On the night Serafina Di Luna cut her palm and pressed it to the stone mouth of Mongibello, the moon did not simply rise — it bled. The crimson eclipse that opens 1099: Blood of the Lupa is not invented atmosphere. It is history, theology, and Sicilian earth memory pressed together into a single terrifying image.
What Actually Happened in the Sky in 1099
The First Crusade ended in July 1099 with the fall of Jerusalem. The chronicles that survive — Fulcher of Chartres, Raymond of Aguilers, the anonymous Gesta Francorum — describe the violence in language that is itself apocalyptic. But medieval sky-watchers across the Mediterranean were also recording something else: lunar disturbances, reddened moons, celestial signs that ecclesiastical writers folded into the broader narrative of holy war and divine judgment.
A total lunar eclipse turns the moon the color of iron rust or cooling blood. The effect is caused by the Earth's shadow bending red wavelengths of sunlight through the atmosphere onto the lunar surface — what astronomers now call Rayleigh scattering. Medieval observers had no such framework. What they had was the Book of Joel: "The sun shall be turned to darkness, and the moon to blood, before the great and terrible day of the Lord." A blood moon in 1099 was not a meteorological curiosity. It was a sentence written in the sky.
Norman Sicily — freshly conquered, still sorting itself between Latin Christianity, Greek Orthodoxy, and Islam — was a place where that sentence could be read in at least three languages simultaneously. That tension is the ground the novel stands on.
The Norman Conquest of Sicily and Why It Matters to the Di Luna Line
Roger I had completed his conquest of Sicily in 1072, and by 1099 his son Roger II was consolidating a kingdom that was, by the standards of medieval Europe, genuinely strange. Arabic was spoken at court. Muslim scholars worked alongside Norman administrators. Greek monks held land near Latin churches. The island was a palimpsest — layer over layer of conquest, faith, and folk practice, none of them fully erasing what came before.
It is into this layered world that Serafina Di Luna was born. A Sicilian woman in 1099 would have inherited a spiritual vocabulary that was already composite: Roman gods beneath Christian saints, Arabic star-lore beside Greek natural philosophy, and underneath all of it, the older island knowledge that belonged to no empire and survived every one of them. The stregoneria that Serafina carries is not a deviation from her world. It is its most honest expression.
The blood pact she makes with the Lupa does not come from nowhere. It comes from a woman who already understands that power in Sicily has always moved through what the conquerors failed to see.
The Lupa, Mount Etna, and the Deep Mythology
Mongibello — Etna — has its own theological biography. The name itself is a layering: Latin Mons fused with Arabic Jabal, both meaning mountain, as if the island could not commit to a single tongue even in naming its most visible landmark. Medieval European folklore placed the mouth of Hell somewhere inside it. Arabic geographers described it as a place of fire and djinn. Greek myth had already given it to Hephaestus and the forge of the gods.
For the purposes of the Luna Strega Trilogy, Etna is where the Lupa sleeps — an entity descended from Sariel, one of the Watchers of the Book of Enoch, and Lilith, whose own mythology runs from ancient Mesopotamia through Jewish mystical tradition as the first woman, the refuser, the one who would not submit. Their offspring is something that fits no church catechism and no simple definition of monster. The Lupa is older than the Norman conquest, older than the Arab occupation, older than the Greeks who named the volcano after their gods. She has simply been waiting.
When the moon goes crimson, she stirs. The eclipse is her signal, and Serafina, standing at the edge of everything she knows, is the one who answers.
Blood Moons in Sicilian Folk Tradition
Sicilian stregoneria — the living tradition of folk magic that runs through the Di Luna saga — treats the moon as the primary seat of feminine power. The crescent is the mark Serafina's bloodline will carry for a thousand years. But the full moon, and specifically the blood moon, occupies a different register entirely. It is not a time for small workings. It is a time for binding, for blood ritual, for the kind of pact that cannot be undone.
The practitioners of the old Sicilian ways — le streghe, the wise women, the ones who knew which herbs to burn and which words to speak backward — understood that a lunar eclipse was a threshold moment. The ordinary rules of the world went thin. What was normally invisible pressed closer. This is not superstition rendered colorful for modern readers. It is a framework for paying attention to the world that predates the scientific method by centuries and has not been replaced by it.
In the novel, the crimson eclipse is the moment the threshold opens. Serafina does not stumble through it accidentally. She walks through it with her eyes open, her hand bleeding, her voice steady. That is what makes her the founding mother of the Di Luna line rather than simply its first casualty.
Writing the Opening Scene: A Note on the Historical Record
As the author, I wanted the opening of 1099: Blood of the Lupa to feel simultaneously inevitable and impossible — the way the most significant moments of a life tend to feel in retrospect. The crimson eclipse gave me the image I needed precisely because it exists in both registers. It is a real astronomical phenomenon with a documented medieval interpretation. And it is also, in the logic of the Di Luna saga, the literal moment when the supernatural world reaches down and makes its first mark on the bloodline.
The historical sources from 1099 are full of people interpreting the sky. Crusader chroniclers saw victory signs. Muslim scholars saw warnings. Byzantine writers saw something else again. Sicily, caught between all of these interpretive traditions, was exactly the right place for one woman to see something none of them had prepared their readers for: an ancient entity waking in a mountain, wearing the eclipse like a crown, waiting to see if anyone was brave enough — or desperate enough — to come forward.
Serafina was. The crescent mark burned into her skin that night would still be appearing on Di Luna women nine centuries later, when three sisters in mid-century America — Loretta, Joann, and Linda — would find themselves navigating a world just as dangerous, just as layered, and just as unwilling to let women hold power without cost. You can read more about the trilogy and its historical foundations on the Luna Strega blog, or explore what we have built around it at the Luna Strega store.
The Eclipse as Covenant
A solar eclipse obscures. A lunar eclipse reveals — the moon does not disappear; it changes color, becomes something it was not, shows a face it ordinarily hides. In the theology of the old streghe, this is what blood ritual does as well. It does not create power from nothing. It reveals what was always present in the blood, waiting for the right moment and the right words and someone willing to make the cut.
The crimson eclipse of 1099 is not a backdrop. It is the first character in the story — the sky itself leaning in, asking whether Serafina Di Luna understands what she is about to agree to. The novel opens with her answer. Everything that follows — across a thousand years and three books — is the consequence of the word she says.
The full account of that night, the pact, the Lupa, and the mark that would survive a millennium lives in 1099: Blood of the Lupa on Amazon. The Di Luna saga begins here, in blood and firelight and a sky the color of rust — and it does not let go.