Aries symbol (♈)
♈ is the glyph of Aries, the Ram, the first sign of the Western zodiac. Astrologers give its dates as 21 March to 19 April, and in their tradition it is a fire sign ruled by Mars.
Meaning
♈ is Unicode character U+2648 ARIES, the first of the zodiacal symbols in the Miscellaneous Symbols block. Its two curves rising from one stem are, in Richard Hinckley Allen’s 1899 account of the constellations, probably the head and horns of a ram. Aries is Latin for ram; the Greeks called the constellation Κριός (Kriós). In astrology the sign is not the constellation but a 30° stretch of the Sun’s yearly path that begins at the spring equinox. The glyph is the sign’s shorthand in Western astrology and, in C. W. King’s words, one of the “symbols so familiar to the eye in our almanacs”.
Origin and history
Where the twelve sign glyphs came from is not known. Encyclopaedia Britannica says their history is unknown and that they first appear in Greek manuscripts of the late Middle Ages. Allen cites Clerke, who found them in manuscripts of about the 10th century but in carvings only from the 15th or 16th, and Brown, who quotes the antiquary C. W. King: King found the glyphs on no antique work and suspected “Arab sages” had devised them, a view Brown did not share. The ram’s-horns reading of ♈ is a likely guess from its shape, not a documented derivation.
The constellation is much older than its glyph. Allen gives Aries the Latin titles Princeps signorum coelestium and Princeps zodiaci, leader of the zodiac, from about 1730 BC through the time of Hipparchos. Ptolemy, in the Tetrabiblos of the 2nd century AD, explains why astrologers still begin with it: because the zodiac is a circle it has no natural beginning, so they take the sign that begins with the spring equinox, Aries, as the starting point of them all.
The golden ram
In Greek myth, as Allen retells it, this is the ram that carried Phrixus, son of Athamas, and his sister Helle to Colchis, away from their stepmother Ino. Helle fell into the sea on the way, which became the Hellespont. Phrixus sacrificed the ram at the journey’s end and hung its fleece in the Grove of Ares, where it turned to gold and became the fleece the Argonauts sailed to find. Ovid called the constellation Phrixea Ovis, Phrixus’s sheep.
What astrologers say Aries means
In Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos, Aries is one of the two equinoctial signs, with Libra, and masculine and diurnal. It is one of the two houses of Mars, with Scorpio, and the Sun’s exaltation, where the length of the day and the Sun’s heat begin to increase. It heads the first of four triangles, Aries, Leo and Sagittarius, which the Sun governs by day and Jupiter by night. Astrology today, as Britannica describes it, sorts the signs by the four traditional elements, and Aries is a fire sign and a cardinal one; “energetic, courageous, impulsive” are the traits its table gives as traditionally attached to the sign. Britannica adds that astrology is not supported by science: no correlation has been found between birth dates and personality.
Why the dates no longer match the stars
The astrological dates for Aries are 21 March to 19 April, but because of the precession of the equinoxes, a slow wobble of the Earth’s axis, Britannica says the Sun is now in the constellation Aries from 19 April to 14 May. Astrologers’ signs stay with the seasons: Ptolemy held that the beginnings of the signs should be reckoned from the equinoxes and solstices, not from the stars.
See also
Libra symbol (♎), Scorpio symbol (♏), Taurus symbol (♉), Gemini symbol (♊), Cancer symbol (♋), Leo symbol (♌).
Sources
- Miscellaneous Symbols, Range: 2600–26FF (code chart), The Unicode Standard, Unicode Consortium, U+2648
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Aries, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Aries
- Star-Names and Their Meanings: Aquarius, Richard Hinckley Allen, 1899 (reprinted by Dover as Star Names: Their Lore and Meaning), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), Aquarius (on the zodiac signs’ symbols)
- Tetrabiblos, Book I, Claudius Ptolemy, 2nd century AD; translated by F. E. Robbins (Loeb Classical Library, 1940), LacusCurtius (Bill Thayer, University of Chicago), I.10, I.11, I.12, I.17, I.18, I.19, I.22
- Zodiac, The Editors of Encyclopaedia Britannica; last revised by Rick Livingston, Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wayback Machine copy, 11 September 2026), Signs and dates; Astrology; History
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Last reviewed September 30, 2026 by Rory Hansen. How we research