The zodiac man: Capricorn
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Capricorn, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Capricorn is a sign the sources expand on rather than disagree about outright. Manilius gave it the knees alone; the wider zodiac man tradition lists the zone as the knees, the shins, the bones generally, the skin, the sinews and the nerves, following Saturn's rulership of the sign into everything in the body that is hard, structural or slow to change, and where the sources differ in this way the tradition keeps the fuller, later list rather than the narrower original. A strong Capricorn placement is read as bearing on the skeleton as a whole and on the skin as the body's outer structure, with the knees, the joint that bends under the body's whole weight, as the zone's oldest and most specific point. A well supported Capricorn zone is read as durability, a frame that wears well over a long life even if it takes strain early; a difficult one is read as stiffness, brittleness or a slowness to heal, consistent with Saturn's own reputation for making a lesson last exactly as long as it needs to.
The story
The widening of Capricorn's zone from Manilius's single joint to the moderns' whole skeleton and skin tracks the sign's own reputation rather than any new anatomical discovery: Saturn, Capricorn's ruler, was already read by the time the medieval zodiac man took its familiar shape as the planet of structure, age, bone and everything durable, so a physician redrawing the old diagram had an obvious reason to extend the zone from one joint to the frame that joint belongs to. The diagram itself, the standing figure ringed by the twelve signs with a line to each zone, is a medieval and Renaissance object above all, copied into medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars across Europe in the medieval era, often paired with a rotating paper volvelle that let its owner find the Moon's current sign without working it out by hand. Its purpose was to time surgery and bloodletting around the Moon's transit, avoiding whichever zone the Moon currently occupied, a rule Europe was, at the time, required by law to observe rather than one left to individual caution.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Capricorn.