Fourteen bodies, twelve signs, eleven aspects. Every shape redrawn at the size you ask for, and for each one what is actually known about where it came from.
An astrological glyph is an abbreviation, not a picture. Most of the ones you read here are contracted Greek letters, worn down by fifteen centuries of hand copying and then frozen by print. A few have an author and a date. Only one, Chiron's, is less than fifty years old.
This page serves two purposes. The first is practical: every glyph is a vector drawing, not a font and not an image, and you can take it away as it is. The second is sorting: more folklore than knowledge circulates about where these symbols come from, so we keep three regimes apart here, what is attested, what is conjectured, and what is false.
Shapes drawn after the Unicode reference glyphs, which the standard itself declares are not prescriptive. Historical sources are named line by line further down.
The library →
The workshop
Pick a size: the page redraws all thirty-seven shapes, it does not enlarge them. The address you get can be shared as it is, and the whole plate works without JavaScript.
Click a glyph, here or in the aspect table, to take it away as SVG. The stroke is written as currentColor: pasted into a page it takes the colour of the text around it, opened on its own it comes out black.
The fourteen bodies
The seven traditional ones, the three modern ones, the two lunar nodes, Chiron and Lilith. These are exactly the bodies our wheels can place: the four major asteroids do enter a chart, but they have no drawing here.
The twelve signs
The shapes we use are the ones in common currency. Several have circulated differently, and fifteenth-century printing gives recognisable variants of them: that is set out below, with the exact leaf.
The eleven aspects
Nine have a glyph, two do not. The semi-sextile and the quincunx are exact mirrors of each other, head to tail: thirty degrees and a hundred and fifty answer one another, and the pairing is deliberate.
The eleven aspects
Glyph
Aspect
Angle
Transit orb
Unicode
Origin of the aspect
ConjunctionMajor
0°
8°
U+260C
CONJUNCTION
Ptolemaic tradition
Semi-sextileMinor
30°
1.5°
U+26BA
SEMISEXTILE
No established attribution
Semi-squareMinor
45°
2°
U+2220
ANGLE
*
No established attribution
SextileMajor
60°
6°
U+26B9
SEXTILE
Ptolemaic tradition
Q
QuintileMinor
72°
1.5°
no code point
Kepler, 1619
SquareMajor
90°
8°
U+25A1
WHITE SQUARE
*
Ptolemaic tradition
TrineMajor
120°
8°
U+25B3
WHITE UP-POINTING TRIANGLE
*
Ptolemaic tradition
SesquiquadrateMinor
135°
2°
U+26BC
SESQUIQUADRATE
Kepler, 1619
bQ
BiquintileMinor
144°
1.5°
no code point
Kepler, 1619
QuincunxMinor
150°
3°
U+26BB
QUINCUNX
No established attribution
OppositionMajor
180°
8°
U+260D
OPPOSITION
Ptolemaic tradition
The quintile and the biquintile have no glyph. The letter Q is written instead, and bQ or Q², and Unicode notes this itself. The only encoded quintile characters are explicitly Russian variants, added to the standard in 2018. We would rather say so than invent a drawing and then go on to teach it.
* Three glyphs borrow a generic shape, and their character names show it: U+2220 is the mathematical ANGLE sign, U+25A1 a white square, U+25B3 a white up-pointing triangle. The semi-square deserves to be stated plainly: no code point is dedicated to it, Unicode merely annotates U+2220 as used in astrological contexts for that aspect.
The glyphs for the semi-sextile, the sextile, the quincunx and the sesquiquadrate only entered Unicode in version 5.1, in 2008. That is a fact about computer encoding, not about the age of the symbols: the sextile is far older than 2008. For the others the entry version has not been verified, and the table would rather stay silent than print a dash you would read as “not encoded”.
The orb shown is the transit, synastry and composite orb. Your natal chart does not use these numbers: it adds the moieties of the two bodies involved, which gives twelve degrees for the Sun and the Moon and five for Uranus and Pluto. Printing a single figure here without saying so would announce a value your own reading never uses.
Dating an aspect, dating a glyph
Two things get confused constantly. The five Ptolemaic aspects, conjunction, sextile, square, trine and opposition, are ancient as concepts. Their glyphs, on the other hand, have no datable first attestation that research has been able to establish. So we will never write that a given symbol goes back to Ptolemy: nobody has shown it.
The quintile, the biquintile and the sesquiquadrate are Kepler's, drawn from the pentagon, the decagon and the octagon. They appear in Harmonices mundi (Linz, 1619), book IV, and he was already working on them in his letter to David Fabricius of 1 October 1602. (Linde and Greenbaum, “Kepler on Aspects, 1602”, Culture and Cosmos 14, 2010.)
The semi-square is often handed to Kepler in the same breath, because the octagon also gives forty-five degrees. We do not do that: the source names the quintile, the biquintile and the sesquiquadrate, and nothing else. On that row the table says “no established attribution”, which means we do not know, not that the aspect is recent.
What is documented, and what is not
One reading rule takes away most of the risk here: the big general references, online encyclopedias and space agency pages, are reliable about which symbol is used today and unreliable about where it came from. Keeping those two roles apart is all it takes. So here are three separate regimes, with the source alongside.
Attested
A name, a work, a date. What follows can be checked.
Jupiter and Saturn are Greek letters
Jupiter's glyph comes from a zeta carrying an abbreviation stroke, for Zeus. John Kamateros still shows it as a plain zeta in the twelfth century. Saturn's comes from the two initials kappa and rho of Kronos, joined by the same abbreviation stroke and reduced to an eta-like shape in the same period. It is the same mechanism in both cases: the Greek name of the planet is abbreviated, the god is not illustrated.
Alexander Jones, Astronomical Papyri from Oxyrhynchus, 1999, pp. 62-63; Salmasius, 1629; John Kamateros, Compendium of Astrology, twelfth century.
The crosses on Mercury and Venus are a late addition
The small cross at the foot of Mercury and Venus was not always there. It is absent in Kamateros in the twelfth century and present in the sixteenth. The dating is solid. The reason for the addition is not, and it is handled below among the conjectures.
John Kamateros, Compendium of Astrology, twelfth century, against sixteenth-century printed books; discussion taken up by W. T. Stearn, Taxon 11/4, 1962.
Mars and Venus for male and female: Linnaeus, 1751
Using the two planetary symbols for the sexes begins with Linnaeus, in his dissertation Plantae hybridae of 1751, and becomes general with Species Plantarum in 1753. No earlier attestation has been found. Biology borrowed two planetary symbols, not the other way round.
W. T. Stearn, “The Origin of the Male and Female Symbols of Biology”, Taxon 11/4, 1962.
Uranus has two symbols, both from 1784
The first is the platinum symbol, a dotted circle topped by a stroke with an arrowhead, proposed by Köhler and taken up by Bode. The second is Herschel's monogram, an H with a globe hanging from it, suggested by Lalande as “a globe surmounted by the first letter of your name”. Astronomers use the first, astrologers the second. One warning is worth recording: the Unicode character U+2645 has the monogram as its reference glyph, but carries the annotation “alchemical symbol for platinum”, which describes the other shape. Anyone writing this page from the annotations alone would get it wrong.
Platinum symbol, Köhler and Bode, 1784. Used by astronomers.Herschel's monogram, Lalande, 1784. Used by astrologers, and by this site.
Johann Köhler and Johann Elert Bode, 1784; Joseph Jérôme de Lalande, 1784.
Pluto has five encoded forms
The best known outside Europe is the P-L monogram, published in the Lowell Observatory Observation Circular of 1 May 1930: it stands both for Pluto and for Percival Lowell's initials. The four other forms are encoded as well. The second, a globe inside a crescent set on a cross, is the most widespread in the world outside the Anglo-American sphere, and it is the one we draw. The third is used mainly by French, Spanish and Italian speaking astrologers; the fourth is Hermann Lefeldt's, Hamburg school, 1946; the fifth dominates in German speaking countries and in Denmark.
Form two: a globe inside a crescent, on a cross. The most widespread, and the one this site draws.P-L monogram, Lowell Observatory, 1930.
David Faulks, “Astrological Plutos”, document L2/16-067R, 2016, with thirty-two dated and sourced samples.
Chiron's glyph has an author
It was created by Al H. Morrison and circulated from 1978, a few months after the body was discovered. It is the only glyph on this page whose author and year are both known to within a year.
Al H. Morrison, 1978; character U+26B7.
The signs circulated otherwise, and it is in print
The Nuremberg Chronicle, at leaf 11 recto, prints the twelve sign glyphs in shapes you would not all recognise: Cancer lying flat, two hooks side by side rather than the upright “69”; Sagittarius as a vertical arrow with a crossbar; Aquarius as three stacked zigzags; Libra as two horizontal bars with a vertical stroke; Capricorn in a looped cursive form; Pisces as two crossing arcs. One point not to copy wrongly: this is a printed book, an incunable, not a manuscript.
Hartmann Schedel, Liber chronicarum, Nuremberg, 1493, leaf 11 recto.
Variants live inside Unicode itself
The reference glyph for U+264E, Libra, is an omega-shaped arc over a single bar. The one for U+2651, Capricorn, is the looped cursive form. U+264D, Virgo, carries the annotation “minim, alternate glyph”, and U+264F, Scorpio, “minim, drop”: the same shapes served in apothecary notation. Those variants can be checked by anyone, today, in the standard's own code charts.
Unicode code charts, Miscellaneous Symbols block, and the NamesList annotations.
With reservations
What follows is held by serious people but is not established. So we write who says it, rather than that it is so.
Mercury: two scholarly camps, no referee
On one side, the glyph is said to be a stylised caduceus. On the other, a contraction of Stilbon, the Greek name of the planet, as with Jupiter and Saturn. Both readings are defended by serious philologists and neither has won. We present both and choose neither.
Caduceus: Alexander Jones, 1999. Contraction: Salmasius, 1629; Renkema; W. T. Stearn, 1962.
Why a cross was added
That the crosses were added to christianise pagan symbols is a suggestion by A. S. D. Maunder, not a result. The right form of words is “Maunder proposed that”, not “they were added in order to”. The dating of the addition is solid; its motive is not.
A. S. D. Maunder, hypothesis; taken up and discussed by W. T. Stearn, Taxon 11/4, 1962.
Jupiter shaped like a 4
The modern shape of Jupiter looks like the numeral 4, and this is commonly explained as a late cursive stage of the zeta. We have found no source that establishes it. The resemblance is a fact; the explanation is a habit.
No source found for the cursive explanation; the zeta origin itself is Jones, 1999.
Pluto as a bident
A bident shape, the god's attribute, does circulate and is attested in Vehlow in 1955. Faulks nonetheless declined to propose it for encoding for want of sufficient sources. So one may write “a bident form circulates too”; one may not write “astrologers generally use it”.
Johannes Vehlow, 1955; David Faulks, L2/16-067R, 2016, who sets it aside for lack of sources.
What we do not write
The following claims are the most widespread on the subject, and they are false or unsupported. Several appear on sites that are authoritative in other respects. We will not repeat them.
That Mars is the god's shield and spear, and Venus the goddess's mirror. That is Scaliger's reading, explicitly rejected: Stearn writes that probably nobody accepts it any longer, and that all the evidence favours Salmasius's conclusion, namely contractions of the Greek names of the planets.
That Mars comes from the tiwaz rune, and that a Venus appears on a Mesopotamian tablet. The British Museum established that the latter rests on a modern draughtsman's misreading of a shadow on a photograph.
That Jupiter's glyph is an eagle hieroglyph, or Saturn's the scythe of Kronos. Both confuse the god's iconographic attribute with the written symbol of the planet, which is an abbreviation of its name.
The sign by sign etymologies: Virgo from parthenos, Leo from a lambda, Cancer from a demotic scarab, Libra from the setting sun, Scorpio's tail from Mars. No scholarly support has been found for any of them.
That the zodiac glyphs are Renaissance simplifications of pictorial representations. It is plausible and it is unsourced. And the manuscript Vat. gr. 1291, often invoked as an authority on glyph shapes, could not be confirmed in that role.
On the first point: W. T. Stearn, “The Origin of the Male and Female Symbols of Biology”, Taxon 11/4, 1962, p. 112.
What we do with them
We never put the Unicode character in a page or in a PDF. It turns into a colour emoji for half of all readers, a bright pink Venus in the middle of a gold table, and it does not exist in any of the fonts our documents use. Every glyph on the site is a drawing, made by the same code that draws your wheels: what you see here is exactly what you will see on your chart.
Where two forms coexist, we use one and we say so. For Uranus, Herschel's monogram, which is astrological practice. For Pluto, form two, the most widespread in the world. These are choices, not truths, and they are shown side by side above so that you can judge rather than take our word.
Where there is no shape, we do not invent one. The quintile and the biquintile come out as letters. Pluto's three other encoded forms are not drawn here, including the one used mainly by French speaking astrologers: we do not have it on firm enough sources to draw it, and an approximate drawing would be copied straight away as a reference.
See them where they belong
These same shapes carry your natal wheel, its signs, its bodies and its aspects. Your sky map is free to see, and reads without knowing anything on this page.