Neck

Taurus takes the neck and throat, with the larynx, the vocal cords and the thyroid, following Manilius's order. Taurus being fixed, earthy and ruled by Venus, the medieval texts read the region for complaints that are slow to arrive and slow to leave, and for swellings, hoarseness and disorders of the throat; the association of Venus with the voice and with music reinforced the connection. The neck is also the part where the melothesia's underlying logic is easiest to see: the sequence is simply anatomical order matched to zodiacal order, and every specific reading is derived afterwards from the sign's element, mode and ruler. Nothing about the neck generated the assignment to Taurus; the position in the series did.

Some versions of the scheme extend Taurus's rulership beyond the throat proper to include the ears, on the reasoning that the region governed by a sign in melothesia is drawn broadly rather than confined to a single organ; later medical astrology texts vary in exactly which structures they assign to a given sign, which is itself evidence that the system was elaborated piecemeal over centuries rather than fixed once by a single authority. The throat's specific vulnerability to swelling in the classical reading also connects to Venus's rulership of Taurus in a second, independent way: Venus governed the sweet and the pleasurable in humoral medicine, and swellings of excess were read as an imbalance of exactly that quality turned against the body that housed it.

Melothesia was not a diagram to be contemplated. It was operational, and the operation was a prohibition: do not cut, cauterise or bleed a member while the Moon stands in the sign that governs it. The rule appears in regimen literature across medieval Europe, it was taught in university medical faculties alongside the rest of astrological medicine, and it governed the practice of the barber surgeons who actually held the knife.

For the neck and throat, the sign is Taurus, and the prohibition bore on a real and frequent procedure. Bleeding from the jugular was standard for complaints of the head and throat, so a barber surgeon working from an almanac would defer it while the Moon passed through Taurus, roughly two and a half days in every month.

The instrument that carried the rule to the practitioner was the folding almanac, a set of parchment leaves worn at the belt, several English examples of which survive from the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Later the printed almanac took over, with the zodiac man on an early page, and the figure persisted in popular almanacs long after the medicine around it had gone.

The atlas records the doctrine as historical practice. It is not a description of how the body works and it is certainly not advice about any procedure.