Kidneys

The kidneys are given to Venus in the western scheme, the reasoning being that they are paired and balanced, that they regulate the fluids and salts of the body, and that they lie in the region of the loins governed by Venus-ruled Libra. In the Chinese scheme the kidney, shen, belongs to the water phase, is paired with the bladder, stores the jing or essence inherited at conception and expended through life, governs birth, growth, reproduction and ageing, produces marrow and fills the brain, and is associated with fear and with the ears. The Chinese kidney is thus far more than a filtering organ; it is closer to a theory of constitutional vitality, and the mismatch with the anatomical kidney is one of the standard difficulties in translating Chinese medical texts.

Ayurveda treats the kidneys, vrikka, as principally governed by Apana Vata, the downward-moving vata subtype seated in the pelvis that governs the elimination of urine as well as of stool and the processes of menstruation and childbirth. Hebrew tradition gives the kidneys, kelayot, a role distinct from both: in the Psalms and in Jeremiah God is repeatedly described as the one who tries or tests the heart and the reins, an old English word for kidneys, treating the organ as an inward seat of conscience and hidden intention that only God can examine, a moral rather than a medical or elemental reading of the pair.

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

No organ carries more weight in Chinese medicine than the Kidney, and the difference from the western anatomical organ is correspondingly large. The Kidney is one of the five zang, belongs to the Water phase, pairs with the Bladder, and is assigned winter, fear, the ears as its orifice, the bones and marrow as its tissue, and the north.

Beyond those regular correspondences it is given a role nothing else has. The tradition describes it as storing jing, the essence: the constitutional endowment received at conception, held to be finite and gradually spent, from which growth, maturation, reproduction and ageing all proceed. The Inner Canon's account of the human life course in cycles of seven years for women and eight for men is written entirely in those terms. Later writers call the Kidney the root of the prenatal, as against the Spleen and Stomach which make the postnatal from food.

Because of this the Kidney is described as containing both the deepest yin and the source of yang for the whole body, which is unusual in a system that otherwise keeps the two carefully apart.

This is the tradition's own model and the atlas reports it as such. The Chinese Kidney is not the anatomical kidney, no claim about renal function is being made, and nothing here is medical guidance.