I cringe whenever I hear an astrologer call Mars a “malefic” planet. Mars can bring us so many gifts, starting with the courage to stand up for ourselves. It's got a dark side though – so do all the planets. Where Mars lies in your chart, you’ll definitely need some of that courage. That’s because Mars usually marks a place in your life where you’ll face some serious stress. Nobody enjoys that, even though we might learn some useful lessons in facing it down. I suppose that astrologers who miss the evolutionary point of that extra dose of tension are the real reason poor Mars got saddled with the “malefic” label.

In my own chart, Mars is in the spotlight in many ways, starting with the fact that I’ve got Scorpio rising which makes Mars the traditional ruler of my chart. It’s also sextile to my Mars-ruled Aries Moon, which deepens my reactivity to it. Mars itself lies in Aquarius, in my 3rd house (Placidus) and in a conjunction with my late-Capricorn Mercury.  Mercury and the 3rd house are both about communication, so those two features reinforce each other, and that’s the dimension of Mars that I want to explore in this newsletter. 

At one level, the effects of that “mercurial” combination of symbols impacting my Mars are about as obvious as they can be: I’m a writer, a counselor, and a teacher. If I’m not talking, I am at the keyboard writing something. Going a little deeper, in classic Mars-fashion I had to overcome a lot of fears and issues around speech when I was young. Those days are long gone. Nowadays, give me a pulpit and an audience and I’m up there thundering away, happy as a duck on a pond. 

• My mouth does get me into trouble sometimes – there’s one fingerprint of a 3rd house Mars. 

• I can win arguments even if I am wrong – there’s another fingerprint. 

Still, generally, I would have to say that language and communication have brought me far more good fortune than problems. Mars’s “malefic” fingerprints, if any, are pretty faint – at least on the surface of my adult life. My childhood, however, was a different story. 

Before I dive into deeper waters, let me start by saying that in using myself as an example, my aim is to try to illuminate some broader principles that apply to everyone. There are obvious advantages to using the charts of famous people as illustrations, including not looking so self-indulgent. There’s a pitfall though – that “famous person” approach tends to shift our attention to outward biographical events. There’s nothing wrong with doing that and it can teach us a lot, but what it tends to miss is that astrology also addresses our most private, “not for prime time,” concerns. With famous people, unless they’ve been emotionally transparent and forthcoming in interviews or autobiographies, some of that depth inevitably gets lost. By using myself as an example, I can avoid getting sidetracked into a tangle of biographical headlines and instead focus on the heart of the matter, which is always the secret journey of the soul. 

I mentioned my early fears regarding public speaking. They were actually pretty severe. In school, I was “a smart kid,” but I never voluntarily spoke in class unless the teacher called on me. That self-enforced silence mostly remained unbroken until probably around my junior year of college. The origins of that vocal blockage are rooted in prior-life trauma, and I’ll get to that keystone piece of the puzzle in a while. 

Let me start with this lifetime . . .

ARRESTED DEVELOPMENT

Exhibit A is something of which I have no personal memories at all. I only know about it from my father. Apparently as a little kid of four or so I was developing speech in the normal way, saying words, stringing together simple sentences, expressing myself . . . then I stopped. I reverted to what my dad described as “baby talk.” He said that he and my mom were so concerned that they considered sending me to a child psychiatrist – and this was the 1950s when the thought of a psychiatrist came with a large helping of social stigma. 

I never actually saw a shrink and eventually I resumed a path closer to the normal developmental trajectory of childhood speech. But what was that strange regression all about? It certainly fits with having “a malefic planet” in my “house of speech.” As I mentioned, I have some karmic speculations which I’ll save for a little later on in this essay. Astrologically, suffice to say that transiting Pluto was squaring my Ascendant throughout that period. Something dark and heavy was surfacing. Why was I afraid to speak?

SPEECH THERAPY

Between the ages of about ten and eleven, I was sent to a speech therapist. This happened in the context of the public school I was attending. The issue was that I was unable to pronounce the letter “L.” It usually came out of my mouth as a “Y” or sometimes as a “W.” 

Again, my memories are fuzzy, but I have one piece of evidence that this problem must have gone back to my preschool days. I had a beloved aunt named Laura. She was my mom’s older sister and a spunky, fun-loving human being whom I wished I could have known better as an adult. Anyway, to me, she was always “Wawie.” Apparently that was as close as I could get to pronouncing “Laura.”  Nobody made fun of me over it. In fact, I hardly remember it being an issue at all – at least until the 4th or 5th grade, when I suspect an observant teacher noticed my  problem. Hence the speech therapist. I guess the therapy helped too – I can pronounce “L” just fine today. (Some years later there was a bit of family giggle about it all when my parents moved to Loblolly Street.) 

These childhood speech impediments all seemed to clear up around puberty. By way of aftermath, all they left in their wake was my self-conscious hesitation to speak in class – something which remained an occasion of Mars-stress for me for almost another decade.

THEN MY HEARING WENT

Remember, my “malefic” Mars is conjunct Mercury and both of them sit on the cusp of my 3rd house. Ask any astrologer: all of that is about communication. One key in thinking deeply about Mercury or the 3rd house is to remember that true communication is always a two-way street: it’s as much about listening as it is about speaking. Most people born with either of those symbols prominent in their charts are natural talkers. Many are even chatterboxes. You can always pick out the more evolved ones by seeing how well they listen. The best of them actually respond to what you say –  that’s how you can tell that they’ve taken it in and thought about it. That’s true listening.

Listening naturally requires hearing – and that’s another place where the stressful side of Mars has made itself felt in my life. In this case it’s a physical problem. I’ve lost track of when I first started wearing hearing aids. I think it was around 1990 when I was just entering my forties. After all the tests, I remember going to the clinic to pick up my first pair. Driving home with the windows open on a Spring day, I wondered what that chittering sound that I was hearing could be. Something wrong with the car? Then it dawned on me: it was birds singing. It had been many years since I’d been able to hear that sound.

Technically, I’ve got about a 50% hearing loss in the consonant-recognition frequencies. That’s the pitch where you can tell the difference between P, T, or K, for example, which naturally makes understanding what anyone is saying a bit of a challenge. With the hearing aids, I’m in pretty good shape so long as I am face to face with someone in a quiet room, but as soon as there’s any background noise, I’m doomed. Covid helped me realize how much lip-reading I do – those masks were as bad for me as a noisy restaurant or a blaring television. For two years, I felt like I was the only English speaker living in Kazakhstan. 

Ask anyone with hearing loss – the simplest social encounters can quickly become sources of stress. I know it’s often true for me. There’s Mars in action – and, once again, all that I've just written is consistent with the more baleful “malefic” dimensions of a Mars-Mercury conjunction on the cusp of the 3rd house.

Those effects are real enough. As ever, conventional approaches to astrology usually do a good job of holding a mirror before the existential realities of anyone’s life, mine included. Any astrologer who sees people strictly through that kind of lens will often do accurate descriptive work. The trouble is that such analyses will also be depressing, laden with the kind of gloomy language that leaves everyone feeling as if they are victims of their charts, powerless to do anything about their own problems. 

Again, Mars definitely brings challenges – no rose colored glasses there. When it comes to moving astrology from prediction into healing, the key is to remember that each Mars-related challenge is an opportunity to learn about courage, assertiveness, and personal empowerment. Those are the parts that we cannot leave out of any interpretation that is going to be of possible help to any of our clients. It’s not just about some misfortune you must endure. It’s about learning how to stand up for yourself, protect yourself, and generally be your own best ally. I know what I am talking about because I’ve lived it. I gradually learned to be a confident public speaker, partly by hurling myself into situations where I had no choice. With my hearing loss, I swallowed any embarrassment and went out and got fitted for hearing aids at a relatively early age. When I can’t understand what someone is saying, I simply tell them that I am half-deaf and I ask them to speak up. And I do my best to stay away from noisy restaurants. 

Those are all choices that I’ve made – the sorts of choices that anyone can make. They are practical examples of the kind of active, positive Mars-related astrological counsel that I am talking about. In empowering myself to make those decisions, I reduced my stress-load. I suspect that at a deeper level, my soul learned something too.

WHY, WHY, WHY?

Evolutionary astrology can take us one giant step deeper: it can help us understand the reasons that we are faced with the specific challenges that life throws at us all. It can at least make a start on answering the eternal question: why?

As soon as we assume that life is purposeful – that there are reasons that you have the chart that you have – we must recognize that any such reasons have to lie in the past. Effects follow causes. Your chart is an effect. What caused it must lie buried in the mists of time. As most of you know, I use the language of reincarnation to make sense of all of that. And when it comes to exploring past life imagery, the portal through which we must pass is the Moon’s south node. With me, it’s in Scorpio on the cusp of my 12th house. 

All of that is too big a subject for me to write about it in detail here, but I bring it up now for one reason: Mars squares my Scorpio south node almost exactly and Mars rules it as well. There’s no way that we can understand the reasons behind all of the personal issues I’ve been writing about without understanding their roots in the karmic past. With Mars so connected to my south node, we see that my speech and hearing issues are totally integral to my karmic story.

MARIAN STARNES

My first true spiritual teacher was a wise woman named Marian Starnes. I met her in my early twenties and she took me under her wing. My debt to her is immeasurable. Among her other qualities, she was one of the most gifted psychics I have ever known. Long before my ears began to fail, Marian foresaw that before long I would experience hearing trouble. In her gentle Cancerian way, she planted a seed that would slowly blossom into understanding over many years. She said that in a prior life I couldn’t stand the screams of people being tortured. I had “closed my ears.” 

And a wish to not be able to hear took root in my soul.

I wrote a bit about this in Yesterday’s Sky – how I came to understand that, as a monk or a priest in the early 1500s, I had misused my gifts with language to justify torture during the Spanish conquest of Mexico. (Remember how when I was young, I couldn’t pronounce the letter “L?” It came out as a “Y.” If you know some Spanish, you’ll see a connection.) In those days, I truly believed that Satan had taken over the Aztec soul as evidenced by their horrible blood sacrifices. Back then, I felt that under such dire circumstances, extreme measures were justified. 

Still, there were those terrible screams . . .

Spanish is the only language other than English in which I can express myself with some fluency. For years, I lectured annually in Mexico City. And yet, even though there is a hint of a nibble lately, none of my books have ever made it into Spanish – dozens of other languages, but never Spanish. 

Karma? I think so. My abuse of language back then still has concrete biographical effects. 

(In an amazing example of synchronicity, as I am polishing up this essay, I just received an email telling me that a Spanish publishing house called Editorial Sirio will be bringing out a translation of my first book, The Inner Sky.)

My Mars problems do seem to have some roots in Mexico, but they go deeper than that and they spread more widely. I have come to realize that some of those screams that Marian Starnes told me about were my own. It took seventy years of work on myself before I could delve down to the painful heart of everything: the fact that I myself have been tortured in at least one prior life, and tortured for what I said. 

Those last six words are the key to everything. 

Technically, as the ruler of my Scorpio south node, Mars represents me in a prior life. With it in the 3rd house and conjoined with Mercury, I had my mouth open and I was angry. In Aquarius, I was in tension with authority – which is a great way to get into trouble. Mars also squares my south node. That configuration often spells having been beset by violence in a prior life – I was attacked and hurt. The south node is in Scorpio, and in nodal analysis Scorpio always represents something nightmarish – something that would make anyone profoundly uncomfortable. Death symbolism? Torture? And that south node is on the 12th house cusp: there is some terrible loss in this story. Taking everything one step further, Pluto co-rules the south node from the 9th house, which often suggests religion. 

I could go on, but I suspect that you already get the picture.

KARMIC ALARM BELLS

How can we know when we are edging closer to one of these karmic landmines? We all have them. As I hope I have just demonstrated, evolutionary astrology can be a big help. Through its techniques we can understand the specifics of our unresolved karma. That knowledge can provide us with an “early warning system.” For me personally with Mars ruling my south node and squaring it, my karmic story simply has a lot of Mars ingredients. Yours may focus on different planets and different issues. Whatever the case, it’s all right there in your chart waiting to be deciphered.

There is another method for sussing out one’s unresolved karma. It’s even more reliable and we don’t even need astrology to use it. Be alert to any extra-intense, exaggerated emotional reactions you have to certain kinds of events. The feelings themselves may be reasonable, but something is inflating them – that’s the emotional residue of the karmic past.

• You have $20 less in your wallet than you thought you had and a terrified feeling that you are on the verge of homelessness sweeps over you. (Maybe in a prior life you really did lose your home.) 

• Your partner is friendly with an attractive person and you feel insecure, as if you are about to be abandoned. (Maybe in a prior life your marriage was destroyed by infidelity.) 

• You gasp and cringe when another driver does something stupid or aggressive. (Maybe you were suddenly ripped from this world in an accident in a prior life.)

The story is always there in the south node, its ruler, and the aspects they both make. If you are new to evolutionary astrology, you can learn all about these techniques in Yesterday’s Sky or just enter “reincarnation” in the search engine at forrestastrology.com. This approach is the heart of evolutionary astrology and it’s too broad a subject to include in a relatively brief essay such as this one. 

BACK TO MY STORY

For me, reclaiming my true voice has been my main Mars issue in this lifetime. One big reason is that in the past, claiming my right to speak my mind had led me to an unspeakably painful experience. I smile to think of myself at age four starting to speak, then changing my mind about the whole thing and “reverting to baby talk.” I was literally afraid to talk – something that seems crazy until we realize where it comes from: if you were tortured for speaking out in a past life, how do you feel about speaking out in this one? From that point of view, it doesn’t look “crazy” at all anymore – instead, it’s an understandable, even rational, reaction to an actual memory of the soul.

How I wish that my father and my mother could have known some astrology back then! It might have helped them help me. How I wish child psychiatrists knew some astrology too! I can only imagine the diagnostic contortions they would have assumed if they were faced with me at age four. I doubt their labels would have been of much help. Healing starts with accurate understanding of a problem.

Peering through the clear lens of evolutionary astrology, most of our psychological dramas resolve into understandable reactions to wounding experiences in prior lifetimes. What was once labelled as some sort of defect in our characters – some sort of craziness – quickly dissolves into compassionate understanding and the wisdom of self-forgiveness.

And those are the greatest gifts of them all. 

Listen to the podcast

Facebook Comments