Disclaimer: Like all my works, this essay is a synthesis and reflection, not scholarship. I am not a mystery knower, adept, true seeker, or whatever. Just a creator and a disciplined dabbler. I might include a typo or two, and I will certainly include personal experience. If either makes you uncomfortable, please don’t waste your time. You’re welcome.
The Corrective Force of Mars
Conventionally treated as misfortune, Mars represents conflict, fear, dread, and destruction. Its Qabalistic names include Din and Pachad, while astrologers call it the lesser malefic, with Saturn being the greater malefic.
For such reason, people fear Mars almost as much as they do Saturn.
But is the red planet really evil? Or does it represent misunderstood principles vital for survival, liberation, and actually moving on?
In the Qabalistic Tree of Life, Mars appears in two ways: the sphere of Geburah (5) and the Path of Peh (27, the Tower Card), which both represent necessary destruction, and even filtration.
Mars is judgement, or justice and precision, which Dion Fortune identifies as the sword that destroys and protects, the surgeon’s scalpel cutting out tumors. It’s the proportion that prevents overgrowth…enabling you to know where to stop. The sword must therefore, Dion Fortune explains, neither be cursed nor wielded in destructive rage. It must be blessed, disciplined, and dedicated to a productive cause.
Optimal Rhythm
The Sephiroth operate as pairs of opposites. You cannot have one without its pair and vice versa. Geburah’s pair is Chesed, the sphere of Jupiter. Chesed and Geburah are a lot like insulin and glucagon…as I’ve been preaching. Being the principle of growth and expansion, Jupiter builds, develops, and moves beyond limitations. Conversely, its partner Mars keeps things in check by trimming excesses, preventing overgrowth and course-correcting if needed.
Yet, this is not metaphor by convenience. While self-helpers might consider expanding your self-image without inflating your ego (Psycho-Cybernetics), our bodies enact the same law at the cellular level. Health (and progress) require balance, not stability but rhythm: movement between opposing forces, maintained through momentum.
Sure, to build muscle and recover, we need insulin (anabolism). On the contrary, permanently elevated insulin (conventional eating) is linked to obesity, diabetes, and tumor-growth-favoring conditions. Glucagon (catabolism) steps in, mobilizing stored energy: the same low-insulin state that enables autophagy, burning toxic proteins and damaged cells.
Note: Benjamin Bickman likens insulin and glucagon to yin and yang, yet I feel Chesed and Geburah represent them even better.
The reason why (when done correctly) IF protocols like the OMAD plan excel is not because they accomplish imaginary numbers of calories. It is because, above all, they bring the body to its optimal state by enabling Jupiter andMars to do their job on a cellular level. It is also why you feel rejuvenated after a 48hrs fast.
More than Destruction
Ketone bodies pose powerful muscle-sparing properties. Plus, the longer Mars is allowed to do its job (fasting/glucagon), the superior results Jupiter (feeding/insulin) will reap due to improved insulin sensitivity, or the body’s ability to make the most of the nutrients whenever they’re ingested. So it’s much more than burn and destroy. Duh!
A body locked into the insulin phase loses the capacity to clear its own wreckage. Hence, the condition of insulin resistance, which is excess insulin being produced but rejected by the receptors (Jupiter let loose). A body locked into glucagon and catabolism (Mars let loose)? Well, after about 40-60 days (roughly 2 months), you die.
Neither phase is health, as health is the oscillation. Geburah and Gedulah: severity and mercy are meant to work together. When they don’t, things break. Hip-Hop heads influenced by Five Percenters can also think of Chesed and Geburah as Build-Destroy, in the Supreme Mathematics.
Western Paradox
Focusing on Gedulah, Chesed, which means mercy, organized religion deemed Geburah as an “evil force” to be avoided at all costs. Ironically, Western society faces an obesity and diabetes pandemic, which spreads like cancer when a demographic adopts Western lifestyle and values. Think of Japan.
The lesson is that no force is particularly evil. Good and evil are conditional and contextualized by purpose, time, and place.
An excess of mercy becomes weakness; an excess of patience, cowardice. Mars is the dynamic energy as mandatory as meekness, charity, and patience. It’s also the most explosive planet, with Mercury as runner-up, balancing the slowness of Jupiter.
Reflecting the chaotic force of Chokmah (Triangles), Chesed is also pretty entropic and random. Crowley calls it the element of luck, the incalculable factor. Mars steps in, letting us have some predictability by eliminating unfavorable conditions whenever possible.
Consider the notion of making your own luck. Often this has to do with pre-selecting and filtering out bad fortune. We need Geburah’s realism to balance Gedulah’s idealism and prevent us from ending up in the wrong place at the wrong time… which is also luck.
Sacrifice
The deeper mystery of Mars is sacrifice. Sacrifice is not the surrender of something precious to satisfy a jealous God. Instead, it is the deliberate and open-eyed choice of a greater good over a lesser one. Think of Kelly McGonigal’s notion of I Will and I Want power. Just never forget it has serious limitations.
With Mars, an athlete sacrifices sloth to strength. The latent energy of coal becomes the dynamic energy of steam. The stored fat is turned into ketones to fuel creative work, productivity, and killer workouts. Likewise, substance abusers sacrifice the recreational high and substance reliance for a healthy and longer life. They eradicate self-destructive habits so wellness can flow.
Saturn represents all forms. Jupiter expands beyond the limiting ones, while Mars further breaks down useless and obsolete ones.
On the other hand, long-term sacrifices of genuinely precious resources is lot more Saturn. An example is whole life seasons (your twenties) to build something that never fully arrived, and even if it did, you paid a massive price for it, at least partially initiating you into sorrow. This is not a healthy course correction or sacrificing to self-preserve. It’s a debt already paid and finally seeing the bill…
Jean Dubuis (Philosophers of Nature) identifies Mars‘s sacrifice not merely as deprivation but transmutation: an existing condition must be broken down before its energy can assume another form. Think of what we covered about insulin sensitivity. It is the corrective element in life. It makes the clean cut, clearing away what has outlived its usefulness, and liberates us from self-pity.
The Tower
The principle receives potent expression in the Tower card (27 Peh), which Crowley also titles War. The card indicates the quintessential quality of the Lord of the Aeon: fire and force. At its foundation appears the destruction of the old-established dogmas and paradigms by lightning, flames, and engines of war.
The opening of the Eye of Horus is also the opening of the Eye of Shiva, through which the Universe is destroyed. Mars is the force by which an exhausted order is brought to its end.
The Tower is called Exciting Intelligence: the very power that makes Hod’s intellect and reasoning function because of Netzach’s passion and emotions. Think of the neuroeconomics concept about the rational brain merely rationalizing decisions already made by the emotional (Baba Shiv).
Yeah, ancient Qabalists were ahead of their time.
Paul Foster Case identifies Mars as the principle stimulating activity and transformation. Its lightning represents a sudden perception of truth that breaks down structures of ignorance and false reasoning. You experience a destruction of an entire philosophy and identification because they were accumulated from superficial observations, inherited assumptions, and a mistaken conception of will.
Reflect on the persons falling from the Tower. They are rectangular, almost origami-like. One might say that Crowley doubts their human qualities, as they have no depth, dimensionality, or validity. Most important, they were never you.
So, honesty and precision are the name of the game.
In that regard, overproducing tends to be one of my vices. One of the most important lessons Mars taught me is knowing where to stop. Striving to get better at it, I am releasing my Mars track alongside this article, as there isn’t anything more to add or take. Thus far, it’s the fourth of the Planetary Adventures compilation, which is still in progress.
—POTB