Mars is a planet which has taken on renewed importance in the world. It is the brother of Eris, the newly discovered dwarf planet. Mars recently went retrograde by secondary progression in the U.S. horoscope for the first time in the nation’s history. When the Iraq War started, transiting Saturn was hitting the U.S. Mars. In 2008, the powerful transiting opposition of Saturn and Uranus will square the U.S. Mars.

Mars represents the following:

• aggression
• anger
• individuality
• confidence
• courage
• impatience
• impulsiveness
• vitality
• stamina
• enthusiasm
• competition
• desires

In individual horoscopes, Mars’ house placement and aspects with other planets greatly modify, inhibit, energize, or enhance the power of the red planet.

Recent pictures which have been sent from the Mars explorer robot show a desolate, rust-colored landscape with wispy, orange-tinted ice clouds. It looks like an iconic battlefield, an earth laid waste. Perhaps these scenes are the metaphoric effects of an unbridled Mars. As Mark Antony prophesizes about Rome in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a very martial play,

"Blood and destruction shall be so in use/ And dreadful objects so familiar/ That mothers shall but smile when they behold/ Their infants quarter'd with the hands of war;/ All pity choked with custom of fell deeds…"

William Lilly relates Mars to furnaces and places where bricks or charcoal are burned.

Rightly employed, Mars is spiritual. Lilly says that Mars is associated with the color ochre, the same color one sees in the recent robot pictures of the Martian landscape. Ochre is the color of renunciation, in which desires have been burned in the fire of meditation and God-realization. The Bhagavid Gita is set on a battlefield--an extended metaphor for the battle to defeat delusion and achieve oneness with God--upon which a reluctant Arjuna is counselled by Krishna to be a warrior and fight.