Mars

Lilly 1659 times its circuit at one year and 321 days, roughly eight weeks to a sign on average, with about 80 days of retrograde motion that can hold it in one sign much longer. Ptolemy, in Ashmand's 1822 translation, makes it chiefly drying and strongly heating, and he reads that in its color. His word malefic follows from those qualities: dryness and cold were thought to break matter down.

Aries and Scorpio are its houses in both authors. Lilly also has it rule the whole water triplicity by day and night, and he seats exaltation at 28 degrees of Capricorn with its opposite point at 28 degrees of Cancer. Detriment falls in Libra and Taurus, the signs across from its own.

Heindel 1918 compares a planet to gunpowder, good or bad by how it is used, which is a long way from Lilly's flat word Infortune. Sepharial 1920 credits Mars with frankness and executive ability even while listing it among the malefics. Modern popular astrology calls it drive and appetite, and it has mostly dropped the old vocabulary of harm.