A Classical Planet

Venus is a classical planet ruling Taurus and Libra, the brilliant morning and evening star long identified with a goddess of love. Its familiar circle-and-cross glyph is not as old as it looks: the earliest surviving papyrus attestations of the classical planetary signs, among them Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 235, show Venus and Mercury without the small cross later fixed to the foot of each, which suggests the cross was added to both signs at some point after their basic forms were already established rather than belonging to their original design. The completed sign went on to a career well beyond astrology.

The Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus took up the Venus glyph, alongside the sign for Mars, to mark the female and male parents of hybrid plants in his 1751 dissertation Plantae Hybridae, and was using both freely as general male and female markers by his Species Plantarum of 1753, the origin of their now-universal use across biology and beyond, entirely detached from the planet either sign once denoted alone. Few astrological glyphs have travelled so far from their point of origin: a mark meant to track a wandering point of light in the evening sky now labels restroom doors and hospital forms across the world, most of whose readers have never connected it to Venus at all.