Mars meaning
The Mars sign is a circle with an arrow. It means the planet and the metal iron. Its use as a general “male” icon is modern. It is not, originally, a gender diagram.
Iron’s mark: a blade’s metal, and later a sex.
The name. A circle with an arrow. Iron, Tuesday, the cut.
Where it comes from
Tuesday — Mardi, dies Martis — and iron. The arrow is the later gender sign’s ancestor only by borrowing, as with Venus. Iron rusts. It remembers water and time. Modern blood chemistry, with its hemoglobin iron, is a rhyme the old system would have liked and did not know. Do not credit the Romans with the red cell.
Alchemy
The metal that stains
Mars is not only aggression. It is the edge that separates, the tool, the thing that holds a shape under a blow and then slowly gives itself to rust. In a person, the choleric and the martial are neighbors, not synonyms. Fire is the element. Mars is a planet and a metal. The vocabulary is precise when the authors are.
Modern
An arrow is not a biography
On a document, the sign means male because a scientific tradition said so, centuries after the armorers were marking iron. The political uses — men’s movements, trans flags that recombine the arrows — are new sentences written in an old alphabet. Read the sentence you were shown.
Near this
Sources
- Early modern planetary glyphs: Mars for iron
Named when the entry depends on a text, a date, or a standard. Catalog numbers are not invented.
Your margin
Private. It stays in this browser and never joins the canon.
symbol.wiki, edited as Sigilla. Last reviewed 2 October 2026. A reading of public tradition, not a ruling.