Recently I saw a movie on cable TV called “The Man Who Saw Tomorrow,” about. . . Nostradamus the prognosticator. ... Nostradamus claims that first Halley’s comet will screw up the entire world and then in the 1990s a Middle East/Russia collaboration will wage nuclear war on the West for 27 years, after which the U.S. and Russia will join together to defeat the Islamic horde. Should I begin to say my prayers?
Wow! That’s exactly how it all went down!
Well. Almost.
The most famous prognosticator since biblical times is Michel de Nostredame, aka Nostradamus, the 16th-century French physician/astrologer/author. Nostradamus claimed to be able to see the future, and he wrote hundreds and hundreds of prophecies encased in four-line verses, or quatrains.
Every time there’s a modern-day disaster or tragedy, someone trots out some obscure Nostradamus quatrain as “proof” that old Nosty saw it coming.
One of the most famous examples is the supposed prediction of Hitler’s reign:
Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers
The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister
Into a cage of iron will the great ones be drawn
When the child of Germany observes nothing
Hister is obviously a reference to Hitler, right? Well, no. It’s actually an old name for the lower portion of the Danube, and it appears in dozens of other quatrains by Nostradamus.
The rest is just vaguely worded, semi-intelligible gibberish that could be retrofitted to mean something about World War II—if that’s what you’re looking for.
Such is the case with virtually every single one of Nosty’s 900-plus “prophecies.” You can take a generic phrase here or a coincidental reference there, apply it to a modern-day tragedy, and say, “See? Nostradamus was a genius!”
In the aftermath of 9/11, a widely circulated e-mail credited Nostradamus with predicting the attacks. He supposedly wrote:
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
Problem is, Nostradamus didn’t pen those lines. In fact, a Canadian university student named Neil Marshall wrote the first three lines a few years prior to 9/11 in an effort to debunk the Nostradamus myth. He couldn’t have possibly known that his very lines would be attributed to Nostradamus just a few years later.
Or could he?
Perhaps Neil Marshall is Nostradamus reincarnated!
When John F. Kennedy Jr.’s plane crashed in 1999, some Nostradamus believers pointed to these lines:
The year 1999 seven months
From the sky will come the great King of Terror
To resuscitate the great king of the Mongols
John F. Kennedy Jr., his wife, and his wife’s sister were killed when Kennedy’s small plane crashed on July 18, 1999. One of Nostradamus’s quatrains mentioned “the year 1999 seven months.”
End of “eerie similarities.” Even if you want to stretch things to the point where death is “the King of Terror,” what’s up with that whole “king of the Mongols” thing? At the time of John Jr.’s death, he wasn’t even king of the magazine world.
And nobody was resuscitated.
Ooh, how about this one:
From the human flock nine will be sent away
Separated from their judgment and counsel
Their fate will be sealed on departure
Kappa, Thita, Lambda the banished dead err
This is clearly a reference to the Challenger space shuttle tragedy of 1986. Clearly. Even though there were seven aboard the Challenger—not nine—and the rest of it doesn’t mean anything.
And so it goes.
Nostradamus was a kooky guy with a big beard and an active brain and delusions of grandeur. He wrote in vague terms about all manner of future (and past) disasters, wars, and tragedies. When translated, retrofitted, and viewed through the prism of the willing, some of his writings can be connected in the most tenuous terms to real-life events.
If you sat down and wrote nearly a thousand similarly worded quatrains right now, in about 400 years your track record would probably come close to matching Nosty’s.
But everyone in your life would abandon you because of the whole “writing a thousand quatrains to prove a point” thing. So don’t do it.