With Mars in Virgo, you’re more concerned with maintaining a low profile and acting in a way that’s geared towards being of service to others than you are with expressing your own personal wishes or taking any unnecessary risks. Having more self-assurance and assertiveness comes naturally when you know you’re doing a good job. When Mars occupies Virgo, it urges you to do things precisely and methodically, which can be frustrating if the world isn’t always that way.
Work overload is common in this position, and that might make you cranky and irritable. Strength is gained by the efficient application of this energy rather than its wasteful expenditure on meaningless pursuits. Nevertheless, you should make an attempt to focus on being helpful rather than criticising, and another thing that gets on your nerves and prompts you to take action is when you receive poor service. Conflicts at work may also arise, with you blaming others for not doing their jobs properly and causing an argument.
You take pride in doing a good job and always aim to do things the right way, but you have a tendency to be too logical and judgmental, especially when it comes to the skills and potential of those around you. You, Mars in Virgo, are not the kind to fumble around ineffectually when confronted with a challenge. However, you do not always ask for what is legitimately yours. You may also be aggressive in your assertion of being correct all the time because you are so committed to the facts. Yet you can help others by showing them how to get their life in order and what steps to take. There is also a clear aptitude for repeating simple, ordinary chores in an efficient and effective manner. Your innate ability to contain Mars’s energy is impressive, yet you still put in a lot of work and need to find ways to physically relieve the tense and high-strung energy you may be carrying around.
Even if it may seem like astrologers are being overly critical of your Mars in Virgo, rest assured that the advice above is meant to help you make the most of your favourable planetary configuration. In this position, you are not a sloppy worker and will take the care to do things properly and effectively and even as quickly as possible, making this a great position for getting things done, taking on jobs, and even speeding up the work. Your passion, drive, and energy lie in the pursuit of detail; you take pleasure in putting the pieces of the puzzle together; you enjoy fixing things and are quick to rush to mend what is broken in life; or you may find these things in the mind, in research, and in understanding the technicalities of a subject.
Mars is a fiery, aggressive planet that is most at home in other fire signs. When it is placed in an earth sign—Taurus, Virgo, or Capricorn—it becomes all about work. The drive of Mars gets channeled into practical areas, and in Virgo it is the love of detail work. These are the editors and correctors of life’s faults, the ones who go through thousands of possible errors in order to make a project as fault-free and perfect as possible. Lest this be disparaged, please recall that sometimes an error can be a hole in a HazMat suit or a couple of loose tiles on the side of a space shuttle. In order to get through this kind of mind-numbing work, you need the fire of Mars behind it. Fire and earth. The Irish goddess Brigid was the maiden of fire, but not wildfire. She was warrior, smith, healer, and poet. In her smith guise, she is where fire meets iron, forging metal from the ground. She also has patronage of other crafts, such as fiber arts and jewelry. For Brigid, it is not just about competence—although one can certainly ask her for that—so much as it is about how a craftsman puts a piece of soul into his work. Soul into work … fire into earth. The hammer and the anvil. True competence is more than just making something properly, although Virgo is all about proper. Things made by true craftsmen draw the eye, invite the touch, and make you want to admire their elegance, even if they are just simple tools. There is something about them, you tell yourself as you explore them with your earth sense—touch—that is hard to explain. It makes them more than inanimate objects. It gives them something that could be called a soul, and it can be recognized even by someone who does not understand their use. Brigid is a warrior, and we must not forget that this supposedly most humble of Mars placements is quite capable of fighting just as hard as any other Mars, and with more skill than many. Raven Kaidera