Your Birth Chart
Astrology Symbols: Every Glyph on Your Chart, Decoded
Astrology symbols are the shorthand glyphs a birth chart prints instead of words: ♈ for Aries, ☉ for the Sun, ℞ for a planet running retrograde. A standard Western chart uses 12 sign glyphs and about a dozen planet glyphs, all encoded in Unicode’s Miscellaneous Symbols block (Unicode Consortium), which is why they arrive as text rather than pictures.
Key Takeaways:
- The 12 zodiac glyphs occupy U+2648 through U+2653 in Unicode’s Miscellaneous Symbols block (Unicode Consortium), so ♈ to ♓ are typeable characters, not images.
- Most planet glyphs are assembled from three parts: a circle, a crescent, a cross, stacked in different orders.
- ♍ Virgo and ♏ Scorpio are the pair readers mix up most. Both are an M shape, and only Scorpio’s ends in a raised tail.
- ℞ beside a planet means retrograde motion, not a warning or a rank.
- Carl Linnaeus borrowed ♂ and ♀ from the planetary signs to mark plant sexes in 1751 (Stearn, Taxon, 1962), so biology’s gender marks came out of the older shorthand, not the reverse.
The 12 Zodiac Sign Glyphs, Character by Character
Every zodiac sign carries exactly one glyph, and each glyph compresses the sign’s image into two or three strokes: ♈ is a ram’s horns, ♉ is a bull’s head, ♊ is the numeral two. Learn these 12 and you can read the outer ring of any Western chart wheel without reaching for a legend.
| Glyph | Sign | Sun enters (approx.) | What the shape draws | Traditional ruler |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ♈ | Aries | Mar 20 – Apr 19 | A ram’s curled horns | Mars |
| ♉ | Taurus | Apr 20 – May 20 | A bull’s head and horns | Venus |
| ♊ | Gemini | May 21 – Jun 20 | The numeral II, the twins | Mercury |
| ♋ | Cancer | Jun 21 – Jul 22 | Two crab claws curling inward | Moon |
| ♌ | Leo | Jul 23 – Aug 22 | A lion’s mane and tail | Sun |
| ♍ | Virgo | Aug 23 – Sep 22 | An M whose last loop turns in | Mercury |
| ♎ | Libra | Sep 23 – Oct 22 | A beam balance, or a sun on the horizon | Venus |
| ♏ | Scorpio | Oct 23 – Nov 21 | An M whose last stroke lifts into a sting | Mars (modern: Pluto) |
| ♐ | Sagittarius | Nov 22 – Dec 21 | An arrow leaving a bow | Jupiter |
| ♑ | Capricorn | Dec 22 – Jan 19 | A goat’s horn ending in a fish tail | Saturn |
| ♒ | Aquarius | Jan 20 – Feb 18 | Two lines of moving water | Saturn (modern: Uranus) |
| ♓ | Pisces | Feb 19 – Mar 20 | Two fish tied at the middle | Jupiter (modern: Neptune) |
Those date ranges drift by a day in either direction from year to year, because the tropical year runs about six hours past 365 days and the calendar catches up with a leap day. Born on March 20 or October 23? The glyph your chart actually prints settles it, and it beats any magazine table. If the boundary is your situation, work out which zodiac sign your birthday really lands in from the chart itself.
Two glyphs cause nearly all the confusion, and it’s always the same two. Virgo ♍ and Scorpio ♏ both start as an M. Virgo’s third stroke folds back into a small closed loop; Scorpio’s third stroke shoots out and up into an arrow. At 11 pixels on a phone they look identical, which is how someone ends up reading a Scorpio Venus as a Virgo Venus for a year and wondering why the description felt so mild.
Capricorn ♑ is the second troublemaker, mostly because fonts draw it so differently. Some render a clean V with a looping tail, others a shape closer to a lowercase n with a curl. Same character underneath.
So the first pass on any chart is mechanical: read the outer wheel counterclockwise and name the 12 glyphs before you look at a single planet.
Planet Glyphs Are Built From Three Shapes
Nearly every planet glyph is assembled from a circle, a crescent, and a cross, stacked in different arrangements. In the Western tradition the circle is read as spirit, the crescent as receptivity or soul, the cross as matter and the physical world. See the parts and you stop memorizing ten unrelated squiggles.
| Glyph | Body | Built from | Traditionally linked to |
|---|---|---|---|
| ☉ | Sun | A circle with a point at its center | Core self, vitality |
| ☽ | Moon | A crescent on its own | Feeling, needs, habit |
| ☿ | Mercury | Crescent over circle over cross | Thinking, speech, exchange |
| ♀ | Venus | Circle above a cross | Taste, attraction, what you value |
| ♂ | Mars | Circle with an arrow leaving it | Drive, appetite, how you push |
| ♃ | Jupiter | A crescent joined to a cross | Growth, belief, excess |
| ♄ | Saturn | A cross above a crescent | Limits, structure, time |
| ♅ | Uranus | An H for Herschel over a small circle | Disruption, sudden turns |
| ♆ | Neptune | A trident | Dissolving, imagination, fog |
| ♇ | Pluto | A circle cradled in a crescent above a cross | Power, buried material |
Venus and Mars hold the detail most people get backwards. The ♀ and ♂ used across biology and medicine were lifted out of astrology, not lent to it: Carl Linnaeus adopted the two planetary signs to mark plant sexes in 1751 (Stearn, Taxon, 1962). Every gender checkbox drawn with those two shapes is quoting a chart glyph roughly 270 years later.
Uranus gets printed two ways, and both are correct. ♅ is the monogram honoring William Herschel, who found the planet in 1781 (NASA); ⛢ is the older continental form built from a circle and a spear. German and French software still favors the second, so a chart drawn on European settings can look wrong to an American eye when nothing is wrong at all.
Pluto has its own split: ♇ is the PL monogram, while some charts draw the circle-over-crescent-over-cross version instead. Worth stating plainly, since it comes up every time someone reads about the solar system: the International Astronomical Union reclassified Pluto as a dwarf planet in August 2006 (IAU), and Western astrology kept using it anyway. Astronomy sorts bodies by physical criteria. Astrological tradition keeps symbols it has already assigned meaning to, and those two decisions answer different questions.
Practically, the glyphs you want cold are ☉, ☽ and the rising sign marker, because those three carry the most weight in a first read of your Sun, Moon and rising placements.
The Marks That Aren’t Signs or Planets
A chart also prints calculated points, four angles, and a set of aspect symbols, none of which are planets. They’re the marks that make a first chart look cluttered, and most of them are quick to place.
| Mark | Name | What it flags |
|---|---|---|
| ℞ | Retrograde | The body appears to move backward against the stars from Earth |
| ☊ | North Node | The lunar node the Moon crosses going north |
| ☋ | South Node | The opposite node, drawn as the same shape inverted |
| ⚷ | Chiron | A key shape, K over O, for the body named after the centaur |
| ⚸ | Black Moon Lilith | A crescent above a cross, marking a calculated lunar point |
| ⊗ | Part of Fortune | A cross inside a circle, derived from Sun, Moon and ascendant |
| AC · DC · MC · IC | The four angles | Lettered rather than glyphed in nearly all software |
The ℞ is the single most-searched mark on this list and the most over-read. It says one thing: from where we stand, that planet’s apparent motion has reversed against the background stars, which is a viewing-angle effect rather than the planet braking. What tradition then makes of that is a separate layer, covered in what retrograde motion actually is. About 20% of a typical natal chart’s planets carry the mark, so it’s ordinary, not ominous.
Chiron ⚷ deserves a note because its glyph looks like nothing else on the wheel and beginners often skip it entirely. It was only added to mainstream chart software decades after the classical set, which is why older printed charts don’t show it and why what Chiron is tied to in a chart reads as a modern addition rather than inherited doctrine.
Then there are the aspect glyphs, which appear in the grid below or beside the wheel rather than in the circle itself.
| Glyph | Aspect | Angle |
|---|---|---|
| ☌ | Conjunction | 0° |
| ⚹ | Sextile | 60° |
| □ | Square | 90° |
| △ | Trine | 120° |
| ⚻ | Quincunx | 150° |
| ☍ | Opposition | 180° |
The shapes are literal. A square glyph marks a 90-degree relationship, a triangle marks 120 degrees, and the two circles joined by a line mark opposition across the wheel. Reading the aspect grid is the step where a birth chart stops being a list of placements and starts behaving like a diagram.
What a Glyph Won’t Tell You
A glyph names a thing and nothing else. It carries no degree, no house, no aspect, no strength. ♂ in your chart tells you Mars is somewhere in the wheel, and the whole reading lives in the numbers printed next to it, so treating the symbol as the meaning is where beginners lose the plot.
The other failure is duller and more common. Half the exotic glyphs render as empty rectangles on phones, because the font in use has no character for ⚷ or ⚸ and falls back to a blank box. Nothing has broken and no data is missing. Just a font gap. Open the same chart in a different app and the shapes reappear.
My honest position after years of watching people study charts: memorizing all 30-odd symbols is wasted effort. Learn the 12 signs, learn the circle-crescent-cross logic behind the planets, then look up the rest as they turn up. Nobody reads a chart faster because they can draw Black Moon Lilith from memory.
One thing you can do today. Pull up your chart, find every ℞ first, then check the two M-shaped glyphs and confirm which one has the raised tail. Those two passes catch the most frequent misread on the page in under a minute.
FAQ
What does the R symbol next to a planet in my birth chart mean? It marks retrograde motion. From Earth, that planet appeared to move backward against the background stars on your birth date, which is an effect of the two orbits’ relative speeds rather than an actual reversal. In astrological tradition a retrograde planet is read as working inwardly or on a delay, not as broken or unlucky.
What’s the difference between the Virgo and Scorpio symbols? Both are drawn as an M with three strokes. Virgo ♍ curls its final stroke inward into a closed loop; Scorpio ♏ sends its final stroke outward and upward into an arrow tail. The tail is the only reliable way to tell them apart at small sizes, and it’s the most common misread on any printed chart.
Are the male and female symbols the same as Mars and Venus? They’re the same characters. ♂ is the glyph for Mars and ♀ is the glyph for Venus, and Carl Linnaeus adopted both for plant sexes in 1751 (Stearn, Taxon, 1962), which carried them into biology and later into everyday use. The astrological use came first by centuries.
Why do some astrology symbols show up as empty boxes on my phone? Because the font rendering the page has no character for that code point, so the system substitutes a blank rectangle. It happens most with Chiron ⚷ and Black Moon Lilith ⚸, which sit in less commonly supported ranges than the zodiac signs. Viewing the same chart in another app or browser usually fixes it.
Do all astrology programs use the same glyph for every planet? Not quite. Uranus appears as either ♅ or ⛢ depending on the software’s regional convention, and Pluto shows up as either the PL monogram ♇ or a circle-and-crescent form. Both variants of each are standard, and no calculation changes between them.
Charts are a compression format, which is the part that gets lost. Twelve sign glyphs and a dozen planet glyphs replace several paragraphs of description each, and once the shorthand stops looking like noise the wheel reads in about the time it takes to skim a paragraph. If you’d rather see the glyphs already attached to your own placements, Nolu draws the chart from your date, time and place of birth and labels what each mark on it refers to.