The zodiac man: Leo
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Leo, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Leo is one of the signs on which the sources genuinely disagree, and the disagreement is old enough to be worth stating rather than smoothing over. Manilius, writing in the first century, gave Leo the sides; the table on Wikipedia's Zodiac Man page lists the sides as Leo's primary association and adds the stomach, the heart, the spine, the upper back and the spleen as secondary associations, without stating any reason for the wider list. Where a source prints both a primary and a secondary reading, the tradition here keeps both rather than choosing between them: a strong Leo placement, or the eighth house cusp falling there, is read as bearing on the sides first, with the stomach, heart, spine, upper back and spleen carried as the fuller secondary reading. Beyond this correspondence of sign to body part, the page gives no separate reading of illness or temperament for Leo itself, so the tradition recorded here goes no further than naming which parts a strong or afflicted planet in Leo is read through.
The story
The Zodiac Man concept is dated by Wikipedia's page to the Hellenistic era, with its earliest exposition in Manilius's Astronomica, book II, lines 453 to 465, and book IV, lines 701 to 710, though the same page notes a cuneiform tablet of unknown date recording a nearly identical list of bodily divisions that may or may not predate Manilius. The standing figure ringed by the twelve signs, the form that carries Leo's fuller secondary list forward, appears most frequently in calendars, devotional Books of Hours, and treatises on philosophy, astrology and medicine in the medieval era, among the surviving copies a fifteenth century manuscript from Wales and a woodcut printed in an almanac of 1702, each marking a zone with a line to its place on the body. Physicians used the diagram, and the volvelle, a rotating calendar, that often came with it, to calculate the Moon's position and to avoid a procedure on whichever body part corresponded to the sign the Moon then occupied, a rule Europe was, at the time, required by law to observe before bleeding, cutting or purging a patient.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Leo.