The zodiac man: Pisces
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Pisces, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Manilius closed the zodiac man's descent at Pisces with the feet, the last region of the body and the last sign of the zodiac both, and no later source moved the assignment: it is among the most stable in the whole scheme. The tradition reads Pisces, ruled by Jupiter in the old scheme and Neptune in the modern one, as governing the feet both literally and by extension, the point of contact between the whole standing structure above it and the ground it finally rests on, and reads a strong Pisces placement as unusually sensitive feet, in sensation and sometimes in circulation, a zone quick to register what the rest of the body is carrying. A well supported Pisces zone is read as an intuitive, almost involuntary sense of footing and balance; a difficult one is read as trouble that settles in the feet specifically, swelling, cold or a vulnerability the tradition treats as consistent with Pisces's own reputation for absorbing more than it visibly shows.
The story
That the descent ends where it does, at the feet under the last sign of the wheel, was read by the tradition as more than coincidence: the zodiac man's whole logic runs head to foot in zodiacal order, Aries first at the crown and Pisces last at the sole, so that the body becomes a small, walked out copy of the sky's own sequence, beginning where the year begins and ending where it turns over into the next one. The diagram that fixed this order for a millennium and more is the familiar standing figure ringed by the twelve signs, reproduced across medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars throughout Europe in the medieval era, and consulted, usually alongside a rotating paper volvelle for finding the Moon's current sign, before a physician decided which part of a patient's body was safe to cut, bleed or purge that day. The rule always ran the same direction, leave alone whatever zone the Moon currently occupies, and Pisces, governing the last stop on the circuit, was no exception to it.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Pisces.