# The Master Mind of Mars — Character guide

> Key figures in The Master Mind of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

- [Ras Thavas](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/ras_thavas.md): Ras Thavas rules a remote tower where he buys, trades, and transplants living bodies with the calm of a man changing coats. He keeps his own thoughts sealed like one of his blood jars, and he chooses the Earthman Ulysses
- [Gor Hajus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/gor_hajus.md): Gor Hajus joins Paxton's escape as a man who has killed for hire and expects to die for it, yet he proves steadier than any noble aboard the stolen flier. He works the idol's hidden mechanisms and guards the prisoners wh
- [Dar Tarus](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/dar_tarus.md): Dar Tarus was a young warrior of Phundahl until Xaxa's favorite, Sag Or, took his beautiful body for himself, leaving Dar Tarus trapped in Sag Or's dissipated frame. He joins Paxton's conspiracy with a personal stake no 
- [Valla Dia](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/valla_dia.md): Valla Dia is the victim whose suffering gives Paxton's mission its moral weight: her fair body now belongs to Xaxa, while her mind endures inside an old and hideous corpse. She kneels before the idol of Tur and speaks Xa
- [Xaxa](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/xaxa.md): Xaxa governs Phundahl through fear and the worship of the idol Tur, and she has purchased Valla Dia's youthful body to escape her own aged flesh. When she wakes bound on the flier, she tries to hurl herself overboard rat
- [Hovan Du](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/hovan_du.md): Hovan Du is one of Ras Thavas's strangest experiments, a white ape whose skull holds a portion of human mind alongside simian instinct. On the flight through the Great Toonolian Marshes he finds fruit and nuts for the fu
- [The Great Tur](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/the_great_tur.md): Tur rules Phundahl as its supreme religious figure, a jade-and-gold idol whose pronouncements shape law, war, and the daily dread of his worshippers. Yet the voice of god belongs to Xaxa, who manages him as a puppet and 
- [Bal Zak](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/bal_zak.md): Bal Zak commands the Vosar and moves through Toonol's landing towers with the ease of a man who knows every guard's weakness. He is practical rather than heroic — he helps fugitives not from sentiment but because he can,
- [Sag Or](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/sag_or.md): Sag Or belongs to the priestly class that surrounds the Great Tur, and he treats Phundahl's faith as an instrument to be wielded rather than a truth to be served. Where Xaxa schemes for power, he schemes for the temple's
- [John Carter](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/john_carter.md): The legendary Warlord of Mars who appears late in the story.
- [Vad Varo](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/vad_varo.md): Vad Varo wakes on Mars in a body not his own, apprenticed to the greatest — and most morally indifferent — surgeon on the planet. He carries an Earthman's horror at what Ras Thavas does casually, and a surgeon's knowledg
- [Mu Tel](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/mu_tel.md): Mu Tel opens his palace and his instruments to the stranger, letting him watch Earth's trenches from a darkened auditorium a world away. He is generous, curious, and unshakably cynical — he tells Vad Varo that war is nat
- [Yamdor](https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters/yamdor.md): A city and its ruler, mentioned as a location.

HTML index: https://www.betterreads.dev/discover/the_master_mind_of_mars_se/characters