Religious Symbols
Scorpio
Astral
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Origin 500 BCE to 100 BCE
The glyph of Scorpio is an M-like figure whose final stroke rises into a barb, read as the scorpion with its sting raised over its back. It differs from the Virgo glyph only in that terminal stroke, the loop closing inward for the maiden and turning outward into a point for the scorpion; the shared base has invited many explanations and none is documented. The scorpion is old and stable in this position, appearing in Babylonian star lists and in the Greek myth of the creature sent to kill the hunter Orion, who still sets as it rises. Scorpio is fixed water, and the glyph stands for the qualities the sting implies: penetration, secrecy, desire, endurance under pressure, and the capacity to go into what is buried, taboo, or dying and come back with something from it.
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 FormAn M-like figure ending in a barbed, upturned tail. 1 Learn More
A Sign of the Zodiac
Scorpio is the eighth sign, a fixed water sign, traditionally ruled by Mars and in modern astrology also associated with Pluto, with the Scorpion as its emblem. The scorpion is one of the oldest figures in the zodiac, attested in Babylonian cuneiform star lists many centuries before Greek astrologers adopted a written shorthand for it. That shorthand, the compact glyph now used for Scorpio, first appears alongside the rest of the zodiacal notation in the Greek horoscope papyri of Roman Egypt, ordinary documents catalogued by Otto Neugebauer and Henry Van Hoesen in their reference work Greek Horoscopes, was copied through the medieval Byzantine manuscript tradition, and only settled into its familiar printed shape during the Renaissance, when printers standardised the sign glyphs across successive editions of the almanacs.
Scorpio's Unicode codepoint is U+264F, one of the twelve consecutive zodiac symbols the standard placed in the Miscellaneous Symbols block, two hundred fifty-six codepoints in all spanning U+2600 to U+26FF, when that block was introduced in version 1.1 in 1993. The scorpion also lends its name to the star Antares, whose Greek name means rival of Mars, a comparison ancient writers drew from the star's reddish colour.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
This source names Babylonians directly: "The glyph of Scorpio is an M-like figure whose final stroke rises into a barb, read as the scorpion with its sting raised over its back."
This source names The Maiden directly: "stroke, the loop closing inward for the maiden and turning outward into a point for the scorpion; the shared base has invited many explanations and none is documented."
Symbol Of
The symbol's own cited description identifies its glyph as that of this zodiac sign.
Sources
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