Embodying Mars
A Planetary Remediation Journey: Part 3
Me & Mars; Mars & Me
Mars is a complicated subject.
For most people, it’s much easier to come up with a general idea of what Venus signifies — even outside of the topic of astrology. Venus is love, it’s beauty, it’s a sensuously savored decadent dessert.
Since there is such a strong emphasis on polarity in astrology, it helps to describe the planet Mars, what it means, and how it functions by treating it as Venus’ opposite.
Mars in repose.
The God of War is also the God of courage, competition, lust, action, and many more noble topics.
If Venus unites, Mars severs.
Venus balances and harmonizes, Mars derails and upsets; Venus is about relationship, Mars is concerned with personal will and ego.
And that’s all absolutely true. But just like everyone’s expression of the Venusian principle is unique to their personality and life experience, so is their expression of Martial energies.
The red planet.
Mars is force and energy. It’s the vitality that flows through you, propelling you to action and informing how you exert your desires onto the world.
The whispers of Venus shape your desires, giving them form; she then hands them over to Mars, who is responsible for breathing them into life.
As one of the representations of the Divine Feminine, Venus operates with receptive Yin energy, and Mars is the ultimate Yang merchant. The Venusian principle receives what the Martial principle emits. Heteronormativity aside, that’s why the glyphs, or symbols, for Venus and Mars are also the symbols for “female” and “male,” respectively.
That being said, just like all the planets, there are signs through which the pure archetypal energy of Mars shines more clearly, like red light through streakless glass, while other signs act more like prisms, shooting out that red light every which way, diluting it, confusing it: to put it simply, Mars is a straight line and some signs just do not operate in a straight line.
Every single piece of a natal chart is important; each is part of the whole, and the whole is a person.
My experience of a natal Cancer Mars is colored by its relationships to the other planets, the areas of life it directly affects, the specific times in my life a Mars transit hit, and much more. Yours might be different, but I’m willing to bet there is a common denominator.
My Mars Experience
First, let me fully describe my Mars placement. I’ll try to be clear for those of you still learning.
Mars is in Cancer, the sign of its fall.
It’s in the 8th house, signifying topics such as death, taxes, inheritances, merging, shared resources, underworld journeys, occultism and other taboo subjects.
Its ruler, the Moon, is in the 1st house, conjunct the Ascendant. This means everything having to do with personal identity as well as my physical vitality is affected by Mars.
This also means my emotional state is affected by Mars.
The Moon is also closely conjunct Neptune, adding a layer of illusion and self-delusion to both Mars topics and Moon topics. (My Neptune placement is complicated; it’s also a great source of spirituality, empathy, intuition, and love. It’s still affected by Mars, though.)
This is the classic placement — literally found in traditional astrology textbooks — of death by one’s own hand: the ruler of the 8th house of death in the 1st house of the self.
My Mars-ruled houses (the ones with Aries and Scorpio on the cusp) are the 5th house of romance, sex, creativity, and children, and the 12th house of isolation, troubled mental health, and self-undoing.
This is the classic placement of the death of a child, and I have a daughter.
Not only that, Mars is in a superior square to some of the most important planets in my chart: my Libra stellium, including my chart ruler, Jupiter. The superior position between planets in square aspect is assigned to the planet in the sign earlier in zodiacal order: Cancer comes before Libra, and so Mars has the power to trounce those Libra planets if it so desires.
(This aspect was even given its own name in ancient Hellenistic astrology: Upon the Tenth. It’s a very strong assertion of dominance by the planet in superior square. Fitting, I guess.)
If this is super confusing, all you have to understand is that my Mars placement is absolute fucking trash.
Me, looking for life on Mars.
It’s been REAL.
Some non-psychological ways this has manifested in my life:
Bodily inflammation, often of mysterious origin (ruler of Mars in the 1st conjunct fucking Neptune), with periods of really awful acne and autoimmune issues. My physical energy is also directly tied to my emotions, causing chronic lethargy, an extreme emotional response to exhaustion, and a sense of never being able to harness my energy in order to apply it to my goals, so why even try.
Some psychological ways this has manifested in my life:
A general inability to connect to my anger, let alone act on it; tendencies towards emotional warfare; meekness, passivity, acting like a doormat; an inability to untangle sex from emotional connection; lack of focus and goals, lack of vitality.
I could go on but this is a public forum.
Oh, before I forget, there’s also: an inability to properly regulate body temperature, past partners with gambling problems, major issues with shared resources and money in general (I literally got scammed out of hundreds of dollars during an especially gnarly Mars transit), and constant bizarre tax issues.
I only fight with, and for, love. My energy is naturally funneled into the occult and other esoteric topics, which is definitely helping me now. I have an endless supply of empathy, time, and energy for those in need (an 8th house Cancer Mars is also a classic therapist placement). My intuition, especially when you factor in the Moon/Neptune conjunction, is pretty powerful.
There are good aspects to this placement, though.
I also have an Aries daughter with a Scorpio Moon ;) Sometimes astrology is so incredibly literal.
As you can see, planets manifest their energies in real life just as much as they do in your psyche.
I’ve lived with this placement for most of my life, and for sure before I really knew about astrology. As I became more well versed in it, I also became more…concerned. I had this powerful chart, and felt doomed to squander it due to this one placement.
So I decided to work on it.
Continued: Part 4