History in the stars: Assassination of Franz Ferdinand

Tourists, historians and diplomats have been arriving in Sarajevo to commemorate the shots fired by a young Bosnian Serb assassin on 28 June 1914 - shots that sparked World War One. But the city and country are uneasy in the historical spotlight, as the tensions behind those events are still alive today.

On Sunday, 28 June 1914, at approximately 10:45 am, Franz Ferdinand and his wife were killed in Sarajevo, the capital of the Austro-Hungarian province of Bosnia and Herzegovina, by Gavrilo Princip, 19 at the time, a member of Young Bosnia and one of a group of assassins organized by the Black Hand.The event led to a chain of events that eventually triggered World War I.

A chart drawn for the assassination of Franz Ferdinand is shown here. On the MC is a powerful conjunction of the Sun with Saturn and Pluto. Here the fast moving Sun was acting as a trigger to the conjunction of Saturn-Pluto that was exact thrice between October 4, 1914 to May 19, 1915. In addition a New Moon [1cn18] had taken place on June 23, 1914 on Pluto [0cn39] just five days before the event.

The primary stars of the warrior constellation of Orion were involved in the conjunction. Gamma (γ) Orion, Bellatrix, is a pale yellow star marking the left shoulder of the Warrior. Alpha (Betelgeuse) with this star gamma (Bellatrix) and lambda (Meissa) were the Euphratean Kakkab Sar, the "Constellation of the King". In China, Betelgeuse was part of Tsan, “The Supreme Commander”. In India it was the determinant star of Ardra “The Moist One” usually depicted as a tear drop ruled originally by the Vedic storm-god Rudra, “the Howler”, “the One who Weeps”, a fierce form of Siva, presiding over destruction and transformation.

Putting these images together to understand the event we have sorrow and anger at the assassination of a King that eventual leads to a World War that causes the destruction and transformation of the great powers. Robert Hand writes:

The First World War was the breakdown of what had become the normal political arrangement of the 19th century. Empires that had existed for hundreds of years were overthrown, and likewise royal dynasties. New nations also came into existence. This is clearly a Saturn-Pluto crisis, involving the destruction of an existing order and the creation of a new one. http://bit.ly/1lcmR2i

Reference

[1] Archive, June 1914: The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand http://bit.ly/1polCFR