Feet

Pisces takes the feet, closing the series that Aries opened at the head, and the neatness of that closure is part of why the scheme has been so durable. Ruled by Jupiter in the classical scheme and by Neptune in the modern one, and watery and mutable, the sign was read for complaints of moisture, swelling and dissolution, and the feet themselves for the parts most subject to damp and to the wear of walking. The head-to-foot ordering means that the last sign takes the lowest part, which invited the moral reading, common in medieval commentary, that the zodiac describes a descent from the rational to the material. The scheme survives today chiefly in the reflexology charts and foot maps sold in the wellness market, which are a modern and unrelated construction that has borrowed the idea of a body mapped onto a diagram.

The modern reflexology chart noted above has its own separate, documented history: it descends from zone therapy, a system developed by the American physician William H. Fitzgerald and published in 1917, which divided the body into ten longitudinal zones each said to terminate in a corresponding part of the hand or foot, and it was popularised in something closer to its present form by Eunice Ingham, an American physiotherapist, through books and teaching in the 1930s and 1940s. Zone therapy and reflexology were built independently of the zodiacal melothesia recorded in this family of articles and do not draw on Manilius, Ptolemy or the medieval Zodiac Man at any point in their own documented history.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with Zone TherapyWilliam H. Fitzgerald, Edwin F. Bowers, Stories the Feet Can Tell Thru ReflexologyEunice D. Ingham

Pisces takes the feet and closes the sequence that Aries opened at the head. The tidiness of that closure is often offered as evidence for the scheme, and it is worth being clear about what it actually shows: twelve signs distributed in order over a body must end somewhere, and ending at the feet is the only available outcome once the first sign is placed at the head. The fit is a consequence of the construction.

What happened to the doctrine afterwards is the more useful history. Astrological medicine was standard university teaching in Europe into the seventeenth century. It came apart not through a single refutation but through the same period that produced Harvey's circulation, the chemical medicine of the Paracelsians, and the mechanical philosophy, and by the eighteenth century a physician who set his practice by the Moon's sign was outside the profession rather than in its mainstream. The zodiac man survived that separation intact, because the almanac trade had no reason to drop a woodcut its readers expected, and the figure is still printed in popular almanacs today.

That long afterlife in print, detached from the medicine it belonged to, is why the doctrine is so much better known than it is understood. The atlas records it as a historical system of correspondence, and asserts nothing about the body.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with A History of Horoscopic AstrologyJames Herschel Holden