Mars + The Culture of Medicine

People who study or practice astrology, particularly from a western perspective, have long associated the planet Mars with the blood, war, knives, soldiers, cutting, and separation. Mars has also been given an association to medicine, and that’s what I want to reflect on in this post.

Why does the planet that has to do with battle, blade, and blood have such a relation to medicine?

Is it the blood part? 

That’s a small part of it, actually. 

First we should consider what the view of medicine has been to understand why Mars has been given rule rulership over it. From the perspective of ancient Romans, for example, medicine and supplementation was specifically created for male soldiers fighting to conquer lands and peoples. In this sense, medicine was created to support people inflicting violence as boundaries, land, and resources were fought over. Medicine was created to supplement men’s body and spirit when killing people inevitably gave way to spiritual/mental afflictions of the soldiers that lived through battles. Medicine was for the warrior, from the physician’s perspective. It wasn’t intended for women, children, or for the weak. That doesn’t mean women didn’t possess medicine. They passed it down to each other and treated the other people, and we see this particularly strong and thriving through shamanistic/indigenous practices. 

In this way, we could also see how Mars is in its joy in the 6th house of illness, daily regimen, labor, and habits/lifestyle. There, Mars depicts productivity (at all costs). Soldiers were carefully monitored and offered supplementation to keep them in “good shape”... like machinery. We could draw a parallel here between labor and enslaved peoples as well, though without the attention and medical care that fighters received.

Many have called Chinese medicine quackery and mocked ancient people’s methods because their idea of anatomy and physiology was different. Emphasis wasn’t on the material appearance of organs, but on systems and movement. The pinnacle of a human being wasn’t reflected in the permanence of a flawless looking stone statue, as it were with Greco-Roman sculptures.

The Chinese did know what organs looked like because it’s inevitable when battlefields are full of bodies where warriors did terrible things to each other. There was no lack of knowing what a person’s insides looked like. That wasn’t the most important thing to the culture. 

But modern culture is caught up in the material version of things. What is visible and what can be touched? It’s a very simple, linear mindset. When we consider Mars’ need for speed and the West’s (and modern society’s) fixation on speed, which has permeated all facets of life, including medicine, we can understand how we’ve reached the conclusion that surgery and quick fixes have become the comfortable norm. We don’t want to slow down, so we pay to have things accelerated (from food to shopping, internet, travel, and medicine). There’s less motivation to change poor habits when we can just cut things out that are foreign or a consequence of our fast lifestyles. This isn’t to blame, bypass, or make an umbrella statement about modern medicine. It’s very gray, but we can still do better.

Medicine and even much of the holistic sphere of wellness has catered to making sure people can get back to work if/when they’re sick. The more productive a person can be, the more money can be made, the faster it can be spent, the faster one hopes to rise, rinse and repeat. This approach leads to a lot of dysfunctional situations, however.

That said, ancient romans defined “worthy citizens” as able bodied, physically strong soldiers rather than as the complexity that human beings are. Ancient texts from Roman physicians actually state that if a patient died from bloodletting or treatment, they weren’t a Roman citizen.🤷🏻‍♀️😳🤯 So if you died in the table due to treatment— you “weren’t a citizen”.

It set the tone for the way the modern pharmaceutical companies still test their drugs. Today pharmaceutical drugs and their sample populations for research are still based on military personnel. 

This view extends to the way men trained for the Olympics back then. Young, athletic men were bloodlet for days while they trained. If they managed not to pass out or die from all the blood loss and injury to their body fluids and blood chemistry they were deemed strong and worthy enough to compete and come again the following event.

In the past, western society and its medicine believed that we were simply bags of flesh and blood and people were sat to one side in barbers’ chairs where they were blood-let, letting blood drain out to one side because the idea of circulation wasn’t coherent like it is today. Side note: Chinese medicine also implemented bloodletting, but it did already understand that humans are made up of circulation patterns, including the blood.

The Chinese weren’t much different for a time, however. Eventually it dawned on their society that it was wiser and kinder to treat and include the weak and those who weren’t soldiers. Strategy became more important and the golden ages of the Tang/Song dynasties led to a flourishing of the concept of what it meant to be a human being and how we are to treat one another, including in medicine. 

Tomorrow, I’ll begin sharing tidbits about Chinese medicine and start to go more into this concept of a “true” or “normal” human and what it means to cultivate a life of being a true or complete human in what I’ll call Wu Woo Wednesdays. 

References:

The history of medicine recounted here comes primarily from the late Liu Ming’s Healing Apprenticeship in Chinese medicine and the mantic arts. To learn more, please visit Dayuancircle.org.