Reference · Symbols · Overview

Symbols

A symbol here is a sign a tradition writes with: a planet or a zodiac sign in a chart, a metal or an operation in an alchemical recipe, a figure of points in a geomantic shield. Most are drawn from a Unicode character and use its official name. Each card links to related material elsewhere on the site.

Unicode's own notes carry some of the history. They record that the sign of Saturn is also alchemy's lead and the Sun's is its gold. They also distinguish an astrological aspect from a visually identical geometric character.

By tradition

Astrology 29 symbols: planets, signs, aspects and the Moon's nodes.
Alchemy 96 symbols: elements, the seven metals, ores and minerals, substances, operations, apparatus, emblems and times and measures.
Geomancy 16 symbols: the sixteen figures.
Hermetic and Golden Dawn 2 symbols: in the ritual of the pentagram. Rose Cross is listed but not drawn: Unicode has no character for it.
Egyptian hieroglyphs 54 symbols: the signs that stand for single sounds, borrowed to spell a foreign name, amulets and emblems, what a person is made of, gods, and the creatures they are written with, sun, sky and time and rule, gold and stone.

Where each part comes from

The drawings: The outline of each character in Noto Sans Symbols, Noto Sans Symbols 2, and Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs, under the SIL Open Font License, converted into vector paths rather than drawn by hand. A different font would render the same character differently; Unicode identifies the character, not its exact outline.
The names, aliases and notes: Unicode 16.0.0: each official name from the Unicode Character Database, and each alias and note from its names list. That is where “alchemical symbol for lead” under Saturn comes from: Unicode's own annotation of the character, not this study's claim.
The groupings: The headings are editorial. Every character in Unicode's alchemical block is included under one of them.
Geomancy: The sixteen figures are drawn as four rows of one or two points from the geomancy data used throughout the site; they are not Unicode characters.