First, a historical note. Did you know that when Christopher Columbus “discovered” America, the thing he discovered was Haiti? So the island that was shaken and the country that was shaken to rubble has a hallowed place in the dark history of the New World, as the place where European feet first touched the ground. There, they met the native Tainos, one of the Arawak people; and made a settlement, called La Navidad, on the north coast of present-day Haiti.
Thus began a holocaust. In 2007, US News and World Report said that from an estimated initial population of 250,000 in 1492, the Arawaks had dropped to 14,000 by 1517. How did that happen? There’s the famous entry from Columbus’s log, reporting his first encounter with them; that pretty much explains it.
“They brought us barrels of cotton thread and parrots and other little things which it would be tedious to list, and exchanged everything for whatever we offered them. I kept my eyes open and tried to find out if there was any gold, and I saw that some of them had a little piece hanging from a hole in their nose. I gathered from their signs that if one goes south, or around the south side of the island, there is a king with great jars full of it, enormous amounts. I tried to persuade them to go there, but I saw that the idea was not to their liking. They would make fine servants. With 50 men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
So much for Pat Robertson’s theory the Haiti quake happened because the Haitians had made a pact with the devil at Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien on August 14, 1791. Yes, those in the slave revolt used Santeria at the commencement of the rebellion; that is historically documented. But even in the unlikely event that has some kind of karmic influence, it doesn’t explain what had happened on Hispaniola for the prior 300 years: brutal slavery at the hands of the Spaniards and the sugar-addicted French. Bad things have been happening in Haiti since Columbus laid eyes on the place.
Is this about something much bigger? Are we getting a message that this is so big, it’s a comment on the story of the entire New World?
Yes, earthquakes happen, and they can happen anywhere. For example, there is an active geological fault line running down the Hudson River. The Indian Point nuclear power plant sits atop a newly identified intersection of two active seismic zones. We in New York who don’t even experience tremors could wake up to the Earth shaking one day next week or in 5,000 years.
The Aries Point and the Earthquake
The Haiti earthquake occurred in the days before a solar eclipse, mixed up with an 11-planet alignment in Capricorn and Aquarius. Yet in the midst of that alignment was a specific astrological marker: the Aries Point.
That’s the location of the Sun on the first day of Northern Hemisphere spring. The Aries Point, literally the first degree of the sign Aries, is extended by astrologers to include all four cardinal signs: the early degrees of Aries, Cancer, Libra, and Capricorn, all of which are sensitive to Aries Point effects.
I often characterize the Aries Point as “the personal is political,” in that the news that occurs around the time of an Aries Point event always affects a lot of people and also has a property of merging the personal and the collective realms. The world crashes into our living rooms. Everything happens at once. On the same day, relief efforts are underway from one of the deadliest earthquakes in recent history, and possibly in a very long time; congressional hearings on the banking crisis that nearly toppled the economy are proceeding. Citigroup was leveraged 68:1, debt to assets. There are no new regulations in place to prevent it from happening again.
Suddenly there’s a new terrorist alert coming out of Yemen; and a new war. Most people hadn’t heard of Yemen until a month ago. One near-miss incident on one flight is causing some to respond as if 9/11 had happened again.
A trial was underway in San Francisco to determine the constitutionality of banning same-sex marriage; talk about the personal being political. This trial is uniting one of the nation’s top conservative attorneys, Ted Olson—the US government’s lawyer under George Bush—with one of the stalwart “liberal” movements. Finally, a defection.
