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NOSTRADAMUS

NOSTRADAMUS. THE NAME EVOKES the image of a mystical seer dwelling in the half-light of the past, his prophecies coming to us in yellowed volumes that presage disasters in the near distance.

Who was Nostradamus? What did he predict? Could he see the future?

To see what Nostradamus was trying to say and whether his words have meaning for us today, it’s helpful to step back and look at him in the context of his times. Although for most people Nostradamus is a shadowy figure, we have a reasonably clear picture of what he was like.

Michel de Nostradamus was born on December 14, 1503, in St.-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France. His father was a scrivener and attorney named Jacobus de Nostredame, or “James of Our Lady.” Originally the family was probably of Jewish origin and took this name as a sign of allegiance to their new Catholic faith. As an adult, Michel would Latinize the surname to “Nostradamus” in the fashion of learned men of his era.

For much of his life, Nostradamus was a wandering scholar, studying and practicing subjects as diverse as medicine, astrology, and even cosmetics and confections. He once made lozenges of rose petals that, he claimed, sweetened the breath and prevented one from getting the plague. (People in those days believed that contagion was spread by noxious odors.)

Only when he was over forty was Nostradamus able to settle down for good. In 1547, he moved to the town of Salon in Provence, in the south of France, and married a rich widow. In 1550, he began to produce an item that was very much in demand at the time: a yearly almanac. In the early sixteenth century, Europe was beset by what climatologists call the “Little Ice Age”—decades of below-average temperatures that played havoc with crops and caused periodic famine. Long-range weather forecasting did not exist in any real sense, and people relied on almanacs, which provided vague weather predictions, to give them some idea of what was coming. Almanacs—including Nostradamus’s—also featured prophecies for the coming year.

Although or because Nostradamus’s predictions in his annual almanacs were often vague (“there shall be a great change of condition, almost from top to bottom, and the opposite from bottom to top”), they proved so successful that by 1554, he embarked upon a much more ambitious enterprise: writing a cycle of predictions in quatrains, or four-lined verses. Eventually they would be collected into ten “centuries,” or groups of hundred quatrains, which would form the bedrock of his reputation. The collection was entitled Prophéties (“Prophecies”). If Nostradamus is quoted today, it’s usually from this work.

What did he use to make his predictions? Most likely a combination of three methods. One technique involves scrying. This essentially means putting the mind in a meditative state and watching attentively—but without editing or censoring—the images that come up. A second method was mundane astrology, which uses the movements and relations of the planets to forecast national and world events. Finally, Nostradamus mined older books of prophecies for his ideas. Since the beginning of Christianity, there has been a vibrant prophetic tradition that tries to take up where the Bible leaves off. Many of these prophecies foretell the coming of a universal Christian monarch to precede Christ’s Second Advent. Nostradamus adapted these predictions for his era.

For all the ups and downs that he endured in his early life, in his later years Nostradamus proved astonishingly fortunate. His greatest piece of luck was Catherine de’ Medici, wife of King Henri II of France. Catherine was a remarkable and powerful woman who for much of her life served as a power behind the throne, but she was also an intense devotee of occultism. Seers, magicians, and astrologers received a warm welcome at her court, and Nostradamus was to be prime among them.

What really cemented Nostradamus’s reputation, however, was an event that seemed to fulfill a strangely worded verse in his Prophecies:

The young lion will overcome the old one

In a martial field by a duel one on one:

In a cage of gold his eyes will burst:

Two classes one, then to die, cruel death.

Like most of Nostradamus’s verses, this one is abrupt, cryptic, and broken in its grammar. Nonetheless, it appeared to be strikingly fulfilled with a bizarre disaster involving King Henri II. Henri was fond of medieval tournaments (already an antique affectation in those days) and enjoyed participating in them himself. In 1559, he jousted against a young nobleman. The nobleman’s lance shattered on Henri’s shield; a large splinter went up through the visor of Henri’s helmet, pierced his eye, and lodged in his brain.

Given the state of surgery in those times, the case was hopeless, and the king died in agony eleven days later. Almost immediately, Nostradamus was credited with predicting the weird accident. The “cage of gold” was the gilded visor of Henri’s helmet; the “young lion,” his opponent.

Thus Nostradamus’s Prophecies became required reading. The queen was his greatest supporter, even deigning to visit him at his home in 1564. Nostradamus’s career was at its height by the time he died in 1566. One evening he told his secretary, Jean-Aymé de Chavigny, “You will not find me alive at sunrise”—a prediction that proved correct.

Nostradamus’s reputation continued to grow after his death. Chavigny republished the full text of the Prophecies in 1568 (he is suspected of doctoring some of the verses to improve their accuracy). Since then, these bizarre mystical poems have remained in print—a remarkable feat for a book that is nearly four hundred and fifty years old.

But the seer did not become widely known in the United States until World War II, when the Nazis were making use of him for propaganda. Several of Nostradamus’s quatrains speak of “Hister”—an ancient name for the Danube River. For Nostradamus, this name almost certainly meant the Austrian Hapsburg monarchy, in his day one of the great powers of Europe. But the Nazis exploited this detail to predict the triumph of Hitler, who came from Austria and whose name looks very much like “Hister.”

The Nazis’ propaganda worked so well that the Allies had to produce their own Nostradamus propaganda in response. During the war, MGM made four movies about Nostradamus. Since those days, he has been a standard feature of the popular landscape. His name is splashed over the more imaginative tabloids—usually in connection with predictions that have nothing to do with anything he really said. He has become such a standard feature of the popular mind that immediately after the 9/11 calamity, the most common word searched for on the Internet was “Nostradamus.”

But what did he really predict? Let’s see what he said in the quatrain that supposedly foretold 9/11:

Forty-five degrees, the sky will burn,

Fire to approach the great new city.

Instantly a great scattered flame will leap up,

When one will want to make proof of the Normans.

By this interpretation, the “new city” is New York, situated at 42 degrees north latitude (close enough to 45 degrees to satisfy many). Even the reference to “making proof of the Normans” seems to fit, since many Americans felt that the “Normans”—i.e., the French—did not support the United States sufficiently in its antiterrorist efforts afterward.

Most likely, though, Nostradamus was thinking of other cities closer to home. A prime candidate is Naples, whose original Greek name, Neapolis, literally means “new city.” Naples is close to Mount Vesuvius, an active volcano whose eruption buried the Roman cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum in 79 A.D. If we take this verse at face value, it seems to be predicting a volcanic disaster for Naples. (Naples is at 40 degrees north latitude, but as astrologers of his day complained, Nostradamus was not always careful in calculations.) Although Vesuvius has erupted continually since Nostradamus’s time (the most recent episode was in 1944), Naples itself so far has been spared. Alternatively, Nostradamus could be thinking of one of many cities in France called Villeneuve (also meaning “new city”), which are closer to the 45-degree parallel.

By the way, the quatrain above is a literal translation of what Nostradamus actually wrote. Soon after 9/11, a number of versions of this prophecy started to circulate on the Internet, some of them combining parts of this verse with others taken out of context, some of them made up wholesale. These versions can be found by looking for “Urban Legends” on the Web, which is exactly what they are.

Nevertheless, Nostradamus’s reputation would not be so indestructible unless he had some apparent successes. And he did. Many of these involve England, a country Nostradamus probably never visited and with which he otherwise doesn’t seem to concern himself. One example:

The fortress near the Thames

Will fall when the king is locked inside.

Near the bridge he will be seen in a shirt.

One in front dead, then in the fort barred up.

The striking part of this verse is the reference to an imprisoned king who is “seen in a shirt.” King Charles I of England, deposed by a popular revolution, was publicly beheaded in London in January 1649. He famously said before his execution, “Let me have a shirt more than ordinary, by reason the season is so sharp as probably make me shake [sic], which some will imagine proceeds from fear. I would have no such imputation.”

Even so, the connection isn’t that clear. The king was not executed “near the bridge”—that is, London Bridge, the only one in the city at the time—but two miles away. Other details in the quatrains don’t fit the episode as well. This situation, where one or two details seem very striking but the rest of the verse doesn’t make a great deal of sense in the same context, is true of practically all of Nostradamus’s prophecies, even the more successful ones.

Considering all this, we can ask, what was Nostradamus’s real agenda? Overall, he probably did not have one. He had tried many occupations, including doctor and confectioner, before hitting on one that made him a success. It’s also true that he thought of himself as a seer and a magus, and like most such men he never ceased delving into life’s mysteries. He was lucky to have hit upon an occupation that enabled to him to pursue his interests while also bestowing fame and prosperity.

Even so, we do see the general outlines of a prophetic direction in Nostradamus. He keeps returning to the theme of a coming universal Christian monarch, as in this verse:

Like a gryphon will come the king of Europe,

Accompanied by those of Aquilon,

Of reds and whites he will lead a great troop,

And they will go against the king of Babylon.

Here the “king of Europe” probably refers to this universal monarch; “Aquilon,” from the Latin word for the North Wind, figuratively refers to the north. Since biblical times, “Babylon” has symbolized spiritual wickedness or apostasy. In this case “the king of Babylon” probably refers to the sultan of the Ottoman Empire (today’s Turkey), who in Nostradamus’s day ruled over Mesopotamia, including the abandoned city of Babylon. The sultan was also head of the Muslims, who to Christians in those days were infidels, so the name fit in this sense as well.

Many of Nostradamus’s other forecasts allude to a coming Muslim invasion of Europe. In a way, this was no prophecy: it was happening in his own time. The European powers were struggling, not always successfully, to keep the Ottomans at bay. In Nostradamus’s time, the Ottomans had control of the Balkans and the eastern Mediterranean, and were constantly pushing westward. His verses predict that they will penetrate far into Europe before the great Christian monarch arises to drive them away. Some interpreters of Nostradamus today link these prophecies with the current influx of Muslims into Europe, but the connection does not hold up well. Muslims in countries like France and Germany have for the most part come there peacefully, to work. It is hard to fit them into Nostradamus’s views of Turkish hordes sweeping across Europe.

This brings us to a crucial point about Nostradamus’s prophecies. They usually make sense in light of the fears and preconceptions of his time; in this context they’re often much clearer than they are given credit for. Although he claimed that his prophecies extended to the year 3797 A.D. (it’s not clear why he chose this date), most of them seem to be meant for his own day.

Moreover, Nostradamus’s prophecies, as we’ve seen, are vague and allusive. With their broken grammar and cryptic verbiage, they possess a power that can only be called oracular—and oracles are famed for their obscurity. Sometimes he seems almost to be speaking of archetypal situations, much like the texts appended to the hexagrams of the I Ching, which can be applied to many circumstances. It’s this feature, probably more than any other, that has ensured Nostradamus’s popularity.

If Nostradamus’s record is so spotty, we might then ask, is it possible to predict the future at all? To answer this question, it’s helpful to remember that many spiritual teachings say that reality is ultimately mental in nature: something exists in the realm of thought before it exists in reality. In simple terms, you have to have some idea of the picture you’re going to paint before you paint it. But it is said that events, too, exist in a realm of thought before they manifest in the physical world. This, in fact, is why thought has such power: an extremely effective way of changing reality is to change your thoughts about it.

If all this is true, it should theoretically be possible to glimpse events in the world of thought forms before they manifest in reality. This is what most prophecy attempts to do, but in practice it generally doesn’t work all that well. To see this for yourself, just go to any shop that sells used books and take a look at works of prophecy that were published ten or twenty years ago. You’ll be amazed—but not at their accuracy.

In what sense, then, can we see the future? Many people have premonitions that serve as warnings or guideposts for the time ahead—foretelling an accident, the death of a loved one, and so on. In short, the future is sometimes revealed to us—but usually only in the very short term, and in terms of what affects us personally. Big-picture issues, such as who will win the next election or when the Dow will hit 15,000, are, the unseen realms seem to be saying, none of our business.

This may seem discomfiting today, when we are constantly inundated by warnings of all sorts of disasters, natural and supernatural, supposedly to come. But we don’t have to worry. If the past is any guide, practically none of these prophecies will come true. And in any case, the lesson isn’t about seeing the future. It is about having the inner strength and serenity to know we can deal with whatever the future brings.