The zodiac man: Scorpio
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Scorpio, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
Manilius gave Scorpio the genitals, and no later version of the zodiac man moved the assignment: it is one of the more stable placements in the whole scheme, following directly from Scorpio's rulership, ancient and modern both, by Mars and Pluto, and from the sign's association, in nearly every tradition that reads it, with sex, death and what is hidden beneath a surface. The tradition reads a strong Scorpio placement, or the eighth house cusp falling there, as governing the reproductive organs and, more broadly, the body's processes of elimination and renewal, since Scorpio is also read as the sign of what a body sheds and rebuilds. A well supported Scorpio zone is read as vitality that runs deep and recovers from strain rather than being easily depleted; a difficult one is read as trouble that tends to hide rather than announce itself, consistent with the sign's own reputation for concealing what it is actually dealing with until the matter can no longer be avoided. As with every sign in the scheme, the zone only carries real weight where several chart points, not one alone, converge on it.
The story
That Scorpio was given this particular region, and that no later version of the zodiac man moved it, says something about how well the assignment fit an image already old and vivid long before any surviving zodiac man diagram was drawn: the scorpion's sting needed no further explaining to a reader who already knew the sign by that name. The diagram itself belongs to the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in the form it survives in, a standing human figure ringed by the twelve signs, each linked by a drawn line to its zone, reproduced in medical almanacs, Books of Hours and physicians' calendars across Europe in the medieval era. Physicians used the figure, and the rotating volvelle often paired with it, to decide which day was safe for cutting or bleeding a given part of the body, based on where the Moon currently stood.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Scorpio.