Brain

The brain is given to the Moon in the western planetary scheme, on the reasoning that the Moon receives and reflects light as the brain was held to receive and reflect impressions, and that both govern change, tides and the humours. The assignment is not universal in the sources; some give the brain to Mercury, and the classical texts more often speak of the head under Aries than of the brain as an organ. It is worth noting that the brain has no place at all among the Chinese zang-fu: it is classed among the extraordinary fu, the qi heng zhi fu, alongside the marrow, bone, vessels, gall bladder and uterus, and its functions are largely distributed among the heart, which governs the spirit, and the kidney, which produces marrow. The contrast is one of the sharpest between the two systems.

In Ayurveda the brain is nourished by Tarpaka Kapha, the kapha subtype that maintains the moisture of the sense organs and the joints of the skull, and is governed by Prana Vata, the vata subtype seated in the head that drives the intake of sensory experience and the mind's own movement; classical Ayurvedic texts locate consciousness more broadly in the heart than in the brain specifically, a position closer to the Aristotelian than the modern view. Egyptian embalmers, by contrast, treated the brain as valueless: Herodotus describes it drawn out through the nostril with a hooked implement during mummification and discarded, while the heart, believed the seat of thought and feeling, was carefully preserved in the body.

Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical WritingsDominik Wujastyk

Chinese medicine does not count the brain among the twelve organs of its main scheme, and where it places it instead is revealing. The brain belongs to a small separate class, the qi heng zhi fu, usually rendered the curious or extraordinary organs, which also holds the marrow, the bones, the vessels, the gallbladder and the uterus. The class is defined by a contradiction: these are items shaped like the hollow yang organs but functioning like the solid yin ones, storing rather than transmitting, so they fit neither category.

What the tradition does with the brain is stranger still to a modern reader. The Inner Canon calls it the sea of marrow and describes it as filled and maintained by the Kidney, which stores the essence from which marrow is made. Cognition and consciousness, however, are not assigned to it. Those belong to the Heart, which houses the shen, with aspects distributed among the other four yin organs.

Later writers were not all comfortable with this. The seventeenth century physician Li Shizhen wrote that the brain is the dwelling of the original spirit, and the question of where the mind sits was argued within the tradition after Jesuit anatomical works began circulating in China.

The western planetary scheme this atlas records elsewhere gives the brain to the Moon. The two systems are separate, they were not built from each other, and the atlas does not merge them.