Mars is of course the Latin form of the Greek Ares, a god more important in martial Rome than in ancient Greece. (MM moves from Latin to Greek nomenclature in the emblem of the Sentence, so that the “A” of LUNA may introduce the ARES sequence.) At Eggenberg, Kaiser points out, “The god of war is shown on the barrel of a cannon, surrounded by a rich Baroque still life of weapons. In the background the three Fates spin the thread of human destiny, which is then wound onto an enormous wheel for Fortune and Virtue. Again the Eggenberg allegory emphasizes the moral dimension. MM’s four books, A, Revolution, Each and Second, are much more various than the emblem of Mars, though the Martial half of the fourth book is based upon Homer’s Iliad, where Ares is especially apposite.
Kaiser says of Mars that “he was the purest embodiment of the male principle, the epitome of strength and audacity but also of destruction and brutal force. Accompanied by his sons Deimos (horror) and Phobos (fear) he ruled the chaos of a raging battlefield. His blind fury is in contrast to the wise courage of Athene, ‘the controller of battles,’ who fights in a level-headed manner.” She also notes that Ares was connected with Aphrodite in a liaison that produced a daughter called Harmonia. In the conventional Eggenberg allegory Mars represents a malefic sign. Kaiser notes that “he was not assigned a positive character until Neo-Platonist symbolism, in which he gives the soul strength and mental devotion during its descent through the spheres.” “In antiquity he was sometimes called Heracles.”
We might emphasize that one of the books of ARES is half lunar, one, half hermetic.