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Correspondences of Mars

the classical correspondences of Mars: day, metal, colour, incense, angel and deva

What the tradition reads

The grimoire tradition gives Mars Tuesday as its day, the day the Heptameron's own working text assigns to this planet's operations, and iron as its metal, correspondences Agrippa's Scale of the Number Seven records. In a separate chapter on planetary colours the same author gives Mars red, burning, fiery, flaming, violet, purple, bloody and iron coloured hues, and in his chapter on planetary fumes a suffumigation built on euphorbium, bdellium, gum armoniack and the roots of both hellebores, with a loadstone and a little sulphur; euphorbium and hellebore root are themselves poisonous, caustic substances, and this entry records that recipe as history, not instruction. Agrippa's own Scale of the Number Seven gives Mars the angel Camael, while the Heptameron's working text names a different angel, Samael, for Tuesday, so that Mars joins Jupiter and Saturn among the planets where the two grimoire traditions, consulted independently, give genuinely different angel names for the same office rather than one name spelled two ways. The Vedic tradition names its own significator for the same planet, Mangala, also called Kuja, a fierce and energetic graha the tradition reads as ruling war, whose colour is likewise red and whose own day, Tuesday, called Mangalavara, matches the Western tradition's day for this planet exactly, one of the few points of straightforward agreement between the two systems for Mars.

The story

Mars's correspondences travel the same route as every other planet's, through Agrippa's Three Books of Occult Philosophy and its Scale of the Number Seven, compiled in the early sixteenth century from an older stock of astrological and alchemical material organised into one table. The planet's own myth reaches back further than any grimoire: Mars is the Roman god of war, an office the Greek tradition gave to Ares, and the astrological planet keeps that god's reputation for aggression, conflict and raw physical courage directly in its correspondences, iron as a metal of weapons, and, in Agrippa's later chapter on colours, red and bloody hues for the god's own battlefield. The Heptameron's working text names Samael as the angel governing Tuesday's operations where Agrippa's Scale names Camael instead, two names from two independent grimoire lineages rather than one office spelled two ways, a disagreement the honest telling records rather than resolves. Mangala's own Vedic myth gives the planet a comparable origin bound up with violence and the earth: one Puranic account, tied to Vaishnava tradition, holds that Vishnu, in his boar incarnation Varaha, rescued the earth goddess Bhumi from the demon Hiranyaksha, recognised her as an aspect of his own consort Lakshmi, and from their union Mangala was born, while a separate Shaiva account holds Mangala was born instead from drops of Shiva's own sweat, raised afterward by Bhumi.

Written from

Corpus key correspondence:Mars.