Man, 2023. What a ride, right? Especially for anyone I know who’s a Pisces. My buddy, Mark, a total textbook dreamy Fish, looked like he’d been run over by a truck by the end of the year. He kept telling me, “Astrology said March was supposed to be the worst because of Saturn, but dude, something else crushed me.”
I heard that from enough people that the whole standard astrology answer started to piss me off. Everyone just parroting the Saturn-in-Pisces line. Yeah, that’s heavy, slow-moving energy, but a lot of the time the sharp, sudden pain comes from something else entirely, something that just jumps you.
I told Mark I was gonna figure it out. Not just skim some online crap—I was gonna run the whole damn chart for 2023, month by month, and see where the actual celestial beatdown happened for a typical late-degree Pisces. I wasn’t using fancy software; I was doing it old school, because that’s how you find the truth, right? You gotta get your hands dirty.
The Great 2023 Chart Scrutiny
The first thing I did was drag out my old ephemeris books. Yeah, paper, I know. But it makes you focus. I didn’t just look at the Moon or the Sun. I logged all the big hitters, the ones that make you cry in the bathroom:
- Saturn: Already known to be pressing in after March.
- Mars: Fast, angry, and makes things happen now. Key suspect.
- Mercury Retrograde: The classic chaos starter.
- Eclipses: The universe’s giant reset button—usually messy.
I started punching the data into a monster spreadsheet I built on my clunky old laptop. I used a fake Pisces chart—20 degrees—just to give the transits something solid to hit. Then I slammed the data in, month by month, looking for the nasty stuff: squares, oppositions, and those moments when Mars just decides to pick a fight with a big, slow-moving planet like Jupiter or Neptune.
I cruised through the spring. March was stressful, sure, with Saturn hitting the sign, but it was a dull ache, not a knife twist. April and May had some Jupiter action, maybe a little too much optimism that leads to trouble later.
I hit the summer. The squares from Gemini/Virgo were annoying—the usual mutable sign back-and-forth—but Mark wasn’t collapsing yet.
Then I slammed into the Fall, and my jaw dropped. It wasn’t the expected month at all.
The Surprising Answer: October’s Stealth Attack
Everyone focuses on Saturn slowly grinding away, but they miss the quick, deep wounds. I identified October 2023 as the true absolute worst month for Pisces, and here’s why, based on the chart I built:
- Mars Enters Scorpio (Opposite the Pisces Ruler): Mars is fire; Scorpio is deep water. It meant deep, painful confrontations—the kind that feel unavoidable. It was applying a hard square to Jupiter and a soft trine to Pisces itself, but Mars is messy.
- The Eclipses: October had a heavy Eclipse season (in Libra and Taurus). Eclipses are always dramatic, but these were activating the house axis of shared resources, death/rebirth, and values for Pisces. It was sudden, relationship-altering stuff.
- Mercury Retrograde in the Late Fall: Messing with communication when the eclipses were already making things unstable.
The total number of hard, fast transits in October—the quick, clean shots—far outweighed the slow, grinding fear of Saturn in March.
How I Knew This Was the Real Deal
And here’s the kicker, the part that proved my homegrown research was spot on. I only sent Mark my findings in December, telling him, “Hey, forget March, I think your crisis was in October.”
He called me back immediately, sounding drained. He recounted his entire 2023 story, and it made the chart analysis terrifyingly real.
He remembered getting the notice in March about budget cuts (Saturn fear). He spent the summer worried, but things were okay.
But in early October? His long-term partnership, which everyone thought was solid, just imploded without warning. No dramatic lead-up, just a sudden, catastrophic end—exactly when the Libra/Aries Eclipse axis was hitting his core relationship houses and Mars was stirring the deep resentment pot.
He then described a major financial setback a week later, directly coinciding with the second Eclipse and the Mercury mess. He didn’t just feel heavy; he was knocked down. It wasn’t a slow build; it was an ambush.
He asked me how I knew, because he’d barely told anyone what happened in October. And honestly, I didn’t. The charts told me. The quick, nasty transits are the ones that drop the hammer, not the slow, obvious ones. I showed him the spreadsheet and the transits hitting his 8th and 7th houses, and he just shook his head. He admitted all the online astrologers were talking crap about March being the worst, but it was October that actually put him in the ER with stress.
So, yeah. My personal practice confirmed it. Don’t listen to the hype. Do the work yourself. When Mars and the Eclipses align for a quick one-two punch, that’s when your life truly changes for the worst, and for Pisces in 2023, that was absolutely October.
