I'm distracting myself from finishing a difficult book on Mongolia. At the rate I'm going I will not finish before the Fri due date, but this is too rich to let pass.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stono_Rebellion That's the link to an article about a courageous rebellion around Charleston SC Sept 9, 1739.
@ ? @ ?
I was studying the chart for the Qing dynasty empress dowager's imperial decree to take first steps toward constitutional monarchy. The road leading to that event was long and winding, or downright circular. She had imprisoned a relative some years earlier for trying to initiate similar reforms and now here she was acting like a western radical.
I circled Neptune at 12° Cancer in top right quadrant of the chart. You can see Jupiter at 6° Cancer following close behind along the ecliptic.
I do this all the time. Not sure how people put up with it - are you wondering what the impending fall of Qing dynasty has to do with The Negro Act of 1740?
Well... my dizzy little astrological mind was wondering about the last time Neptune was in Cancer! I played around in the ephemeris, a kind of mathematical river of organic time, and saw that was around 1740. Since I am most familiar with US history I gravitated to the opposite side of the globe from China/Mongolia, and looked up events for US in 1740.
Up popped the Negro Act of 1740 precipitated by the Stono Slave Rebellion of 1739. Get this! The rebelling slaves were trying to escape to Spanish Florida! Politics are so dynamic and slippery. Moments like this I give myself a pass for feeling lost. It's hard to keep up with all the twists and turns and byways of history.
Of course with all the controversy about Disney Land and how to teach history I had to make a note of this event in American Colonial history.
Below is the 1740 paragraph from the Wikipedia US History timeline
- 1740 – The Plantation Act of 1740 is passed to encourage immigration to the Thirteen Colonies and regularize the colonial naturalization procedures. Battle of Cartagena de Indias, where the colonists are called "Americans" for the first time. James Oglethorpe fails to take St. Augustine. South Carolina enacts the Negro Act of 1740.
Next is the chart for 9 months earlier, the day after the Stono Rebellion started.
The slaves heading for asylum in Catholic Florida had already killed 1 or 2 people in the South Carolina Low Country and I imagine the slave owner posse was close on their heals. You gotta read the article, here's the link again. Stono Rebellion. There's a beautiful detail in the 1st paragraph under Events of the Revolt - ] The Africans marched down the roadway with a banner that read "Liberty!", and chanted the same word in unison.
Well, that's it. Like I always say, there's so much in those charts. When I perused the first one for Empress Dowager Cixi finally taking steps 'forward' to westernize China, and by extension Mongolia; and saw that hope mongering Jupiter coming to it's meeting with Neptune, it was like looking at a mathematical painting of industrial visions taking physical form and moving onto the Mongol Steppes with modern technology. While many Chinese reformers were hailing the imperial proclamation that signaled a move toward modernization, positively inebriated with hope for a kinder more democratic government; nomadic herders in Mongolia were eyeing the arrival of thousands of Chinese technocrats and agricultural enterprises with grave worries about their own future.
Earth looks like such a jewel in the pictures from space.
