Dear Martin,

Many thanks for your comments and suggestions. I am surprised that the symbols are not referenced in the astrological literature as I often see them in contemporary navagraha yantras (also thanks to Jean-Luc Chevillard for sharing an image of them in a Tamil pañcāṅga). Perhaps they belong to a comparatively late tradition or perhaps, as you suggest, they appear in a different genre of texts. The context I am seeing them in now is gameboards, playing pieces, knight's tours, and ganjifa cards from early to mid-19th-century Mysore.

Your suggestion that the symbolic shape of Venus might refer to the pattern of its orbit was echoed by a colleague in Berlin who shared the following illustration of Kepler's ideas on the subject:

 

 

I was initally just looking for a reference for a footnote, but there seems to be deeper mysteries to ponder here!

 

Best regards,

Jacob

Martin Gansten via INDOLOGY skrev den 2026-03-19 07:34:

Dear Jacob,

I have no immediate textual references for you, but I would suggest
(you may have thought of this already) looking for such in ritual
manuals of navagraha worship, for the construction of temporary
maṇḍalas and the like, rather than in astrological texts as such.
I can't recall ever seeing the planets represented in this way in a
horoscope, for instance (where they are usually represented by
abbreviated forms of their names, such as सू or चं.) Perhaps
there may be something on the topic in S.K. Ramachandra Rao's
two-volume _Navagraha-Kosha_, but I'm not sure.

Some of the symbols are more readily intelligible than others,
especially the sun disc and crescent moon. Ketu does mean flag or
banner and originally referred to comets (usually in the plural),
which again is understandable in visual terms. (I don't know when the
word came to designate the south lunar node, but it seems to be rather
a late development.) Venus could conceivably have derived its shape
from the pattern it forms during its eight-year cycle with the sun (a
web search will tell you more about this, with useful images), but I'm
less sure about that. The rest are less clear to me, unless Rāhu's
basket is a stylized version of a severed head (Rāhu being the head
of the demon Svarbhānu, cut in two by the Sudarśana disc of
Viṣṇu in the myth about the churning of the ocean).

Best wishes,
Martin

Den 2026-03-18 kl. 23:27, skrev jacob--- via INDOLOGY:

Dear friends and colleagues,

I am trying to understand the origin of the symbolic forms (ākāra)
associated with the navagrahas, but have not had any luck so far.
The standard forms, as far as I have been able to determine them,
are as follows:

Sun = circle (vṛtta)
Moon = crescent (ardhacandra)
Mars = triangle (trikoṇa)
Mercury = arrowhead (bāṇa)
Jupiter = rectangle (dīrghacaturaśra)
Venus = pentagon (pañcakoṇa)
Saturn = bow (dhanus)
Rāhu = winnowing basket (śūrpa)
Ketu = flag (dhvaja)

I would be grateful for any pointers to primary sources or articles
discussing these forms.

Best regards,
Jacob

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