AUTHOR’S NOTE: In his essay on the Knight of Swords in Tarot Master Class, Paul Fenton-Smith observed that this “quick-minded” Knight “is keen to practice an imaginative turn of phrase.” This once again brought to mind my own predilection for nailing the “well-chosen metaphor” in my writing on divination. (Full Disclosure: I’m a Thoth Knight-of-Cups type and the exploits of the RWS Knight of Swords are far from my wheelhouse. For those of my readers with long memories, this is a more thorough discussion of peregrine Mars than in my earlier posts on the subject.)

From a metaphysical standpoint, I’ve often pondered where the occasionally quirky creative spark comes from in both my visual art and my writing, although I’ve been convinced for a long time that the spirit moving me is “just passing through” and doesn’t originate within. This perception of a super-conscious stimulus is surely what brought me to the study and practice of tarot, which at its most impressive is both a feast for the eyes and a celebration of the inquiring mind.

I’ve always been strongly influenced by my early exposure to science-fiction and fantasy literature (mainly of the not-so-literary “pulp-fiction” kind), as well as by my boyhood fascination with the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe and Samuel Taylor Coleridge and my preference for the vibrant paintings of the French Impressionists and Post-Impressionists (Aubrey Beardsley was a monochromatic side-trip). But those formative years didn’t directly inspire my present urge to become a “minor master of the three-paragraph essay,” which is more intellectual than visceral.

I’ve poked around in my natal horoscope, looking for evidence of this proclivity, but all of my personal planets reside in taciturn Water and Earth signs rather than in more loquacious Fire and Air. The two “social” planets – Jupiter and Saturn – are trine to one another in the Fire signs of Sagittarius and Leo, respectively, but their outgoing dynamic doesn’t stand a chance against my pronounced aversion to social posturing.

I no longer use the three “transpersonal” (aka “generational”) planets, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, at the psychological level in my natal delineation, having reverted to the traditional seven-planet mode with its “humours and temperaments,” but only Uranus in Gemini hints at the kind of unique imagination I’m talking about, and it is overshadowed by the nearby Sun-Mercury-Venus conjunction in Cancer. Those three bodies are locked into a powerful opposition with the Moon in Capricorn, leaving only Mars in 10th-House Virgo as an orphaned outlier. (I have to admit that this looks more like the astrological signature of a maverick businessman than of a mystic, one who counts on the wisdom of experience and downplays intuitive guesswork.)

This is where it gets interesting.

At first glance, Mars stands out as “peregrine” (ancient Greek for “wandering”) in that it makes no major Ptolemaic aspects to the other six planets. Thus it resembles a metabolic “free radical” in biochemistry because it owes no allegiance to any other planetary complex and therefore operates outside their purview. It sits at the zenith in close proximity to my Midheaven in “scientific” Virgo (an archaic designation that Virgo shares with Scorpio and Aquarius), and I’ve always taken it as a badge of my pragmatic acumen, which I turned into a rewarding technological career as an engineering manager and technical/legal writer.

But the plot thickens.

On closer examination, Mars is joined in a tight quintile (72-degree) aspect to both Mercury and Venus in Cancer (the Sun is just out of range). The quintile is commonly seen in the nativity of artistically-inclined individuals, so it stands to reason that in my case Mercury and Venus supply the rational and emotional input and Mars furnishes the drive to bring it to creative fruition with characteristic Virgoan precision.

This occurs in passive signs so, although Mars is in “high focus” as the most elevated planet in the chart, ideally making it a career powerhouse, it receives a bit of refinement from the quintile that softens its hard-nosed stance and also leads it away from the brink of excessive self-promotion. Although I went to art school for graphic design and took creative writing classes thinking I might translate one or the other into a going (i.e. “paying”) concern, it never happened unless eight years of almost daily blogging qualifies as a second, post-retirement career.

This quest taught me a good deal about the nature of peregrination and the quintile aspect since, without putting the two together with Mars, Venus and Mercury, I might not have found the astrological key to my artistic disposition, and Mars would have remained a footnote in my horoscope. Now I see it as an old friend and instigator of my creative forays that has matured along with me by overcoming its characteristic rashness and embracing productive discipline. Several years ago I designed personal heraldry for myself that I think captures the essence of Mars in Virgo, although my source material was Qabalistic, not astrological, and I only made the connection just now.