Note to Readers: There’s not a regular edition of Astrology News today — so I’m posting this archive edition from earlier this year. It’s the Jan. 15, 2010 lead article from the subscriber series of Friday essays, following up on the earthquake in Haiti earlier that same week. –efc
Dear Friend and Reader:
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 this week 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’ 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 fifty men we could subjugate them all and make them do whatever we want.”
So much for Pat Robertson’s theory that this week’s quake happened because the Haitians had made a pact with the devil at Bois-Caiman near Cap-Haitien on Aug. 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.