Mars

Mars is the fire. Desire, anger, drive, the will to act — and, most usefully, what you will fight for and how you fight.

Mars is where the chart stops being contemplative. He describes the moment you stop weighing and start moving: how you pursue what you want, what makes you angry, whether your anger is a flash or a slow burn, and what happens to it when it has nowhere to go.

That last part is the one people avoid. Mars energy does not evaporate when it is not expressed. It goes somewhere — into the body, into the work, into passive forms that do not look like anger at all.

Mars is the lesser malefic, and modern astrology has been too quick to soften that. The tradition was not moralising; it was describing a real thing: Mars cuts, and cutting is sometimes surgery and sometimes injury.

He rules Aries and Scorpio — the two ways of going after something, headlong and subterranean. He is exalted in Capricorn, where force acquires strategy, and in fall in Cancer, where the need to protect the family interferes with the willingness to fight.

Sect matters here more than anywhere. Mars is a nocturnal planet: in a chart born at night he is in his element and works more constructively. Born by day, he is more likely to run hot. Same placement, different temperature, depending on whether the Sun was above the horizon when you arrived.

By sign — the style of the fight. Mars in Aries goes straight at it. Mars in Libra fights by negotiation and hates the confrontation it is nonetheless having. Mars in Pisces fights indirectly, or refuses to fight and then floods.

By house — the battlefield. A 10th house Mars fights in public and about status. A 4th house Mars fights at home, or fights for home. A 6th house Mars pours the fire into work and the body — which is sustainable until it isn't.

By aspect. Mars–Saturn: the classic frustration signature — force meeting brake, which either builds extraordinary discipline or produces a person who cannot start. Mars–Pluto: enormous power, and a need to learn not to use all of it. Mars–Neptune: the will dissolves, or is directed toward what cannot be fought.

Find your Mars, and then answer plainly: what makes you angry? Not what should. What does.

Then: what do you do with it? Some Mars placements discharge immediately. Some store it. Some convert it — into productivity, into caretaking, into illness.

And the diagnostic question: where in your life are you tired in a way that rest does not fix? That is often Mars, working somewhere he was never meant to be stationed.

Mars at 10° Leo in the 6th house, conjunct the Moon at 13°.

Mars fused to the Moon means the need and the fire are not separate systems. When this person's needs are not met, they do not get sad first — they get hot. And because Leo's need is to be seen, the anger is specifically about invisibility.

The 6th house is where it goes: work, service, the body. Leo in the 6th converts the hunger for recognition into usefulness, because being needed is a permitted way of being seen. So the fire becomes productivity. It looks like diligence. It is partly diligence and partly a Leo Moon that has been told its hunger is unacceptable.

And the fire does not vanish. The 6th is the house of the body, and unexpressed Mars tends to present there — in the nervous system, in exhaustion that sleep does not resolve.

The correction is not more discipline. It is to let the want say its name out loud.

• Sue Tompkins, Aspects in Astrology — the most practical treatment of Mars aspects in print.
• Chris Brennan, Hellenistic Astrology — the chapter on sect, and why a night-born Mars behaves differently.
• Liz Greene, The Astrology of Fate — on aggression as a psychological function rather than a flaw.