Mars in Medical Astrology

Mars was the lesser malefic of the classical scheme, hot and dry in Ptolemy’s account, and the texts tied it to heat wherever it stood. Ptolemy’s chapter on injuries and diseases in Book III of the Tetrabiblos made Saturn and Mars the two planets whose positions marked the body for harm, and gave each its own kind. Lilly, in Christian Astrology (1647), opened his chapter on Mars by calling it hot and dry, choleric and fiery, and his list of its diseases ran through fevers, inflammations and what he called hurts by iron. Culpeper, in the Astrological Judgement of Diseases (1655), kept the same frame: the complaints Mars signified were the hot and sharp ones, quick to rise and quick to run their course. Every sentence of that kind on this page is a report of what those authors wrote. None of it describes a reader, and none of it is medical information.

Lilly’s chapters on the sixth house in Book II of Christian Astrology dealt with questions about sickness, and Mars entered them in two ways. As a planet in the sixth, or as the ruler of the sixth, it told the astrologer the nature of the disease: Lilly read a Mars signification as hot, choleric and sharp, a fever rather than a lingering complaint. As a planet in hard aspect to the lord of the Ascendant, it was one of the testimonies the astrologer weighed when judging how the matter would end. Culpeper followed the same method in the decumbiture, the chart cast for the hour a person took to bed, and placed Mars among the significators of acute illness. Both writers were describing a method for a question, not a trait of a person born with Mars there.

The sixth house itself is the subject of the 6th house guide, which sets out what Lilly listed under it, servants, small animals and sickness, and the method for reading its ruler. On this page the point is narrower. A natal Mars in the sixth was, for the texts, a planet in the house of sickness, and the astrologer took its sign, its dignity and its aspects to the lights before saying anything. The share of charts in which Mars occupies that house is in the table lower down; it is close to one chart in twelve, as it is for the other houses.

Between 1900 to 2050 Mars entered a sign 1,037 times, and the mean stay was 53.2 days, a little under two months. The longest single stay ran 235 days in Virgo, more than four times the mean. That outlier is what a retrograde loop does to a stay: Mars entered the sign, turned retrograde inside it, returned toward its starting point, turned direct and crossed the sign again before leaving. Mars was retrograde on 9.51% of the days in the sample, which is a smaller share than Jupiter or Saturn carry, since the Earth overtakes Mars only once in about two years and two months.

The time by sign is uneven in a way the faster planets do not show. Mars spent most of the period in Virgo, 10.11% of its days, and least in Aquarius, 6.92%. The shape of the orbit explains the spread. Mars’s path around the Sun is noticeably elongated, so the planet moves slowest, as seen from the Earth, in the part of the zodiac where it stands farthest from the Sun, and the retrograde loops there last longest. In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries that slow stretch fell across Leo, Virgo and Libra, and the quick stretch across Aquarius, Pisces and Aries. The table lists the full set of figures for every sign.

The table beneath this section renders the assignments from the three texts side by side, and the prose here only reads it. Ptolemy’s chapter gave Mars the left ear, the kidneys, the veins and the genitals, in the standard summary of the Robbins translation. Lilly’s chapter in Book I listed the gall, the kidneys, the left ear and the genitals, and added the blood in its hot aspect, that is, the heat of the blood rather than the blood itself, which he placed under Jupiter. Culpeper’s list in 1655 was the shortest of the three: the gall, the blood as heat and the left ear.

Two features of the lists stand out. The left ear is in all three; the texts split the ears between Saturn and Mars, the right to Saturn and the left to Mars, as they split the eyes between the Sun and the Moon. The gall is the humoral entry: choler, the hot and dry humor, was the humor of Mars in the scheme Galen’s followers passed to the astrologers, and the gall was the organ the physicians of the period associated with it. Lilly and Culpeper both opened with it for that reason. None of the three sources has yet been checked against the text for this page, so the works are named without chapter or page.

The first house, for Lilly, signified the life and the form of the native, the stature, color and complexion, and a planet rising in it colored that description. In his chapter on the form and shape of the native in Book III of Christian Astrology, Lilly read Mars in the Ascendant as giving a mark or scar in the face, a reading repeated by most later English handbooks. Ptolemy’s chapter on injuries put a different weight on the same place. The malefics in the angles, and above all rising or setting in configuration with the Sun or Moon, were the positions from which he read injury and disease, with Mars signifying the kind that came by cutting, burning or fever and Saturn the kind that came by cold. These are the texts’ readings of a chart, stated in the past tense, and this site does not apply them to anyone.

The texts gave Mars two domiciles of its own, Aries and Scorpio, and its exaltation in Capricorn; Taurus and Libra were its detriment and Cancer its fall. Lilly’s table of essential dignities in Book I added the water triplicity by day and by night, and the terms and faces that every planet had in every sign. What a dignity signified was strength to act according to the planet’s nature, and a debility the reverse: Lilly wrote of a planet in its fall or detriment as one whose significations came out poorly, like a person out of their own house and among strangers. Mars dignified, in the chapters on manners, signified courage turned to good use; Mars peregrine or in fall, rashness without it. In the sixth-house chapters the same table told the astrologer how much to trust what Mars signified, not what the matter was.

Combustion, in Lilly’s table of definitions, was a planet standing within a few degrees of the Sun on either side; closer still, in the Sun’s heart, it was cazimi and counted as fortified. The texts read a combust planet as hidden and unable to act. In the table of fortitudes and debilities in Book I Lilly counted combustion among the heaviest debilities, and in the sickness chapters a combust lord of the Ascendant or of the sixth was one of the testimonies he read against the sick.

Retrogradation he scored in the same way, as a debility of similar weight, and the sickness chapters gave it a specific sense: a retrograde significator meant a complaint that returned, or one that ran longer than its first appearance promised. Mars is the least often retrograde of the planets beyond the Earth, as the stays table shows, so the reading arose less often for Mars than for Saturn. The figures on this site record only how often Mars was retrograde; they say nothing about what that signified for anyone, which was the astrologer’s judgment and the texts’ claim, not an observation.

Across every day from 1900 to 2050, with the birth hour stepped through the day and the chart cast for the equator, Mars stood in the Placidus sixth house in 8.32% of charts. At 40 N the figure was 8.27%, and at 60 N 8.17%. Under Whole Sign houses at 40 N it was 8.01%. All four numbers sit near one twelfth, which is what a planet with no preference among the houses would show, and the small drift downward with latitude is well inside what the Placidus method does to the house sizes in the north. Mars, in other words, is in the sixth about as often as in any other house.

A second way to read the same table is by the clock. At 40 N Mars spent about 1.98 hours of each day in the sixth house, the time it takes the house to pass over the planet as the sky turns. A birth within that window put Mars in the sixth, whatever the sign and whatever the year. The figure matters for the question the texts asked: a natal Mars in the sixth was common enough that the astrologer read its sign and aspects before the house meant anything on its own.

A planet is never read alone in the texts, and Mars least of all. Lilly’s method went from the planet to the ruler of the sign it occupied, then to its aspects, and the two planets he always checked it against were the lights. Mars with the Sun was combust or under the beams; Mars with the Moon by square or opposition was, in the nativity chapters, among the heaviest testimonies on the first house. From there the reading went to the ruler of the Ascendant and the ruler of the sixth, and the 6th house guide sets out that part of the method. The sign pages for Aries and Scorpio, the two signs the tradition gave to Mars, carry the regions the Zodiac Man lists assigned to them, and the planets pillar sets Mars beside the other six.