The zodiac man: Cancer
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Cancer, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Manilius gave Cancer the chest, and the medieval zodiac man kept the assignment essentially unchanged, extending it in most later tellings to the breasts specifically, the region directly below Gemini's shoulders and arms and above Leo's heart and back. The tradition reads a strong Cancer placement, or an afflicted planet standing there, as bearing first on the chest, the breasts, and the stomach just beneath them, since Cancer's rulership by the Moon ties the sign to digestion and to the body's fluids as much as to feeling; a difficult Cancer is read as a constitution sensitive there, quick to be unsettled by worry, while a well supported one is read as nurturing in the most literal sense, a body built to sustain another. As with every sign in the scheme, the zone is drawn not from one placement but from several read together, the Sun, the rising sign, Venus, Mars, the Moon and the eighth house cusp, so the chest recurs as a zone of real emphasis only when two or more of those points fall in Cancer at once, rather than from the sign's presence anywhere in the chart.
The story
Cancer's zone sits at the emotional centre of the whole scheme for a reason the tradition considers obvious rather than incidental: the Moon rules both the sign and, in the older physiology the zodiac man assumes, the body's fluids and its capacity to be moved, so the chest, the seat of breath and of the heartbeat felt through it, was a natural home for the Moon's own sign. The zodiac man diagram itself is medieval and Renaissance in its familiar form, most often a standing figure surrounded by the twelve signs with a line drawn from each to its bodily seat, copied into medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars across most of Europe in the medieval era. Its use was blunt and practical: a physician was expected to check where the Moon stood before bleeding, cutting or purging a patient, and to avoid working on whichever region the current sign governed, a rule serious enough that Europe was, at the time, required by law to calculate the Moon's position before any such procedure could go ahead.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Cancer.