Liver

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

The Liver is one of the five zang and the ruler of the Wood phase, paired with the Gallbladder. Its correspondences are spring, anger, the eyes as its orifice, the sinews and tendons as its tissue, and the east.

Its two named functions are among the most used ideas in Chinese medicine. The first is that it stores the blood, releasing it during activity and receiving it back during rest, which is why the tradition assigns the Liver's horary hours to the deepest part of the night. The second is that it ensures the free and smooth movement of qi throughout the body, so that any constraint or stagnation anywhere is referred back to the Liver's condition. That second function has no counterpart in the western organ at all, and it is the one a practitioner in this tradition invokes most often.

The classical office is the general, the one who plans and devises strategy, paired with the Gallbladder's office of decision.

The atlas records the western scheme separately, where the liver goes to Jupiter and stands in Galenic physiology as the origin of the venous blood and the seat of the natural spirits. Both traditions gave the liver a central place; they gave it different central places, and the atlas does not reconcile them. Nothing in either is a statement about hepatic function.