The zodiac man: Aquarius
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Aquarius, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Manilius gave Aquarius the lower leg as a whole, and the table on Wikipedia's Zodiac Man page adds to that same region the ankle, the calf and some blood vessels, the stretch that runs between Capricorn's knees and Pisces's feet. The page dates the concept of the zodiac man to the Hellenistic era, with its earliest exposition in Manilius's Astronomica, at book II, lines 453 to 465, and book IV, lines 701 to 710, and it pairs the figure with the medical practice of its day, in which the Moon's position had to be calculated before any procedure on a patient. The zone is read only through that correspondence of sign and body; the page gives no separate reading of illness or temperament for Aquarius itself.
The story
Aquarius sits second to last in the zodiac man's descent down the body, and the medieval diagrams that fix it there are part of the same tradition that produced the standing figure surrounded by the twelve signs, which Wikipedia's own account describes as appearing most frequently in calendars, devotional Books of Hours and treatises on philosophy, astrology and medicine in the medieval era, each zone marked by a line drawn from the sign to its place on the body. The logic of the descent itself, head to feet, sign by sign in zodiacal order, is older than any single surviving manuscript and is already implicit in Manilius's first century Astronomica, which lists the body from Aries down in the same order the medieval copies keep. The diagram's use was medical rather than decorative: a rotating paper volvelle, often bound in alongside it, let a physician find the Moon's current sign without calculation, and the rule that followed, do not cut, bleed or purge the zone the Moon currently occupies, was one Europe was, at the time, required by law to observe before any such procedure could go ahead.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Aquarius.