The Upper Mount of Mars, also called Mars negative or Mars passive, lies on the outer edge of the palm below the Mount of Mercury and above the Mount of Luna. The tradition claims for it endurance, resistance, self-control and the courage that consists in bearing rather than in attacking, as against the active courage assigned to the lower mount. The division of Mars into two mounts with a plain between them is a feature of the French school and is one of the places where different palmistry traditions diverge most visibly; Indian hasta samudrika and Chinese hand-reading use quite different divisions of the palm and different sets of correspondences, and the popular assumption that palmistry is one worldwide art with local dialects does not survive comparison of the actual systems.
The Upper Mount of Mars, distinct from the Lower Mount of Mars near the thumb, lies on the percussion, or outer, edge of the palm below the Mount of Mercury and above the Mount of Luna, roughly beneath where the heart line ends. Where the lower mount is traditionally read as active, aggressive courage, readiness for a fight, the upper mount is read as its passive counterpart: moral courage, resistance, the capacity to endure hardship, resist provocation and hold a position under pressure rather than to initiate conflict. Together the two Mars mounts are sometimes described as bracketing the whole of the palm's central Plain of Mars between them, active courage on one side and endurance on the other, a symmetry the nineteenth-century systematisers of this scheme built deliberately into its design.