What to Do in a Mars Hour: Courage, Endings and Standing Your Ground

You were reasonable about it.

You raised it politely the first time, because you assumed it was an oversight. You gave the benefit of the doubt. You tried the soft version twice, once in person and once in writing, and you were careful about the wording on both occasions.

It is still happening. And you have started to suspect that your reasonableness is not being received as maturity but as evidence that there is no cost attached to continuing. A Mars hour is the window for attaching one.

What Mars actually governs

In the Western tradition Mars governs decisive action and the will that pushes through resistance. Conflict, severing, justice and the ending of things.

The tradition is direct about why it exists. Mars is necessary. Without it a life becomes passive and a person becomes prey, and nothing changes under pressure. It is the department for the situation where something must be stopped: a bully, sabotage, a legal threat, a competitor who plays dirty, a person who will not respect a limit however often it is stated.

Mars ends what words cannot. That is the whole function, and the tradition is careful to add that it is for clear targets and not for vague anger.

It also holds the quieter half of the same territory: courage, momentum, the capacity to act without hesitation and the spine required to say the thing you have been rehearsing for a fortnight.

The rule the tradition puts on it

Every planet in this system carries cautions. The one attached to Mars is the strictest of the seven.

Do not use it as a first move when something softer would end the matter. That is not a moral flourish added later by someone nervous about the subject. It is in the method itself, for the practical reason that force applied to a situation that did not need it creates a second problem on top of the first.

The image at the top of this page is called Blade. It was made on a Tuesday, in the hour of Mars, with Mars newly arrived in Scorpio, one of the two signs it rules. That choice was deliberate. Mars in Aries is the warrior charging the field. Mars in Scorpio is the strategist who has already worked out the ending before the first move is made. Precise, controlled and devastating only where devastation is actually required.

That is the register this whole department operates in when it is used well. The work was done three days after the Saturn artwork, under the same conditions. The sword and the wall were forged in the same week.

What to do in a Mars window

Tuesday belongs to Mars, and Mars hours come round several times in every other day of the week as well. The planetary hours are the layer underneath the days, and that article covers how to find yours.

Time the act itself rather than the deliberation before it. Decide in your own time, and if possible not in temper. Then do it in the window.

Resign. Hand in the notice. Send the letter you have had in drafts since March.

End it. The final conversation. The last message. The version where you stop explaining yourself and simply say that this is finished.

Escalate formally. The complaint, the grievance, the report to the body that has authority over the person. The step past asking nicely.

Instruct the lawyer. Sign the engagement, file the claim, answer the letter you have been sitting on.

Say the thing. The confrontation you have rehearsed in the shower for three weeks. Once, clearly, to the person's face.

Compete. The tender, the audition, the pitch against named rivals, the trial, the race. Anywhere the outcome is contested and someone is going to lose.

Do the thing you are afraid of. The call you keep not making. The barrier you have stopped at four times. Mars is the department for hesitation as much as for opposition.

What Mars will not do, and what it costs

Mars cuts. It does not hold, and holding is the more common need.

If what you need is a boundary that stays up over time, that is Saturn. The tradition puts them as a sword and a wall, and they solve different problems. A wall keeps something out. A sword ends something. Reaching for the sword when you needed the wall is how people end up in a fight they did not want.

If you do not yet know what is actually going on, that is Mercury, and the sequence the tradition gives is truth before action. Get the facts, then decide. If you need standing before you act, that is the Sun, since authority makes opposition think twice about starting.

The pairings run in a specific order. Protection first and then the strike, so Saturn before Mars. Clarity before either, so Mercury before both. Each of the seven governs its own department, and this is the one most often reached for by mistake.

The cost is straightforward. Mars is the opposite instrument to Venus, and the tradition is explicit that you should not aim warmth and severing at the same person. Choose which one you are actually doing. A message that is trying to end something and be liked at the same time achieves neither, and everyone who has ever sent one knows it.

If you are being threatened, harassed or stalked, that is a matter for the police and a lawyer. Timing is not a substitute for either and nothing on this page should delay that call.

Beyond timing

Timing is the layer you can use immediately and it costs you nothing. It is also the outermost layer.

The older tradition went further than choosing the hour. It spoke into the hour, addressing the planet directly with a specific request rather than waiting to see what the day would bring. Astrological Magic sets out that practice in full and gives the Mars line eight operations with the exact wording for each.

Start with the hour. Find the current Mars window for your location.