227,900,000 kilometers (141,600,000 miles).
1.88 Earth years (687 Earth days)
Distinguishing features: Known as the Red Planet, Mars has a very thin atmosphere containing mostly carbon dioxide, with nitrogen, argon, and trace amounts of oxygen and water vapor. There is evidence that liquid water flowed on the surface long ago. Now all the water left on the planet is frozen in the polar ice caps or beneath the surface. Mars also has two small moons, Phobos and Deimos. Although no one knows how they formed, they may be asteroids snared by Mars’ gravity.
Zodiac Sign Rulership: Aries Old Rulerships: Aries and Scorpio
Mars is the first planet in the series out from the Sun that is outside the orbit of the earth. As the first superior planet, Mars represents energy directed outward from the self into the world. It is the energy to initiate action and the ability to meet challenges and overcome obstacles. In mythology, Mars is the god of war. In the birth chart, Mars is the self assertive and aggressive urge, the sex drive and the need to achieve our desires. Positively, Mars is expressed as courage, initiative, and the will-power to pursue our goals. Negatively expressed, Mars is impatience, violence and the use of force or threats.
Mars’ sign position and aspects to Mars in the chart show how we assert ourselves and express our desires. Mars is traditionally a masculine planet, and therefore represents the expression of the male ego. In a women’s chart, the energy of Mars is often repressed by social and family conditioning, and indicates how she will experience the male ego through the men around her, whether positively or negatively expressed. It is, however, becoming increasingly possible for women to break away from traditional passive roles, and express their own martian drives, but this is often not completely successful until after the age of about 30.
Mars represents your sex drive, stamina and how aggressively you assert yourself and express your desires.
If you do not know your Mars Sign find out with your Soul Profile
The 12 Mars Signs Of The Zodiac
You assert yourself quite naturally . . .
because you have a reliable but uncontainable supply of raw energy. The important point is that this energy has to have an outlet – and more importantly still – a direction. Unless you have some more introverted personality traits, you are unlikely to see the complications to life that seem to beset so many others. This enables you to get on with things without being sidetracked or compromised by the pros and cons.
So courage and initiative are firmly on your list of virtues, but love, patience and an awareness of more subtle points and undercurrents are not. These need to be learned if you wish stop to battering your head against the brick wall of your blind desire to get what you think you want. As a rule, you have an abundance of sexual stamina too. If you are female, you may well be attracted to macho, energetic, go-getting or even violent type males.
You assert yourself best in a physical . . .
or material way. This means that you are happy pursuing or involving yourself with something that is tangible and not just a concept. Your ‘desire nature’ therefore very much relates to physical contact and reactions. Indeed, as if to prove the point, you have a definite feel and touch sensuously speaking.
This could find expression in work like massage or physiotherapy. Your shortcoming is that you can undervalue the importance of subtler, more psychological aspects of being and relating. You can also be inordinately preoccupied with acquiring money and property, with the result that you become a slave to assessing worth solely in material terms. You are quite passionate sexually, but it can take a lot to turn you on – or off.
You assert yourself best . . .
when something or someone has caught your interest. Whatever happens to be passing through your mind has to be acted upon quickly – and with some energy – so your mental mood is very important because it’s likely to make itself known to others in an impulsive, even nervous, fashion – for good or ill.
Positively, you have keen wits and/or a mobile body – your hands are especially skilful. Negatively, you can be bitingly sarcastic and hyperactive. With you, sexual drive has much to do with appeasing nervous energy or with intensifying mental contact with someone; but you can keep sexual urges in your head until it’s fit to burst. Initially, you have a rather cavalier attitude towards sex, which you get away with – but only until age or disaster strikes.
You assert yourself best when you feel secure . . .
But when you have to assert yourself in order to achieve security you’re in a bit of a Catch 22 situation. Consequently, you are inclined to be rather indirect when it comes to knowing and showing what you want – just in case you get turned down. As a reaction to this, what you do get is not quite what you wanted – or not what you wanted at all! What you are directly, even fiercely, assertive about is protecting your family and other people or things close to you.
You are also very good at getting alongside sensitive areas physically or emotionally. Perhaps if you saw yourself as part of what you are protecting and nurturing you would be a bit more forthright, and therefore clearer, in asserting your own needs and wishes. As a result, you’d get what you really wanted – rather than what you feared.
You assert yourself best by doing so . . .
for noble reasons and through creative means, which gives direction to the hot and fiery streak that runs through you. You must respect yourself for what you are doing. Without such a noble justification for your powerful push you can be arrogant and domineering.
So, you can either command respect and allegiance from others, or become increasingly involved in a battle of wills with nothing but bruised egos to show for it. Equally, and for the same reasons, the quality of your sex life can either be pleasurably steamy, or a stalemate born of unyielding and precious pride.
You assert yourself best . . .
when you have learned (and use) some sort of technique then whatever you do; you do with thoroughness and precision. You are very exacting of others in their work – and sexually too – and you like to keep the score. You know how to hit the right spot, but make a fuss if your opposite number doesn’t.
In effect, you have given yourself quite a tall order of satisfying your desires and your need for purity at the same time. This can mean that you put yourself out of the running altogether for a time – or work yourself into the ground trying to achieve perfection. If you allow yourself to become neurotic about this, your health could suffer. So relax and stop driving yourself to do the impossible when your best will more than suffice.
You aim to get what you want . . .
and to please others at the same time. If successful in this you are quite the social mover. When, more commonly, this is not the case, you are left with the extreme alternatives of either satisfying your desires by being involved in something, which only concerns yourself, or being an indecisive yes-person – or see-sawing between the two.
There is therefore a danger of your becoming insular or ineffectual, whether it is in a business or a sexual situation. As if to force the issue then, you are attracted to quite pushy or quick-tempered partners so, sooner or later, you’ll have to get in touch with your own powers of self-assertion and be more unequivocal. Until then, unless you are happy in the role of social buffer or arbitrator, you can be uncomfortably over-sensitive to the reactions and opinions of others. Always remember: you cannot please everyone.
Potentially, you should be able . . .
to assert yourself with ease and dynamism because there’s a powerful sense of survival and sexuality about you. You are therefore quite compulsive about whatever attracts or repels you. It’s important that you are aware of your pronounced power potential, because it never elicits a bland response from others, even if you are trying to hide it, or hide from it.
This underlying sting of yours was just as, if not more, apparent when you were a child – so it’s likely that both deep enemies and friends will have been made quite early on in life. The psychological effect here is important to consider for it will influence all your later relationships, especially of the intimate kind. Such raw energies that you possess can be anything from healing to almost murderous. You make for being a formidable lover – or enemy.
You assert yourself best . . .
when you have something to promote and believe in. This is why you have such energy and desire to travel and get around – in order to discover what it is that you are supposed to be championing, and then to actually do the championing. So initially, the essential thing is that you have the freedom to make off in any direction when and with whom you want to.
The trouble is that such wild energy as this – especially with regard to your sexual exploits – could become a law unto itself and you might forget that it was a means to an end, not an end in itself. So, at some point, you’re likely to get ‘hobbled’ – that is, restrained by certain circumstances – until you’ve realigned yourself and your prodigious energies with some cause that’s worthy of them, rather than simply horsing around. As a way of managing your great energy, or even as a pursuit in its own right, sporting activities should come naturally to you.
You assert yourself best . . .
when you have planned just how you are going to get what or who you want. Without some kind of structure or timetable you get very little done thoroughly. On the other hand though, you can also stick too much to your formula and become limited by it. Once you’ve embarked upon your plan however, very little can stop you reaching your target.
You’re also quite businesslike in your sexual attitude and approach – and don’t like wasting your energy backing or chasing losers. You like earthy no-nonsense types because they turn you on and keep you turned on. Eventually you’ll learn to be in good control of your sexuality, but should avoid suppressing it – which isn’t the same thing
You assert yourself best . . .
when performing as part of a group, or in the name of some collective goal. Without this you can be rather indolent because you cannot find it in yourself to go it alone – and neither do you want to be just another unit in the human mass.
What initially gets you going and sets you off on the road to self-confidence is having to rebel against, or break away from, something or someone which is hemming you in. You also like a sexual relationship to have a liberating effect upon you. In fact, you may enjoy sex more as an act of freedom than as an act of love or desire.
You assert yourself and get what you want . . .
by subtle or indirect means. This can be likened to the angler who baits and casts his line and then sits in wait, accepting what life’s current will bring. Strong emotional undercurrents are influencing your actions though, so you need to be honest and perfectly clear about what your desires actually are if you wish to avoid resentments, regrets and awkward situations building up as a result of missing your target through being too circumspect.
The reason behind all this is that you’re very sensitive to being spurned – especially sexually. Bearing in mind that your ‘desire nature’ is like a subtle emanation that others sort of hypnotically respond to, would keep you in touch with the fact that you’ll get equally subtle responses back from them. You get under people’s skin, rather than bluntly proposition them. You like to kind of dance, rather than wrestle, with your opposite number.
