SYM·0098 · Venus
Venus
a planet, a metal, then half of humanity
- Unicode
- U+2640 female sign
- Meaning
- The planet Venus; copper in alchemy; and, since the eighteenth century, the female sex.
- History
- An astronomical sign that alchemy read as copper — the metal of Cyprus, Venus’s island. Its third career has a date and an author: Linnaeus put ♀ and ♂ to work in 1751 to mark the sexes of plants, and biology has used them ever since. From there they passed to medicine, demography, and in the twentieth century to political movements, where ♀ over a raised fist became the mark of one.
- Variants
- The circle-and-cross is stable; the fist and the doubled forms are twentieth-century additions.
- Related
- ♂ Mars, its pair in all three careers; the alchemical metal set.
- Appears
- Biology, medicine, forms, lavatory doors, and political banners.
- Evolution
- Planetary sign → metal → botanical shorthand → a statement about people.
Sources · 3
- documented Carl Linnaeus’s adoption of ♀ and ♂ for plant sexes, 1751 — the moment the astronomical signs became biological.
- documented The alchemical correspondence of Venus with copper.
- folk That the sign depicts Venus’s hand mirror. Universally repeated and almost certainly wrong: the likelier ancestor is a contracted Greek abbreviation, and the mirror is a reading applied afterwards to a shape that already existed.