Mars And Spirituality

Mithraists and Dante made spiritual journeys to Mars. See Why Mithras Lost II. John Carter went there in an astral body which became physical on arrival.

"Spirit" mainly means an immaterial subject of consciousness, e.g., a soul, embodied or disembodied, or a "pure spirit": angel, demon or God. Pagan gods have superhuman bodies but lack coherent theology. Balder is killed, goes to Hel and returns after the Ragnarok when the chief gods die with neither survival nor resurrection.

We also speak of the good or bad "spirit" of a person, group or team and might describe them as "spirited." "Spiritual" connotes either supernatural or intuitive. (There is no agreed terminology for these issues. "Intuitive" is my best attempt at "conscious but neither intellectual nor merely sensorial.")

On different fictional versions of Mars, we encounter:

disembodied "Old Ones" in Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles and in two novels by Robert Heinlein;

space-dwelling eldila in CS Lewis' Out Of The Silent Planet.

The Martians in Poul Anderson's Shield can communicate by simultaneously using tactile, verbal, musical, choreographic and many other languages but this requires a psychological affinity or oneness between the communicators and would also require Terrestrials to be represented by both sexes and every age, race and culture. Where we say "psychological," earlier generations would have said "spiritual." Martian multi-linguistic communication sounds like what we would call "intuitive" and also maybe "spiritual."