Mars in Aries: What an Aries Mars Means in a Chart

Someone with Mars in Aries was born while Mars stood in Aries, the sign that opens the tropical zodiac at the March equinox. What follows concerns that fixed birth-chart position, not the sky of this month. Astrologers read Mars for drive, courage and the way a person goes after what they want, and they treat Aries as the sign of beginnings. All of it is inherited tradition and belief, put forward as something to think about and enjoy, not as proof of anything.

Mars in Aries: the planet of action in its first sign

Sepharial, in 1910, wrote that Mars “confers a sense of freedom, much ambition and executive ability, frankness, truthfulness, and scorn of consequence.” His list of signs makes Aries a fire sign and, in his word for what is now called cardinal, a movable one, and it names the ruler in five words: “Mars governs Aries and Scorpio.” An Aries Mars is therefore the fighter planet in the sign that starts the wheel, and one modern guide calls it one of the most comprehensible Mars placements.

Alan Leo in 1903: positive and enthusiastic

Alan Leo opens his entry for Mars in Aries in How to Judge a Nativity (1903) with “Positive, idealistic, enthusiastic, loyal and independent.” For the last third of the sign, the ten degrees from 20 to 30, he adds “fluency of speech, impulsiveness, enthusiasm”. Leo used the male pronoun and moved on to fortune and health, so nothing from those passages appears on this page. Set against the modern guides, the older portrait leans on character and speech, where recent pages lean on pace and temper, and neither one is offered as a ruling on anyone.

How Aries Mars is described in current guides

Four modern guides were read for this section, and all four agree on the basic picture. Details found on fewer pages are worded as such.

Direct, quick, first

Modern astrologers often call this placement bold and direct: action that starts fast, pioneering, at ease going first. Guides say an Aries Mars tends to speak plainly and to head straight for its target, with little use for hints. They also tie it to a love of movement and a need to exert energy.

A temper that flares

Where anger is concerned, several widely read pages say the Aries Mars temper arrives quickly. Some describe a match striking, hot and brief, and one says the blow-up is usually followed by relative calm and not by a grudge. A third page notes that the flare can sometimes turn into full rage. Each of these is a tendency written about in astrology, never a fact about a person born with the placement.

Beginning and finishing

Several pages describe a placement stronger at starting than at finishing. Initiative and courage come easily, they say, while patience and follow-through are named as the places where effort can thin out. Summed up in a line, the common reading is Mars at home: energetic, frank and impatient with delay.

Attraction and romance

Two guides describe a direct, persistent style in romance, and one adds that this Mars can find it hard to meet partners who match its pace. That is a picture taken from a small number of pages, and it is not a forecast for anyone.

Mars rules Aries: what that does and does not say

In the classical tables, Aries is one of the two signs Mars rules. Ptolemy, in the second century, assigned Mars both Aries and Scorpio as his houses, and Sepharial’s 1910 rule says a planet in a sign it governs acts more strongly than usual. Wikipedia’s table of commonly used dignities lists Aries and Scorpio for Mars too. Astrologers today read dignity as a description of how easily the planet works in the sign, not as a rating of a person, and many of them use rulership by itself and leave the other dignities aside.

Counting Mars in Aries: stays from 1960 to 2012

Below are the stays of Mars in Aries that began from 1960 to 2012, dated by noon UTC. Anyone born on the first or last day of a stay should confirm the sign with the calculator.

We read the sign of Mars at noon UTC for every one of the 21,915 days from 1950 to 2009, and Mars was in Aries on 6.97% of them. That sits below the even split of 8.33%, inside a spread that runs from 6.6% (Aquarius) to 9.72% (Cancer). In that span 34 stays began and 2 of them included retrograde motion, a topic the calculator page covers. The median stay lasted 40 days, with or without a retrograde, and the briefest one without a retrograde lasted 39. The longest, 102 days, ran from Jul 14, 1988 to Oct 23, 1988, with a retrograde in the middle.

Finding your Aries Mars

Put your birth date and place into the Mars sign calculator below. That is almost always enough, and on a changeover day the tool lists both signs. Should your date sit near the edge, Mars in Pisces and Mars in Taurus describe the neighbors.