Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Venus is a circle set above a cross. The usual account reads it as the hand-mirror of the goddess, the circle being the polished disc and the cross its handle, and this is plausible but explicitly uncertain; ancient mirrors were made of polished copper, which is also the metal Venus rules in alchemy, where the same sign denotes copper. What is attested is that the cross is a relatively recent addition, being absent from the form in Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 235 and from the twelfth-century work of Johannes Kamateros, so the medieval glyph was a circle with a short stroke rather than the modern hooked cross. Later esoteric readings take the circle of spirit resting upon the cross of matter, but this is interpretation and not derivation. Beyond astrology the sign was adopted in biology for the female sex and in the twentieth century as a feminist emblem, uses that postdate its astrological career by a long way.
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 above a cross, described as a hand mirror. 1 Learn More
A Classical Planet
Venus is a classical planet ruling Taurus and Libra, the brilliant morning and evening star long identified with a goddess of love. Its familiar circle-and-cross glyph is not as old as it looks: the earliest surviving papyrus attestations of the classical planetary signs, among them Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 235, show Venus and Mercury without the small cross later fixed to the foot of each, which suggests the cross was added to both signs at some point after their basic forms were already established rather than belonging to their original design. The completed sign went on to a career well beyond astrology.
The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus took up the Venus glyph, alongside the sign for Mars, to mark the female and male parents of hybrid plants in his 1751 dissertation Plantae Hybridae, and was using both freely as general male and female markers by his Species Plantarum of 1753, the origin of their now-universal use across biology and beyond, entirely detached from the planet either sign once denoted alone. Few astrological glyphs have travelled so far from their point of origin: a mark meant to track a wandering point of light in the evening sky now labels restroom doors and hospital forms across the world, most of whose readers have never connected it to Venus at all.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Venus, Deities This source names Venus directly: "The glyph of Venus is a circle set above a cross."
Symbol Of
Venus, Planets The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this planet.
Sources
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