The parts of the body as medical astrology mapped them: the zodiacal man, or melothesia, that assigns each sign a region of the body from Aries at the head to Pisces at the feet. This scheme governed practical medicine for centuries, when to bleed or purge a patient turned on it. Each entry records the region, its ruling sign, and the organs the tradition placed under it.
Facts
Overview
- Entries in the Atlas
- 19
- What Defines This Grouping
- Parts of the body as the correspondence traditions assign them - to a zodiac sign, to a planet, or to a phase. A map of attribution rather than of anatomy, and a historical framework rather than current medical guidance. 1
Origins
- Whose Classification This Is
- The planetary and zodiacal rulerships of the body used in English medical astrology are codified in William Lilly's Christian Astrology, 1647. 2
Attestation
- Era of Attestation
- The zodiacal melothesia, each sign ruling a region of the body from head to feet, is set out in Manilius's Astronomica in the first century CE. 1
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The Body in the Correspondence Traditions
The parts of the body are mapped here by the zodiacal man of medical astrology, which assigns each sign a region of the body, from Aries at the head to Pisces at the feet, the scheme known as melothesia. Other traditions, Chinese and Ayurvedic among them, map the body by their own principles and are treated in their own categories.
A body part in this scheme is a point where the macrocosm meets the microcosm: the same forces held to move the heavens are held to govern the corresponding part of the body, so that the state of the ruling sign bears on the health of what it rules.
Medicine as correspondence
Medical astrology used this mapping to diagnose and to time treatment, bleeding or purging avoided when the Moon was in the sign ruling the affected part, and the zodiacal man was a standard image in medieval and Renaissance medical almanacs. The atlas presents it as a historical framework, not as current medical guidance.
The atlas gives each body part its ruling sign and the organs placed under it. The signs that rule the body parts, and the organs treated in the medical traditions, are treated in their own categories.
Enter a year to compare these entries as the atlas records them at that moment. Leave it empty for the present. A year before the common era is entered with a minus sign, so 44 BCE is minus 44.