Sanguine and daring
Mars slowly moves on; a question for the tarot about work.
Since September, I’ve tasked myself with committing to memory the planetary prayers of the Hygromanteia, a group of 15th-century texts that offer magical instructions, guidance, and techniques for engaging purposefully with the planets, plants, and other forms of divination. Every morning, I light a candle on my altar, turn over my tarot cards, write, and, after the morning coffee has brewed, I recite the prayer associated with the planetary day, watching the force of my breath make occasional ripples across the liquid in my mug.
The prayers aren’t very long, and the language—like the language in all weird grimoires—often makes me want to laugh or roll my eyes a bit (I am both a serious astrologer and one who is seriously uncomfortable, still, about my practice, my belief). But there are also lines that have become beloved to me, phrases and sentences that catch in my throat, helping me to reframe a recent struggle, find a solution to something that’s been nagging me for days, or else simply give me words to turn over in my head as a source of wonder and delight.
In the prayer for Tuesday, Mars’ day, that line comes mid-text, as one of the epithets meant to conjure or call forth the more positive characteristics of the planet of war and strife: “I conjure you, Ares, sanguine and daring, by the air, by the earth and by the center of the earth …”
“Sanguine and daring” as a phrase always strikes me somewhere in the solar plexus. As a self-proclaimed homebody crank, these words speak of attributes that feel like an anathema to me at the same time as representing ways of being in the world I desperately aspire to. Hopeful amidst challenging times, courageous to the point of audacity. If I’m like this even a little bit, it’s only because motherhood has forced me into faking sanguinity and daring—trying one on like a mask, another like a cape—for the sake of my son.
Channeling the virtuous side of Mars is a productive way to approach the coming week, however much it feels like “faking it til you make it.” Mars has begun to slowly speed up its forward motion through the Gemini, after spending a long three months retrograde, slow, and discombobulated in the sign of the twins. As the lesser malefic in ancient systems of astrology, Mars was considered to bring about separation and strife, sudden disease and inflamed passions, the latter not in a good way.
“Mars, the planet, is the original inauspicious omen,” Dr. Ali A. Olomi remarks in his lecture on Mars in medieval astrology, noting that, in ancient Babylon, Mars was linked to mid-summer, the season of war and disease, the forces that needed to be kept at bay as the desert heated up and made life interminably more difficult. “Mars is the force of friction,” Olomi goes on. “It is agitation, if you will. It is the force of fire—and that fire can either help you cook your food, or it can burn your house down.”
