Modern culture has borrowed a lot from the ancient Greeks and Romans. This is not only a huge number of words that came to modern languages from antiquity, but also knowledge in the field of mathematics, chemistry, physics, architecture and many other sciences. By the way, it was the ancient Greeks and Romans that contemporaries should be grateful for such signs as the mirror of Venus and the spear of Mars, used to designate male and female.
Symbol of Venus - Mirror
Absolutely everyone has seen this sign, and more than once. Modern manufacturers of erotic products and contraception quite actively use it.
If you open any book about the relationship of the sexes, one of the illustrations will necessarily show a mirror of Venus. After all, this is a symbol of the feminine that came from the time of Ancient Greece. There is also a similar symbol of the masculine principle - the spear of Mars.
What does the mirror of Venus look like?
Today, the female symbol is indicated by a circle with a cruciform handle at the bottom. However, such an appearance in the mirror of Venus was not always.
In the pre-Christian world, the sign of the female goddess Venus (Aphrodite) was like a graphic image of a magnifying glass. But when Christianity became the main religion, displacing all the others so as not to identify the mirror of Venus (symbol) with the pagan pantheon, a horizontal line was added to the “pen”, and it became like a cross.
Appearance story
So, we found that the modern symbol of the feminine came to us from distant antiquity, but in other cultures there were its analogues. In olden times, female deities were always identified with wisdom, love, wealth, beauty and fertility, without which ancient people considered their lives to be inferior. Therefore, each religion had its own supreme female goddess: Venus, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Astarte and others. Very often their symbols were a circle meaning wealth and usefulness, very similar to the mirror of Venus. By the way, the beloved by many Egyptian ankh is also similar to the symbol of the feminine and is often considered its ancestor.
In ancient Greece, and later in the Roman Empire, the cult of Aphrodite, or Venus, was quite common. She, like most of the supreme goddesses, protected women, giving them beauty, and also patronized lovers and pregnant women.
In fact, Venus personified the ideal woman: beautiful, independent, strong, smart and at the same time passionate. Her priestesses-hierodules gave love affection to every visitor to the temple who wishes. Therefore, Venus, her servants, as well as the symbol of the passionate goddess were associated precisely with the feminine. However, with the abolition of the cult of the goddess, he became less popular.
This symbol, as well as its male counterpart, became widespread thanks to the scientist Carl Linnaeus, who came up with how to classify representatives of flora and fauna. Faced with the fact that it is necessary to somehow indicate the sex of plants and animals, in 1751 he decided to use the symbols of male and female principles that came from pagan Greece.
Different symbol meanings
Besides the fact that it acted as a symbol of the ancient goddess and the planet named after her, as well as a sign of the feminine, the mirror of Venus in the Middle Ages was used by alchemists to denote the chemical element Cuprum, which today is known to everyone as copper. Oddly enough, but the very name of this metal is also associated with Venus.
The fact is that in antiquity mirrors were made of copper. And the largest deposit and supplier of this metal at that time was Cyprus - the place where, according to legend, the passionate goddess was born and where the center of her worship was located. Therefore, not only the planet, but also a chemical element was named in honor of Venus.
Modern variations of the symbol
Several millennia have passed since the appearance of the symbol of the feminine. Over the years, it has evolved.
In the twentieth century, this sign also underwent numerous changes. With the proliferation of feminism, the slightly modified mirror of Venus (photo below) has become a symbol of the struggle of women around the world for equal rights with men. So the traditional image of a mirror with a cross handle was supplemented with a fist in the center of the circle.
After the sexual revolution, people got the opportunity to openly build relationships with their gender. In addition, now they were able, with the help of modern medical advances, to change the gender given by nature to another.
To designate such individuals, a modified sign is used that combines both the mirror of Venus and the spear of Mars. In addition, there is another sign, created also on the basis of the above images, only here there is also a third element symbolizing the transformation.
Among other things, a slightly modified symbol of the feminine is used to indicate hermaphroditism (the presence of signs of both sexes in one person, animal, plant). It is interesting that the planet, named in honor of another ancient deity - Mercury, is exactly the same sign.
The drawing designating the feminine principle (the mirror of Venus) was able to survive the abolition of the cult of its goddess and other cataclysms. For many centuries it remained unchanged, but with the advent of the twentieth century, it experienced rebirth and again became a symbol of courageous, beautiful and free women.