Breasts

Cancer takes the breasts, the chest and the rib cage, and in many versions the stomach. The sign being cardinal, watery and ruled by the Moon, the region was read for complaints of fluid, of digestion and of the emotions, which the older physiology did not separate from the body as sharply as modern medicine does. The association with the breasts and with nourishment ties the sign to the Moon's significations of the mother and of feeding, and medical astrology of the medieval and early modern period used the sign in questions of nursing and of infant health. The atlas records this as history. Modern medicine has no place for it, and the historical confidence with which such judgments were made in matters of women's and infants' health is one of the less happy parts of the record.

Manilius sets the doctrine out twice in the Astronomica, once in the second book and again, in a related but not identical passage, in the fourth, which is itself evidence that melothesia was treated by the poem's Roman audience as an established piece of astrological doctrine worth restating rather than a single aside; modern Manilius scholarship generally reads the fourth-book passage as the fuller and more carefully worked-out of the two. Cancer's place in the sequence, following Gemini's arms and preceding Leo's heart, situates the chest and breasts at roughly the body's midpoint in the head-to-foot ordering, matched to the sign that, as the first cardinal water sign, opens the second quarter of the zodiacal year.

The chest and breasts belong to Cancer, but the more interesting fact about this part of the scheme is where a medieval person would have encountered it. The homo signorum was not confined to medical manuscripts. It appears in devotional books made for lay owners, most famously the Anatomical Man that opens the calendar of the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, illuminated for Jean de Berry in the first decades of the fifteenth century, where two figures stand back to back with the signs distributed over them.

That placement tells you what the doctrine was. It was not occult knowledge and it was not fringe. It sat in the calendar section of an expensive prayer book, next to the labours of the months, as part of the ordinary furniture of the year.

Cancer's assignment carries one of the scheme's standing disagreements. The sign takes the breasts and rib cage in every version, and the stomach in many, which puts it in competition with Virgo. Sources differ, and the atlas records both rather than choosing.

Printing did not kill the figure. It multiplied it, and the zodiac man stayed in popular almanacs into the nineteenth century and beyond, long after the medical theory supporting it had been abandoned by physicians. The atlas records all of this as history, not as anatomy.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with The Zodiacal Miniature of the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry: Its Sources and MeaningHarry Bober