Bathing

Bathing is in this vocabulary because the electional tradition put it there. Medieval and Renaissance election texts carry lists of ordinary bodily acts with a recommended moment for each: cutting the hair and nails, taking medicine, letting blood, and washing. They are the most domestic material astrology ever produced, and they are entirely serious in their own terms.

The Moon carries almost all of it. In the humoral physiology these texts assume, the Moon governs the moist and the cold, the tides of the body, the phlegm, and everything that increases or decreases on a cycle. A body is treated as a thing with water in it, and the Moon is what the water answers to. So a bath is timed by the Moon's sign and phase before anything else. The water signs, Cancer, Scorpio and Pisces, are the obvious ones, and the waxing Moon is used where the intention is to increase, the waning where it is to draw off.

Venus enters as the planet of ease, adornment and the pleasant condition of the body, which is what distinguishes a bath from a purge. Where the Moon supplies the physiology, Venus supplies the reason a person would want one.

None of this is medical advice and the atlas does not offer it as any. It is a record of how one tradition reasoned about the body, and the reasoning stays legible even where the physiology behind it has long been superseded.

An entry for bathing looks like a curiosity until the shape of the tradition it comes from is clear. Astrology as practised in the medieval Islamic world and in Latin Europe was not principally a way of describing character. It was a decision technology, and its largest working branches were horary, which answers a question from the moment it is asked, and electional, which chooses a moment for an act.

Once a system claims that some moments are better than others for beginning a thing, it owes an answer for every thing anyone might begin. That is why the electional literature reads like a household manual: sowing, building, marrying, buying, travelling, taking medicine, washing. The mundane items are not decoration. They are the system being consistent with itself.

There is a second reason washing in particular recurs. It sits on the boundary between hygiene and purification, and in most of the traditions this atlas covers that boundary is not drawn where a modern reader would draw it. Ritual bathing before prayer, before an initiation or before a working is widespread, and an astrological election for the moment of washing belongs to the same order of thinking as a ritual prescription for the water's source or its temperature.

The atlas records the astrological material under this entry and treats the ritual material under the traditions that hold it, because the two overlap without being the same thing.