The zodiac man: Taurus
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Taurus, for a strong placement there (the Sun, the Ascendant, the Moon, Venus, Mars, or the eighth house cusp)
What the tradition reads
The old zodiac man, homo signorum, assigns one region of the body to each of the twelve signs, reading the body as a small copy of the whole sky laid out from head to foot. Manilius set out the scheme in the first century, in the second book of his Astronomica, and gave Taurus the neck, the region just below the head that Aries governs above it; the wider zodiac man tradition later extended the zone to the throat, the shoulders and the ears as well. The tradition reads this literally in medical astrology: an affliction to a planet standing in Taurus, or to the sign's own ruler, Venus, is read as a weakness that shows first in the throat, the neck, the thyroid, or the voice, while a well aspected Taurus is read as a constitution built for endurance there, a strong and often pleasant speaking or singing voice among its more agreeable signs. Zones are drawn from several points at once, the Sun, the rising sign, Venus, Mars, the Moon and the cusp of the eighth house, so a single body may carry two or three signs worth of zones depending on how the chart falls, and Taurus recurring among them is read as doubling the emphasis on that one region.
The story
The medieval and Renaissance zodiac man outlived Manilius by well over a thousand years because it answered a practical question rather than a merely decorative one: before the emergence of scientific empiricism in the seventeenth century, European medicine held that a physician should avoid cutting, bleeding or purging a body part while the Moon transited the sign that governed it, on the reasoning that the Moon's presence made that zone unusually sensitive to interference. The result is a widely copied diagram, a standing human figure, ringed by the twelve signs, each drawn with a line to its zone, appearing in Books of Hours, medical almanacs and physicians' calendars across Europe in the medieval era, often accompanied by a volvelle, a rotating paper wheel that let its owner find the Moon's current sign without arithmetic. Consulting the diagram before surgery was, in several places, required by law rather than left to a physician's private judgement.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Taurus.