Mars Retrograde: December 20, 2009 through March 10, 2010

Mars is still retrograde, i.e. moving backward in the sky.  Because this is a time when the hero is called forth in all of us, I’m telling stories of heroes from Greek and Roman mythology as examples of heroic virtues.  Today’s virtue is resourcefulness, the ability to face obstacles cleverly and to sometimes overcome them by evading them.  The most resourceful and smart hero of Greek and Roman mythology is undoubtedly Odysseus (also called Ulysses).

Legends of Odysseus:  The Odyssey
Odysseus had finished up with some wars that were happening far from home and the Odyssey tells the story of the many adventures he encountered on his return to his loving and devoted wife, Penelope.  On the journey, he faced many obstacles, some of which required strength in battle, but many of which required cleverness, resourcefulness, wisdom and a pure heart.

Here’s one example:  Odysseus and some of his sailors entered a cave that contained some goat-pens.  It turned out the goatherd was the Cyclops, a terrifying giant with one eye in the center of his head.  It also turned out that the sailors found themselves trapped inside the cave, blocked by a boulder only the Cyclops could move.  It was no use killing the Cyclops, because only he could move the boulder.  So instead, Odysseus sharpened a pole and poked the giant’s eye out with it.  As the Cyclops fumbled around for his enemies, and moved the boulder to find out if they’d escaped, Odysseus and his men escaped by clinging to the undersides of some of the goats.

In another example, Odysseus managed to sail past the Sirens.  The Sirens were beautiful nymphs whose singing was so beguiling that they could tempt sailors to crash on the rocks for love of them.  Odysseus stopped up the ears of his crew with wax so they could not hear the Sirens’ song.  For himself, he wanted to hear it, but didn’t want to be a danger to himself or his crew, so he had them tie him to the mast and instructed them not to release him, no matter how he begged or threatened them (which of course he did).  In this way he was able to hear the Sirens while his men sailed safely past them.

Penelope herself was a fit match for her clever husband.  During the many years it took him to return home, many suiters came to press her to remarry, because surely Odysseus was dead.  Her response was: “Sure, as soon as I finish this burial shroud.”  Every day she worked on the shroud and every night, when no one was looking, she unraveled all she had woven.  In this way she fended off the pressure to remarry and was waiting faithfully for Odysseus when he came home.  Odysseus deserved such a wife because at the beginning of his journey a goddess had told him it would be very hard and offered him herself instead of Penelope.  But Odysseus knew that the love of a true, mortal wife is worth more than the whim of a goddess and he chose the journey with all its hardship.

Heroic Virtue #3:  Resourcefulness
Sometimes a battle is best won not by brute strength or by any kind of force at all.  Sometimes it’s about taking the right approach.  An obstacle is an obstacle and you always have the choice about whether to push through it or to find a way around it.  A clever hero looks for many ways to solve a problem and selects the one that leaves him fit to fight another day.

What Mars is Asking of You
During this Mars retrograde period, Mars wants to know:
Have you been fighting too hard?
Have you tried force when cleverness might win you the battle?
Is there a resource you’ve forgotten about?

Next:  Alliance—Castor & Pollux

Other articles in this thread:
Mars Retrograde:  The Hero’s Journey
Hercules, Hero of Strength
Achilles, Hero of Courage

Mars Retrograde: December 20, 2009 through March 10, 2010

Mars is still retrograde, i.e. moving backward in the sky.  Because this is a time when the hero is called forth in all of us, I’m telling stories of heroes from Greek and Roman mythology as examples of heroic virtues.  Today’s virtue is courage, the ability to face the enemy with a strong mind as well as a strong body.  The best example of that is valiant Achilles, hero of the Trojan war.

Legends of Achilles
Achilles, central character in the Iliad, was one of the best-known heroes in Greco-Roman mythology.  He was considered to be the paragon of manly valor and gorgeousness.  For Achilles, courage was based in fearlessness, because his whole body was literally invulnerable, except for one small part—his heel.  Yet he is known to us mainly by that vulnerability.  In modern-day, we speak of an ‘Achilles heel’ as a person’s chief, or only, weakness.

And how exactly did he come to have an ‘Achilles heel?’  According to the mythology, Achilles was the child of a mortal man and an immortal sea-nymph.  When he was an infant, his mother foresaw his death and gave him invulnerability by dipping him in the river Styx.  The Styx was the river that the dead must cross to get to the underworld.  In bathing the child in the river of the dead, she was giving him an early experience of death and rendering him, if not immortal, at least invulnerable.  But she held him by one heel and so that was the only part of him that never touched the underworld’s waters.  It thus became his only weakness.

Heroic Virtue #2:  Courage
Not much of a weakness for battle purposes, you might think, as perhaps his mother did.  Who would think to shoot Achilles in the heel?  Yet someone did, with a poisoned arrow, and that’s how he finally perished.  But on the way to that death he performed incredible feats of courage, which were bolstered by the kind of fearlessness that comes from repeated experiences of surviving when others around you are falling.  So Achilles stands for courage, because he fought bravely, without giving in to fear.

What Mars is Asking of You
During this Mars retrograde period, Mars wants to know:
Where have you forgotten to have courage?  Have you been listening to your fearful inner voices instead of your encouraging ones?
Are you focusing on your weakness (the heel) instead of your strength?
Have you been whining and complaining, when you could put your complaints aside and meet the obstacle more bravely?

Next:  Resourceful Odysseus

Mars Retrograde: December 20, 2009 through March 10, 2010

Right now, Mars is retrograde, which means it is moving backward in the sky.  Because this is a time when the hero is called forth in all of us, I’m telling stories of heroes from Greek and Roman mythology as examples of heroic virtues.  Today’s virtue is the most basic one Mars has to offer: physical force and pure strength.  And nobody is a better example of it than Hercules.

Legends of Hercules
Hercules was known as the greatest of legendary heroes due to his enormous strength.  He was your typical “big and stupid” kind of guy: he carried a club and once he even held the whole sky on his shoulders.

The best-loved tales of Hercules involve his Twelve Labors.  These started out as Ten Labors, but inflation set in because the king he was laboring for got nervous of the Herculean prowess and claimed that two of the labors “didn’t count.”  So Herc had to do two additional in order to stave off the anger of Juno, the goddess who was the original source of the demand.  Juno disliked Hercules because he was the illegitimate offspring of her hubby, Jupiter (who really got around).  Yeah, apparently old Mount Olympus was a real soap opera.

Hercules’ exploits included:
•    Slaying the Nemean Lion, a fierce creature that was terrorizing the countryside.  Herc slew it and wore its pelt as a snazzy outfit.  Otherwise he was not known for his fashion sense.
•    Cleaning the Augean stables, which were occupied by a herd of 3,000 oxen.  This had to be one of nastiest cleaning jobs ever required in mythology, because the stables had not been cleaned for 30 years.  Hercules diverted a river through the stables, wiping them sparkly in one swoop.
•    Slaying the giant Antaeus, who was a mighty wrestler.  Because he was the son of Terra, the Earth, each time he fell he rose up stronger than before.  Hercules defeated Antaeus by holding him up in the air and strangling him.

Upon Hercules’ death, Jupiter made him immortal, declaring that only the vestiges of his mortal heritage were burned away on his funeral pyre, leaving his immortal being to take his place among the gods on Olympus.  Juno decided Herc was here to stay and forgave him his illegitimacy.

Heroic Virtue #1:  Strength
Hercules was obviously a force to be reckoned with.  The tales of his many doings focus not on wit, intelligence or strategy, but on pure physical strength, brute force and the ability to assert himself and overcome.

What Mars is Asking of You
Strength and force are the most basic abilities Mars has to offer.  A Mars retrograde period is a time to look at your life and ask “Where do I need to use more force?  Where have I gotten weak?  Am I a pansy?  A 98-pound weaking?  Where could I use a burst of testosterone or a shot of adrenaline?  Where have I forgotten to assert myself—or maybe never learned to assert myself in the first place?”

A Mars retrograde period is a time of feeling pressure to draw that line in the sand.  It is marked by anger, irritation, annoyance and bursts of ancient, stuck ferocity trying to get out.

Modern people are uncomfortable with this rough-and-ready god.  Mars was not polite, nor was he cautious.  He was a man’s man and sometimes we need a dose of that.  It’s good to know he’s in your corner.  So if, during this Mars retrograde period you find places in which you have not been defending or asserting yourself sufficiently, call on Mars.  He is always there inside your fierce heart when you need him.

Next:  Achilles, Courageous Hero

Everybody wants to be a hero somewhere in her life, but what area of life she wants to be heroic in differs from person to person.  Where do you want to be a hero?  To answer this question, you can look at the location of Mars in your birth chart.

The house your Mars is in represents an area where there is irritation, stress, strife and discord, as you learn (over the course of your lifetime) to go after what you want with appropriate force—not too much, nor too little.  You may have a tendency to see that area of life as a battleground.  It’s a great area for you to “fight the good fight” and be heroic.  Some of this stress may be self-created by you habitually approaching this area as if a battle is needed, when perhaps it is not.  Shifting your approach from that of a warrior to a hero can be the key to enjoying the stress as a worthy challenge and not being oppressed by it.

If you want to find out what house your Mars is in, you can order your own personal Astrology Chart Decoder.  This is a special tool I’ve invented that puts your chart’s details in English, instead of astrology symbols.  Your Decoder tells you where every planet in your chart is located:  the sign it’s in, the house it’s in and the exact degree it occupies.  When you’ve got your Decoder in front of you, you can easily see what house your Mars is in.

Where Do You Need To Be A Hero?
The First House is the domain of identity.  If your Mars is in the First House, you identify as a Warrior or as a Hero.  Your sense of yourself as a person, an individual, blossoms when you act decisively, heroically.  When you take actions out of impulse or anger and negative results happen, you tend to take it personally.  You just want to do the right thing and it hurts when you find your best efforts have missed the mark.  Let your life shape you towards right action.

If your Mars is in your Second House, you are a Hero of Protection.  Guarding and putting energy into the people and things you hold as your own is paramount.  You can become quite fierce when your security (or the security of someone you love) is threatened.  Ownership is the key to energy—when you feel listless and unmotivated, take an attitude of possession and ownership towards the thing you want to be motivated by, and your energy will rise.

If your Mars is in the Third House, you are a Hero of Words.  The pen may be mightier than the sword, but for you sometimes they are one and the same.  Words can be weapons, so watch to ensure you do not hurt people unintentionally with your sharp language.  You’ll learn, over the course of your lifetime, to curb your tongue and slow down your communication so that others can hear you—and so you can hear them too.  Pursue your avid curiosity, because learning gives you energy.

In the Fourth House, Mars bestows combativeness and challenges at home.  Mars is not very comfortable in the fourth house and can make it hard to feel settled and relaxed at home.  But Mars as Heroic Mama Bear can be quite fierce when it comes to defending your home, family and country.  Pour that drive and fierceness into real estate and you can do quite well providing yourself and others with housing.  Buy a fixer-upper to use up all your energy and make it exactly as you want it, for the pride and love of it.

In the Fifth House, you are a Creative Hero.  Your drive to bring the fruits of your creativity into the world are strong and you thrive on the attention it gets you, whether directly or vicariously.  Throw yourself into self-expression and beware of frittering away your energy on fun and entertainment, rather than channeling it into the creative directions that give you energy back.  Especially beware of gambling—it can be a powerful high in the moment, but its long-term effects can ultimately drain you.

When your Mars is in the Sixth House, you are a Hero of the Workplace.  You respond well to missions put to you by a strong, able boss and you can act independently at work.  Your boss needs to be someone you can respect, or you will strike out on your own, with varying results.  Your tendency to be fast and efficient makes you easily irritated with the slowness or obstructions of your workmates.  Take the time to make your work area organized so you can work in a streamlined way—that will give you drive.

In the Seventh House, Mars can make relationship a battleground.  You may be attracted to partner up (in both romance and business) with ultra-strong people so you can push on them and find your limits.  On the other hand, your frankness and honesty are appealing and in relationship, your Heroic Lover can be quite unabashed in pursuit of the partner you fix your sights on.  This I-Yam-What-I-Yam attitude is attractive to the right person and quickly sorts the receptive targets from the uninterested ones.

People who have Mars in the Eighth House tend to be strongly sexed and enjoy the pursuit and conquering games that are part of sexuality.  As a Sexual Hero, you may have a tendency to press others into further intimacy than they are ready for because of your impatience to get to the merging and connecting you desire.  Curb your tendency toward being a boundary-crosser and slow down your approaches and your “game” may improve.  Beware also of double-standards—no self-respecting partner will tolerate them.

In the Ninth House, you are an Adventure Hero.  Get out there and travel because your need to see the world and throw yourself into it is great.  Travel gives you juice, whether it’s external or internal, so pursue personal growth and ongoing education because your desire for self-improvement is strong.  You can ride on the energy of this by deliberately taking the attitude that “This is an adventure!!” towards anything you want to accomplish.

If your Mars is in the Tenth House, you have an ambitious streak.  You’re a Corporate Hero and the sky’s the limit as to how far you might advance.  Beware of alienating the higher-ups by your sometimes combative attitude—respectful soldiers get promoted but disrespectful ones get discharged.  Your energy and drive can’t fail to be noticed, but it’s up to you to make sure it’s noticed as a good thing.  A little generosity and thoughtfulness towards those above and below you will grease the tracks greatly.

With Mars in the Eleventh House, you’re a Hero With A Cause.  Driven by your ideals, you love to be the flag-bearer for your like-minded group.  You don’t mind taking one for the team and learning to play well with others is a valuable life-skill for you.  Watch that you don’t push your ideas onto others with too much force because you can be zealous about the ideas you believe in.  Develop your principles, because they are the source of your drive.  You are attracted to strong friends and enjoy leadership among them.

Your capacity to assert yourself may seem buried if you have Mars in the Twelfth House.  Most likely, when you were growing up, you felt that it wasn’t ok to assert yourself, be strong or hold strong boundaries in the home you grew up in.  You became sensitive about it and learned to hold your anger in until it sometimes exploded.  You were born to discover what it means to be a hero and how to properly express your force of personality on your path to becoming a Heroic Spiritual Master.

Aries Rams, how about a special birthday present?
Your birthday is your own personal New Year’s Day.
Having an astrology reading at this time can motivate you
to spring into action and get on track in the coming year.
Contact Jamie at pandora@pandoraastrology.com
to schedule a reading.

Most cultures around the world have a warrior tradition.  The way of the warrior is seen as a respected path to glory, honor and self-discipline.  In astrology, the sign Aries exemplifies the archetype of Warrior and has much to teach us about his ways.

Act Decisively
When you act, make your action a clear one.  Don’t pussyfoot around.  Don’t muddy the waters with unclear actions, unfinished motions.  When you act, follow through immediately—it gives your actions force and power.  To take an action is to create momentum.  Let the momentum unroll its force and the action is supported.  To make one action and pretend another is to undermine one’s own force of personality and would never be done by a Warrior.

Draw The Line, Then Hold To It
Aries excels at boundaries.  The Warrior cares about territory and will respond with anger and affront when lines are crossed.  You can count on the Aries part of you to know where the lines are.  The Warrior will hold others responsible for crossing his line and will have respect for the lines of others—if they are held strongly.  A Warrior always knows another Warrior and knows when the enemy is weak.  Aries is naturally combative and may sometimes enjoy pushing the boundaries of others, simply to test them.

Be True
If you give your word, the Warrior would have you stand by it.  If you commit to a course of action, then damnit, follow through!  This is difficult for Aries, which tends to act in short bursts of energy and actually has a hard time sustaining beyond the initial burst.  But inside the Aries heart, there is pressure to hold to the principle of a thing once you’ve begun it.  It is the Warrior’s way to learn to channel aggression into guided action.

Be Honest
Aries loves honesty and directness, for two reasons.  One is that it is natural to Aries to be transparent and having to pretend is a lot of work.  The other is that because the Aries heart is not naturally duplicitous it doesn’t expect others to be that way either.  Aries has a naïve streak and feels affronted and surprised when deceived by others—even when it happens over and over again.

Cultivate Your Honor
The life of a warrior can be a lonely one.  As a Warrior, your relationship with yourself is the most intimate one you are likely to experience and being able to look at yourself in the mirror with dignity is crucial.  Knowing that you lived according to your principles matters greatly and is the source of self-esteem.  A code of honor is a covenant with yourself—when you promise to live by a code and then break that promise, what is broken is your connection with yourself and the ability to stand up proudly as an individual.  To break such a code is to de-individuate.  “Cultivate your honor,” says the Warrior, “because at the end of the day, it’s all you have.”

A Caution For Overzealous Warriors
The downfall of the Warrior is that he needs a war.  When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.  It is the nature of Aries to be attracted to strife and conflict, perhaps even to create conflict where there is none.  Don’t let your Warrior nature make life harder than it has to be.

The Gift of Force
This simple-natured sign represents your forceful side, your ability to know what you want and to pursue it.  Force has a bad rap these days, but force is what you need to hold your own integrity and be an individual apart from other individuals.  When others push on you, you have to be able to push back.  The key here is “to be able to” push back.  When you can trust that you’ll be able to defend yourself if needed, you can let go of the need to force your will on others.  Individuals with true strength and self-esteem do not have to be fierce in order to establish selfhood and pursue desires.  To satisfy the Aries part of yourself is to become the best, most ethical Warrior you can, and thus to increase effectiveness, self-esteem and honor.

Here are more Aries posts.

Aries Rams, how about a special birthday present?
Your birthday is your own personal New Year’s Day.
Having an astrology reading at this time can motivate you
to spring into action and get on track in the coming year.
Contact Jamie at Pandora@pandoraastrology.com
to schedule a reading or put one on your wishlist.

“I ought to go upright and vital, and speak the rude truth in all ways.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson

Aries is the first sign of the zodiac and kicks off the solar year with a burst of energy in spring. The first day of Aries is the day of the equinox, when days and nights are of equal length. There is a sense of rebirth after the cold, dark winter. The lands have gone fallow and are waking up again from their sleep. The animals (including human animals) wake up too. From here the light increases, and there is a feeling of warmth and expansion, as the days grow longer into summer. Living things respond with mating and energy is high. Baby mammals are born, stretch their legs and bravely begin to explore the world.

Have you noticed how your energy rises in springtime? Have you noticed that no matter how depressed you feel in winter, spring wakes you up and gets your blood moving? Do you suddenly feel a little crazy, prone to falling in love and other rash behavior? Do you notice that your body just wants to move? That’s you responding to the natural cycle of the year, to the force of Aries, which will not be ignored, and which runs in your veins like fire.

This sign is the very essence of beginnings and fills you with drive and force. Now is the time to begin things. Those things will be tested soon enough by life, but for now, the initial burst is needed and life is calling it out of you. Aries contains the force necessary to overcome inertia, to begin something from nothing. What have you been wanting to do, start or create? Aries is ready for the risk, excited by it, thrilled by it. Aries makes you feel fully alive. This energy comes only once a year and will only be here for a month—grasp it now and move! Take the leap. Risk and courage are the stuff Aries is made of. They are available in spring, in abundance.

Imagine the qualities of early spring captured in a human personality. That is what it is to be an Aries type. Ask yourself: what would that be like? What traits would it show? What would it look like to other people? What would it feel like to the Aries individual to be that?

To embody spring is to embody birth and newness. The Aries individual will always have a streak of the ingénue about them, no matter how old they get. Aries is hope; Aries is open to trying; Aries does not give up or acknowledge defeat. There is no sign more capable of starting over than Aries. This sign symbolizes birth, not from the mother’s point of view, but from the infant’s. Birth is an awe-inspiring adventure and it’s one of those life-passages that, if humans knew what they were really getting into, would make us run screaming from the room (as we do from death). Aries, fortunately, is innocent of all knowledge of what it is getting into and therefore tosses itself headlong into the unknown. Aries represents our very capacity to do that. This ability is inherent in all of us, because we all contain at least a smidgen of Aries, no matter how small. Any human being can reach for such courage, even if they have only a bit of Aries in their chart.

To be the first sign of the year conveys a certain preoccupation with. . . being first. If you are driving along the freeway and you have red Aries blood pumping through your veins, you cannot tolerate having anyone in front of you. Despite the fact that it’s not a race, that there’s no shared goal, and that you are not in competition with the other drivers around you, still you must be first. You feel compelled to pass others, to exceed the speed limit and to be driving faster than anyone near you. Of course, when you get stopped by a police officer, you are affronted because you were just expressing your true nature.

Being newborn, Aries is guileless. If you are Aries and you have learned guile, rest assured it’s not the Aries part that learned it. If you’re a strong Aries type, you’d rather speak the truth at all times, simply because it’s easier. You don’t want to have to pretend, gloss over or white-lie. You prefer to be yourself all the time and let the chips fall where they may. This is generally harder for Aries women than men, because there is so much social conditioning for women to be nice. Aries doesn’t want to bother with nice—there’s too much to do that’s truly interesting to bother with niceness. Niceness only slows you down.

The spring is a time of intense sexual heat. Hormones are on the rise. Aries is sexual; there is no doubt about it. The mating instinct is captured in this sign. Aries women often become impatient and pounce on potential partners without waiting for them to initiate. Aries men radiate testosterone and are prone to boastfulness, leaving you in no doubt of their bedroom prowess. Lions are not the only creatures that roar!

It takes tremendous force to be born, to propel oneself into the world. The “birth” quality of spring is a form of fierceness. Aries is very active, driven, directed and forceful. Aries is like fire-in-motion: a rocket, a bullet, a speeding train. Aries is pure momentum, however it works in short bursts and is not strong on continuity. Thus Aries is full of bluster but does not always follow through (that’s what Taurus, coming close behind Aries, is for). This sign is consummately about courage, faith and action. When Anais Nin wrote: “And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom,” she was talking about spring and renewal. She was talking about Aries.

What is there in you that requires courage? What would you start today, if you believed in yourself? What would you do if you could not be stopped? Draw on your Aries courage and take the first step now.

Aries Rams, how about a special birthday present?
Your birthday is your own personal New Year’s Day.
Having an astrology reading at this time can motivate you
to spring into action and get on track in the coming year.
Contact Jamie at pandora@pandoraastrology.com
to schedule a reading or put one on your wishlist.