Mars in Pisces

Mars in tropical Pisces

What the tradition reads

Mars holds no domicile, exaltation or particular weakness in Pisces by Ptolemy's classical scheme; the sign belongs to Jupiter, with modern astrologers adding Neptune, and Mars there is read as drive carried into the host planets' own dissolving of ordinary boundaries rather than expressed in its own sharper, more decisive register. Pisces is a mutable water sign, the last of the twelve, read by the tradition as compassion and a blurring of the line between one feeling and another, and Mars set there is read as a force considerably gentler and less direct than anywhere else in the zodiac, more inclined to drift with events than to shape them by force. Cafe Astrology's delineation describes Mars in Pisces as mild-tempered, prone to real guilt about its own anger, more comfortable going with the flow than asserting itself directly, its desires changeable and difficult to pin down, though its energy can be turned constructively toward creative outlets. The tradition names a difficulty asserting itself plainly as the placement's ordinary cost, a Mars that can let real aggression leak out sideways, through games or indirect manoeuvring, rather than name what it actually wants, though the same softness is credited with a compassion and creative sensitivity a more forceful Mars would likely never develop.

The story

When Typhon attacked the assembled gods, the Olympians scattered into Egypt and took on animal shapes to escape him: Apollo became a hawk, Hermes an ibis, Artemis a cat, Dionysus a goat, and Ares himself, the god most associated anywhere in myth with meeting force directly, became a fish, diving beneath the surface rather than standing to fight a monster even he could not have beaten. Pisces preserves a comparable transformation from the same crisis, usually told of Aphrodite and her son Eros, who slipped into the water as two fish rather than risk a confrontation with Typhon at all. Mars in Pisces is read through this less flattering, rarely mentioned version of his own myth rather than through his usual reputation: a force that, on the one occasion the danger was actually too large to meet head on, chose the same soft, evasive, water-bound escape Pisces asks of everyone in it, proof that even the god of war has, somewhere in his own history, needed to simply go with the current rather than fight it.

Written from

Corpus key planet-in-sign:Mars:Pisces.