Head

The assignment of the head to Aries is the first term of melothesia, the scheme that maps the twelve signs onto the body from crown to sole in zodiacal order. The doctrine is ancient: Marcus Manilius sets it out in verse in the Astronomica in the first century, giving Aries the head, Taurus the neck, Gemini the arms and so on to Pisces at the feet, and Ptolemy treats the medical application of astrology at length in the Tetrabiblos. The head takes the first sign because the scheme begins where the body begins and because Aries begins the zodiac; the logic is one of correspondence between two ordered series rather than of any observed relation. Aries being ruled by Mars and hot in the classical scheme, the head was accordingly read for fevers, inflammations, injuries and complaints of the eyes and face.

Ptolemy's own treatment in the Tetrabiblos is less tidy than Manilius's simple head-to-foot list: his third book treats the body twice, once on form and temperament and once, separately, on the hurts and diseases specific afflicting planets can cause, a causal and diagnostic framework rather than a fixed chart of correspondences. Other writers filled out the doctrine independently. Teucer of Babylon, writing around the turn of the era, and Julius Firmicus Maternus, in the Mathesis of the 330s, both give their own versions of melothesia, Firmicus combining it with a separate scheme of bodily subdivisions called the dodekatemoria; the doctrine was therefore never a single fixed list but a family of related schemes sharing the same head-to-foot logic.

The most familiar image of this doctrine is the homo signorum or zodiac man, a diagram of a human figure with the sign glyphs or animals disposed over the corresponding parts, which appears in medieval manuscripts, in the illuminated calendars of books of hours, and in vast numbers in the printed almanacs of the fifteenth to nineteenth centuries. Its practical purpose was to warn against bloodletting or surgery on a part of the body while the Moon stood in the sign governing it, a rule that was standard medical caution in Europe for centuries and appears in surgical texts as well as in popular almanacs. The figure survived in almanacs long after educated medicine had abandoned the theory, and versions were still being printed in the nineteenth and even the twentieth century. It is recorded here as a real and consequential episode in the history of medicine, not as guidance.

The single most celebrated version of the image appears in the Tres Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, painted by the Limbourg brothers around 1412 to 1416 for Jean, Duc de Berry, and left unfinished at their deaths; it shows two figures, one facing forward and one from behind, with the sign glyphs set over the corresponding parts of each, an image found in no other book of hours and generally read as reflecting Berry's own particular interest in astrology. In English almanacs the figure, often called the Man of Signs, appeared in roughly three-quarters of all almanacs printed by 1760, a share that fell to about a third by the century's end as Enlightenment-era printers began adding sceptical commentary alongside it; some almanacs, including the modern Old Farmer's Almanac, still print a version of the figure today.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with The Zodiacal Miniature of the Tres Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry: Its Sources and MeaningHarry Bober, Astrology and the Popular Press: English Almanacs 1500-1800Bernard Capp