IRON ROD OF MARS
Appropriately Mars rules the red blood corpuscles, the male sexual organs (as Venus rules the female), the nose.muscles and excretory tract. Its energy is found in occupations dealing with sharp tools and weapons, soldiering, surgery, butchery, some forms of research, and any job where fearlessness and an iron discipline is necessary.
In the Jewish system of knowledge known as the Qabala, the sphere of Mars on the Tree of Life is also represented by images of war; a mighty warrior in his chariot; the symbols of a sword, spear, scourge and chain (and curiously, the five-petalled rose, a symbol of the feminine). This fifth sphere is called Geburah, meaning Strength or Severity, and here the highly dynamic and fiery Mars-iron force is focussed to bring the virtues of energy and courage, or the vices of cruelty and destruction. In Geburah is found the sacrificial priest, the pruner, the katabolic force which breaks down old forms and destroys them to release their energy.
This can be identified with the Egyptian sekhem,” the pitiless force that wills the destruction of one form for the conception of another,” personified by the red lion-headed goddess Sekmet, the consort of the iron Ptah and the power behind his creations. Her name is the root of the Hindu shakti, the female creative energy typified by the mother goddess Kali. She is honoured with red wine, blood and ritual sex — blood the vehicle of the Mars-iron energy both biologically and magically.
Blood gives power to the sacred spears of Mars and Horus; iron is ruled by the African deity Ogun and is used in his rites of blood. There are more wars, more blood spilt on the earth now in our ‘civilized’ times than ever before as Mars demands his sacrifice for man’s use of the sacred iron. The destruction of Nature, the pollution of our world, it can all be linked to man’s abuse of this humble metal we have taken for granted for too long.
The deeper nature of iron has been forgotten, hidden like the alchemical sun in the dark womb of the earth but still contained in the name for iron, the Latin/em/m derived from the root of the verb few, meaning “to create, to form, to bear…”
It has been forgotten that Mars was originally associated with agriculture rather than war, as a ‘dweller in the woodland’ who protected the crops and herds from thieves and wild animals. Even earlier, the rites of blood associated with Mars referred not to the blood of war but to the female blood of sexuality. Tuesday, or Mars-day, is sacred to Kali the goddess of Time and Blood; it was on Tuesday according to a Jewish tradition that Eve began menstruating. As occultist Kenneth Grant explains, female blood was “the earliest type of Mars as the mystical energy of the goddess,” before the feminine mysteries of blood were superseded by the solar-male cults.10 It was the first blood sacrifice, the first sacrament of life. The violent heat and energy of Mars’ ‘denoted feminine power at its height,” expressed so vividly by the rapacious lioness Sekmet whose thirst is quenched by the blood of the wicked, or the bloodied Kali dancing on corpses in the cremation ground.
Her nature is two-fold, like iron. She is both creator of life and in another form she is called the ‘Night of Destruction,’ which happens at the end of the world and which is necessary before a new world can come into being. She is the explosive, unpredictable power of Nature. She is also the purifying power of iron and was said to come into being to combat the demons of man’s iron-based greed and materialism.
This purifying and healing power is evident in the sign of Scorpio and is also observed in nature, in iron’s close relationship with arsenic where it binds this highly poisonous substance into an insoluble and harmless mineral. This process is also constantly taking place in our own bodies where the iron in the blood works to neutralize the cyanide-like poisons produced by the digestive process.
“By virtue of its iron content the blood sets up healing processes to oppose these pathological accompaniments of the unfolding of consciousness.”5
Even the sea is purified with iron which precipitates with poisonous heavy metals to fall as mud on the ocean floor. With the energies of iron, with the steel will and ‘rite’ action of Kali, we can find the way to detoxify the environment and ourselves, and create a new world.
These times we ‘re living in could be called the culmination of the Iron Age, the phase described by alchemists as’ ‘an active descent of the Spirit into the lowest levels of human consciousness…so at this stage of the work the Spirit appears submerged in the body and as if extinguished in it. This is the ‘outermost’ coagulation, and the threshold of the final completion – the transformation of the body into the Spirit-become-form.”11
IRON REFERENCES
1. The Monuments of Mars — A City on the Edge of Forever, Richard C. Hoagland, North Atlantic Books, CA, 1987
2. The Nature of Substance, Rudolf Hauschka, Rudolf Steiner Press, London
3. The Zodiac and the Salts of Salvation, George Washington
4. Astrology & Biochemistry, Vanda Sawtell
5. The Secrets of Metals, Wilhelm Pelikan, Anthroposophic Press, NY, 1973
6. Agriculture of Tomorrow, E. and L. Kolisko, Kolisko Archive Publications, Bournemouth, England. 1978
7. Spirit in Matter, L. Kolisko, Kolisko Archive, Rudge Cottage, Edge, Stroud, England 1948
8. NEXUS Issue no. 9, 1989-90, PO Box 51, Bowraville, 2449, NSW Australia
9. The Journal of Borderland Research, Vol. XLII, No. 1, Jan-Feb 1986, BSRF, Garberville, CA
10. Outside the Circles of Time, Kennetji Grant, Frederick Muller Ltd., London, 1980
11. Alchemy, Titus Burkhardt, Element Books, Ltd., Dorset, Great Britain, 1986