Mouth of the Deep: On the Fixed Star Fomalhaut

Fishing for the whale with explosive balls, 1884.

Today’s newsletter is a deep dive on the fixed star Fomalhaut, found in the mouth of the Pisces Austrinus constellation. You don’t need to have much technical knowledge of astrology to appreciate the stars. We have been writing stories and praying to them since we have been looking up. This essay is meant to help readers connect more deeply to these divine messengers and better understand ourselves. If you want to know if Fomalhaut touches your chart, see if you have any planets or significant placements within 2º of 4º Pisces. Even if not, you have so much to learn from this fierce, transformative star.

If you want to learn more about how the stars touch and guide your beautiful life, and what your soul is asking of you, book a fixed star reading with me ⭐. You have to feel the magic of the stars yourself to believe it.

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Fomalhaut is a bright star marking the mouth of the celestial fish— no, not Pisces, a different one. Piscis Austrinus, the Southern fish, lies, as illustrated above, at the foot of Aquarius. Whereas the Pisces constellation depicts two fish swimming in opposite direections tied together by a cord, Piscis Austrinus stands alone. The name for its brightest star comes from the Arabic “Fum al Hut”, “the fish’s mouth”, the place where the border between inside and outside is opened.

Even amongst its aquatic counterparts, this star stands out. Aratus tells us that “[b]elow Aegoceros [Capricorn] before the blasts of the South wind swims a Fish, facing Cetus [the Whale], alone and apart from the former Fishes”.¹ Amidst the sea full of other creatures, the Southern fish swims in solitude. The constellation is also depicted swallowing the water offered by the water bearer, which immediately feels contradictory: What good is water to a fish already submerged in the celestial sea? Already, Fomalhaut’s is raising more questions than it answers, beckoning us farther and farther from shore.

Yet we know these questions to be important because Fomalhaut carries the unique distinction of being royal. Only four stars— the others being Regulus, Aldebaran and Antares— are considered royal stars, each associated with a cardinal directions and marking the ancient solstices and equinoxes. Further, the royal stars each indicate the potential for great eminence and success with a different flavor depending on the star.

I often tell clients that Fomalhaut’s royalty hearkens back to when rulers were said to be the descendants of or literal reincarnations of the gods. There’s a divine, otherworldly, quality to Fomalhaut. It portends the ability to win the hearts and souls of the people through being a vessel for inspiring visions and glamours that exist beyond conventional reality. Fomalhaut speaks in poetry, stokes the imagination, helps us find hidden treasure, both materially and mystically. But this star, like the other royals, also comes with a warning: there is a nemesis to be avoided if you don’t wish to fall from grace and lose all that you have gained. For Fomalhaut, that nemesis is self-delusion. If you believe too much in your own fantasies, you risk forsaking both the magic and the mundane, losing any victory or power you may have attained.

But I’m getting ahead of myself. First, let’s get simple. What does the symbol of the fish tell us about the magic Fomalhaut contains?

Swimmer of the Depths

It’s worth noting that this constellation has been associated with the aquatic realm since the dawn of human civilization. Fragments of Ancient Euphratean celestial maps label it with the Sumero-Akkadian title Si’a-Do-Kha-Bi, "Constellation-Fish- of-the-Canal”,² this time specifying that the fish exists in some kind of man-made enclosure— did the fish wander in or was he caught? Symbolically, when one catches a fish, one has attained some sort of psychic or spiritual power. The act of fishing, which requires proper preparation combined with plenty of pregnant waiting, mirrors the spiritual path, which does not guarantee any gains or insight save for that with which spirit graces you on a timeline not your own. Zen teacher John Tarrant puts it this way: “If spiritual openings are accidents, as a number of teachers have pointed out, then the spiritual work of meditation makes us accident-prone, susceptible to the imagination of eternity, the wit of God”.³ Like its piscine imagery, Fomalhaut natives are gifted with an innate connection to the winding, relational spiritual process and the gifts that come with receiving its messages— namely the ability to drop into meditative or trance states that allow you to witness the water around you, so to speak.

Like spirit itself, fish also represent the power of the waters as “origin and preservers of life” and “[emblems] of divinities of love”, as well as good fortune, both materially and mystically.⁴ The word for “fish” in China is a homophone for “abundance,” while in Japan the carp is a homophone for love.⁵ In Hindu mythology, Vishnu saved humankind from a flood and founded a new race riding in on the back of a fish.⁶ Here we see the spiritual meaning of fish coalesce with all sorts of “wet” significations: love, liberation and material wealth. All of these boons come to us through connection and flow, and are ultimately just tiny pieces of the wondrous, unfathomable whole that the sea represents. As the fish swimming through the vast, unexplored waters, its mouth open, Fomalhaut represents our ability to be part of the whole and receive all that porousness has to offer, even stretching beyond the known.