Religious and political symbols in Unicode

Unicode contains a number characters that represent various cultural, political, and religious symbols. Most but not all of these are in the Miscellaneous Symbols block.

Most of them are treated as graphic symbols that are not characters. Exceptions to this include characters in certain writing systems that are also in use as political or religious symbols, such as ࿕ (U+0FD5), the swastika encoded as a Chinese character; or ॐ (U+0950), the Om symbol which is strictly speaking a Devanagari ligature. A special case is ﷲ (U+FDF2), the llah glyph of the Arabic alphabet codepage which is a special ligature of the Arabic script which, however, has as its only application in the writing of the word Allah.

Unicode defines the semantics of a character by its character identity and its normative properties, one of these being the character's general category, given as a two-letter code (e.g. Lu for "uppercase letter"). Characters that fall in the "political or religious" category are given the "general category" So, which is the catch-all category for "Symbol, other", i.e. anything considered a "symbol" which does not fall in any of the three other categories of Sm (mathematical symbols), Sc (currency symbols) or Sk (phonetic modifier symbols, i.e. IPA signs not considered letters).

The Unicode consortium in its Miscellaneous Symbols chart has a section explicitly labelled "Religious and political symbols", running from U+2626 to U+262F. The symbols in the section labelled "Religious and political symbols" are:

Ostensibly religious symbols are, however, not limited to this section, as the same chart has another short section of two characters labelled "Syriac cross symbols", with the explanatory gloss "These symbols are used in liturgical texts of Syriac-speaking churches". Another short section of two symbols is headed "Medical and healing symbols", including U+2624 ☤ Caduceus (c.f. U+1F750 ???? "alchemical symbol for caduceus"), U+2695 ⚕ "staff of Aesculapius and U+2625 ☥ Ankh, all of which originate in religious (polytheistic) tradition.

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