Atlas and Talus

Abstract

This article explores the history of the terms atlas and talus and discusses the unexpected implications of their use in human anatomy. Renaissance anatomists decided to call the first cervical vertebra the atlas. But the name atlas was first used by the ancient Romans for the seventh cervical vertebra. The most common explanation why the first cervical vertebra is called atlas is that the vertebra holds up the globe of the cranium the way Atlas holds up the globe of the heavens. However, an important part of the myth of Atlas is that the Titan was being punished. The seventh cervical vertebra was so named due to its suitability for supporting burdens. (Pollux, 1900) Switching the designation atlas from the seventh to the first cervical vertebra in human anatomy implies that the point of man’s burden has shifted from his shoulders to his head. What an anatomist is saying by making, or accepting, this change is that man’s true burden is not a physical load, but rather, it is his mind. We explore the implications of this switch, and how it is represented in Renaissance anatomy diagrams. Long before the first cervical vertebra was called atlas it was known as the astragalus, the same term used for the talus, or ankle bone. We examine the many different terms that were used for the ankle bone during the Middle Ages and Renaissance, as well as the connection of the term talus with Greek mythology.

This article explores the history of the terms atlas and talus and discusses the unexpected implications of their use in human anatomy. We offer new insight into why the first cervical vertebra is called the atlas.

Sometime around 1522, the Bolognese anatomist Jacopo Berengario di Carpi decided to call the first cervical vertebra the atlas (Berengario, 1959; Singer, 1959). But the term atlas was first used by the ancient Romans for the seventh cervical vertebra. No one knows for sure why Berengario decided to make this change. The anatomist left no known records hinting at a motive. The most common explanation why the first cervical vertebra is called atlas is that the vertebra holds up the globe of the cranium the way Atlas holds up the globe of the heavens. Some scholars speculate that it may also be an allusion to how mythological warriors occupied a place between earth and heaven, the same way the first cervical vertebra sits between the skull and vertebral column (Karenberg, 2013). Although these are perfectly fine explanations, changing the designation atlas from the seventh to the first cervical vertebra may also represent something deeper: it is a comment on mankind’s often frustrating efforts to understand the true meaning of the universe.

Atlas first appears as an anatomic term in Pliny the Elder's 77 AD Natural Histories when Pliny shares a folk remedy assured to bring peace to any troubled home: keep a hyena's genitals and “Atlantian knot” somewhere in the house (Pliny, 1855). Pliny believed that a hyena's neck was formed from a single bone, and the Atlantian knot, also known as the “joint of the spine,” was where the neck joined the thorax (Pliny, 1855). Pliny adds that the Atlantian knot, itself, was a proven treatment for epilepsy (Pliny, 1855). Galen does not use the term atlas in De ossibus ad tyrones (Singer, 1952), but Julius Pollux (1900) records it as the name for the human seventh cervical vertebra in his first Century AD Onomasticon, noting atlas’ suitability for supporting physical (but no mention of familial) burdens. When the poet Hesiod writes, “Atlas through hard constraint upholds the wide heaven with unwearying head and arms” (Hesiod, 1914), it is important to remember that the heavens are a burden, at least to Atlas who was being punished by Zeus for leading a rebellion against Olympus. Both the literal and metaphorical weight of the heavens bearing down on the unfortunate Titan, a predicament captured by the second C. AD Farnese Atlas (Figure 1). The name Atlas, in Greek, means both he who dares and he who suffers (Graves, 1988).

FIGURE 1.

The Farnese Atlas, ca. 200 AD, in the collection of the Naples National Archeological Museum. Photograph by G. Seah, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by‐sa/3.0/deed.en

Singer (1959) writes that the Onomasticon was unknown to Western or Arabic scholars until the end of the 15th century and that the term atlas first appears in a printed text in 1501 when Giorgio Valla's De humani corporis partibus was issued in Venice. Berengario uses the term atlas for the seventh cervical vertebra in his 1521 Commentary on the Anatomy of Mundinus, noting the bone is so named because it bears burdens (Berengario, 1521). But only a year later, in the first edition of Isagogae Breves, Berengario gives the name atlas to the first, rather than the seventh, cervical vertebra, an appellative switch implying that the point of man's burden has shifted from the base of his neck to his head. What an anatomist is saying by making, or accepting, this change is that man's true burden is not a physical load on his shoulders, but rather, it is his mind. The burdensome mind is a theme that has appeared in Western culture since the Book of Genesis. Adam and Eve feel the weight of the mind after eating from the tree of knowledge and the “eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized they were naked” (Genesis 3:7). Or, as the Book of Bokonon in Kurt Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle puts it: “Tiger got to hunt/Bird got to fly/Man got to sit and wonder, ‘why, why, why?’/Tiger got to sleep/Bird got to land/Man got to tell himself he understand” (Vonnegut, 1988). Man must brood life's mysteries, but the true nature of the universe, and the meaning of life's hardships, are beyond the mind's comprehension.

This is not to suggest that Berengario somehow disparaged the human mind—on the contrary, he acknowledges the brain as the center of higher intellectual function and describes the cranium as “outstanding in man on account of its contents” (Berengario, 1959). Rather, Berengario's use of the term atlas for the first cervical vertebra may be an acknowledgment of the mind's limitations and a reminder to anatomists to have humility.

Vesalius, by contrast, has a different view of the mind. Lind describes Isagogae as the first anatomical textbook illustrated in the modern sense, and the most authoritative anatomical work before de Fabrica (Lind, 1959). Singer and Rabin (1946) conclude that Vesalius probably read Berengario sometime before 1538. There are many compositional similarities between the diagrams in Isagogae and de Fabrica, though the quality and detail of the artwork are clearly superior in the latter. The skeleton diagrams in both books use similar imagery—a skeleton, a cranium, and a tomb (Figure 2). But whereas Berengario's skeleton is atlas‐like, in that it holds up a pair of skulls, Vesalius’ skeleton is contemplative as it handles a disarticulated cranium which rests upon a tomb—quite literally above death. The epitaph on the tomb, “Vivitur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt,” is a line taken from the first Century AD poem Elegies on Maecenas and translates to “genius means life, all else belongs to death,” or “genius lives on, all the rest will perish” (Duff, 1934). In de Fabrica, the mind is anything but a burden—it is transcendent and eternal, which may explain why Vesalius kept the designation atlas for the seventh cervical vertebra (Vesalius, 1543).

FIGURE 2.

The bone diagram from Isagogae Breves, left, and de Fabrica, right. The full verse from which the epitaph is taken reads: “Marmorea Aonii vincent monumenta libelli: vivitur ingenio, cetera mortis erunt” or “Aonian (poetic) writings will eclipse marble monuments; genius means life, all else belongs to death.” (Duff, 1934)

Long before the first cervical vertebra was called the atlas, it was known as astragalus, the same term used for the ankle bone (Hyrtl, 1879; Skinner, 1961). Parts of the first two cervical vertebrae and the ankle bones of domestic animals were used to make dice or astragalos in Greek (Hyrtl, 1879; Skinner, 1961). Homer writes in the Iliad that Achalochus is decapitated when a spear smote him at the astragalos, or “the joining of head and neck” (Homer, 1924). Talus, a diminutive of taxillus, Latin for dice, was used for both the ankle and ankle bone in human anatomy (Langslow, 2000; Skinner, 1961), though Celsus also refers to the latter as the osse transverso talorum (Celsus, 1971).

Medieval and early Renaissance anatomists used a variety of now obsolete terms for the ankle bone such as os cahab, Latinized Arabic of ka'b, meaning cube, a term Arabic writers applied to both the talus and malleolus; os baliste and nux balistae, a reference to an arquebus, an early Renaissance firearm; cavilla meaning wedge; and alshobh, a Hebrew translation of the Arabic al shawki, meaning spur‐bone (Achillini, 1521; Berengario, 1959; Hyrtl, 1879; Ketham et. al., 1925; Lind, 1975; Singer & Rabin, 1946; Vesalius, 1543) (Figure 3). In an effort to use only anatomic terms derived from Latin or Greek, Alessandro Benedetti writes “Talus quem astragalum vocat,” in his 1502 Historia corpori humani (Benedetti, 1502), and when Vesalius uses the term talus in De Fabrica, he scolds the Latin translators who had wrongly called the bone malleolus (Vesalius, 1543). Anatomists also confused the talus with the calcaneus (Singer & Rabin, 1946), while a misunderstanding between ankle and heel evolved in lay language. The idiom “Achilles heel” is a product of this confusion. The first reference to Achilles’ feet was not by Homer or Virgil, but by Apollodorus and Hyginius, both of whom write that the hero was struck in the ankle, an injury depicted in several works of ancient Greek art (Gantz, 1993) (Figure 4). Somehow, as the language evolved, what was originally ankle became heel, as the late Latin talone, and the French and Italian, talon and tallone, can attest (Gantz, 1993).

FIGURE 3.

Bones of the foot in Isagogae Breves. Berengario uses the term os cahab

FIGURE 4.

The Chalcidian amphora, ca. 540 BC, shows the fallen Achilles with an arrow in his ankle. Colorized drawing by K. Vail after a photograph by A. Rumpf

The word talus, homophonically, evokes mythological imagery. Stories of the mythological Talus appear as far back as Apollonius’ third Century BC Argonautica, and Apollodorus’ first Century AD Bibliotheka. Talus, the guardian of the island of Crete, is described as a bronze giant whose entire body was invulnerable except for his ankle, beneath which ran a vein filled with his lifeblood or ichor. The vein was protected by a bronze nail. There are three different accounts of Talus’ death, all of which involve his ankle: Medea, one of the Argonauts, drives him into a fit of madness, causing him to graze his ankle on a rock and spill his ichor; or, Medea pulls out the bronze nail; or, Talus is shot in the ankle with an arrow (Apollodorus, 1921; Apollonius, 1912). Like Achilles, the vulnerable ankle symbolizes a place where the hero's vitality is concentrated (Gantz, 1993; Graves, 1975), and like Atlas, the name Talus means he who suffers (Graves, 1988).

It is nice to imagine that ancient or Renaissance anatomists engaged in clever mythological wordplay when calling the ankle bone talus. But talus has never been recognized as a mythological reference and is absent from even the most comprehensive studies of anatomical eponyms and mythonyms (Karenberg, 2013; Orly, 1994; Rodin, 1989). It is certainly fitting, though, and would be quite poetic for anatomists to say that, at least symbolically, vitality, and vulnerability are concentrated in the bone which bears the weight of the entire body.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no conflict of interests.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

David J. Jackowe conceived the paper. Both authors contributed to acquisition of references, drafting and editing of the manuscript, and approval of the article.

Jackowe, D.J. & Biener, M.G. (2022) Atlas and Talus. Journal of Anatomy, 240, 1174–1178. Available from: 10.1111/joa.13613