Nostradamus

Nostradamus, (December 14, 1503 – July 1, 1566) born Michel de Nostredame, is one of the world's most famous authors of prophecies. He is most famous for his book Les Propheties, which consists of rhymed quatrains (4‑line poems) grouped into sets of 100, called Centuries.

Nostradamus enthusiasts have credited him with predicting numerous of events in world history, including the French Revolution, the atom bomb, the rise of Adolf Hitler and the September 11 attacks on the World Trade Center (see under Misquotes and Hoaxes below). Indeed, they regularly make similar claims regarding each new world crisis as it comes along, for the most part shamelessly twisting either the words or the events to fit. (Nostradamus does not in fact mention any of the above specifically, not even Hitler: the name Hister, as he himself explains in his Presage for 1554, is merely the classical name for the Lower Danube, while Pau, Nay, Loron – often claimed to be an anagram of 'Napaulon Roy'– merely refers to three neighbouring towns in south-western France.) This linguistic sleight of hand is particularly easy to carry out when the would-be commentator knows no French to start with, especially in its 16th-century form – to say nothing of French geography. Not surprisingly, then, detractors see such 'edited' predictions as examples of vaticinium ex eventu, retroactive clairvoyance and selective thinking, which find non-existent patterns in ambiguous statements. Because of this, it has been claimed that Nostradamus is "100% accurate at predicting events after they happen", while the seer has acquired even more disrepute than he possibly deserves.

Biography

Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France in December 1503, Michel de Nostredame was the son of a grain dealer who was also a prosperous home-grown notary. His family was originally Jewish, but had converted to Catholicism during the previous century. Nothing is known about his childhood, but at the age of fifteen he entered the University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year he was forced by the Plague to leave again. In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine, but was promptly expelled again when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, which was a 'manual' trade expressly banned by the university statutes. He then continued work as an apothecary, and created a "rose pill" that was widely believed to protect against the plague.

In 1531 he was invited by Jules-César Scaliger, a leading Renaissance man, to come to Agen. There Nostradamus married a woman whose name is still in dispute (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), but who bore him two children. In 1534, however, his wife and children died, presumably from the plague. After their death he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly Italy.

He settled down in 1547 in Salon-de-Provence, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde Gemelle and eventually had six children – three daughters and three sons. After a further visit to Italy, he began to move away from medicine and towards the occult. He wrote an almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinising his name to 'Nostradamus', and was so encouraged by its success that he decided to write one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained at least 6338 prophecies (most of them, in the event, failed predictions), as well as at least 11 annual calendars, all of them starting on 1st January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. He then began his project of writing 1,000 quatrains, which form the supposed prophecies for which he is famous today. Feeling vulnerable to religious fanatics, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "Virgilianised" syntax, word games and a mixture of languages such as Provençal, Greek, Latin and Italian. For technical reasons connected with their publication in three instalments, the last 58 quatrains of the seventh 'Century', or book of 100 verses, were never published.

The quatrains, written in a book titled "Les Propheties", received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane, while many of the elite thought his quatrains were spiritually inspired prophecies. Soon nobility were coming from far and wide to receive horoscopes and advice from him, though he normally expected them to supply the birthcharts on which they were based. Catherine de Médicis, the queen consort of King Henri II of France, was one of Nostradamus's admirers. After reading his almanacs for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she summoned him to Paris to explain them, as well as to draw up horoscopes for her royal children. At the time he feared that he would be beheaded, but by the time of his death in 1566, she had made him Counselor and Physician in Ordinary to the King.

By 1566 Nostradamus's gout, which had painfully plagued him for many years and made movement very difficult, finally turned into dropsy. At the beginning of July, after making an extended will and a much shorter codicil, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive by sunrise." The next morning he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor between his bed and a makeshift bench.

Some biographical accounts of Nostradamus' life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, but neither prophecy nor astrology fell under this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practised magic to support them. In fact, his relations with the Church as a prophet and healer were always excellent. His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely because he had published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.

Preparation and methods of prophecy

While Nostradamus was clearly familiar with recent Latin printed editions of a range of esoteric writings, as well as having a passing acquaintance with astrology, recent research has shown that most of his prophetic work was based on paraphrasing collections of ancient end-of-the-world prophecies (mainly Bible-based) and supplementing their insights by projecting known historical events and identifiable anthologies of omen-reports into the future. It is thanks to this that his work contains so many predictions involving ancient figures such as Sulla, Marius, Nero, Hannibal and so on, as well as descriptions of "battles in the clouds" and "frogs falling from the sky". The end of the world, after all, was confidently expected at the time to occur in either 1800 or 1887, or possibly in 2242, depending on the system adopted.

His historical sources include easily identifiable passages from Livy, Suetonius, Plutarch and a range of other classical historians, as well as from the chronicles of medieval authors such as Villehardouin and Froissart. Many of his astrological references, by contrast, are taken almost word-for-word from the Livre de l'estat et mutations des temps of 1549/50 by Richard Roussat. Even the planetary tables on which he based such birthcarts as he was unable to avoid preparing himself are easily identifiable by their detailed figures, even where (as is usually the case) he gets some of them wrong.

His major prophetic source was evidently the Mirabilis liber of 1522, which contained a range of prophecies by Pseudo-Methodius, the Tiburtine Sibyl, Joachim of Fiore, Savonarola and others (his Preface contains no fewer than 24 biblical quotations, all but two of them in exactly the same order as Savonarola). The book had enjoyed considerable success in the 1520s, when it went through half-a-dozen editions (see Links below for facsimiles and translations). The obvious question – why the Mirabilis liber did not sustain its influence in the way that Nostadamus’s writings did – is explained mainly by the fact that the book (like the Bible) was mostly in Latin and in Gothic script and, to make matters even more complicated for the general reader, contained many abstruse scholastic abbreviations. Nostradamus was, in effect, one of the first to present its prophecies (and others) openly in the French vernacular – as was also happening to the Bible at the time – which is no doubt why, these days, he has retained all the credit for them. The Mirabilis liber, for its part, (some of whose predictions had already lapsed by the time Nostradamus started writing) was not translated into French until 1831, when knowledge of Latin was beginning to die out, and then mainly for scholarly and antiquarian reasons.

Meanwhile, if Nostradamus's many competitors – and he had many – never accused him of copying from it, it was because copying and/or paraphrasing, far from being regarded (as it is today) as mere plagiarism, was regarded at the time as what all good, educated people should do anyway. The whole Renaissance was based on the idea. Copying from the classics in particular, often without acknowledgement, and preferably from memory, was all the rage. Only in the 17th century did people start to be surprised by the fact that much of his output was evidently based on earlier and often classical originals – which was no doubt why, according to Garencières, his Prophecies started to be used as a classroom-reader at that time. Nostradamus, it should be remembered, denied in writing on several occasions that he was a prophet on his own account. In translation:

Although, my son, I have used the word 'prophet', I would not attribute to myself a title of such lofty sublimity

Nostradamus: Preface to César, 1555

Not that I would attribute to myself either the name or the role of a prophet

Nostradamus: Preface to César, 1555

...and some of [the prophets] predicted great and marvellous happenings: [though,] for me, I in no way attribute to myself such a title

Nostradamus: Letter to King Henri II, 1558

I do but make bold to predict (not that I guarantee the slightest thing at all), thanks to my researches and the consideration of what judicial Astrology promises me and sometimes gives me to know, principally in the form of warnings, so that folk may know that with which the celestial stars do threaten them. Not that I am foolish enough to pretend to be a prophet...

Nostradamus: open letter to Privy Councillor (later Chancellor) Birague, 15th June 1566

This is presumably why he entitled his book

LES

PROPHETIES

DE M. MICHEL

NOSTRADAMUS

(which, in French, as easily means 'The Prophecies, by M. Michel Nostradamus' – which is precisely what they were – as 'The Prophecies of M. Michel Nostradamus' – which, except in a few cases, they weren't, other than in the manner of their editing, expression and re-application to the future). Any criticism of Nostradamus for claiming to be a prophet, in other words, would have been for doing what he never claimed to be doing in the first place.

Further material was gleaned from Petrus Crinitus's De honesta disciplina of 1504, which included extracts from Psellus's De daemonibus and the De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum..." (Concerning the mysteries of Egypt...), a book on Chaldean and Assyrian magic by Iamblichus, a 4th-century neo-Platonist. Latin versions of both had recently been published in Lyon. While it is true that Nostradamus claimed in 1555 to have burned all the occult works in his library, no one can say exactly what books were destroyed in this fire. The fact that they reportedly burned with an unnaturally brilliant flame suggests, however, that some of them were manuscripts on vellum, which was routinely treated with saltpetre.

Given that his methodology, clearly, was mainly literary, it is doubtful whether Nostradamus used any particular methods for entering a trance state, other than contemplation, meditation and incubation (i.e. ritually 'sleeping on it'). His sole description of this process is contained in letter 41 of his collected Latin correspondence, as republished by Jean Dupèbe. The popular legend that he attempted the ancient methods of flame gazing, water gazing or both simultaneously is based on an uninformed reading of his first two verses, which merely liken his own efforts to those of the Delphic and Branchidic oracles. In his dedication to King Henri II Nostradamus describes "emptying my soul, mind and heart of all care, worry and unease through mental calm and tranquility", but his frequent references to the "bronze tripod" of the Delphic rite are usually preceded by the words "as though".

His works

The Prophecies - In this book he collected his major, long-term divinations. The first edition was published in 1555. The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557. The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed in 1558, but nowadays only survives as part of the omnibus edition that was published after his death in 1568. Thanks to printing practices at the time, no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two copies exactly the same.

The Almanacs - By far the most popular of his works, these were published annually from 1550 until his death. Often he published two or even three in a single year, entitled either Almanachs (detailed predictions), Prognostications or Presages (more generalised predictions).

Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer, too. We know that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was an alleged "translation" of Galen, and in his so-called Traité des fardemens (basically, a medical cookbook containing, once again, materials borrowed mainly from others) he included a description of the methods he used to treat the plague – none of which (not even the blood-letting) apparently worked. The same book also describes the preparation of cosmetics.

A manuscript normally known as the "Orus Apollo" also exists in the Lyon municipal library, where upwards of 2000 original documents relating to Nostradamus are stored under the aegis of Michel Chomarat. It is a purported translation of an ancient Greek work on Egyptian hieroglyphs based on later, Latin versions, all of them unfortunately ignorant of the true meanings of the ancient Egyptian script, which was not in fact deciphered until the advent of Champollion in the 19th century.

Since his death, only the Prophecies have continued to be popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Indeed, they have seldom, if ever, been out of print. The reason for this may be due partly to popular unease about the future, partly to people's desire to see their lives in some kind of over-all cosmic perspective and so to give meaning to them – but above all, possibly, to their vagueness and lack of dating, which enables them to be wheeled out after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claimed as 'hits'.

Skepticism

Skeptics of Nostradamus state that his reputation as a prophet is largely manufactured by modern-day supporters who shoehorn his words into events that have either already occurred or are so imminent as to be inevitable, a process known as as "retroactive clairvoyance". No Nostradamus quatrain has been interpreted before a specific event occurs, beyond a very general level (e.g., a fire will occur, a war will start).

A good demonstration of this flexible predicting is to take lyrics written by modern songwriters (e.g., Bob Dylan) and show that they are equally "prophetic".

Some scholars believe that Nostradamus wrote not to be a prophet, but to comment on events that were happening in his own time, writing in his elusive way – using highly metaphorical and cryptic language – in order to avoid persecution. This is similar to the Preterite interpretation of the Book of Revelation; John the Apostle intended to write only about contemporary events, but over time his writings became seen as prophecies.

The well-known prophecy that "a great and terrifying leader would come out of the sky" in 1999 and 7 months "to resuscitate the great King from Angoumois" has been much over-stated. The phrase d'effraieur (of terror) in fact occurs nowhere in the original printing, which merely uses the word deffraieur (defraying, hosting). On the basis of Nostradamus's by-now well known technique of projecting past events into the future, it therefore evidently refers back to the restoration to health of the captive Francis I of France (who was Duke of Angoulême) following a surprise visit to his cell by his host, the then Holy Roman Emperor Charles V in 1525. No fewer than five of the planets were in the same signs on both occasions.

The bulk of the quatrains deal with disasters of various sorts. The disasters include plagues, earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, battles and many other themes. Some quatrains cover these in over-all terms; others concern a single person or small group of persons. Some cover a single town, others several towns in several countries. All of them are presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world – a conviction that sparked numerous collections of end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by Christopher Columbus.

Misquotes and Hoaxes

Nostradamus' writings have frequently been mistranslated and, in some instances, even deliberately altered in order to "prove" that he supposedly predicted various events – especially the most recent and dramatic ones. There is a persistent tendency to claim that 'Nostradamus predicted whatever has just happened'. This applied most recently to the September 11, 2001 attacks on New York. Almost as soon as the event had happened, the relevant Internet sites were deluged with enquiries into whether Nostradamus had predicted the event. In response, Nostradamus enthusiasts started searching desperately for a Nostradamus quatrain that could be said to have done so. The best they could come up with was quatrain VI.97, which in the original 1557 edition ran:

Cinq & quarante degrés ciel bruslera,

Feu approucher de la grand cité neufve,

Instant grand flamme esparse saultera,

Quant on voudra des Normans faire preuve:

With instant evidently a version of the Latin instanter ('violently, vehemently'), a reasonable English translation would thus appear to be:

Five and forty degrees, the sky shall burn:

To great ‘New City’ shall the fire draw nigh.

With vehemence the flames shall spread and churn

When with the Normans they conclusions try.

To the enthusiasts, this was meat and drink. 'Five and forty degrees' was the latitude of New York City (which it isn't), or really meant '40.5 degrees' (even though the decimal point had not yet come into use in the Europe of Nostradamus's day); the 'New City' had to be New York (even though Nostradamus refers to lots of 'New Cities', normally because that is what their names actually mean, such as Villeneuve, Villanova, even Naples – from Greek Neapolis, 'new city'); and the 'Normans' – well, they just had to be fitted in somehow. Realising that this simply wouldn't do, some of them now suggested that the first line 'really' referred to the angle at which one of the hijacked airliners hit the Twin Towers (which is extremely dubious, even if the rest fitted). Mercifully, none of them went on to suggest that it 'really' referred to the temperature at the time...

In fact, the verse merely appears to be an undated projection into the future of the capture of Naples by the Normans in 1139 during a year marked by a notably violent eruption of nearby Mount Vesuvius that is recorded in the contemporary Annales Cassini. Lemesurier (op. cit. below) suggests that in this case the first expression may simply be a version of

Cinq[ante minutes] & quarante degrés

– which is indeed the latitude of Naples.

Perhaps in frustration, the searchers now turned to quatrain I.87, which in the original 1555 edition (Albi copy) ran:

Ennosigée feu du centre de terre

Fera trembler au tour de cité neufve:

Deux grands rochiers long temps feront la guerre

Puis Arethusa rougira nouveau fleuve.

or, in a possible English translation:

Earth-shaking fires from the world’s centre roar:

Around ‘New City’ is the earth a-quiver.

Two nobles long shall wage a fruitless war,

The nymph of springs pour forth a new, red river.

This, of course, was a gift. The cité neufve had once again to be New York (what else could it possibly be?); au tour de had to refer to the Twin Towers (even though, in French, the word tour in the masculine – as it is here – has absolutely nothing to do with towers); the Deux grands rochiers had to be the Twin Towers themselves (one couldn't, after all, expect Nostradamus – who was more than familiar with the huge Gothic cathedral towers of contemporary Europe – to know what a tower was!); and Arethusa had of course to be an anagram of 'the USA'. Once again, however, rather more sober investigation once again revealed (bearing in mind that, in French, faire la guerre aux rochers, or 'to make war on the rocks', simply means 'to struggle fruitlessly') that the reference was probably to Naples and its nearby volcano, and particularly to the Annales Cassini's report of its first known lava eruption in 1036, at a time when the Lombards of Capua and the Byzantine dukes of Naples were constantly at war over the city prior to the decisive intervention of the Normans. For 968, similarly, Leo Marsicanus had reported in the same annals that ‘Mount Vesuvius exploded into flames and sent out huge quantities of sticky, sulphurous matter that formed a river rushing down to the sea’. And, given that Arethusa was the classical nymph of springs and rivers, with a well-known 'spring of Arethusa' still visitable today in the Sicilian port of Syracuse...

Meanwhile the following spoof text was already being circulated on the Internet, along with many more elaborate variants (one of them signed 'Nostradamus 1654' – when he would, of course, have been just 150 years old!):

In the City of God there will be a great thunder,

Two brothers torn apart by Chaos,

while the fortress endures,

the great leader will succumb,

The third big war will begin when the big city is burning

As it turns out, the first four lines were indeed written before the attacks, but by a Canadian graduate student named Neil Marshall as part of a research paper in 1997. Ironically enough, the research paper included this poem as an illustrative example of how the validity of prophecies is often exaggerated. For example, the "City of God" (why is New York City the City of God?), "great thunder" (could apply to just about any disaster), "Two brothers" (lots of things come in pairs), and "the great leader will succumb" phrases are so ambiguous as to be meaningless. The fifth line was added by an anonymous Internet user, showing obvious alteration since Nostradamus wrote his Propheties in four-line verses called quatrains. Nostradamus also never actually referred to a "third big war".

Sometimes, though, the Internet hoaxes are tongue-in-cheek:

Come the millennium, month 12

In the home of greatest power,

The village idiot will come forth

To be acclaimed the leader.

This was supposed, of course, to refer to the election of George W. Bush as President of the United States.

To verify the authenticity of a purported Nostradamus quatrain, compare the identifying number (e.g.: C1, Q25 or 'I.25' means Century 1, Quatrain 25) against an authoritative version of Nostradamus's works, which will probably also contain the original old French – or click on the appropriate link below to see facsimiles of the originals.

Nostradamus in popular culture

Television

The television series Alias prominently features the character Milo Rambaldi, a fictional Nostradamus-like prophet. In the science fiction series First Wave, the protagonists use the quatrains of Nostradamus to fight back against an alien invasion. Nostradamus has also been parodied on Comedy Central's Chappelle's Show as Negrodamus.

Film

He is the subject of many films and videos, including:

Nostradamus: The Man Who Saw Tomorrow at IMDb (1981)
Nostradamus at IMDb (2000)
Nostradamus at IMDb (1994) Depicts Nostradamus's rise in influence, because of success in treating plague and his predictions, culminating in his appointment as court physician to Charles IX of France.

None of them can be regarded as factual or reliable, though.

Music

Composer Robert Steadman has twice used Nostradamus' prophecies in pieces of music: in the 1987's quatrains by Nostradamus were juxtaposed with the Latin Requiem Mass text and poems on environmental issues. And in 1999, he set what was thought by some to be Nostradamus's prediction of the end of the world for soprano and chamber ensemble in The Final Prophecy.

In 2005, Dutch band Kayak released a rock opera called Nostradamus - Fate of Man. English singer/songwriter Al Stewart wrote a song called "Nostradamus", concerning the prophecies, for his 1973 album Past, Present, and Future.

Comics

In an Italian Mickey Mouse story, Mickey and Goofy travel back in time and by accident a young boy followed them back to the present. The boy had to go back to his own time and his memory of the future was erased, but before that he grabbed pieces of books. The boy of course became Nostradamus and the ripped pages from books explained his visions of the future. The story was made by Massimo Marconi and Massimo De Vita.

A Phantom story from 1983 by Ulf Granberg and Jaime Vallvé featured an appearance by Nostradamus.

In the DC Comics Universe, Nostradamus was an ancestor of Zatara and Zatanna.

In Scott Adams's comic strip Dilbert, "Nostradogbert" is a pseudonym of Dogbert.

Sources

Originals (see External links below for facsimiles)

Nostradamus, Michel: Orus Apollo, 1545 (?), unpublished ms
Nostradamus, Michel, Almanachs, Presages and Pronostications, 1550-1567
Nostradamus, Michel, Ein Erschrecklich und Wunderbarlich Zeychen..., Nuremberg, 1554
Nostradamus, Michel, Les Propheties, Lyon, 1555, 1557 (September), 1568
Nostradamus, Michel, Traite des fardemens et des confitures, 1555, 1556, 1557
Nostradamus, Michel, Paraphrase de C. Galen sus l'exhortation de Menodote, 1557
Nostradamus, Michel, Lettre de Maistre Michel Nostradamus, de Salon de Craux en Provence, A la Royne mere du Roy, 1566

Modern studies and re-editions

Dupèbe, Jean, Nostradamus: Lettres inédites, 1983
Randi, James, The Mask of Nostradamus, 1993, (mainly for his demolition of traditional commentators)
Brind'Amour, Pierre, Nostradamus astrophile, 1993
Brind'Amour, Pierre, Nostradamus. Les premières Centuries ou Prophéties, 1996
Lemesurier, Peter, The Nostradamus Encyclopedia, 1997
Prévost, Roger, Nostradamus, le mythe et la réalité, 1999
Chevignard, Bernard, Présages de Nostradamus 1999
Wilson, Ian, Nostradamus: The Evidence, 2002
Clébert, Jean-Paul, Prophéties de Nostradamus, 2003
Gruber, Dr Elmar, Nostradamus: sein Leben, sein Werk und die wahre Bedeutung seiner Prophezeiungen, 2003
Lemesurier, Peter, The Unknown Nostradamus, 2003 (biography)
Lemesurier, Peter, Nostradamus: The Illustrated Prophecies, 2003

External links