A magnitude 7.0 earthquake struck Tuesday afternoon near Port-au-Prince, the capital of Haiti. The country, one of the poorest on Earth, shares an island, called Hispaniola, with the Dominican Republic. Port-au-Prince is 710 miles southeast of Miami. The island is situated right next to Cuba and Jamaica. In global terms, it’s a fairly large island — the 10th most populous and the 22nd largest in the world. But Haiti is crowded. Nearly 1,000 people live on a square mile. Port-au-Prince has a population of about three million people, so we’re talking about a city the size of Brooklyn, NY — where a great many Haitians live. Due to the extreme poverty of Haiti, there has been a global diaspora. Haitian communities and their Creole culture can be found in many parts of the world.
The quake took place at sundown, so it was a long night of having no real idea the extent or scope of the casualties and damage. In astrological terms, dusk puts the Sun (and the North Node, where Friday’s solar eclipse will occur) on the western angle of the chart, which puts a stress on the Earth.
Due to its location in the hurricane belt, Haiti is no stranger to disasters, but this is different. Nearly all of the infrastructure of the country has been damaged and much of it has been destroyed. This was the first major earthquake in 200 years. Haiti’s buildings are designed to withstand big storms, not the Earth shaking.
Notably, there were no reports of tsunamis. [MSNBC is reporting that the airport’s runway and control tower are functional, which is very good news for getting in relief supplies. The president of the country survived the earthquake but the national palace collapsed.]
When I said in yesterday’s subscriber edition that the eclipse this week was a setup for earthquakes, it was based on one scientific fact and three observations about the chart. A few weeks ago I read an article, which I’ll need to find, that confirmed what astrologers have known for a long time: earthquakes follow planetary alignments.
Astrologers are pretty much the only people who are watching what’s happening with other planets when something happens on Earth. Astrologers know that major quakes are likelier to happen close to New Moons and Full Moons. The Banda Aceh quake on the island of Sumatra on Dec. 26, 2004 happened during the last approach to a Full Moon, for example (and there are other similarities to the Haiti quake chart).
The astrological facts included the alignment of 11 planets across Capricorn and Aquarius, some of which (such as Jupiter and the Sun) are putting enormous gravitational stress on the Earth. [This link includes the minor planets from Serennu.com.] Second fact was the eclipse itself. Eclipses are precise alignments with direct effects. The third fact was that this eclipse was in Capricorn, which I consider the sign for the Earth itself; that is, for the physical structures that make up the planet, such as the tectonic plates, mountains, caves and so on.