Mars in the twelfth house of a composite chart makes it absolutely imperative that the two people understand exactly what they want from the relationship and from each other. Robert Hand does not hedge that sentence, and the whole delineation is built on it.
What he asks for is a conscious understanding and agreement. In most relationships, he notes, agreements are made tacitly rather than formally stated or written down. Here he suggests doing the unusual thing and writing one out.
What This Placement Describes
The basic principle of Mars, in Hand's account, is the ego drive, the energy by which a person sustains a sense of being an individual toward the world and toward others. In a composite chart it signifies the ability to create an environment where both people can express themselves fully without threatening each other and provoking destructive conflicts. Some conflict is inevitable and should not be suppressed. The requirement is that the ego drives be basically compatible.
The composite twelfth house, Hand says, represents repressed thoughts, once conscious ideas that have been eliminated from the waking mind because the mind chose not to deal with them, along with the environmental factors that caused the repression. The problem with repressed ideas is that they give rise to unconsciously motivated actions, and because those actions are automatic they are often inappropriate to the situation and serve to undo rather than aid the relationship.
He gives the literal meaning of Mars here in one line: unconscious forms of ego expression. He then refines it. The twelfth house is not really unconscious, but it often indicates signals that are being sent out into the world very strongly and not acknowledged. Whether or not they are acknowledged, the two will have to live with the consequences.
How It Tends To Play Out
The written agreement Hand recommends is the most concrete instruction in the chapter, and his reason for it is precise. By doing it, the two may discover that they have included all kinds of demands they never thought they would ask for. The exercise is not administrative. It is a way of making a hidden expectation visible at the moment it is written down.
He explains why that matters. If the demands are not made explicit, then every time one of them is broken it will cause a conflict, and neither person will understand exactly why. The conflict is real and the cause is out of view.
The Opposite House
Hand's paired house rule comes from the mechanics of the composite. Two midpoints exist for any pair of planets, and although the nearer one is used, the farther one keeps some effect, an effect that increases as the two natal positions approach opposition. So a twelfth house Mars should also be read through the sixth, and where the two natal Mars positions are near opposition, reading both is essential rather than optional.
The sixth house is the duties and responsibilities the relationship must fulfil. Hand's reading of Mars there describes a sense of work to be done together and a need to feel that something fairly concrete is being accomplished. Read as an axis, the sixth is the obligation that is stated and the twelfth is the demand that is not. The pairing is a useful one, because the sixth house version of this energy is exactly what the twelfth house version is missing, which is an explicit account of what is required.
Hand gives no threshold for when the second reading takes over and no method for blending the two. Both stand.
Where It Gets Difficult
Hand is direct about the mechanism. This placement signifies that the two are putting into the relationship sources of conflict that could weaken it badly, and he says the worse part is that it would be very unclear why the problems exist. Difficulty without a legible cause is harder to address than difficulty with one.
His next observation is the honest one and it is worth stating carefully. If the two verbalise their wants, they may find those wants full of contradictions, double binds and contract arrangements that cannot be fulfilled. That is not a prediction that the relationship fails. It is a description of what unexamined expectation usually looks like once it is written down.
The conclusion he draws is conditional in both directions. Only if the two take the trouble to examine their expectations closely will it be possible to understand what they really want from each other and whether their needs can be met. That last clause allows for either answer, which is characteristic of how Hand handles the twelfth house. He also says elsewhere that twelfth house relationships must be evaluated very carefully and cannot be rejected out of hand.
The house sets the issue. Whether the unspoken material comes up workably is described by the aspects to Mars, which is a separate question.
Recommended Reading
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- Robert Hand, Planets in Composite: Analyzing Human Relationships (1975), chapter nine.
- Robert Hand, Planets in Composite: Analyzing Human Relationships (1975), chapter four, on the composite twelfth house and the paired house rule.
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Next: Composite Chart Placements and How to Read a Composite Chart.