Learn · The Sun, Moon and eight planets
Mars
Mars in a birth chart is your drive: how you act, compete, desire and get angry, and what you will go after without being asked. It circles the zodiac in about two years.
There is a moment when you stop arguing with yourself and simply begin, and a different moment, hotter, when someone has stood in your way. Both are Mars: energy with a direction, and the heat that rises when the way is blocked.
In your chart
Its sign gives the manner of your drive: direct in Aries, patient and stubborn in Taurus, strategic in Scorpio, disciplined in Capricorn. Where it stands by house, you most want to act and most readily compete. Aspects show what steers it. A trine to Saturn is energy with discipline built in; a square from Mercury is a fast tongue.
From a real analysis
In her chart: Mars in Aries, in the 6th house · 11°16′ Aries
“If you want it done by Friday, hand it over.” A colleague or a friend has said something like this about you, and it is fair: on an ordinary working day you clear the pile, push the stalled task forward and get restless when nothing needs doing. Your Mars, the planet of drive and fight, sits in Aries, the sign of the first step and the bold start, and it is at home there: picture a warrior in its own camp, quick and unafraid. It stands in your sixth house, the house of daily work and routines, so your courage shows up in the plain business of the job.
Themes
Mars is appetite, courage, competition, sex and anger. It is the capacity to want something openly and go for it, and in a chart it shows how you handle a wish that will not wait. Sport, tools, argument and anything that ends in sweat belong to it, and so does the friend who is first through the door when something needs doing. Mars is physical, too: how you sit down, how you cross a road, how you hold a tool, and the pace at which you get up in the morning.
Temper is the risk, or its opposite: drive held in so long that it comes out sideways. Mars needs a job. Give it a direction and anger becomes resolve, and the people around you feel the difference.
Two years round
Mars is the first planet beyond Earth’s orbit. Mars needs 687 days to lap the Sun, roughly two months a sign, though it lingers where it turns back. The turn comes about every two years and lasts around ten weeks, so a retrograde Mars is not rare, and the tradition reads it as drive that turns inward before it turns outward.
Aries and, traditionally, Scorpio are its signs; Capricorn, at 28°, is its exaltation, where force meets discipline; the sixth house, the working house, is its joy.
How the analysis treats it
Mars has a chapter with sign, degree, house, any retrograde and every aspect named. Drive is read as something to be aimed, and the chapter follows where you aim it.
Your chart places Mars to the minute of its sign, and the analysis names it by its degree, its sign and its house. When it was retrograde at the moment of birth, the chart marks it with an R.
Sources: every position and date here comes from NASA JPL’s DE440 ephemeris and is checked against NASA’s JPL Horizons. How it is checked.
Your Mars
That is Mars in everyone’s chart. Yours stands in one sign and one house, and those two say what it means for you. Free, and it takes a minute.