Mars in Ancient Mythology: The War God That Became Our Destination

A Red Light in the Ancient Sky

Look up on a clear night when Mars is near opposition, and you understand immediately why ancient peoples were unsettled by it. That steady, rust-colored glow — brighter than almost anything else in the sky — pulses with an intensity that feels almost alive. It moves differently from the stars, wandering against the fixed background of the constellations in a motion the Greeks called planetes, meaning wanderer.

For cultures across the ancient world, this strange red wanderer demanded explanation. The answer they arrived at, independently and repeatedly, was war.

Mars Through Ancient Eyes

Mesopotamia: Nergal, Lord of the Underworld

The Babylonians and Sumerians associated the red planet with Nergal, a god of death, plague, and destruction. Babylonian astronomers — some of history's first serious sky-watchers — tracked Mars's movements with remarkable precision as early as 1600 BCE, believing its position could foretell pestilence and the fates of kings. Their clay tablet records, including the Enuma Anu Enlil series, contain detailed omens linked to Mars's color, brightness, and retrograde motion.

Greece and Rome: Ares and Mars

The Greeks named the planet Ares after their god of war — a deity they regarded with a mixture of fear and contempt. Ares was brutal, bloodthirsty, and unpredictable. He represented not the glory of battle but its carnage. The Romans rebranded the same planet as Mars, their own war deity, but with a crucial difference: in Roman culture, Mars was respected. He was the father of Romulus, the legendary founder of Rome, and held a place of honor second only to Jupiter. The month of March — Martius in Latin — bears his name, as does the concept of martial law and the martial arts.

Egypt: Horus of the Horizon

Ancient Egyptians knew Mars as Horus Deshret, meaning Horus the Red, or alternatively as Her Desher, the Red One. They associated its reddish hue with the desert and with Horus in one of his more aggressive celestial aspects. Egyptian astronomical texts tracked Mars's retrograde periods, during which the planet appears to briefly reverse direction — a phenomenon that deepened its association with disruption and chaos.

India and China

In Vedic astrology, Mars is Mangala, a masculine planet associated with courage, conflict, and ambition — still consulted today in traditional Indian horoscopes. The Chinese called it Huoxing, the Fire Star, linking it to the element of fire and, by extension, to warfare and calamity. Japanese culture absorbed this Chinese framework, naming the planet Kasei — also meaning Fire Star.

Why Red Means War

The connection isn't arbitrary. Mars's reddish color — caused, as we now know, by iron oxide on its surface — visually evoked blood across widely separated cultures that had no contact with one another. The planet's erratic motion through the sky, including its dramatic retrograde loops, reinforced the sense of an unpredictable, dangerous force. Brightness variations as Mars swings between opposition and conjunction added to its unsettling reputation.

Cognitive scientists and historians of religion have noted that humans are pattern-seeking creatures prone to projecting agency onto powerful, poorly understood phenomena. A blood-red light that moved without warning and brightened unpredictably was precisely the kind of thing ancient minds would anthropomorphize — and fear.

From Mythology to Destination

The irony is striking. A planet that ancient civilizations associated with death and destruction is now humanity's most ambitious target for exploration and potential settlement. NASA's Perseverance rover has been collecting samples on Mars since 2021. SpaceX is developing the Starship vehicle with Mars colonization as an explicit goal. The European Space Agency's ExoMars program continues searching for signs of past microbial life.

The name stuck. We still call it Mars — the war god's planet — even as we send our most sophisticated machines there to search for life and scout locations for future human habitats.

Perhaps that's fitting. Every great human endeavor carries some echo of the ancient impulse to confront what frightens us most, and to claim it as our own.