Mars in the signs

What Mars means

In a natal chart, Mars stands for appetite and action. Traditional astrology called it the lesser malefic, the planet of iron, fevers and blades, but in a modern reading it is simply your engine, the part of you that wants something and moves toward it. Mars describes how you start things and how you compete, what makes you angry and what you do with that anger, how you approach desire and sex, and the kind of physical energy you run on. A well-placed Mars can be quiet; what matters is whether it can act.

Mars spends about six to seven weeks in a sign, so it moves faster than the outer planets but slower than the Sun. When it turns retrograde, roughly every two years, it can stay in one sign for up to about seven months. People born a few weeks apart often share a Mars sign, and in a retrograde year a whole season of births can have it. Mars rules Aries and, traditionally, Scorpio, and it is exalted in Capricorn. It is in detriment in Libra and Taurus and in fall in Cancer, signs where its directness has to find a less obvious route.

The sign gives the style of the drive. The house shows where in life it gets spent, and aspects to the Sun, Moon and other planets show how freely it moves. Because Mars changes sign several times a year, your Sun sign tells you little about it. To find your Mars sign you need your birth date, and the free calculator will place it exactly.