Planetary attribution
The tarot cards of Mars
Force, conflict, appetite and the will to break something open.
Mars takes The Tower, the deck's most violent image, and the attribution needs no explanation. Both are the sudden application of force to a structure that was not going to yield to anything gentler.
Mars carries more cards than any other planet in this scheme, and they are the sharp ones: rivalry, grief, sleeplessness, the defended position. Traditional astrology rules both Aries and Scorpio with Mars, which is why its cards run from open aggression to the kind that has gone underground.
7 cards
The trump first, then the numbered cards that carry the same attribution.
The other planets
Where these attributions come from
The Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in the late nineteenth century. They mapped the whole deck onto the zodiac, the planets and the Hebrew alphabet, and the Rider-Waite-Smith deck was built on that system, which is why most modern decks still inherit it.
It is a system rather than a discovery. The fifteenth century Italian decks had no astrological scheme at all, and other traditions map the cards differently. Every attribution on this site is the Golden Dawn one, and where a card is disputed its own page says so.
Mars in an actual chart
This page is about what the tarot tradition attaches to Mars. The astrology itself, calculated from real ephemeris data rather than described, is on our sister site.
Mars on Memento Astra