Mars, Existentialism, and the “Problem” of Existence
- Claire Nakti
- 23 hours ago
- 5 min read
Updated: 16 minutes ago
I recently made a full video analysis on manic pixie dream girls & their Sun dominant energy (especially possessing the Sun-ruled nakshatras of Uttara Phalguni & Uttara Ashadha), focusing on how these women function as embodiments of life itself-- of vitality & pure existence. When you look across the films where a manic pixie dream girl appears, a consistent pattern emerges in the men paired with her: he feels existentially hollow. Life feels drained of meaning, inert, repetitive, or unreal to them. He is in a state which is apathetic towards and withdrawn from life, while she is a life-affirming figure who personifies true ease in “embodiment”.
Astrologically, men with Mars-ruled nakshatras (Mrigashira, Chitra, and Dhanishta) dominate these roles as manic pixies’ romantic partners.
Degrees (sidereal)
Mrigashira: 23°20′ Taurus – 6°40′ Gemini
Chitra: 23°20′ Virgo – 6°40′ Libra
Dhanishta: 23°20′ Capricorn – 6°40′ Aquarius
Zach Braff, with Dhanishta Moon, is called “a repeat offender" in this type of role, cast as a disillusioned young man in a form of existential crisis-- opposite a manic pixie-- in both The Last Kiss & Garden State, which he also wrote and directed.
Elizabethtown, the film that inspired the manic pixie trope's defining in the first place (Nathan Rabin came up with it after watching the movie), stars Orlando Bloom, a Dhanishta Ascendant native. Dhanishta Sun & Moon Ashton Kutcher was originally hired for the role. The iconic manic pixie film 500 Days of Summer stars Dhanishta Sun Joseph Gordon Levitt as Summer’s love interest. Many more examples of Mars-ruled men as the boyfriends in the indie "manic pixie" genre are covered on my Patreon.
Fight Club shows a similar dynamic with Chitra Moon Edward Norton; a Mars psyche hollowed out by life’s monotony & meaninglessness encounters a Solar figure (Uttara Ashada Moon Brad Pitt) who embodies pure presence, vitality, detachment, and certainty of being.
In Jyotish, Mars represents action, will, effort, severance, & heat. It is the force that moves toward something with intensity and direction. It is the warrior not the King, and for Mars’ purpose, it needs struggle, a problem to confront or a “quest” to pursue. Its sense of reality is forged through effort, through doing something that proves it exists. The same intensity that fuels action becomes agitation, restlessness, and doubt. “What should I do?” slowly mutates into “Why am I here at all?”, as Mars’ strategic nature and problem solving becomes applied overarchingly to its existence in general. Instead of asking merely how to act within life, it begins interrogating the structure of life. Instead of confronting a problem, it confronts Being. As an analytical force, Mars struggles with what appears unsolvable and can become caught up in probing at it. The unanswerable mysteries of life can capture-- and even torment-- this planet, because for a mind oriented toward resolution, the possibility that some questions may never yield answers creates an ongoing tension.
The Mars individual wants life to justify itself-- to explain why it exists and why they exist within it-- and instead encounters silence and indifference. This tension gives rise to what is commonly called existential dread or the existential vacuum: a state marked by inner emptiness, disorientation, and a loss of vitality or will to live that can’t be traced to external circumstances alone. Existentialism historically emerges from this type of confrontation: the human demand that life justify itself meeting a universe that does not reliably respond. The thinkers most closely associated with articulating this tension were Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre, both Dhanishtha Moon natives.
Preceding and surrounding them were figures now widely recognized as central to existential thought. Chitra Sun Friedrich Nietzsche is consistently named as a foundational existential voice for declaring the collapse of inherited meaning and demanding self-creation in its aftermath. Chitra Moon Martin Heidegger is considered one of the movement’s most influential philosophical architects for centering his work on Being itself and the anxiety of mortality.
Franz Kafka (Mrigashira Moon) is widely regarded as a key predecessor to twentieth-century existentialism precisely because his work dramatizes a Universe that refuses to justify or explain itself. In The Trial (one of his best-known novels) Josef K. is arrested and prosecuted by an opaque authority while never being told what he is accused of, what law he has violated, or how the system that has seized him actually works. The governing logic of that universe remains inaccessible throughout, operating with a cold indifference that withholds explanation even as it shapes every moment of his life, and in doing so it gives form to the very sense of Universal alienation and absurdity that later existentialists sought to describe.
Dhanishta Moon filmmaker Woody Allen has openly cited the influence of the European existentialists; critics frequently describe his intellectual formation as deeply shaped by Camus and Sartre. His films repeatedly center on characters in this mode, wrestling with “grand” justification-- pacing, narrating, intellectualizing, & obsessively questioning the meaning of their own lives. In works like Annie Hall & Hannah and Her Sisters the central tension is metaphysical anxiety. Life is not enough; it must be explained. In the English-speaking world, Dhanishtha Moon* William Barrett was instrumental in bringing existentialism into mainstream Western discourse through his widely read book Irrational Man (which Woody Allen named one of his films after), which helped frame it as the defining intellectual mood of modernity.
Across Mars-nakshatra starring films, participation in life becomes secondary to solving it. The same Mars impulse that excels in engineering, strategy, and competition becomes an attempt to master uncertainty itself, to "solve" the "problem" of existence.
In a full 24-minute video on Patreon, I explore this in much more depth, providing an experiential dive into these energies-- following how these themes are channeled into art, far beyond the manic pixie genre and broadly into existential films in general. There, I trace how this structure repeats through 30+ Mars-ruled nakshatra natives’ lives and roles across decades of film, as well as explore more on how Mars interacts with Solar figures, who embody a very different relationship to Being.
Click here for the full exploration video:
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