Mars
Mars is the outer planet whose distance from Earth varies the most over an orbit, and two visible facts follow directly from that. Its apparent brightness swings further between one opposition and the next than that of any other planet, and its retrograde loop, traced against the fixed stars when Earth overtakes it on the inside track, is the largest and most conspicuous of the five. Its colour, a distinct red-orange to the naked eye, needs no instrument to see, and it is the reason both its Greek and Akkadian names fasten on fire and burning.
The underlying arithmetic is ordinary orbital mechanics and is not in dispute. Mars completes a sidereal orbit in about 687 days, and because Earth is also moving, the two planets line up at opposition, and Mars turns retrograde around it, roughly every 780 days, a little over two years. Mars’s orbit is markedly more eccentric than Jupiter’s or Saturn’s, so successive oppositions are not identical: at a close opposition Mars briefly rivals or exceeds Jupiter as the brightest planet other than Venus, and at a distant one it is unremarkable among the visible planets. The same eccentricity is why the retrograde loop itself changes shape and length from one cycle to the next.
The names
The Greek descriptive epithet is Pyroeis, “the fiery one”, applied before the planet was identified with Ares. As with the other four visible planets, the descriptive name is the older layer, and the god-name was mapped onto it later, onto an identification already made in Mesopotamia 1. Unlike Venus and Mercury, whose Greek names split by apparition into a morning-star and an evening-star form, Mars carried a single descriptive name across its whole cycle: as an outer planet, its position is never confined to the neighbourhood of the Sun the way the two inner planets are, so it has no separate morning and evening phase to name.
Gap in the evidence
The Akkadian name for the planet is Ṣalbatānu. No literal meaning for the word has turned up in the scholarship consulted for this entry, in contrast to Saturn’s Kayamanu, “the steady one”, or Mercury’s Šiḫṭu, describing a darting motion. Where a name resists a clean gloss, that is reported here as an open gap.
The associated deity, by contrast, is straightforward: Nergal, the Mesopotamian god of plague, war and the underworld, is the identification the standard narrative histories give 1. The Latin name is Mars, and the Romance weekday names preserve the god rather than the descriptive epithet, as they do for all five true planets.
Dignities
| Domicile | Aries, Scorpio |
|---|---|
| Detriment | Libra, Taurus |
| Exaltation | Capricorn, at 28 degrees |
| Fall | Cancer, at 28 degrees |
| Triplicity | Earth (participating); Water (by night) |
| Bounds held (Egyptian) | Aries 20-25Taurus 27-30Gemini 17-24Cancer 0-7Leo 24-30Virgo 28-30Libra 28-30Scorpio 0-7Sagittarius 26-30Capricorn 26-30Aquarius 20-25Pisces 19-28 |
Mars takes Aries and Scorpio by domicile, the third pair out from the Cancer and Leo signs held by the luminaries, sitting in the middle of the five non-luminaries in the scheme’s symmetric arrangement described at Saturn for the outermost planet, Saturn. Mars is also the planet named in the water triplicity’s most contested row, where the Hellenistic mainstream, Lilly’s later table and a modern rereading of Ptolemy’s Greek assign it three different roles. The full apparatus, that dispute included, is set out in Essential Dignity.
The table above also shows Mars exalted in Capricorn and falling in Cancer, so its exaltation sign is one of the two Saturn holds by domicile and its fall sign is the one the Moon holds by domicile. That pairing is a feature of how exaltations and domiciles are laid out across the twelve signs, and it is visible directly in the table.
Sect
Mars is a nocturnal planet, and its place in the sect division mirrors Saturn’s exactly: in a chart of the night it is the malefic of its own sect, and in a chart of the day it is the malefic contrary to sect, where Saturn is the reverse in each case 2. Sect sets out the apparatus this rests on and why a planet’s condition is read differently depending on the sect of the chart it appears in.
Tradition
Held byClaudius Ptolemy, Tetrabiblos bk. I ch. 4, Alexandria, c. 150 CE
Ptolemy derives Mars’s drying and burning nature from two observables at once, its fiery colour and its position immediately above the Sun’s sphere: “The nature of Mars is chiefly to dry and to burn, in conformity with his fiery colour and by reason of his nearness to the sun, for the sun’s sphere lies just below him” 3 bk. I ch. 4. Of the seven planetary passages in this chapter, this is the one that names its physical premises most plainly, a visible colour and an ordering of the spheres. The physics comes first and the significations follow, exactly as Saturn reports for Saturn.
Gap in the evidence
William Lilly’s Christian Astrology gives every planet a chapter built on a fixed template, described at Saturn for Saturn 4 bk. I. Whether Lilly’s Mars chapter fills that template with anything distinctive to Mars, beyond what is already characterised there, has not been verified against the primary text for this entry, and no content is asserted here beyond that general structural fact.
References
- Claudius Ptolemy, trans. F. E. Robbins. Tetrabiblos. Loeb Classical Library 435. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1940 (composed c. 150 CE). bk. I ch. 4. find a copy (catalogue search) recordprimary source
The standard English reference and the chapter-numbering scheme this site adopts and names. Non-Robbins reprints number the chapters differently, so every locus here is given as Robbins numbering.
- William Lilly. Christian Astrology. London, 1647 (composed 1647). bk. I. https://archive.org/details/b30338724 recordprimary source
Second edition 1659. Where a figure differs between the two printings this site says which printing it is quoting.
- Chris Brennan. Hellenistic Astrology: The Study of Fate and Fortune: Amor Fati Publications, 2017. ISBN 9780998588902 recordscholarly
A practitioner-scholar synthesis: comprehensive and well referenced, but not peer-reviewed philology. This site cites it with that characterisation.
- Nicholas Campion. A History of Western Astrology, Volume I: The Ancient and Classical Worlds: Continuum, 2009. ISBN 9781441127372 recordscholarly
The standard single narrative survey. Volume I first appeared as The Dawn of Astrology, Hambledon Continuum, 2008. The subtitle is "The Ancient and Classical Worlds", not "The Ancient World"; the shortened form is widely miscited.