Inverted asterism

[James Kass]

On 2023-03-30 4:54 PM, David Starner via Unicode wrote:
> There doesn't seem to be an inverted asterism in Unicode. Is there a
> good reason there's not?
> https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Page:Monthly_scrap_book,_for_February.pdf/24
> shows the example I have at hand, from an 1832 English-language
> periodical from Scotland.
>
Looking at it in the browser, the two 'stacked asterisks' match. 
Copy/pasting the line into a plain-text editor (which uses a different 
font) shows one asterisk above and two below.

      ⁂ The above short Hints were submitted to the ...

Would this be considered a glyph variant, or a separate character? Are 
the two forms ever used contrastively in the same source?