Mars ingresses into his cardinal and diurnal domicile of Aries on 28 June 2020. He will finally leave Aries during the current cycle on January 6, 2021. This means that Mars will be impossible to ignore as we approach the Winter Solstice and the Grand Conjunction. Mars is the Lord and scorching emissary of the chart.

Mars is less agitated in his nocturnal domicile, as the night is said to cool his burning rage. In Aries, there is no holding back. The Islamic representations of Mars almost always portray him carrying a severed head with apparent glee. Mars in Aries is like a rambunctious and aggressive adolescent one a good day and far worst on a bad one. However, there is mercifully no guile in this placement,. This is unlike Mars in Scorpio. He is direct and sure of the rightness of his cause, entirely unconcerned what others may think of that.

Let’s look at the larger picture as Mars ingresses into Aries.

As I have had many occasions to mention, we are in the middle of a highly volatile mix. Jupiter is consorting with Saturn and both are retrograde. I have written also on the eclipses preceding this event with “Ancestral voices prophesying war” The moment is of the Hour of Moon, the Day of Saturn and the Almuten is Venus, in Mercurial Gemini and disposited by Mercury in Cancer, retrograde and in the Exaltation of Jupiter.

We might think of Jupiter and Saturn as the big brothers of Mars; and in this case, they will tend to cool his heels with saturnine gravitas for the time being. This relationship is made all the more intriguing by the fact that Capricorn is the Exaltation of Mars, the sign in which Jupiter lingers in his Fall.

“Pandora.” Completed by John William Waterhouse in 1896

Of course, when a malefic favours another malefic we don’t expect all sweetness and light. 2020 is a year full of pretty much all the things listed in Pandora’s box, a tale first was written down by Hesiod in his Theogony and Works and Days in the 7th century BC. These didactic poems relate how the gods came to create Pandora and how the gift Zeus gave her ultimately ends the Golden Age of humankind.

Specifically, when she opens the box, all manner of strife and torment is leashed upon the world. In the words of K. Kris Hirst, ” Pandora is a trick gift, a punishment for the good of Promethean fire, she is, in fact, Zeus’s price of fire.” But metaphorically, all that plagues humanity, including plagues themselves, swarms of locust in numbers hitherto unseen and destroying subsistence crops over an area never before seen,  combine to give the impression of an apocalypse.

Cities are replete with arsons and looters, tearing down and defacing monuments, including those with strong religious significance. It is as if W.B. Yeats; “Second Coming” is being enacted before our very eyes; and we want to know where we will all be when the wheels fall off the chariot.

The story of Pandora is the story of the fall from an ideal world or state of being, strikingly similar to the story of the biblical fall. This is a productive way to understand the nature and purpose of the malefics.  They are the price we pay whilst we inhabit this sub-lunary sphere. The ladder to the empyrean is fraught with all manner of difficulties and Saturn guards the Gates of Paradise.

With this in mind, even the most difficult times are not without meaning and that can make even the worst times bearable, but hardly pleasant. Angst and fear are permeating the collective and those states of being are decidedly Saturnine qualities, made all the more dramatic and painful by Mars.

Mars is going to really stir things up, for good or for bad. The opposition to the Venusian Moon in Libra is unfortunate and Mars squared the Cancerian Sun and Mercury, also retrograde as mentioned, is cause for alarm.

Considering the larger picture, including the approaching Grand Conjunction and the powerful eclipses involved, cooler heads may not be in ready supply. But the alternative is chaos and war. This is a pivotal time for humanity to cultivate a consciousness higher than the one that brought us fast food, deforestation and propagandistic networks.

More than anything, this is a struggle for truth in an ocean of deceit.  Much like Manjushri, we cut through the roots of illusion that keep us enslaved to a world even more alienating, kept passive by the shadows on the wall of the Plato’s Cave.

The spectre is Saturn as Falsifer. For now, Mars works with Saturn to a great extent, but Mars can make a great servant when not busy being a terrible master. Yet in spite of all that faces us, indeed because of it, we must find a way to put all that plagues us back into the box. Pandora’s power was rooted in her ability to deceive – to appear to be what she was not, much as the sweet voice of the serpent in Genesis made the forbidden fruit appear to be a wonderful gift

This is a time of enormous opportunities and one which we cannot ignore. The threats we face are existential, even to the Earth herself.  Gaia is in torment and we hear and see her clearly as if awakening from an enchanted sleep.