Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Mars is a circle with an arrow springing from its upper right, traditionally read as the shield and spear of the god of war. The medieval evidence supports the martial reading in outline: by the eleventh century the sign is drawn as an arrow set across or through a circle, and earlier medieval forms show the spear drawn across the face of the shield. The earliest Greek papyrus forms are simpler and their relation to the later circle-and-arrow is uncertain, so the continuity is not perfectly established. In alchemy the same sign denotes iron, the martial metal from which weapons are made, and the association of the planet, the metal and the god is old and consistent. Astrologically it marks assertion, appetite, anger, courage, competition and the capacity to act and to cut. Like the Venus glyph it was later borrowed by biology, in this case for the male sex.
Facts
Origins
Origin Period Origin PeriodCodified among the seven classical planets of Hellenistic astrology 2 Origin PeriodObserved and deified in Mesopotamia across the second and first millennia BCE 2 Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Adopted as an Emblem Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormA circle with an arrow projecting from the upper right, a shield and spear. 1 Learn More
A Classical Planet
Mars is a classical planet, traditional ruler of Aries and Scorpio, its red colour long linking it to a god of war. The familiar circle-with-arrow glyph read today as a shield and spear is attested in that basic form from at least the eleventh century, an arrow drawn across or through a circle, but it is not the planet's oldest recorded sign.
The Greek Oxyrhynchus papyri, among the earliest surviving sources for the classical planetary glyphs, show Mars marked with a different symbol altogether, evidence that more than one graphic convention for the planet circulated in antiquity before the shield-and-spear form eventually won out and stabilised through the Byzantine and medieval periods. Its warlike associations made the reading of a shield and projecting spear an easy, memorable gloss once the form had settled, whether or not that was the design's original intent, and the same association of Mars with iron and weaponry later carried the sign into unrelated technical vocabularies that had nothing to do with astrology. Mars's glyph is unusual among the classical seven for having a single dominant reading, shield and spear, agreed on across most modern popular accounts, where several of its companions, Jupiter's and Saturn's especially, are more honestly described as abbreviations whose pictorial gloss was added after the fact.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Mars, Deities This source names Mars directly: "The glyph of Mars is a circle with an arrow springing from its upper right, traditionally read as the shield and spear of the god of war."
Venus, Deities This source names Venus directly: "Like the Venus glyph it was later borrowed by biology, in this case for the male sex."
Symbol Of
Mars, Planets The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this planet.
Sources
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