Nostradamus, Prophet of Mystery

FireIce SG

In 1555 a French seer predicted that his king, Henery II of France, would die in a jousting accident. Four years later the prophecy was tragically fulfilled. This was just one of the 942 famous predictions that Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, began to publish in 1555.

Born in Provence, in the south of France, in 1503, Nostradamus studied medicine at Montpellier. He was apparantly caring and courageous and treated many unfortunate plague victims. He became interested in magic and the occult, and travelled widely. In around 1534 Nostradamus married a beautiful and wealthy girl, and they had two children. But tragically the plague claimed his whole family.

Nostradamus developed a reputation as a seer early on. While walking one day in Italy, so the story goes, he encountered a monk and immediately knelt, referring to the man as His Holiness. About 45 years later the monk became Pope Sixtus V. Then in 1550, Nostradamus began recording his prophecies.

In 1554 Nostradamus married a wealthy widow, Anne Ponsart Gemelle, who bore him six children. He started publishing his predictions in 1555, covering events up to the year 3797. His contemporaries took his prophecies very seriously -- Henr's widow, Queen Catherine de Medicis, who was his patron, had great respect for him.

Nostradamus prophesied by scrying, an ancient method of divination. At night he would gaze into a bowl of water placed on a brass tripod until he was possessed by the inspiration. It was then that he would see and hear future events. Nostradamus presented each of his predictions in a four-line verse, or quatrain; a hundred quatrains make up each of 10 Centuries, except for the 17th Century, which as 42. To avoid accusations of witchcraft, Nostradamus "scrambled" his writing, using an obscure mixture of symbols and words in French, Italian, Provencal, Latin and Greek. The chronological order is deliberately confused, but many quatrains seem uncannily close to recorded events.

The prophet is said to have predicted the fate of Napoleon; the American Revolution and the American Civil War; events in English monarchical history, including the abdiction of King Edward VIII; the assassinations in the United States of Abraham Lincoln, John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy; and the success of Iran of the Ayatollah Khomeini. He is also said to have foreseen air and space travel, and the moon landings.

Before the Second World War the Maginot line of defences was built because the then French chief of staff believed that one particular quatrain indicated the invasion of France would take place via Switzerland. Despite such enduring influence, the prophet who believed that awareness and action could alter the future would doubtless be disappointed to learn how little his predictions have helped to avert disasters.

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FireIce SG

:::The Prophecies of Nostradamus:::

Ever since Nostradamus began to publish his predictions in 1555, people have attempted to explain them. In 1939 Josef Goebbels alerted Adolf Hitler to Quatrain II:24:

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers,
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister.
He will drag the leader in a cage of iron,
When the child of Germany observes no law.

The name Hister was close enough ti Hitler and the war theme appropriate but the quatrain did not predict triumph for Germany. Fake prophecies proclaiming victory were dropped by the Luftwaffe over France and Belgium.

The obscure writing of Nostradamus often makes his work difficult to interpret, but the last two digits of the date in Quatrain II:51 are explicit enough in his prediction of the Great Fire of London for 1666:

The blood of the just will be demanded of London Burnt by fire in three times twenty plus six.

Some verses are wrong, forecasting events that did not take place -- such as Quatrain VI:54:

At dawn, at second cock-crow,
Those of Tunis, Fez and Bougie,
The Arabs captured by the King of Morocco,
In the year 1607 by the Liturgie.

But these failures are more than compensated for by the accuracy of other lines, for example, prophesying the rise of Napoleon:

An emperor will be born near Italy,
Who will cost the Empire very dearly.

And his relinquishment of power on St Helena:

A small place of tiny are in the middle of which
He will come to lay down his sceptre.

Nostradamus also described Louis XVI's unsuccessful flight to Varennes in 1791 and the gruesome guillotine of the French Revolution:

By night will come through the forest of Reines
Two partners by roundabout way;
The Queen, the white stone,
The monk-King dressed in grey at Varennes,
The elected Capet causes tempest, fire and bloody slicing,

Quatrain III:96 states:

The leader from Fossano will have his throat cut
By the man who exercised the bloodhounds and greyhounds.
The deed will be committed by those of the Tarpean rock,
When Saturn is in Lep on thirteenth February.

The king of Fossano was the Duc de Berry's grandfather. The duke was stabbed to death by a stable worker on 13 February 1820. The assassin was a Republican -- a technical link to the Tarpean rock of execution in Republican Rome.