic markers. Finally, around 2 AM, I hit paydirt.
I found a community’s self-published guide from the late 1970s. This community, which seemed to be based somewhere in rural Oregon, had decided they were going to redefine the zodiac entirely based on their specific spiritual interpretations, completely ignoring astronomical and mathematical fact. They created their own arbitrary system. In their chart, they decided to stretch the Pisces designation for an insanely long time, making it span late February all the way to… wait for it… May 20th.
Why did they do this? The book didn’t say. It just claimed that Pisces was a much “stronger energetic force” in the Northern Hemisphere spring months and therefore its influence must extend further. Essentially, they made it up.
The Final Realization
I realized Brenda wasn’t confused about tropical versus sidereal. She was clinging to a historical error—a niche, completely non-standard, custom-made calendar used by a small group fifty years ago. She was a Taurus who had been told she was a Pisces by a chart that literally nobody else uses.
The next morning, I sent Brenda the scan of the ridiculous 1970s chart and the standard tropical chart, side-by-side. I typed out a simple message: “You were born in May. You are a Taurus. This chart you follow is not astrology; it’s just someone’s creative writing.”
She called me back, offended but quiet. She admitted her grandmother had kept that old spiritual guide. She said she just always assumed it was the “real” star chart. I closed my laptop, satisfied. Can you be a Pisces if you were born in May? Absolutely not, unless you choose to believe in a chart invented by a small group of folks decades ago who just decided to rewrite the universe. I wasted two days proving a simple date range, but now, when anyone mentions the May Pisces myth, I know exactly where it came from. It wasn’t the stars; it was a dusty book from Oregon.
