The Venus symbol

A mirror, a cross and a circle

The symbol has two parts. The circle is the whole, spirit or the self; the cross below is matter. Placing the circle above the cross is read as spirit leading matter, in keeping with a planet of attraction instead of force.

Venus never strays far from the Sun in the sky, reaching at most about 48 degrees from it, which is why it is the morning star before dawn at some times of the year and the evening star after sunset at others. In a birth chart that limit means Venus is in the Sun's sign or at most two signs away from it.

A second, more concrete reading says the glyph is a hand mirror with a round glass and a handle, the object that Roman art gave to Venus. A third explanation traces the shape to a stylised cursive abbreviation in Greek manuscripts. The tradition holds all three readings side by side, and none is the single settled origin.

What goes with the glyph in the traditional scheme

The pentagram Venus draws in the sky

A curious fact about the planet, and one reason the symbol of Venus sits so comfortably with the number five: Venus meets the Sun in the same part of the sky every 584 days (583.9 on average), and five of those cycles add up to 2,919.6 days, just under 8 years (2.4 days short). Plot the five meeting points on the zodiac and they sit at the corners of a five-pointed star, which shifts slowly around the wheel over the centuries.

Astrologers do not need this fact to read a chart, but it is often given as the reason why Venus has been tied to harmony and proportion for so long. It is geometry, not a prediction.

Where else you will see the glyph

• In birth charts and ephemerides, labelling the planet.
• In biology, where the same glyph has marked one of the two sexes of an organism since the eighteenth century. The borrowing is a notation habit, and it plays no part in how astrology reads Venus.
• In alchemy and old pharmacy, as the sign for copper.
• On Friday columns of planetary hour tables and almanacs.

Typing the Venus symbol

Unicode files the glyph as FEMALE SIGN, U+2640, because it is shared with biology. Many systems draw it as a coloured picture. To force the plain version, append the variation selector U+FE0E.

Venus retrograde, and a year's worth of signs

Venus goes round the zodiac in about a year, so it spends roughly a month in each sign on average. Every 584 days or so it turns retrograde for about six weeks, a pause that astrologers read as a time for revisiting what one values. Over eight years the five retrogrades fall in five different places around the zodiac, the five points of the pentagram described above.