Knees

Capricorn takes the knees, and by extension the bones, the joints and the skin, following the general assignment of hard, dry and structural tissue to Saturn, the sign's ruler. The knees are the joint on which kneeling depends, and a good deal of medieval moral commentary made something of that, linking the sign of authority and limit to the posture of submission. The classical scheme reads Saturn for the cold and the dry, and complaints of the region were accordingly attributed to obstruction, stiffening and the effects of age. The pairing of bones with Saturn is one of the more persistent astrological correspondences and appears in modern popular astrology substantially unchanged, which makes it a useful case for observing how little the doctrine has altered.

In the classical planetary scheme, before the eighteenth-century discovery of Uranus, Saturn ruled both Capricorn and Aquarius, so the two consecutive regions at the end of the sequence, the knees and then the ankles, were both read under the same planet's cold, dry, structural character; only the later assignment of Uranus to Aquarius in modern astrology split the pairing. The knees have kept their Saturnine reading throughout, while the ankles, as the next article in this family notes, absorbed an additional and much later layer once the circulation of the blood became known to medicine.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with A History of Horoscopic AstrologyJames Herschel Holden

Capricorn's share is the knees positionally, and the bones, the joints and the skin by inheritance from Saturn, its ruling planet. Saturn's associations in this tradition are consistent and dark: the slowest of the seven planets, the outermost known, the greater malefic, and the significator of cold, dryness, age, restriction and everything hard and enduring. The bones are the body's hardest and most enduring tissue, and the skin its limit and boundary, so both fall to it.

The knee is a joint that carries weight and wears, which fits the same set of associations, and this is one of the assignments where the positional and planetary arguments reinforce each other rather than pulling apart.

The tradition's treatment of Saturn is a good corrective to the idea that these schemes are uniformly consoling. Saturn's parts were not lucky parts, Saturn's hours were not good hours to begin anything, and the Saturnine temperament, the melancholic, was a burden rather than a gift. Only later, and largely through the Renaissance reading of Aristotle's Problemata by Ficino and his circle, did melancholy acquire its association with genius.

The atlas records the doctrine as history. Nothing on this page concerns the actual condition of joints, bones or skin, and nothing in it is guidance.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with Saturn and Melancholy: Studies in the History of Natural Philosophy, Religion and ArtRaymond Klibansky, Erwin Panofsky and Fritz Saxl