Venus meaning
The Venus sign is a circle over a cross. In alchemy and astronomy it means the planet and the metal copper. Its use as a general “female” icon is modern, not Roman.
Copper’s mark, long before it was a gender icon.
The name. A circle over a cross. Copper, Friday, the garden and the bed.
Where it comes from
Friday, copper, love, growth. The glyph is old astronomical and alchemical notation. Linnaeus and the botanical tradition borrowed it for the female in plants; biology kept it; twentieth-century feminism borrowed it again, often doubled or fisted, as a political sign. The borrowings are legitimate uses. They are not the birth of the mark. Mars underwent the mirror history.
Alchemy
A metal with a temper
Copper takes a polish and a green corrosion. It is Venus because the old system liked that kind of rhyme: beauty, a surface, and a body that reacts to the air. The circle over the cross was read, later, as spirit over matter. That reading is a gloss on a workshop sign. Both can be true in their centuries.
Modern
How a sign changes job
When the circle-and-cross means “woman” on a form, it is doing eighteenth-century biology’s work, not a Roman priestess’s. You can want the political symbol and still know which desk invented that particular use. Origin stories that start in the 1970s are incomplete. Origin stories that end in Babylon are usually fantasy.
Near this
Sources
- Early modern planetary glyphs: Venus for copper
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.