The zodiac man: Virgo
general summary of the zodiac man's body assignment for Virgo, 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 in descending order, and Virgo, sixth of the twelve and the last sign of the upper half of the body, is given the belly, extended in most tellings to the wider abdomen and its organs, the intestines, the gallbladder, the pancreas and the liver, the region just below Leo's heart and ribs as the descent continues downward. Manilius set the scheme out in the first century, in the second book of his Astronomica, placing Virgo at the body's own midsection, fittingly for a sign the tradition already reads as governing digestion, discernment and the sorting of what is useful from what is not. The tradition reads this literally in medical astrology: an affliction to a planet standing in Virgo, or to the sign's own ruler, Mercury, is read as a weakness showing first in the stomach, the bowel or the liver, a digestion easily upset by worry, while a well aspected Virgo is read as a hardy constitution for digestion and a metabolism that processes what it takes in efficiently, matching the sign's own reputation for order and careful management. Zones are drawn from several points, the Sun, the rising sign, Venus, Mars, the Moon and the cusp of the eighth house, so Virgo recurring among them doubles the emphasis the tradition places on this one region.
The story
The medieval and Renaissance zodiac man outlived Manilius by well over a thousand years because it answered a practical medical question rather than a decorative one: European medicine, from the late Middle Ages until well into the early modern period, 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 there made the zone unusually sensitive to interference. Virgo's place at the body's midsection, sixth in the descent after Leo and before Libra, is fixed in every surviving copy of the standing human figure ringed by the twelve signs that appears across the medieval era in calendars, devotional Books of Hours and treatises on philosophy, astrology and medicine, surviving copies running from a fifteenth century Welsh manuscript to a woodcut in a 1702 almanac, each sign drawn with a line running to its zone on the body. A rotating paper volvelle, often bound alongside the diagram, let its owner find the Moon's current sign without calculation, and physicians across Europe were, in this period, required by law to calculate the Moon's position before treating a patient or undertaking any procedure, so the rule that followed, do not cut, bleed or purge the zone the Moon currently occupies, held as more than an old superstition kept on the side.
Written from
- Wikipedia, Zodiac man
- Manilius, Astronomica II.453 to 465
Corpus key body-zone:Virgo.