Welcome to Ghost of a Podcast. I’m your host, Jessica Lanyadoo. I’m an astrologer, psychic medium, and animal communicator, and I’m going to give you your weekly horoscope and no bullshit, mystical advice for living your very best life.

My Darlings, it’s time for more Ghost of a Podcast ‘Astrology Hot Takes.’ So this week, I want to talk to you about Mars. I’m not going to get into the Mars Retrograde that will begin September 9th of 2020—that will require its own episode, and I will be happy to unpack all of it. But before that happens, let me just give you a primer on Mars. Mars is a really important planet when understanding yourself and understanding your life, so I’m going to talk to you about it on lots of levels. The first of which is Mars in your birth chart.

Now, when we look at your birth chart, and we look at Mars, what we are seeing is a number of things. One thing is your body. So there’s a lot of ways of looking at physical heath in the birth chart, and they’re not in any way limited to looking at the planet Mars. But Mars is really a physical planet. It governs your musculature, your red blood cells. It’s your virility and your strength. So it’s really very much a body planet. This planet represents so much of your vitality. So that doesn’t necessarily mean your physical health, but it’s how you feel in your body. You can have no serious health issues and feel exhausted all the damn time. You can have tons of health issues but actually have a very resilient and strong nature, right. So this is when we look not to Mars for a health diagnosis, but to Mars for information about how you feel in your body.

Another important thing about the planet Mars in your birth chart is it describes your sense of ownership of your body. Now of course, there are many social considerations, but so many of those social considerations actually can be read in the birth chart. That is a whole other topic. When we look at your birth chart, what we can see is your nature around self-ownership, self-direction, embodiment. And if you are a person who is having a difficult time with those issues, whether it’s just a chronic thing for you or it’s in response to a traumatic or upsetting or stressful event in your life or series of events in your life, then when you understand Mars’ placement by zodiac sign and house, then you can understand foundational pieces of your nature.

Now you don’t want to stop there. You also want to understand the impact of natal aspects, so aspects in your birth chart from and to Mars—that tells you so much about your nature. And within your nature, you can figure out what you’re working with: what is hard for you, what your skills are, what your resources are internally, and what you need to overcome. The birth chart will tell you all of these things, not just about Mars, but we are talking about Mars.

Another thing that Mars is related to is fornicating. I am a humungous fan of the word fornication. I just wanted to acknowledge that any chance I have to say something about fornication, I’m going to use the word fornication. I just wanted to be clear about that. So Mars governs fucking. It’s doing it. It’s the athletics of sex. It is about the action of sex. It is not about the feelings, the emotions of a sexual encounter. Other planets will be related to that. But when we look at Mars, it is about your sex drive, the frequency that you prefer sex, the pace that you prefer sex, the intensity of your sexual impulses. A lot of your style of how you like to do a damn thing and how you like to have it done to and with you, this is all found by Mars. So your sexual drives are related to Mars.

Now in this simplification that occurs of talking about astrology—really of talking about most serious things in life—what happens is we want things to be really simple, so we’re like, Mars is sex; Moon is feelings. But the truth of the matter is it’s hard to parse these things out, especially when it comes to sex. Because for queer people, for people who are gender queer, for people who were raised as female, there’s this sense that we’re not supposed to have ownership of our own bodies and our own sexual impulses and desires. We’re supposed to sublimate them. We’re supposed to shove them down or only be responsive to others. But Mars isn’t about that. Maybe that’s how your Mars functions, but that is not inherently what Mars is. Mars is actually about I want. I see. I do. I get. It’s mine.

And, so, there is a way that when we have social conditions that kind of twist up the functions—the healthy functions of a planet, there starts to be some confusion in the world of astrology because there’s this idea that girls are from Venus and boys are from Mars. It’s an antiquated idea, obvi, and it’s also a false idea. Everybody is from Earth. We’re all from Earth, Goddamn it. And we all have Venus in our charts, and we all have Mars in our charts.

And, so, when we talk about the functionality of Mars in the birth chart of all the people, all the genders, it’s really important to acknowledge that there are social conditions that are centuries old, a lot of them, that interrupt or negate some of the healthy functions of a planet. All to say, when we look at Mars in the birth chart, we want to look not as idealists but as realists. We want to look at how much space we have in our lives, according to others, to actually embody the fullness of a planet. And when it comes to a planet as sexual and passionate and driven as Mars, that’s going to be really different for more than half the population than it is for men and, in particular, heterosexual, cis men and even more so for heterosexual, white men. So we want to really keep in mind the social conditions and how they kind of impact our birth charts and the embodiment of our truths. So Mars is about how you fuck, how you like to be fucked.

Okay. That’s not all it’s about. Mars in your birth chart also indicates your sense of ambition, your willingness and ability to get a thing done. Where we find Mars in the birth chart is our motivation. It’s our action. Interestingly, Mars is related to how you drive your car. And if you own a car, it’s related to your literal car. So the upshot here is Mars is the planet you want to look to to understand how you do a thing and how you get a thing done—your sense of ownership of what you want to have happen and your sense of ownership of your own ability and capacity to make a thing happen. Mars is related to entitlement. But that’s not all.

Mars is also related in the birth chart to anger. Yes, anger. Who could be surprised based on my list? So Mars governs your ability to experience anger, irritability, activation, aggression, intensity. Mars is related to fighting—literally like punching people, getting in a ring maybe, boxing, but also in the streets and fighting people. It’s also related to fighting not in a physical sense but more in a just combative general like, “Fuck you. You suck. How dare you post this thing” sense.

Mars is combat, and there are a lot of ways to go to battle with a person or with yourself. You see? And, so, the thing that we want to understand about Mars is that it is motivated. It is motivated. Now it’s not always clean and clear about how it’s motivated or what it’s motivated by, but it is very fucking motivated.

And many people have this feeling about anger that it’s bad. Anger is bad. Fighting is bad. I don’t agree with that at all. I am very pro Mars. I love Mars. I think that anger is a healthy emotion. We need to get angry. Have you seen the world lately? I hope you are fucking pissed off about it. I really do. In order to recover from an illness, you have to have the motivation, you have to have a sense of passion and drive, which is not necessarily about anger, but its energy is very similar to anger actually.

Many people will tell me that they don’t experience anger; they don’t get mad at people; they don’t do anything like that. And generally, what my experience is as an astrologer is when somebody doesn’t get mad at other people it’s because they’re too busy being mad at themselves. Many people experience Mars, aka anger as exhaustion, fatigue, sadness, victimization, martyrdom. That is not the healthiest and most ideal experience of Mars because Mars wants you to be activated.

Mars is actually an assertive and aggressive planet, right. And, so, when we look at Mars in your birth chart, we want to consider what is the most healthy and embodied expression of your anger, your irritability, so that you can find healthy outlets for those emotions instead of repress them or do what is very commonly done which is over express them, just get mad at people all the time, tear people down as a way to make yourself feel better.

Where we have Mars, we have the generative potential to create and to destroy. Similar to Pluto but very different. And what we want to be able to do is access those energies so we can activate them with intention, so that our motivation, our intention, and our impact are as close to equal as possible.

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Want to learn more about Mars or any other planet in your birth chart? Buy my book. It’s called Astrology For Real Relationships: Understanding You, Me, and How We All Get Along. It’s available by eBook or regular paper book or even audio book, pretty much anywhere books are sold. The link is in show notes.

Now, let me talk about Mars by transit. So there’s two ways to talk about this. There’s transits occurring in the world, like the one that is happening right now. We have an exact Mercury square to Mars happening on the 8th of July, and it will re-occur on the 27th of July. That means that this month is really marked by this heavy, irritable Mars energy. Also, Mars is going Retrograde on September 9th. It is a really meaningful transit, especially because it’s in its natural sign of Aries.

And, so, when we talk about Mars transits in the world, so they’re not happening to you personally; they’re happening in the sky IRL, and they’re impacting us socially. They’re impacting us all at once—everyone of all demographics across the globe. When we are talking about transits to Mars that impact the collective, we are in it together whether we like it or not.

What you can expect is to feel annoyed, to feel easily triggered and agitated or to deal with other people’s irritability and defensiveness. When we go through these kinds of transits as a collective, generally, you either have to stand your ground or assert yourself, and you have to know what’s worth fighting for and what is not worth fighting. The downside of Mars is that it can be so egotistical that it can find you fighting just because of your damn ego instead of fighting for what you believe in. If you’re fighting out of anger, and you’re fighting out of rage, and you’re fighting with the impulse to punish others, you end up just sitting in that fucking energy yourself. It’s not super fun. It’s not super healthy. Fight for what you love.

Now there’s another kind of transit that occurs, and that is a transit from a planet in the sky IRL to Mars in your birth chart. When we go through transits to our natal Mars, that is when we really feel ourselves. We feel our ego. We can feel really irritable, really defensive, really stuck. We can feel like crying all the time and we don’t know why. We can feel really horny and like all we want to do is like smash one out. We can feel restless, like we need to change something in our lives, and we don’t know what. And what a lot of people feel is pissed; they just feel fucking pissed. They feel mad.

And no matter what you’re feeling based on the transit that you’re going through, it’s important to know that whenever you are going through a transit to your natal Mars, you have the opportunity to develop a healthier and more embodied relationship to your ego, to your passions, to your ambition, and to the healthy embodiment of anger. And these are invaluable tools because in order to be a whole and embodied person, honestly, you need to embody your Mars. And when we overexpress it or under express it, when we recoil from intense emotions or unpleasant emotions, we leave a part of ourselves behind. We are essentially saying to ourselves, this part of me is not acceptable. I will repress it. I will throw it at someone else, whatever it is. And where we thrive as people but also as a society is when we can tolerate our feelings enough to investigate them, so that we can be intentional about how we respond to them and how we embody them.

It’s not about not being angry. It’s about doing it from an embodied place. It’s about doing it in ways that reflect accountability, presence, and a willingness to be a part of the mobilization that you so very much want. And that’s the thing about Mars. Mars doesn’t want to talk. Mars wants action. Mars governs action. And, so, when you are engaging with your natal Mars, either by transit or in reaction to someone else or simply by embodiment of your birth chart and your nature, what you want to be able to do is explore what is authentic and true for you from an embodied place.

Having sex, getting pissed off, exercising, dancing, these are all Mars things, and when we do any or all of them from an embodied place, not a distracted place, not a disassociated place, that action is completely different. It’s just completely different. And not all of us can be embodied for various reasons, that’s part of being a person, unfortunately. Life is fucking traumatic. However, moving towards embodiment incrementally based on what is healthy and possible for you is a really great idea for just about all of us.

One more thing before I close up this Mars Hot Take. I have left out a kind of glaringly obvious part of Mars, which is abuse. Because Mars is related to anger and fighting, and it can be related to domination and entitlement and all kinds of other things like that. Because it is related to sex and to violence, it is absolutely a planet that we would look to for understanding abuse. I want to just acknowledge that I did not speak to these topics because it deserves its own, separate conversation.

All right, my loves, thank you for once again joining me for an ‘Astrology Hot Take,’ Ghost of a Podcast style. I hope that you can take some time this week to really drop into your body and just fucking be with it, just be with it, whatever it is. Maybe spend some special solo time getting to know your body, or maybe just try to move a little bit more. This is a really important time for finding healthy and creative outlets for the feelings that are bubbling to the surface in the old meat suit. Bye.