MARS : aggressive element

Now both arms are raised up, parallel, with the hands curled inwards retentively. The arms are then lowered, bringing what is above down bringing the heavens to meet the earth, and then up again raising the earth to the heavens. The movement is dynamic, pulsed through with a contained molten strength, aggressive.

The planetary movements of Mars are irregular too, as is his fiery light. He charges forward, then loops and retrogrades. Then seeming to stand still he suddenly charges off again, fast and furious. These irregularities of movement were deeply shocking to the Greeks when they first began to observe them. Geminus of Rhodes wrote of this: “Only a drunkard stands still, staggers backwards, totters, then lurches forward again on his senseless way. How can it be that a god behaves like a drunkard?”

Rudolf Steiner describes Mars as inspiring with delight all speech. One only need think of a young child cheerily nattering on about this and that without any seeming “logic” to recognize the insider of the delight of speech in itself. Those timid in discussion groups will recognize the aggressive capacity needed to get a ‘word in edgewise’ or to speak ‘out’ and ‘to speak up’.

This inner movement requires great mastery, for it has the power to work constructively or destructively, as we all know - like the iron that must be forged in the furnace and hammered on the anvil to become a tool.