The zodiac man: Aries
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Aries, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
The old zodiac man, homo signorum, assigns one region of the body to each of the twelve signs in order, reading the body as a small copy of the whole sky laid out from head to foot, and Aries, first of the twelve, is given the head itself, along with the eyes and, in some tellings, the adrenal glands and the body's own blood pressure. Manilius set out the scheme in the first century, in the second book of his Astronomica, opening the descent with Aries exactly where the zodiac itself begins. The tradition reads this literally in medical astrology: an affliction to a planet standing in Aries, or to the sign's own ruler, Mars, is read as a weakness that shows first in the head, whether as headache, a wound to the face or scalp, or trouble with the eyes, while a well aspected Aries is read as a strong, decisive constitution, quick reflexes and a head for leading rather than following. Zones are drawn from several points at once, the Sun, the rising sign, Venus, Mars, the Moon and the cusp of the eighth house, so a single body may carry more than one sign's zone at once, and Aries recurring among them doubles the emphasis the tradition places on the head and the face.
The story
The medieval and Renaissance zodiac man outlived Manilius by well over a thousand years because it answered a practical medical question rather than a decorative one: European medicine, from the late Middle Ages until well into the early modern period, held that a physician should avoid cutting, bleeding or purging a body part while the Moon transited the sign that governed it, on the reasoning that the Moon's presence there made the zone unusually sensitive to interference. Aries opens the descent in every surviving version of the diagram, the standing human figure ringed by the twelve signs that appears across the medieval era in calendars, devotional Books of Hours and treatises on philosophy, astrology and medicine, surviving copies running from a fifteenth century Welsh manuscript to a woodcut in a 1702 almanac, each sign drawn with a line running to its zone on the body, head to Aries first and feet to Pisces last. The diagram was regularly paired with a volvelle, a rotating paper wheel that let its owner find the Moon's current sign without arithmetic, and physicians across Europe were, in this period, required by law to calculate the Moon's position before treating a patient or undertaking any procedure, so bleeding a patient's head while the Moon stood in Aries counted as a real and avoidable risk rather than an old superstition kept out of caution alone.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Aries.