As April begins, Mars is completing one of its relatively rare forays into retrogradation. Since Jan. 23 the red planet has been climbing back down through the sign of Virgo.
Given that retrogradation requires a particularly sophisticated understanding to use well, this transit is doubly tricky on the collective level. Played out in society, the unconscious side of planetary archetypes gives rise our worst stereotypes about them: hence the rulership by Mars of armies, weaponry and war.
Dark Mars
The classic case of distorted Mars took place on March 11th, when a U.S. Army sergeant massacred 16 slumbering Afghan civilians, nine of them children. Among global observers habituated almost to numbness by the ongoing violence in Serbia, Mexico, the Sudan and elsewhere, here was a headline-grabber to sicken the heart.
Virgo is the sign of service, a word whose ancient auspices in humility and helpfulness are distorted beyond recognition in the oxymoronic modern euphemism “armed services.” In the case at hand, the face of dark Mars in this placement is most obvious in the man who perpetrated the atrocity – whose unit was called, with perverse appropriateness, The Stryker Brigade. It was also expressed in the outrage his murders elicited from the Afghan civilian population.
But if we are to learn from the massacre we must look behind the singular act and consider the collective madness of which it is the tip of the iceberg. In what happened on March 11th — the first anniversary of that other catastrophe, the quake/ tsunami in Japan — we can see encapsulated the distorted face of Mars in army life in general. In every nook and cranny of the military culture, inculcated into the recruits 24/7, we can see the foreshadowing of atrocity. Not just in the physical drills that train these young people to kill, but also in the ideological and social rituals that implicitly train them do so, as exemplified by the violent video games they play on the base in their down time.
Mars’s back-and-forth movement has been highlighting the clash between Virgo and Pisces, where Neptune and Chiron are currently transiting. Accordingly, the massacre has been raising questions about many of the dysfunctions (Chiron/ Neptune) of the world Sgt Bales and his ilk inhabit. With the planet of aggression (Mars) opposing the sign of drugs (Pisces), for example, a conversation has begun about the routine use of psychiatric meds in the military. Attention has also increased about the violent suicides1 that are epidemic among soldiers both active and retired. Eighteen American veterans commit suicide every day. More than seventy thousand soldiers were diagnosed with post traumatic stress syndrome between 2000 and 2011.
Among his appalled fellow citizens, calls are being made for the charge of murder to be leveled not only at Sgt Bales, the perpetrator, but also at the military commanders who sent him back, again and again, into the fray, to slog on through punishingly multiple tours of duty. On March 23rd, with Mercury retrograding back into Pisces in the sky, the army responded to the outcry by announcing that it does not track which or how many of its thousands of PTSD sufferers are sent back to active duty.
Martial anger has been lighting cultural fires in minds and hearts of all who see in this horrible incident not just a personal but a systemic disorder. With stationary Mercury conjunct Uranus — setting off the Cardinal Cross — on the Ides of March, anti-war activists took to the streets across the USA and elsewhere. The massacre of March 11th provided fuel for their battle cry: the only way to end war crimes is to end the war.2
Mars in the Personal Sphere
By contrast with the collective level, on a personal level simple self-awareness allows each of us the chance to reach an understanding of Mars that transforms its crude expression. Nothing more or less than our mindfulness makes the difference. Mars is about challenge, and it is up to us as individuals to shift its energy from destructive challenge to the creative kind.
If you’ve been feeling a certain free-floating anxiety lately, you are not alone; particularly if your natal chart already features aspects between mutable signs (Gemini, Virgo, Sagittarius and Pisces). This means retrograde Mars has been aspecting them, or soon will. Two weeks into the month, on Friday the thirteenth, Mars makes a direct station, seeming to stop in the sky before heading forward again.This is our last chance to return to old ground and clean up our act.
Where Did You Put Your Yang?
To get the most out of Mars in mutable Earth, take a moment to identify where 3°– 23° Virgo falls in your natal chart. The houses in question represent the departments of your life where Mars has been active. Make a ritual of stopping for just a moment – just as Mars seems to be doing, in the sky above us3 — and consider what you’ve learned about yourself during the eleven weeks of the retrograde. Do you understand your motivations and desires differently than you did two months ago?
Retrogradation asks us to go back to where we were before, to make sure we haven’t forgotten a part of ourselves. We’re invited to go fishing in the past (this “past” could mean a couple of days ago, years ago, or several lifetimes ago) to retrieve whatever got waylaid in a particular house of our chart, and needs to be reunited with the rest of us.
Tweaking the Masculine
When we find it, we get another crack at understanding it, and integrating it. With most such cycles there are three chances to cover the same ground, so we get to refine our understanding several times, each pass encouraging a more refined self-awareness. The Cosmos is an infinitely patient teacher.
Mars represents the archetypally masculine aspects of our lives; hence the lore about a Mars Retrograde bringing old boyfriends back. We’re finishing up two months’ worth of rediscovering any stray yang energies that we may have lost along the way, and welcoming them back into the fold. The Virgo energy Mars is channeling has urged us tweak these part of ourselves so they fit better with the other parts of our psyche.
Right Use of Will
Like all transits, it’s the inner self that is really the object of this lesson. Mars in Virgo teaches us to use our wills efficiently. We may experience the situation as a tug-of-war between a demanding inner voice and a spaced-out passive inner voice, with the former trying in vain to get the latter to toe the line (see my blog, Fog Fight).
But, being human, we usually conduct our self-studies by projecting the transits’ energies onto the outside world. Many of us have been skittering around in review, actively taking things apart to see what makes them tick, rehashing and critiquing whatever we found sloppy or disorganized. If you find that you’ve been fussing a lot over something, use the first half of April to consider whether the objects of your attention reflect something disorganized about yourself.
Some of this restless activity may have been quite beneficial. Unlike psychologists, astrologers don’t consider projection to be inherently pathological. It certainly can be, but it isn’t necessarily so. Working on a detailed project as part of our job, for instance, would be an appropriate use of this placement.
Mars stays in Virgo until July third.
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Note:
1 Mars governs suicide in the sense that self-destruction is anger directed inward.
2 Since the invasion ten long years ago, an enormous abyss of ignorance remains about Afghanistan among the US government and population at large. Still undecided about what “victory” would mean in this context, Uncle Sam has been trying to destroy an enemy engendered and trained by the CIA itself, back when Afghanistan was being occupied by the Soviets. It is hard for many of the Americans who fund this ill-starred war to remember that they originally green lighted it during a wave of popular vengeance unleashed by 9/11; with Washington propagandists hoping the public would not realize that the WTC saboteurs included not Afghans but Saudi nationals, who were living in not Afghanistan but Germany. Unfortunately most of what the war’s critics were saying years ago has held true.
3 The exact station is April 13th at 8:54 pm PDT.
