Virgo & Gut
The season of Virgo is about using the gut as our second brain, learning the body’s way of sorting, refining, and knowing what truly nourishes us in everything we consume.
Sign: Virgo
Organs: Pancreas, small intestine, cecum, colon, digestive tract, duodenum, rectum, sense organs: eyes and ears.
Virgo rules the digestive system, which is located in the abdomen. Ironically, this part of the body is connected to one of the most notorious and cruel items in the history of fashion, which embodied the tyranny of perfection: the corset. Demanding an orderly, restrained, and refined appearance, corsets distorted the body by ruthlessly constricting the waist and chest. Muscle atrophy, back pain, and shortness of breath were only some of the consequences of prolonged corset wear. The earliest corsets compressed the waist and chest so tightly that they flattened and fused the body’s organs, leading to severe digestive problems. As the body adapted to these restrictions, the corset became paradoxically both the cause of suffering and the device used to “support” the condition it had created. To refuse the corset was not merely a risk to a woman’s physical health, but a challenge to her social standing. Even men wore them until the mid-19th century, using corsets to project a stately posture or to hide excess weight.
The belly is a battleground of control. It had to appear flat, lean — a myth that persists in today’s fashion, which glorifies the “perfect abdomen” in crop tops while demanding concealment of even the smallest deviation. Often, it ends up creating tension with your own body rather than perfection. I think about those moments when clothing makes you uncomfortable in the area of your belly: after a long dinner, needing to unbutton trousers in secret. (That’s why oversized tops at family gatherings are always my choice.) These little negotiations between body and clothing remind us that comfort and adaptability matter more than rigid ideals of control.
If in the previous season of Leo I wondered what it might mean to “choose your clothing from your heart,” this month I was reflecting on what “wearing from the gut” feels like to me. It is said that the gut is your second brain. In that sense, if you listen to your gut, your intuition, it’s really about what fits you exactly. Using your gut means sharpening your discerning eye for finding what suits you, and cutting away what doesn’t. This knowledge comes only from knowing yourself inside out. If “we are what we eat,” we are, in a sense, everything that we consume. And we need to make sure to consume what nourishes us in all senses.
On this phenomenological note, I give the word to this season’s guest: Will Britten (Virgo), artist & lecturer, co-founder, DOKK Arts Centre:
As a double Virgo, this season, I am letting reflection chewww and digest, before forming my next expression. As I turn 30 this week, I am delighted to be here writing, considering the modi operandi of digestion, expression, reflection and as ever; representation.
I lay half asleep on a comfy 70s couch in Kärdla, Hiiumaa, whilst my friend weaved a carpet day after day. We listened to Pam Gregory introduce Nessus and his poisoned shirt…? If I remember correctly, in the current Virgo–Pisces cycle, the Moon conjoins Nessus in Pisces opposite the Virgo Sun, so Nessus’ themes of a poisoned gift and the moment a pattern stops—arrive on Virgoan ground: particularly referenced were notions of gut, hygiene, routine and textiles. The work for us all signalled here by lovely Pam, is to metabolise what harms, refuse what masquerades as care, and re-stitch practices that let the body and the day breathe.
As Carl Jung put it, the discovery of the unconscious is “a Shirt of Nessus which we cannot strip off”. You can’t unknow the rub; you learn to tailor it. That tailoring is Virgo’s art. Virgo’s reflection is physiological: the gut sorts, refines, releases; the jejunum—“empty” by name—is readiness, not lack. Only after the sift do we show.
Representation therefore becomes the after-image of good reflection: not a mask, but a well-digested truth.
I have been photographing again with my twin-lens reflex camera, always held down and pressed against my stomach. I look down through the clean mirror’s reflection, check the parallax, and turn the focus knob until the ground glass snaps clear. This is the digestive move and expressive take I am cyclically repeating this season.
My friend later showed me a book of her favourite artist. On its reverse, John Berger wrote of Ülo Sooster “he makes things seen, as if for the first time”. Lips (1964), disembodied and hovering, read to me as a post-Pam threshold image: ingestion begins here, speech exits here. Reflection in; representation out. A distorted dichotomous interior & exterior of a piece & place which belongs to the body.
For me, Virgo is having a gut feeling about something needing to be done (and doing it) then checking what the recipe over, or under represented. I will let this be a fad-fashion diet tip to the reader then. Try precision without punishment. Choose inputs and textures that nourish, definitely retire what inflames, and let the mouth be a mindful portal.
touching💙