Almagest

The library · The body zones

The zodiac man: Sagittarius

general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Sagittarius, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)

What the tradition reads

Manilius gave Sagittarius the thighs, the long muscle below Scorpio's genitals and above Capricorn's knees; the wider zodiac man tradition later widened the zone to the legs, the hips and the groin as well. The tradition reads a strong Sagittarius placement as a constitution suited to movement, an easy stride and a hip and thigh structure that carries the rest of the body well over distance, and reads Jupiter, the sign's ruler, as adding a generosity to the reading, growth, expansion, and a body that tends toward largeness of frame rather than compactness. A difficult Sagittarius placement is read as trouble settling in the hips or the thighs, sometimes brought on by exactly the restlessness the sign is known for, the strain of a body pushed to keep moving past what it can comfortably sustain. As with the rest of the scheme, the zone matters most where several chart points converge on the sign together rather than by the sign's presence alone.

The story

Sagittarius carries one of the zodiac's oldest composite images, the centaur, half man and half horse, drawn mid stride and built, in every telling, for covering ground; the sign's zodiac man assignment, the thighs and the ground they cover, sits comfortably alongside that older image without needing it as its own proof. The diagram that carried the assignment forward through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance is the familiar standing figure ringed by the twelve signs, each linked to its bodily region by a drawn line, appearing in medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars across most of Europe in the medieval era; the figure was consulted, together with a rotating volvelle for finding the Moon's current sign without arithmetic, before a physician decided whether a given part of the body could safely be cut, bled or purged that day. The rule, that the Moon's own zone should be left alone while the Moon stood in it, was one Europe was, at the time, required by law to observe rather than a private superstition kept on the side.

Written from

Corpus key body-zone:Sagittarius.