Divinity Atlas

Sacred Correspondences
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The Liver as the General

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The Liver as the General

The Liver is one of the five zang and the ruler of the Wood phase, paired with the Gallbladder. Its correspondences are spring, anger, the eyes as its orifice, the sinews and tendons as its tissue, and the east.

Its two named functions are among the most used ideas in Chinese medicine. The first is that it stores the blood, releasing it during activity and receiving it back during rest, which is why the tradition assigns the Liver's horary hours to the deepest part of the night. The second is that it ensures the free and smooth movement of qi throughout the body, so that any constraint or stagnation anywhere is referred back to the Liver's condition. That second function has no counterpart in the western organ at all, and it is the one a practitioner in this tradition invokes most often.

The classical office is the general, the one who plans and devises strategy, paired with the Gallbladder's office of decision.

The atlas records the western scheme separately, where the liver goes to Jupiter and stands in Galenic physiology as the origin of the venous blood and the seat of the natural spirits. Both traditions gave the liver a central place; they gave it different central places, and the atlas does not reconcile them. Nothing in either is a statement about hepatic function.

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