Zodiac Man Body Map

The Zodiac Man is the standing figure the old texts marked with the twelve signs from head to feet, one sign to one region, in the order the signs rise. This calculator takes a birth date, time and place, casts the chart, and writes that chart onto the figure. Each placement goes to the region the texts assigned to its sign. The placements are the Ascendant, the cusp of the 6th house, and the ten planets from the Sun to Pluto. Nothing else from the chart is drawn.

The figure is the site’s own drawing, the one the Zodiac Man guide describes: a plain outline with twelve markers down it, each labeled with a sign and the region the lists gave that sign. Every marker is the same size and every region the same color. When a chart is placed on it, the markers for the signs that chart occupies gain a short label naming the placements that fall there. A region with several planets looks the same as a region with one, apart from a longer label. A region with none keeps its sign and region name and nothing more.

That design is the whole point of the tool. The texts assigned the regions to the signs, the chart supplies the signs, and the figure puts the two together and stops. It ranks nothing, enlarges nothing, colors nothing differently and interprets nothing. What a reader sees is a correspondence table drawn as a picture, with a chart’s placements written onto it, and that is all the page produces.

The form takes a birth date, a local time, a time zone and a birthplace. The calculator sends them to the site’s natal API, which returns the chart: the Ascendant with its sign, the house cusps, and each planet with its sign and longitude. The tropical zodiac is used throughout, and the methodology page sets out how the positions are computed. The API scores nothing for this tool. The figure is drawn in the browser from the response, and the only logic that runs is a lookup.

Three kinds of placement are read from the chart. The first is the Ascendant, the sign on the eastern horizon at the birth moment. The second is the cusp of the 6th house, taken from the Placidus house table the API returns. Placidus divides the sky by time rather than by sign, so the 6th cusp can fall in any sign and, away from the equator, is often not the sixth sign from the Ascendant. The 6th house guide explains the difference between Placidus and Whole Sign houses and why the cusp moves with latitude. The third kind of placement is each of the ten planets, read by the sign it occupies.

Each placement is then looked up in one table, the same table the Zodiac Man guide prints in full. The table has one row per sign and, for each sign, the region the texts assigned to it in the wording most of the sources share: Aries with the head and face at the top, Pisces with the feet at the bottom, and the ten other signs between them in zodiacal order. A planet in Capricorn goes to the knees because the lists put Capricorn there. The planet’s degree within its sign, its house, its speed and its aspects play no part. Two planets a degree apart on either side of a sign boundary land in two different regions, as the lists would have placed them.

The figure then draws the result. For every sign the chart occupies, the marker gains a line of text naming the placements there, such as the Ascendant, the 6th cusp, or planets by name. The marker’s position on the figure is fixed by the sign and never by the chart. The order of names within a label follows the order of the placements in the response and carries no weight. The figure counts nothing and compares nothing.

Two charts from the site’s databank serve as specimens: Frida Kahlo’s and Steve Jobs’s. Both are charts of people who have died, with birth data the databank records from documents, and both appear here for one purpose, to show what the figure’s labels hold when a real chart is placed on it. Nothing below is a reading of either person. The table counts, region by region, the placements each chart puts there.

Kahlo’s chart rises in Leo, and its Placidus 6th cusp falls in Capricorn. The Sun, Jupiter and Neptune share one sign, Cancer, the sign the lists gave the breast and ribs, so that region carries all three planet names on a single label. Mars and Uranus sit in Capricorn beside the 6th cusp, so the knees carry the cusp and both planets together. The fullest label on Kahlo’s figure holds 3 names, at the knees (Capricorn).

Jobs’s chart rises in Virgo with its 6th cusp in Aquarius. Its planets are spread more thinly over the figure. No region holds more than 2, and the region the table names first at that count, the legs and ankles (Aquarius), is matched elsewhere on the figure. The Moon and Mars share Aries, Jupiter and Uranus share Cancer, and Mercury stands in the same sign as the 6th cusp. Every other planet in the chart has a sign to itself.

What the two tables show is the difference a label can carry without the drawing changing. Kahlo’s figure has 3 names on its fullest label and Jobs’s has 2, and the markers that carry them are drawn the same size, in the same color, as every empty marker on both figures. The counts belong to the table, not to the picture. A higher count, or a lower one, says only how many placements a chart happened to put in a sign. The texts assigned the region to the sign long before either chart was cast, and the number of visitors changes nothing about the assignment.

The planets are the obvious things to place, since each occupies a sign. The two points were added because the tradition read them as the chart’s two main places for questions about the body. Lilly took the Ascendant and its ruler as the first place to look for the frame and complexion of the native, and in his list of the houses he gave the 6th to sickness, along with servants and small animals. The 6th house guide covers both readings as history, and what the 1st, 8th and 12th houses added in the texts.

The map reads neither point. It marks the sign. The Ascendant’s sign is placed at the region the lists gave that sign, exactly as a planet is placed, and the 6th cusp’s sign the same way. For Kahlo’s chart that puts the Ascendant’s label at the region for Leo and the cusp’s label at the region for Capricorn. For Jobs’s chart the two labels sit at the regions for Virgo and Aquarius. Neither point is drawn larger than a planet, and neither carries a different color.

The choice of the Placidus cusp matters here, because the two common house systems can disagree about the 6th. Under Whole Sign houses the 6th house is the sixth sign counted from the rising sign, so the cusp’s sign follows from the Ascendant alone and adds no new mark to the figure. Under Placidus the cusp is computed from the birth time and latitude, and at middle and high latitudes it often falls in a sign other than the sixth from the Ascendant. In both specimen charts the two systems happen to agree: the Placidus cusp and the sixth sign from the rising sign are the same sign, so the figure is the same under either system. The 6th house guide’s table shows how often that is not the case.

The figure’s labels use the wording most of the sources share, but the sources are four and they do not agree in every row. The Zodiac Man guide sets the four columns side by side in a table and tells the history of each. The four are the Latin poem of Manilius, the earliest surviving list; the Greek sign list that Ptolemy presupposed in the second century, since his own chapter in the Tetrabiblos assigned parts to the planets instead; William Lilly’s table in Christian Astrology of 1647; and Nicholas Culpeper’s chapter in his book on decumbitures, printed in 1655 after an earlier version of 1651.

All four run the same way down the figure, from Aries at the head to Pisces at the feet, one step per sign. Where they differ is in how much of a region they named and, in one row, which region. Manilius gave Leo the flanks, the sides of the trunk, where the Greek list, Lilly and Culpeper gave the heart. The figure’s label for Leo reads heart and back, following the three later sources, and a planet in Leo is placed at the chest of the drawing on their authority rather than at the sides on Manilius’s.

The other differences are additions rather than contradictions. Lilly and Culpeper wrote the hands into the Gemini row, where Manilius had written shoulders and arms and the Greek list shoulders alone. Lilly added ribs and stomach to the breast for Cancer, and Culpeper kept the stomach. For Libra, Manilius and the Greek list wrote the loins alone; Lilly added the reins and kidneys, and Culpeper the reins. For Scorpio the Latin groin became, in the two English writers, a euphemism of their day for the genitals, with the bladder added. Lilly gave Capricorn the hams along with the knees, and both Englishmen wrote legs and ankles for Aquarius where Manilius had the shins and the Greek list the legs.

The figure resolves none of this. Its label gives one wording per row, the one the table marks as the shared region, and the list of placements beneath the figure repeats that wording. A reader who wants Manilius’s flanks for Leo, or Lilly’s hams for Capricorn, has the full table on the Zodiac Man guide, and each sign page carries the Manilius and Ptolemy wording for its sign. The calculator’s job is to place a chart. The history of the wording lives on the pages written for it.

The panel opens with the result notice, the line every calculator in this family carries above its output: a reading of a historical method, not a statement about anyone’s health. It stands above the figure and above the list, so that neither can be read or copied without it. The same line is drawn into the share image, as the last paragraph of this section describes.

Below the notice comes the figure, drawn as the sections above describe, with a label at each marker the chart touches. The label names the placements in that region: the Ascendant, the 6th cusp, and the planets by name. A region with several placements lists them on one line. Each sign’s label links to the page for that sign once the page is live, and the region name sits under the sign name on every marker, occupied or not.

Below the figure is the list: the Ascendant, the 6th cusp and the ten planets, each with its sign and the region the lists assigned to that sign. The list says in words what the figure says in a picture. It is there for a reader using a screen reader, for a reader copying the result into notes, and for the share image, where a label on a small drawing can be hard to make out. Nothing in the list is a reading. Each line pairs a placement with a sign and a sign with a region, and the second pairing is the texts’ own.

The share button renders the panel to an image: the figure with its labels, the list, and the result notice drawn into the picture itself, so the line travels wherever the image goes. The image carries no name and no birth data. The temperament calculator’s share image is built the same way, and the two follow one pattern so that no result from this family leaves the site without its notice.

The figure is a diagram of a historical correspondence with a chart written onto it. It is not a picture of anyone. The regions on it are the regions the texts assigned to the signs, in the order Manilius, the Greek list, Lilly and Culpeper agreed on, and the labels say only which of those signs a chart occupies. The tool never calls a region marked out, singled out or given weight by a chart, because the texts never assigned a region to a chart. They assigned regions to signs, and a chart, for this tool, is a set of signs.

The old practice the figure served is told on the Zodiac Man guide in the past tense: almanacs printed the figure beside a table of the Moon’s sign for each day, and the surgeons of the period read the two together before letting blood. This calculator takes no date but the birth date, draws no Moon table and marks no day. It reads a natal chart and nothing else, and a natal chart placed on the figure yields a list of signs and regions and nothing further.

Nor does the figure carry the planetary list. Ptolemy assigned parts of the body to the planets rather than to the signs, the spleen to Saturn, the heart to the Sun and so on, and Lilly and Culpeper repeated a planet list of their own beside the sign list. The body map uses the sign list only. A planet on the figure sits where its sign sits: the Sun in Capricorn is drawn at the knees, not at the heart, because the figure places by sign alone. The planets and the body guide covers the second list and what each source put in it.

Finally, the figure is not a method. The temperament calculator on this site scores a chart by a rule and names a result. The body map does neither. There is no rule, no score, no tally and no result beyond the placing of markers, so nothing on the page can be right or wrong about a person. What can be checked is whether each placement sits in the region the lists gave its sign, and the list beneath the figure exists so that a reader can check it.