The Martian Drive to Do and Be

Regardless of gender, the fiery planet must continually sustain one's separation and freedom from the blob.

“The art of living is more like wrestling than dancing.” —Marcus Aurelius

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I REMEMBER TOURING a Montessori school with a friend who was exploring the possibility of enrolling her child. We walked the grounds with one of the administrators and stopped to watch a group of kids playing during recess. As some boys will do, their play included yelling and harmless roughhousing.

Immediately, a teacher appeared on the stairsteps adjacent to the play area and reprimanded the boys, shushing and urging them to find ways to play “more fairly.” (Whatever that meant.) Two expressions—being shushed and cooperating—that the astrological Mars, be it in the chart of a male or female, has no stake in.

I’m thinking of Mars in Libra people while writing that out. People who can’t function optimally if they aren’t engaged in arguments (generally thoughtful ones) that let them feel out both sides of a story.

In contemporary culture, political ideologies, converted into blob-like echo chambers on the internet, have done away with healthy Martian expressions. Before the dominance of social media, how individuals engaged with the government was more effective. A person had to leave their house to attend a city council meeting or arrange a protest. Now they argue with imbeciles on Twitter and make TikTok videos in their car railing about—whatever. (BTW: Why are all these people filming themselves in their car?) Oh, wait: Automobiles are modern-day armor. Armor and Mars go together, so this is another expression of a sublimated Martian articulation captured by a mobile phone.

Watch for when your natal Mars is activated by intense transits (like the conjunction or opposition or square). These are moments when it’s wise to provide a constructive outlet to channel the potentially disruptive impulse. Even a Mars in Pisces individual, the most reserved of Mars signs, will find their imaginary life goaded by martial themes and the need to ‘do’ something with them. When Uranus, some years back, transited my natal Mars in Pisces, I became obsessed with the Civil War and went missing into Ken Burns’s lengthy documentary on the epic battle. I then moved on to in-depth studies of WWII and spent months researching its history. A pacifist by nature, I’d astounded myself by how my imagination exploded (Uranus) into enchantment (Pisces) via obsessively contemplating carnage and death (Mars in the 8th).