The Zodiac Man

The Zodiac Man is a drawing of a standing human figure with the twelve zodiac signs placed on it from head to feet, one sign to one region, in zodiacal order. The texts assigned the head to Aries at the top and the feet to Pisces at the bottom, and set the other ten signs between them in the order in which they rise. Latin writers called the figure homo signorum, the man of the signs, and the scheme behind it is called melothesia, a Greek term for the allotment of the limbs.

The list is older than the picture. Manilius wrote the earliest surviving version in Latin verse during the reigns of Augustus and Tiberius, and Greek, Arabic and Latin writers repeated the same sequence for more than a thousand years. The drawn figure, with a sign painted or printed on each part, belongs to the manuscripts and printed books of the late Middle Ages, where it appeared in calendars, Books of Hours and medical compendia.

Its use was practical rather than decorative. Almanacs printed the figure next to a table of the Moon’s sign for each day. The surgeons of the period held that blood was not to be let from the region whose sign the Moon occupied. That rule is described below as a piece of history, in the past tense. Nothing on this page describes anyone’s body; it describes what the texts listed, how the list traveled, and why the lists differ.

Manilius set out the list in the second book of the Astronomica, in a passage of about a dozen lines. It comes as part of a larger argument: the sky, for Manilius, answered to the human frame part by part, and the signs held the parts in turn as they held the months. Each sign received its region with a verb of allotment or ownership, so that the Ram was allotted the head, the Bull held the neck, and so on down the figure.

The poem has no picture. Manilius described a sequence, and the sequence is the zodiacal order and the order of the body at once. That is the point of the passage. The circle of the sky was read onto a body standing upright, with the first sign at the crown and the last at the soles. G. P. Goold’s English in the Loeb edition keeps that order and renders each term plainly, head, neck, arms and shoulders, breast, flanks, belly, loins, groin, thighs, knees, shins and feet.

Two entries stand out against the later lists. Manilius gave the Lion the flanks, the sides of the trunk, where every later column in the table below gives the heart. He gave the Water-bearer the shins, where Lilly and Culpeper wrote legs and ankles. These are differences between lists and between words, not disagreements about anatomy, and the table sets them out cell by cell so that each source speaks in its own terms.

The table has four columns. The Manilius column follows Goold’s wording. The Ptolemy column records the Greek sign list that Ptolemy presupposed, since his own chapter on the body assigned parts to the planets rather than to the signs, as the next section explains. The Lilly and Culpeper columns are the English wording of the seventeenth century, which added organs to the regions the Latin had named. None of the four references has yet been checked line by line against the text, so the table names each work without a page.

Ptolemy, writing in Alexandria in the second century, did not repeat the sign list in the Tetrabiblos. His chapter on injuries and diseases in Book III, as Robbins titled it in the Loeb edition, assigned the parts of the body to the seven planets instead. In the standard summary of that chapter Ptolemy gave the spleen and the bones to Saturn, the lungs to Jupiter and the kidneys to Mars. He gave the heart and the sight to the Sun, the liver to Venus, the tongue to Mercury, and the stomach and the womb to the Moon. The two lists, by sign and by planet, ran side by side from then on. The companion page on the planets and the body follows the second of them.

The Arabic writers carried both lists east and then back west. Abu Ma’shar in ninth-century Baghdad and al-Qabisi in the tenth century included the sign-to-part sequence in their introductions to astrology. Al-Qabisi’s Introduction, known in Latin as Alcabitius, was translated by John of Seville in the twelfth century and became a standard university text. With it the list entered the Latin schools in the form Manilius would have recognized.

From the thirteenth century the list became a picture. Calendars, surgical handbooks and medical miscellanies drew a standing figure and wrote or painted the sign on each part, often with lines running from the sign name to the region. The best-known painted version is the Anatomical Man in the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry, a manuscript made for the duke by the Limbourg brothers in the early fifteenth century. It shows two figures set back to back inside an almond-shaped frame, the signs placed on the body in the traditional order, and short Latin notes on the qualities of the signs in the four corners.

Print fixed the image. The Fasciculus Medicinae, a medical compilation printed in Venice at the end of the fifteenth century, put a Zodiac Man beside a bloodletting figure, and the pairing was copied for two hundred years. In England the figure became a fixture of the almanac. Printers called the woodcut of the man and his signs the Anatomy. Bernard Capp’s history of the English almanac describes it as a feature readers expected from the sixteenth century into the eighteenth. It usually faced the calendar that listed the Moon’s sign for every day of the year.

The figure answered a question that the medicine of the period asked every day. In the physiology the medieval schools took from Galen, the four humors were kept in balance by removing excess, and bloodletting was the ordinary procedure for an excess of blood. The surgeon or barber who opened a vein needed a day and a place, and the almanac supplied both. The rule, as the almanacs and the phlebotomy manuals printed it, was that blood was not to be drawn from the part of the body whose sign the Moon occupied on that day. The reason the texts gave was that the Moon drew the humors toward that part.

The almanac page worked as a lookup. The Anatomy stood on one page and the calendar on the next, with the Moon’s sign printed against each date. A reader found the day, found the sign, and looked across to the figure to see which region that sign named. Some almanacs added a verse that walked down the body from the Ram to the Fishes, so that a reader who could not make out the woodcut could still recite the list. Capp’s study describes this page as one of the most reprinted images in early modern England.

The learned tradition used the same list for a different purpose. Lilly’s table of the signs and the parts in Christian Astrology, printed in 1647, served the judgment of questions and nativities rather than the surgeon’s calendar. Culpeper’s Astrological Judgement of Diseases, printed in 1655 after an earlier version of 1651, used the sign list together with the decumbiture, the chart cast for the moment a person took to bed. Culpeper wrote for the physicians of his own day. Both men stated the list as settled doctrine and spent their argument on how to read it.

The end of the practice is a matter of medical history rather than astrology. Histories of medicine date the decline of bloodletting to the nineteenth century, and the almanac rule went out with the procedure it served. The woodcut outlived its purpose: almanacs went on printing the Anatomy long after the barbers had put away their lancets, and some popular almanacs print it still as a traditional feature. On this site the figure is shown for what it was, a diagram of a historical list, and for nothing else.

The clearest disagreement in the table is the Lion. Manilius gave Leo the flanks, and the later lists gave it the heart. The two words belong to two ways of dividing the trunk. Manilius worked down the outside of the figure in three bands, breast, flanks and belly, which is surface anatomy. The later lists named organs, the heart, the stomach, the kidneys and the bladder, which is anatomy from the inside. The move from flanks to heart fits the planetary list, since the tradition gave Leo to the Sun and Ptolemy gave the heart to the Sun, so the sign took the organ of its ruler.

The Crab shows a smaller version of the same shift. Manilius and the Greek list wrote breast alone. Lilly listed breast, ribs and stomach, and Culpeper breast and stomach. The texts do not say why the stomach moved up from the belly, which the Latin had given to the Maiden. A plausible reason, offered here as an inference and not as a reading of the texts, runs through the planets. Ptolemy gave the stomach to the Moon, and the tradition gave Cancer to the Moon. Once the two lists were read together, the organ followed the planet into the sign.

The Scorpion is a difference of wording rather than of region. Manilius wrote groin, a single word. Lilly and Culpeper used a euphemism of their period for the genitals and added the bladder, so the seventeenth-century English names the same region more delicately and adds one organ to it. The table keeps their phrase as they wrote it rather than modernizing it, since the point of the column is to record what each source said.

The remaining differences are additions rather than contradictions. Lilly and Culpeper added the hands to the Twins, the hips to the Archer and the ankles to the Water-bearer. Lilly listed reins for the Balance, the old English word for the kidneys, and hams for Capricorn, the hollows behind the knees. In each case the later writer kept the earlier region and named more of it. Across all four columns the order never changes: head at the top, feet at the bottom, and each sign one step down the figure from the one before.

The Zodiac Man drawn on this site is the site’s own vector figure, not a scan from a museum or a library. It carries the twelve regions with the consensus labels from the table above, head and face for Aries down to feet for Pisces, in the order the texts listed. Each region links to the page for its sign, and the sign pages carry a short note on what Manilius and Ptolemy assigned to that sign, under the same historical framing as this page.

The body map calculator, linked from this page once it is live, places a chart’s Ascendant, sixth-house cusp and planets on the figure by sign. A reader can then see which regions the old texts attached to the signs that a chart happens to occupy. It draws every region at the same size and in the same color, ranks nothing, enlarges nothing and gives no reading. The result is a diagram of a historical correspondence and a chart, and it says nothing about any living person. The hub page on medical astrology sets the figure beside the planets, the sixth house and the four temperaments, which were the other three parts of the tradition.