The Planets and the Body

The old astrology kept two lists of the body. One ran by sign, head to feet, and is the Zodiac Man. The other ran by planet, and it is the subject of this page. Ptolemy set it out in the second century in the third book of the Tetrabiblos, in the chapter on bodily injuries and diseases. He gave each of the seven planets a sense, a set of organs and a side of the body. William Lilly in 1647 and Nicholas Culpeper in 1655 wrote the English versions of the same list, and the three agree on the outline while differing on several organs.

In the shortest summary the texts assigned the heart and the eyes to the Sun, the stomach and the brain to the Moon, the tongue and the hands to Mercury, the throat, the reins and the womb to Venus, the gall and the left ear to Mars, the lungs and the liver to Jupiter, and the spleen, the bones and the right ear to Saturn. The table lower on this page lays the three lists side by side, cell by cell, so that each source speaks in its own words. The three planets found with telescopes, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, have no entry in any of the texts, and the section on them explains what later handbooks did about that.

The reasoning behind the list was humoral. Each planet carried two of the four qualities, hot or cold and moist or dry, and the organs assigned to it were those that Greek medicine held to share its qualities. That frame is set out first, because without it the list reads as arbitrary. Everything on this page is stated as history. The texts said these things about planets and organs; the page does not, and it describes no reader.

Greek medicine from the Hippocratic writers onward held that the body was governed by four humors, blood, phlegm, yellow bile and black bile, and that each humor carried a pair of the four qualities. Blood was hot and moist, phlegm cold and moist, yellow bile hot and dry, black bile cold and dry. Galen, the physician of the second century whose works the medieval schools took as their textbook, tied the humors to the organs that were held to make or store them, the liver to blood, the gall to yellow bile, the spleen to black bile, and the brain to phlegm, and to the four seasons and the four ages of life. Health in this system was a balance of the four, and a person’s habitual blend was the complexion, later called the temperament. The astrologers took the scheme whole. The planets, in Ptolemy, heated, cooled, moistened and dried by their natures, and so each planet could be matched to a humor and to the organs that produced it. Jupiter, hot and moist, took blood and the liver in the later lists; Saturn, cold and dry, took black bile and the spleen; Mars, hot and dry, took yellow bile and the gall; the Moon, cold and moist, took phlegm and the brain. The temperament guide on this site follows the same four qualities into the scoring of a chart.

Ptolemy opened the first book of the Tetrabiblos with the powers of the planets, and his account became the standard one. The Sun, he wrote, heated and dried. The Moon moistened, chiefly, and warmed a little, because of its nearness to the earth and the vapors it drew up. Saturn cooled and dried, being far from the Sun’s heat and from the Moon’s moisture. Mars dried and burned, by its color and its nearness to the Sun. Jupiter was temperate, heating and moistening in a moderate measure, standing between the cold of Saturn and the heat of Mars. Venus warmed a little and moistened mostly, as the Moon did. Mercury was changeable, drying or moistening by turns according to its distance from the Sun.

From these qualities Ptolemy drew the division that every later text repeats. Jupiter, Venus and the Moon, whose qualities were moist and temperate, he called beneficent. Saturn and Mars, one cold and one burning, he called maleficent. The Sun and Mercury he placed between, taking their character from the planets they were joined with. He sorted the planets a third way as masculine or feminine, and a fourth as diurnal or nocturnal, and all four sortings governed how a planet was weighed in any reading.

Lilly’s planet chapters in Christian Astrology give the same natures with a few changes of emphasis. Where Ptolemy’s Venus was mostly moist and a little warm, Lilly wrote her as temperately cold and moist, the lesser fortune. Where Ptolemy’s Mercury had no fixed quality, Lilly wrote him as cold and dry by nature and otherwise the companion of whatever planet he stood with. Culpeper followed Lilly. The table on this page gives each classical planet the nature the three sources most often agreed on, and marks Mercury as changeable rather than forcing a vote.

The table has three source columns for the seven classical planets, with Ptolemy first and the two English writers after him, and a fourth column that is empty for the classical seven and filled, as a later addition, for the modern three. The cells are the standard readings of the three works. None of them has yet been checked line by line against the text, so the works are named without a page or chapter number and the whole table is to be read as provisional.

The three sources agree most on Saturn and the Sun. All three gave Saturn the spleen, the bones and the right ear, and Lilly and Culpeper added the teeth. All three gave the Sun the heart and the eyes, and Ptolemy added the brain and the sinews, which the English writers moved elsewhere. For the Moon the stomach stands in every column, and Lilly and Culpeper added the brain and the bladder where Ptolemy wrote the belly and the womb. For Mercury the tongue stands in every column, with Ptolemy adding the bile and the English writers the brain and the hands. For Mars the left ear is the one item all three share; Ptolemy and Lilly gave the kidneys, Lilly and Culpeper the gall and the blood as heat.

The liver is the clearest disagreement. Ptolemy assigned it to Venus, together with the flesh and the sense of smell. Lilly assigned it to Jupiter, with the lungs, the ribs, the blood and the seed, and Culpeper did the same while also listing it under Venus. The move follows the humoral frame: once Jupiter carried blood and the liver was held to make blood, the organ went to the planet. The womb moved in the same direction, from the Moon in Ptolemy to Venus in Lilly and Culpeper, and the arteries moved from Jupiter in Ptolemy to the Sun in Culpeper.

Ptolemy’s list has a structure the English lists dropped. He gave each planet a sense: sight to the Sun, taste to the Moon, speech to Mercury, smell to Venus, touch to Jupiter, and hearing split between Mars on the left and Saturn on the right. He also gave the Sun the right-hand parts and the Moon the left-hand parts of the body. Lilly kept a trace of this in the rule that the Sun signified the right eye of a man and the Moon the left, with the sides reversed for a woman. The rest of the senses fell out of the tables by the seventeenth century, and the organs took their place.

A second principle runs under both lists. Where a sign and its ruling planet were given the same region, the sign list and the planet list reinforced each other, and the astrologers read the two together. Leo and the Sun both carried the heart; Scorpio and Mars both carried the organs of the groin; Capricorn and Saturn both carried the knees and the bones. The Zodiac Man guide sets out the sign list in full and describes where the planet list appears to have pulled a sign’s region toward its ruler’s organ, as with the heart moving to Leo.

Uranus was first identified as a planet in 1781, Neptune in 1846 and Pluto in 1930. Ptolemy, Lilly and Culpeper knew seven planets and wrote lists for seven, so the three modern planets have no entry in any of the texts this page draws on. The table marks their classical columns empty rather than filling them, because an empty cell is the historical fact.

Astrologers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries wanted the new planets to fit the old frame, and the common method was analogy with a sign. Once a handbook had given Uranus a kinship with Aquarius, it gave Uranus the nervous system and the legs by extension from the sign’s region and from the planet’s supposed suddenness. Once Neptune was paired with Pisces, the handbooks gave it the feet, the lymph and the fluids of the body. Once Pluto was paired with Scorpio, they gave it the organs of elimination and the processes of breaking down and rebuilding. The table’s fourth column records those additions as what twentieth-century handbooks said, not as part of the tradition.

The distinction matters for how this site reads the planets. The pages for Uranus, Neptune and Pluto in the planet series say plainly that the texts have no entry, and report the handbook additions as such. A reader who sees a modern planet given an organ as if Ptolemy had written it is reading a twentieth-century book, not a second-century one, and the table here keeps the two apart by column.

A planet’s place in the lists was only the start of a reading. The texts then asked how the planet stood in the chart, and the answer governed what they made of it. The first measure was dignity. A planet in its own sign or its exaltation was read as strong and acting according to its nature; one in its detriment or its fall, or peregrine with no dignity at all, was read as debilitated and acting confusedly. Lilly gave a table of points for each dignity and debility and summed them, and his chapters on sickness told the reader to weigh the lord of the sixth and the lord of the Ascendant by that score.

The second measure was the planet’s relation to the Sun. A planet within a few degrees of the Sun was called combust, and the texts read it as burned up and hidden, unable to show its nature. One a little farther off was under the Sun’s beams, a milder version of the same debility. A planet in the very heart of the Sun, cazimi, was read the opposite way, as fortified. Lilly set exact spans for each state in degrees, which this page gives in words only, and read a combust significator of sickness as a disease hidden from the physician.

The third measure was motion. A retrograde planet, moving backward against the order of the signs as seen from the earth, was read by the texts as a significator that went back on itself. In Lilly’s rules for a decumbiture a retrograde lord of the sixth was read for a disease that returned or changed its course, and a retrograde lord of the Ascendant for a sick person who relapsed. A planet about to turn direct was read as about to mend. Combined with the qualities, these measures let the astrologer say whether the humor a planet carried was held to be in excess or in defect.

Each of these rules is a statement about the method, and this page gives them in that spirit. A dignified Saturn in a seventeenth-century reading meant a strong Saturn, and a strong Saturn in the sixth meant, to Lilly, a long cold disease of the kind the spleen and the bones were assigned. The planet pages set out dignity, combustion and retrograde for each planet as what the texts said they signified, never as what they do to anyone, and that is the only sense in which they appear on this site.

The planet lists were not medicine, even in their own century. Lilly was an astrologer, not a physician, and his chapters on sickness are rules for judging a chart, not for examining a patient. Culpeper trained as an apothecary, translated the London dispensatory into English against the wishes of the College of Physicians, and wrote his decumbiture book for readers who already had a Galenic physician’s training. In both men the astrology sat beside the medicine of the day and borrowed its vocabulary; it did not replace it, and the physicians of the period who used it used it as one sign among many.

The lists are also correspondences, not anatomy. The texts assigned the liver to Venus or Jupiter because of the qualities each was held to share, not from any observation of livers. When Ptolemy gave the right ear to Saturn and the left to Mars he was completing a pattern of sides and senses, and the pattern is the point. A reader who takes the table as a map of what a planet does to an organ has mistaken a scheme of likenesses for a claim about cause, which no text on this page makes.

That is why this site states every entry in the past tense and names its source, and why no page in the family reads a chart for anyone’s health. The notice at the top of the page says what the page is, and the notice at the foot says what it is not. The table is a record of what three writers listed, and the planet pages that follow it keep the same frame, planet by planet.

The planet pages take each of the ten planets in turn. Each one gives the planet’s entry from the three texts, its nature and the signs it ruled, what the tradition read for it in the first house and in the sixth, how its dignity, combustion and retrograde motion entered the reading, and generated figures for its stays by sign and its share of time in the sixth house. The 6th house guide explains the house those readings were made in and why the cusp sign depends on the house system.

The Zodiac Man guide gives the companion list by sign, with the four sources set side by side, and the hub page on medical astrology places the two lists beside the four temperaments and the reading of a nativity for vitality. The temperament guide follows the four qualities, which this page introduced under the planets, into the scoring of a chart. The body map calculator, when it is live, draws a chart’s planets on the Zodiac Man figure by sign and makes no use of the planet list at all, since the figure is a sign list and nothing more.