The liver is given to Jupiter in the western scheme. In Galenic physiology the liver was the origin of the venous blood and the seat of nutrition and of the natural spirit, one of the three principal organs alongside the heart and the brain, and its association with the sanguine humour, warm and moist, matched Jupiter's nature exactly. That physiology stood until William Harvey demonstrated the circulation in 1628 and removed the liver from its central place. In the Chinese scheme the liver, gan, belongs to the wood phase, is paired with the gall bladder, stores the blood, governs the free and smooth movement of qi through the body, and is associated with anger and with the eyes and the sinews; liver qi stagnation is one of the most commonly diagnosed patterns in Chinese clinical practice.
Ayurveda gives the liver's blood-producing heat to Ranjaka Pitta, the pitta subtype seated in the liver, spleen and stomach that is said to colour the blood and to govern its formation, a role recognisably close to the Galenic account of the liver as the source of venous blood recorded above, though the two traditions developed independently. Mesopotamian divination gave the liver a further and very different importance: hepatoscopy, the reading of omens from the liver of a sacrificed sheep, was a major branch of Babylonian priestly practice, and clay models of the liver marked out with regions for interpretation, used to train diviners, survive from the early second millennium BCE.
Sources Christian AstrologyWilliam Lilly with The Roots of Ayurveda: Selections from Sanskrit Medical WritingsDominik Wujastyk