Fighting

Mars is the planet of fighting in every layer of the Western tradition, and the tradition is unusually consistent about what it means by that. Mars is hot and dry, the lesser of the two malefics, the malefic of the night sect, and the ruler of Aries and Scorpio. Its subjects are iron, fire, blood, wounds, surgery, soldiers, thieves, and everything done quickly and by force.

Lesser malefic is a technical rank rather than a judgement of severity. Saturn, the greater malefic, is cold and dry and does its damage by deprivation, delay and slow constriction. Mars does its damage by cutting, burning and haste. In a night chart Mars is of the sect in favour and its expression is more likely to be effective action than injury; in a day chart it is out of sect and the tradition expects the harsher reading. That is the sect doctrine again, and it is the single most useful correction a modern reader can apply to a textbook description of this planet.

Courage sits inside the same signification as violence, and the tradition does not treat that as a contradiction. Mars supplies the capacity to act against resistance, and whether it appears as bravery, as aggression or as surgery depends on the chart around it and on what the native is acting against.

The natural house of Mars is the sixth, where the tradition places its joy, among illness, labour and the daily attrition of a household.

Conflict is distributed across the houses in a way that repays attention, because the tradition distinguishes kinds of enemy that a single English word does not.

The seventh house holds the open enemy, and holds them in the same place as the spouse, the business partner and the other party to a lawsuit. What these have in common is that the other person is declared. A seventh house enemy is someone the native can name, meet and answer, and a suit at law is the most formal version of that relation.

The twelfth holds the enemy who is not declared: secret enemies, treachery, imprisonment, and in Lilly's list, self undoing. Saturn has its joy there. The twelfth is the house of what works against the native out of sight, including what the native does to themselves, and the tradition treats an unrecognised opponent as a different order of problem from a recognised one.

Between them sits the practical question any horary on a quarrel has to answer first, which is which house this is. A reading that puts a hidden enemy in the seventh will spend its time waiting for a confrontation that never arrives.

Mundane astrology, which reads charts for nations rather than people, uses the same distinctions at scale, taking Mars for war and the seventh house of a national chart for declared foreign enemies. The atlas records the technique. It makes no claim that any chart has ever predicted a war.