MARS IN SCORPIO
“The Powerhouse of Passion”
Sex is an all-consuming fascination for people having Mars in Scorpio. Strictly speaking, they are the sexiest Lovers in the Zodiac—or at least the Lovers for whom sex has the deepest significance. They tend to be very conservative, cautious people who conduct their sex lives with weighty deliberation, like a general planning an important campaign. They treat sex with great deference and with a respect that borders on awe. It is as if they know something about human sexuality that everyone else has somehow missed—something a little scary.
For Mars in Scorpio Lovers, sex has a significance that goes far beyond the personal. They recognize that sex is the means whereby we piteous mortals can look into the most elemental forces of nature and thus touch the infinite. It becomes a means of transformation and a way of plumbing the depths of the soul. In this sense, copulation becomes a spiritual act and every aspect of sexual excitement becomes a sacrament. This almost religious approach to sex means that these Lovers are seldom able to limit sex to just one area of their lives. Sex is everywhere as far as they are concerned, touching every aspect of their existence.
Sex and power are often interchangeable for these Lovers. This, of course, makes control the salient issue in their love lives, but it is not control of their partners or their relationships that most concerns them; it is the control of sex itself.· Sex has a dangerous and at times addictive attraction for these folks and even the most conventional of them will have an active interest the darker aspects of sexual expression. If nothing else they find validation for their own concept of sex as a powerful and fearsome force while observing the bizarre behavior sex brings out in other people. Other Lovers of this type will develop a fear of sex that can seem irrational and obsessive. Still other Mars in Scorpio Lovers, a small but attention-grabbing minority, will veer sharply in the other direction, surrendering to their fascination and letting the power of sexual passion consume them.
Mars in Scorpio Lovers often exert a strong sexual presence. They have an allure that is mysterious, seductive and tinged with danger. Power also plays a role in this attraction. The notion of using sex as a means to gain power over another person comes easily to these Lovers. Mars in Scorpio Lovers can be very subtle, almost insidious, in their domination of a relationship. They can also be shockingly cruel and duplicitous but these qualities only reflect the depth and power of their sexual passions and how pervasive those passions can become within their lives. There is always more going on than meets the eye in the Mars in Scorpio universe, levels of emotional need, psychological understanding and devastating eroticism that seem to have no end, and this is what makes these Lovers so dangerously exciting.
There is a sharp divide among these Lovers between those who are able to keep the darker aspects of sex at a distance and those who succumb to them entirely. The former are very secretive about their sex lives and wary of letting people see how powerful and awesome their sexuality really is. For these Lovers intimacy is something shared only with a lucky few. The second group of Mars in Scorpio Lovers find the power of sex and the intensity of the sexual experience so transformative, so mind expanding that they seek to share it with the whole world. Of course, there is nothing wrong with being an advocate of sexual pleasure but the Mars in Scorpio Lover who fails to give sex the proper respect runs the risk of becoming an instrument of that pleasure rather than an advocate.
CELEBRITY EXAMPLES OF MARS IN SCORPIO
It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the most eye popping of our examples of The Powerhouse of Passion are the ones who have failed to exhibit the caution and control that is most characteristic of this type. They are the minority for whom the dark mystery of sex becomes a self-destructive fascination or a bombastic means of attacking conventional complacency, or both. We see this is the behavior of porn star Marilyn Chambers who consciously took her live performances to extremes that even people inured to pornography found alarming. Charlie Sheen, Robert Mapplethorpe, Henry Miller, Marilyn Manson and Larry Flynt all have become famous by flaunting their own hyper-sexed point of view in the face of a disapproving public. To a lesser degree and in more conservative times, dancer Maud Allan, actress Clara Bow and writer Colette did the same thing. Some of these people survived their foray into the dark side of sex unscathed. Others were not so lucky.
Most of our examples of this type, however, have done a better job controlling their powerful sexualities. Some, like Mohandas Gandhi, seemed to have managed to conquer their sexual demon altogether while others, like writer Ayn Rand and T.E Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia) devised elaborate schemes to keep their sexual excesses hidden from the public (and, to some degree, from themselves.) Some like Oprah Winfrey, who has admitted that in her youth she was persuaded by a man she loved to experiment with cocaine, experienced lapses in their self-control but not a complete breakdown. Still others directed all that sexual power into an all-consuming fascination with their sexual partner. We see this in the artwork of Rembrant Van Rijn and Pierre Bonnard. Both artists painted their wives over and over, often in the nude and forever young and desirable.
For more information about these and other examples, see the various Mars/Venus combinations.