Glyph and Origin

The glyph is a compact figure combining a goat's head with a fish's tail, and its written derivation has long been argued over. A widely repeated account, reaching back at least to the eighteenth century, reads it as a ligature of the Greek letters that open tragos, the word for goat; an older rival explanation attributed to the French astronomer Lalande instead describes the same lower stroke not as lettering at all but as the animal's own twisted tail. Neither account is beyond dispute, and no ancient source settles the question either way.

The Greeks attached to the hybrid the story of Pan turning himself into a goat with a fish's tail to escape the monster Typhon, a tale layered onto the far older Babylonian goat-fish. The written mark is preserved through Byzantine copies of Greek horoscopes, the manuscript corpus catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, and the modern shape is a Renaissance regularisation, fixed once printed almanacs in the tradition of Regiomontanus's Nuremberg Kalendarium began setting the signs in type. Precession, the slow wobble of the Earth's rotational axis, has carried the tropical sign away from its constellation over the more than two thousand years since the sign was first fixed by Hellenistic astrologers.