Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Saturn, like that of Jupiter, is an abbreviated Greek name rather than a picture. It derives from the initial letters kappa and rho of Kronos, written in ligature with a stroke to mark the abbreviation. Its development can be followed in the manuscripts: by the time of Johannes Kamateros in the twelfth century it had been worn down to a shape resembling a lower-case eta, and the modern form with its cross and descending hook is a later regularisation of that. The common later reading of a cross of matter weighing down a crescent of soul is a symbolic gloss on an inherited letter-form. In alchemy the sign denotes lead, the heavy and base metal. Astrologically it marks the greater malefic and the outermost of the seven traditional planets: time, limit, structure, discipline, ageing and endurance, and the scythe of Kronos is often read into the hook of the modern glyph after the fact.
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 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormA cross surmounting a curved stroke, read as a sickle. 1 Learn More
A Classical Planet
Saturn is the outermost of the seven classical planets and traditional ruler of Capricorn and Aquarius, its slow motion linking it to time, limit and old age. Its glyph began as a ligature of kappa and rho, the opening letters of Kronos, the planet's Greek name, marked with a stroke to flag the abbreviation, the same device used to build the signs for Jupiter and several of the other classical planets from Greek initials. In alchemy the identical mark stood for lead, the heaviest and dullest of the seven metals, a fitting counterpart to a planet already associated with slowness and constraint by the time the correspondence between planets and metals had settled into its familiar form by the sixteenth century.
Saturn's weekday is the one clear exception to the general replacement of Roman planetary names by Germanic gods in English: Saturday preserves dies Saturni, Saturn's day, directly and untranslated, because the Anglo-Saxons had no native god judged an adequate match for Saturn, unlike Mars, Mercury, Jupiter and Venus, each swapped for Tiw, Woden, Thor and Frigg in turn. Historians of the calendar generally attribute the exception to Saturn's comparatively minor place in the native Germanic pantheon, which left translators without an obvious local god to substitute, so the Latin name was simply carried across largely unchanged rather than replaced.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Jupiter directly: "The glyph of Saturn, like that of Jupiter, is an abbreviated Greek name rather than a picture."
This source names Saturn directly: "The glyph of Saturn, like that of Jupiter, is an abbreviated Greek name rather than a picture."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this planet.
Sources
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