There's an old habit in astrology that our co-founder Steven Forrest has spent his whole career working to break. Open a traditional text and you'll find Mars and Saturn labeled the malefics — the bad planets. Saturn was sometimes literally called Satan, the Greater Malefic. Mars was the one the ancient Chaldean priests would scramble to sacrifice a lamb over whenever it so much as twitched in the sky. Hard planets, hard aspects, the square, the opposition — all of it filed under trouble.
Steve's response to that inheritance is one of the foundational ideas behind everything we build at Ask Lila. As he puts it in The Inner Sky: astrological symbols are neutral. There are no good ones, and no bad ones. No planet is there just to hurt you. No aspect is a curse. Every piece of your chart is, in his words, a blueprint for the most fulfilling path of growth available to you.
That reframe turns out to matter for something psychology has been studying hard in the last two decades — a quality called grit. And once you put the two side by side, you realize they're describing the same thing from different ends. Grit isn't a burden you were handed. It's what a good relationship with your Saturn and your Mars actually looks like.
What the research found
Psychologist Angela Duckworth went looking for the trait that predicts who succeeds when things get hard. She studied cadets surviving their brutal first summer at West Point, finalists in the National Spelling Bee, rookie teachers in struggling schools, salespeople grinding through daily rejection. It wasn't talent. It wasn't IQ. The same quiet quality kept rising to the top, and she named it grit. When she tracked hundreds of salespeople, grit predicted who was still standing six months later better than any other trait she measured.
And when she broke grit down, it split into two halves. One is perseverance — hard work, resilience, getting up again on the bad days. The other is passion — not a thunderbolt, but a steady North Star: loving something and staying in love with it instead of chasing a new obsession every few months. You need both. Most people are stronger in one than the other.
Two halves: sustained discipline, and aimed fire. Astrology already has names for those. Saturn and Mars — the very two planets the old books were most afraid of.
Saturn: the discipline half
Forrest reframes Saturn in a single sentence we come back to constantly: Saturn isn't bad, Saturn is hard. And only lazy people think those two words mean the same thing. A genuinely demanding teacher is hard — and that's exactly why you actually learn the material.
Saturn is the part of you that can do what you don't feel like doing. That lands almost word for word on Duckworth's perseverance research, and Forrest takes it somewhere deeper. In The Inner Sky he describes Saturn as the planet of faith — but not the comfortable kind. Jupiter, he says, gives you faith by propping you up with a thousand crutches: look at the bank book, the new car, the easy life. Saturn does the opposite. He takes the crutches away, shows you darkness and the real possibility of defeat, and then asks: do you still have faith? Only a faith that can stand alone, unassisted, against apparent impossibility is the real thing.
That is the inner architecture of perseverance. Duckworth's fourth ingredient of grit is literally hope — the conviction that you can keep going even when you have doubts, that effort can change your situation. Steve was describing the same muscle decades earlier, in the language of the planet everyone had been taught to dread.
Mars: the fire half
Mars got the same bad press, and the same rescue. Yes, Forrest writes, Mars can be horrible when it goes wrong — cruel, selfish, the symbol of the killer instinct. But to lead with that is to miss the point entirely. Above all, Mars is the power of the human will — the steam to shape your own life. And then he reaches, unprompted, for the exact image psychology would later use for grit: it is Mars that lets the marathon runner sprint that last half-mile. Mars that puts the gleam in an old man's eye and the spice in an old woman's spirit. Destroy it and we'd all simply go to sleep.
The crucial law of Mars, Forrest teaches, is that its energy can't be created or destroyed — only aimed. If you don't give your fire a worthy direction, it doesn't politely vanish. It attacks the wrong target. He describes the warrior who turns away from his real battle: the fire remains, and it goes off like Fourth of July fireworks over something pointless — "why do you insist on wearing that damned yellow shirt?" Marriages fail and careers blow up over trivia, and the person is left asking why they put everyone on the defensive. The answer, Forrest says, is simple: the warrior fought the wrong war.
Duckworth's research arrives at the same place through what she calls purpose. Interest alone, she found, is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime. What ripens passion into something durable is the conviction that your work matters beyond yourself. Her mature exemplars of grit all said a version of the same line: my work is important, both to me and to others. That's Mars aimed at the right war — fire that found a cause larger than its own heat.
Why the "hard" aspects are the point
Here's where the reframe goes all the way down. It's not only the hard planets that got slandered — it's the hard aspects, the square and the opposition, the angles of friction and tension between planets. And the Forrest school's teaching on this is radical in its simplicity: those aspects aren't damage. They're the engine.
A square is friction between two parts of you — Mars wanting to charge while Saturn counts the cost. Neither side gets to win; the work is compromise, giving both their due. But that friction is generative. As the teaching goes, the friction of a square can actually strengthen both sides. An opposition is a seesaw of tension that resolves not by one side defeating the other but through synthesis — finding the common ground the two share. And the governing principle behind all of it: everything in the chart is here for your growth. There is nothing in your chart you cannot use to grow. Some pieces are simply harder-won than others.
Sit with that, because it's the whole thing. Grit, by definition, only exists where there's resistance. You don't need perseverance for what's easy or passion for what doesn't cost you anything. Grit lives precisely in the friction — the square between your discipline and your desire, the tension you have to keep integrating rather than resolve once and for all. Duckworth found that grit grows, especially with maturity, as we learn which goals to release and which to hold with tenacity. Forrest would call that maturation the literal purpose of Saturn, and the slow integration of a hard aspect the literal work of a life.
So the next time someone tells you their chart is "difficult," or you feel that Mars-square-Saturn tension as a flaw in yourself, you might hear it the way Steve taught us to. The discipline to keep going when it's hard — that's your Saturn, asking if you still have faith with the crutches gone. The fire that makes you care which direction you're going — that's your Mars, looking for the right war. And the friction between them isn't a curse on the chart. It's the grindstone. Grit is simply the virtue you forge on it.
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