After

A. Late Antiquity → Early Middle Ages (1–1000 CE)

Continuity of the god

• Pagan Mars cult slowly dies under Christian empire; statues destroyed, reused, or later collected.
• The name Mars sticks permanently to the planet in Latin Christendom.
• Day-name: dies Martis → mardi / martedì / martes / Tuesday (Tiw’s day overlay).

Manuscripts

• Ptolemy’s Almagest (2nd c., then Arabic → Latin): geometric Mars, epicycle-deferent.
• Ptolemy’s Tetrabiblos: Mars = hot, dry, malefic — war, violence, iron, surgery, heat.
• Planetary spheres enter Christian cosmology: Mars as one of the seven heavens (Dante later seats warriors of the faith in the sphere of Mars).

Symbol

Classical ♂ (shield + spear) solidifies in late antique / Byzantine transmission; later used for male sex and iron in alchemy/biology.

B. Islamic Golden Age (8th–13th c.) — al-Mirrīkh

Name & image

• Arabic: المريخ al-Mirrīkh (still modern Arabic/Persian/Urdu root).
• Illustrated astrology: warrior with sword and often a severed head.

Science & books

• Zīj tables track Mars rigorously (al-Khwārizmī and successors).
• al-Bīrūnī: astronomy + critical astrology handbooks.
• Abu Ma‘shar, al-Qabisi: Mars doctrines Europe later absorbs as Albumasar, Alcabitius.

City legend

When Baghdad was founded (762), Mars was rising — ominous in later accounts. Cairo (al-Qāhira, “the Victorious”) is tied in lore to Mars rising at foundation — Mars as city destiny.

Perception: still malefic planet + warrior personification, now inside high mathematical astronomy. No “Martians” — only judgments (aḥkām).

C. Medieval Latin Europe (1000–1450)

Manuscript art genres

1. Planetary spheres diagrams — concentric orbs; Mars between Sun and Jupiter in Ptolemaic variants.
2. Zodiac & planet personifications — Mars as armored knight.
3. “Children of the Planets” — soldiers, surgeons, blacksmiths, butchers, executioners; battle, forge, bloodletting.
4. Medical astrology — choleric humor, gall, iron instruments, acute fever.

Literary embedding

Dante, Paradiso: Heaven of Mars = crusading / martial saints (cross of light).

Perception: Mars is moral-astrological weather — courage or cruelty depending on chart. Still not a desert world.

D. Renaissance & Baroque (1450–1700) — the god returns as painting

Christian Europe rediscovers the body of Mars through classical myth.

Alchemy

Mars = iron; red rust echoes the planet; ♂ in lab books.

Telescope begins (early 1600s)

• Galileo and others resolve Mars as a disk (surface still vague).
• Kepler works Mars’s orbit hard — elliptical breakthrough partly from Mars data (Tycho’s observations).

Still no canals — just a moving body with geometry.

E. Scientific planet (1700–1870)

• Better oppositions → polar caps, dark/light markings, rotation period.
• Mars becomes a physical globe: seasons, ice, possible atmosphere.
• Maps begin (Beer & Mädler, etc.).
• Perception shift: from omen → another Earth-like world? Speculation of life starts scientifically, not only mythically.

F. Canal fever (1877–1910s) — the modern dream is born

Other cultural artifacts

• Soap ads with “Martians.”
• Tesla wonders if radio noise is planetary greeting (1901).
• Pickering discusses light shafts / signaling schemes.
• Fiction: H.G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898) — invasion as imperial reverse.

Visual culture

Canal maps (straight lines, oases) = the new “sculpture” of Mars — graphic, not marble. Magazine illustrations of thin air, red deserts, canal cities.

Mars is a dying older civilization — mirror of Victorian anxiety about climate, empire, and progress.

G. 20th century — invaders, sterile rock, robots

Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.
— Carl Sagan

H. Continuities that never died after Jesus

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