Religious Symbols
Capricorn
Astral
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Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Capricorn is a compound figure read as the head and forequarters of a goat joined to the hindquarters and curling tail of a fish. The goat-fish is genuinely ancient and not a late invention: the Babylonian suhurmasu, the goat-fish, occupies these stars in cuneiform sources, and the Greeks attached to them the story of Pan turning himself into a goat with a fish tail to escape Typhon. A common account derives the written glyph from a ligature of the Greek letters of tragos, the goat, but this derivation is contested and the pictorial reading is the safer one; the modern shape is a Renaissance regularisation of the forms found in the Byzantine codices. Capricorn is cardinal earth and holds the winter solstice in the tropical zodiac, and the glyph stands for ambition, structure, discipline, endurance, and the slow climb toward authority and lasting form.
Facts
Origins
Origin PeriodThe twelve-sign zodiac was standardised in Babylonia in the mid-first millennium BCE and fixed as equal signs in Hellenistic astrology. Place of OriginMesopotamia (Babylonia), transmitted through the Hellenistic Greek world. 2 Form
Type of SymbolAstral figure: sun, moon or planet 1 Geometric FormA compact figure combining a goat's head with a fish's tail. 1 Identity
Also Known As Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Capricorn is the tenth sign, a cardinal earth sign ruled by Saturn, with the Sea-goat as its emblem, its opening degree marking the northern winter solstice of each calendar year in the tropical reckoning. The goat-fish hybrid behind the sign is genuinely ancient, not a later invention: Babylonian cuneiform sources already name a constellation called the suhurmasu, the goat-fish, in this stretch of sky, long before Greek astrologers gave it a written abbreviation.
The compact glyph now used for Capricorn belongs to that later layer of notation, first attested with the rest of the zodiacal shorthand in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, the corpus of ordinary documents catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in Greek Horoscopes, and carried forward through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition before Renaissance printers gave it a fixed, consistently reproduced shape in successive editions of their almanacs. Capricorn's Unicode codepoint is U+2651, one of the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, a range of two hundred fifty-six codepoints spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Capricorn is a compound figure read as the head and forequarters of a goat joined to the hindquarters and curling tail of a fish."
This source names Typhon directly: "into a goat with a fish tail to escape Typhon."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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