Glyph and Origin

The glyph is an M-like figure ending in a barbed, upturned tail, and it differs from the Virgo glyph, which shares the same basic M shape, only in that final stroke, closing inward into a loop for the maiden and turning outward into a point for the scorpion; the shared base has invited a great deal of speculation among writers on the symbols but no documented explanation from any ancient source.

The sign descends from the Babylonian zodiac codified in Hellenistic astrology, where the scorpion already appears in cuneiform star lists, and Greek myth attached to it the creature sent to kill the hunter Orion, who still sets below the horizon as Scorpio rises in the east. The written mark is preserved through Byzantine copies of Greek horoscopes, the manuscript corpus catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen, and it reached a stable printed form only after fifteenth and sixteenth century almanacs and ephemerides, in the tradition established by Regiomontanus's early Nuremberg press, fixed the zodiac signs in type. The tropical sign no longer coincides with the constellation Scorpius, the two having separated through the same slow axial wobble that has carried every tropical sign away from its namesake over the centuries.