The zodiac man: Libra
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Libra, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Libra is another sign where the sources build on each other rather than simply repeat. Manilius assigned it the buttocks alone, the region just below Virgo's belly; the wider zodiac man tradition widens the zone considerably, to the hips, the lower back, the kidneys and the endocrine glands, treating the whole lumbar and pelvic region, and the balance the endocrine system keeps within it, as Libra's. Libra's rulership by Venus ties the widened zone, in the tradition's reading, to balance in the most physical sense as well as the metaphorical one: the lower back is the body's own fulcrum, the point around which the rest of the frame keeps or loses its poise, and the endocrine glands keep a chemical balance the tradition finds a fitting home for the sign of the scales. A strong or afflicted Libra placement is read first through the kidneys and the lower back, a region the tradition treats as sensitive to imbalance of every kind, physical, dietary and emotional alike, and a well supported one is read as a constitution that carries weight evenly and recovers its footing quickly after a strain.
The story
The widening of Libra's zone from Manilius's single region to the moderns' fuller list follows the same pattern as several other signs in the zodiac man scheme: a physician redrawing the old diagram extended the zone from one part of the body to the wider system it sits within, in Libra's case from a single point in the pelvis to the whole lumbar and glandular region around it. The zodiac man diagram that carried the assignment forward through the Middle Ages is the familiar standing figure surrounded by the twelve signs, copied into medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars across Europe in the medieval era, its purpose entirely practical: a physician consulted it, together with a rotating paper volvelle for finding the Moon's current sign without calculation, before deciding whether it was safe to bleed, cut or purge a given part of the body that day. The rule, avoid the zone the Moon currently occupies, was one Europe was, at the time, required by law to observe rather than a matter of private superstition.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Libra.