On 30 March 1282 (Julian) in front of the Chiesa dello Santo Spirito in Palermo at the hour of Vespers, a riot broke out that resulted in the death of 2,000 French soldiers and their families that night, and it led to the deaths of thousands more French and the overthrow of the Charles of Anjou’s rulership of Sicily.
The astrological chronicle starts at 6:20 pm just as the sun is setting. The event originated in front of the church. An organized religious building is the 9th house and that is where we are going to start to understand this event. There are three actors present in the 9th house: Cancer Uranus – the rioters, Cancer Juno – the married couple, and Cancer Mars – a French soldier.
The crowd has one actor a Virgo Neptune. Common people are coming to the church as spiritual pilgrims. They are heavily under the influence of beauty and the idea of heaven on earth. This is not a regular church service. This is Easter with its special customs. The common people have spent most of the day taking part in rituals that celebrate the spiritual hope that Christ will rise and restore God’s divine rule over man. This is the triumph of good over evil and walking into the festivities they find a confused and horrifying scene.
This is the height of taboo, a young virgin has been raped while she was participating at the Easter festivities. The offending soldier is being confronted by the parents. In his arrogance of representing the king and playing with the power of Pluto, he is standing in front of the outraged parents and threatens to rape the mother making the public rape a pure display of power. The pagan rites of spring meets the Christian tradition of rebirth in the worse possible way. The rape of Persephone as initiation into adulthood and gathering to celebrate the rebirth of Christ from his earthy form to a heavenly one. This is profane and it triggers a deep primordial reaction. The father is not just an angry father. Here he is Jupiter and he is the wrath of God. Jupiter is expansive and in the first house signifying an attack. This is a sign of an overkill. The soldier is dead but the attack isn’t over. The spiritual pilgrims see the raped girl and witness the father brutalizing the corpse of the offending Frenchman. The religious bells ring out and this becomes a clarion call to the crowd. The soldier is dead but the attack isn’t over. “Moranu li Francisi”
The crowd are common people that have come as Neptune, spiritual pilgrims, but the horror they have witnessed coalesces with the ringing of the bells and they have become Uranus, now a religious frenzy, striking down the abomination. They aren’t armed so they stone the French. They find weapons and cut them down. The French are not Christian anymore they are foreign savages fit only for destruction. Each Frenchman is the defiling arrogant soldier. The frenzy expands into Palermo. All of them must be found and killed.The French run to the churches for sanctuary. This further enrages the crowd. The French are being destroyed because they are defilers and now they are in the sacred houses of God. The crowd is still drunk on the high ideals of beauty and heaven on earth. The land must be cleansed and purified of this French taint. The children are killed because they are French, the wives are killed because they consort with the French. This is the danger of playing with Pluto. The crowd seizes this power and paints French the color of death. They are all marked for destruction.
It wasn’t organized or civilized. Organization came only after the slaughter. This was a bolt out of the blue that ignited a deep primitive drive for security for the tribe. This security the base element of culture.
Our own culture has pagan rituals associated with this festival. Young children hunt eggs supposedly laid by bunnies. We eat chocolate bunnies and give baby animals as gifts. Easter always has a slight forbidden quality even when everything goes according to plan. Our modern culture mixes the idea of a virginal sacrificial savior with barely concealed fertility rites. Both Pagan and Christian Easter are very much about the spring rebirth. There is just a thin veil between the two traditions. This playing with the taboo is always dangerous. The zodiac sign Scorpio lies between just Libra and foreign Sagittarius. Scorpionic taboo always resides between the just and the foreign. Rend the veil at great peril. The trespass of a taboo leads to Us versus Them. The Profane Easter Celebration of 1282 was the unwelcome Descent of Inanna not the expected Resurrection of Christ.