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The Ankles and Circulation Under Aquarius

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The Ankles and Circulation Under Aquarius

Aquarius takes the ankles and the calves, and in most versions the circulation of the blood. The circulatory assignment is worth pausing on, because it postdates the anatomy: William Harvey demonstrated the circulation of the blood in De Motu Cordis in 1628, and astrological texts written before that date cannot have meant by circulation what later texts mean. The tradition absorbed the discovery and attached it to the sign whose classical ruler is Saturn and whose modern ruler is Uranus, itself an eighteenth-century addition. The layer is therefore modern, and the example is a useful one: astrological correspondence systems are not fixed, they take in new material as it becomes available, and dating a particular correspondence is often possible if one asks when the thing it refers to became known.

Uranus itself was not always going to bear that name: William Herschel, who discovered the planet in 1781, proposed calling it Georgium Sidus, George's Star, after King George III, and it was only decided by international astronomical convention across the following decades, settling by around the middle of the nineteenth century, that it should instead take a name from Greek mythology to match the other planets. The assignment of this comparatively young planet to Aquarius, and by extension to the ankles in the modern layer of the melothesia, is accordingly a nineteenth-century addition to a scheme whose other correspondences are many centuries older.

Sources AstronomicaMarcus Manilius with William Harvey's Natural PhilosophyRoger French, Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline HerschelMichael Hoskin

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Sources
Astronomica
Marcus Manilius, Harvard University Press, 1977View the Source
William Harvey's Natural Philosophy
Roger French, Cambridge University Press, 1994View the Source
Discoverers of the Universe: William and Caroline Herschel
Michael Hoskin, Princeton University Press, 2011View the Source
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