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The Signs of the Zodiac were associated with the human body in ancient and middle age medicine, ailments being treated in accordance with the connection supposed to exist between the various parts of the body and the constellations to which they were mystically related.
There are three possible explanations of the origin of this association: (a) that the Zodiacal signs were transposed to the body from the sky, (b) that the signs were originally symbols of parts of the body and were later assigned to the constellations, and (c) that in identifying the sky with his body the “baptizer” experienced some autosymbolizations which determined the special names given to the twelve signs. These autosymbolizations can still be traced in our unconscious thinking, and possibility (c) is suggested by my own experience.
Because the theories I am offering were reached through an investigation entirely different from researches into archaeology or astronomy, questions posed in this paper are simply questions, directed toward those who have knowledge of these subjects. My own contribution is a method of catching hold of the product of unconscious processes which we all very likely experience but usually cannot remember. These processes are akin to the normal thought processes of primitive man, and may in early days have been fully, or in great part, conscious; at any rate they met with less resistance in being raised from the unconscious. I understand that the same method has been used to get hold of autosymbolizations by Silberer, Varendonck and others, and was employed in normal psychology and in psychiatry to create and observe hypnagogic phenomena.
In trying to trace the change at the turning point of sleep from coherent thought to apparently incoherent nonsense, I found that I could catch and bring back impressions from the different layer of attention into which we sink when we fall asleep. To wake myself and remember my thought-sequence was difficult at first, both