It is difficult to start from any other point except that of a voice emanating from nothing, a shadow of itself, unstructured even, because it seems to reject every classification and invalidate every norm or rule. It is not only the syntactical order of the Prophecies of Nostradamus that is disjointed by the almost complete absence of pronouns and conjunctions, or sometimes of verbs. It is also that the words do not carry a rational meaning. His prophetic quatrains play metaphorically with knowledge as though reflecting a cognitive illusion the better to question it:1
The bright star seven days shall burn
Cloud shall cause two suns to appear:
All night long the great mastiff shall howl,
When great pontiff changes his abode.
Nostradamus uses here a well-attested source, taking inspiration from it whilst at the same time paraphrasing and modifying it. Nothing, however, explains why he makes the changes that he does. The source is the fourth-century BCE Roman writer, Julius Obsequens’ Book of Prodigies (Liber de prodigiis), in which he describes a star of extraordinary brightness which shone for a whole week long at the time of the Roman consuls Marc Antony and Publius Cornelius Dolabella.2 Referring to this new star, Nostradamus makes a surprising correction to the text. The Roman historian referred to three suns, shining brightly whilst dogs bayed all night long in front of the house of the triumvir (or ‘great pontiff’) Marcus Aemilius Lepidus, the largest of them having been torn to pieces by the other. The dog becomes a single ferocious hound in Nostradamus. These were, as Pierre Brind’Amour has shown, the portents of the civil war between Caesar and Marc Antony. But it is difficult to know what Nostradamus intended by this prophetic exemplum. Was it simply intended to reiterate, in a slightly modified form and perhaps adapted to the poetic medium, prodigies from the time of the end of the Roman republic, hence to establish a paradigm for the chaos of civil war? Or was it intended to evoke a parallel historic epoch, because the ‘great mastiff’ makes another appearance in the fifth century:3
The great mastiff from the city chased
Will snarl at the foreign alliance:
After having chased the stag across the fields
The Wolf and the Bear will defy each other.
This time it is no longer a dog barking at night, driven by a predatory instinct, but someone vexed by a ‘foreign’ alliance such that those who have chased the stag, in this case the wolf and bear, will end up at each other's throats.
The impression is that Nostradamus is playing with epochal time, and that the quatrain, rather than being a presage of the dark future in store for Lepidus, could as well apply to the time of the Great Schism (the antipope John XXIII being known as the ‘stag of Naples’). Equally, it might refer to some other unidentified historical time (the pontiff being known as the ‘servant’ [‘servus’, but also ‘cervus’, viz ‘stag’] of the servants of Christ’), or even eschatological time, since the stag could be a reference to Christ. What, at first sight, might seem to be an authentic historical point in time becomes, therefore, by the creative processes of imaginative writing, falsified or undermined. It is a sure sign that one must not be sidetracked into the trap of trying to make such identifications. We should rather imagine it as a kind of poetic composition, piecing together different elements of narrative whilst at the same time deforming them. The result of such metamorphoses is to put into perspective any attempt to link them to any particular event in the past, since it could also apply to another one subsequently.4 Nostradamus was not the historian that some have claimed him to be. He wrote his predictions deliberately around the principle of destabilizing the past as well as the future, and the passing moments in time that characterize one epoch from another. He does so precisely in order to indicate the irreparable frailty of our human understanding, which is part of our ontology as human beings. Nostradamus’ fundamental approach to writing is to undermine what would make sense to us, and to erode its potentiality from within. In this scheme of things:5
The world's final age close by,
Slow still Saturn will return:
Empire transferred toward the nation of Brodde,
The eye plucked out at Narbonne by the Vulture.
In a cycle of 354 years and 4 months – corresponding to that of the reign of the planets – the Empire will be handed over to the ‘Brodde nation’ (perhaps the Savoyards) and the eye plucked out by a vulture at Narbonne.6 The incident of the vulture is certainly to be found in the predictions of Julius Obsequens but it does not take place in Narbonne. Is the eye in question a person, a prince, or a divinity? Nostradamus locates nothing – time, space, people or their attributes – in any fixed way. He refashions them logically but also arbitrarily in a way dictated to him by his style of oracular utterance.
What undoubtedly makes the quatrains particularly disconcerting and hard to apprehend is their apparent lack of order (ordo neglectus). Unstructured digressions, unsequentialities, discrepancies, or appparent semiological similarities create a sense of overall multiplicity. Here is an initial example:7
Born deformed, in horror suffocated,
Inhabiting the city of the great King:
Severe edict captives revoked
Hail and thunder, priceless Condom.
It is difficult to discern even the smallest degree of logic in this quatrain – unless, that is, one starts from the premise of a conjuncture of the monstrous birth or death of a child with that of the revocation of an edict as the preliminary sign of an extraordinary storm to hit the town of Condom! Here is a further example:8
The wretch overcome will die of grief,
His female vanquisher will celebrate his fall:
Fresh set of laws clear edict decreed,
The wall and Prince on the seventh day will fall.
Once again, the association of two completely divergent statements – the death of a broken man, overcome by melancholy at his own ill-fortune, and the decreeing of a fresh law – provide the preconditions for a prophetic outcome that will occur on the seventh day, the day of Saturn. The identified outcome depends on the apprehension of a convergence of random facts that appear to have no causal relationship to each other. In the two instances cited, similar causes (the death of a monster, and that of a wretched individual) do not produce similar effects for, in the first, a law is repealed, and in the second it is decreed.
What Nostradamus seeks to provide, then, is a key to a language of outcomes that relies on unsequentiality, on a deconstruction of the inductive and deductive rationality of knowledge that seems, nevertheless, to function on the basis of an interchangeable register of factual postulates. Here is a third example:9
Sanctity, too faint and seductive,
Accompanied by a fluent tongue:
The old city and Parma too hasty
Florence and Siena shall turn more desert-like.
Everything here seems to revolve around the power of words, whose very abundance is (in a system of inverted relationships) a premonition of the solitude or silence awaiting the two cities of Tuscany. In Nostradamus’ scheme of antimonies, more of the one (words) means less of the other (sound). It is as if Nostradamus has determined that one of the rules of grammar for reading the outcomes of prophetic utterances is that of contradiction – the contradiction between abundance and scarcity, between word and silence. A further example demonstrates the point:10
Born under the shadows and nocturnal day
In sovereign benevolence shall reign:
Will renew his blood from the ancient urn,
Making new the age of bronze into that of gold.
The person who, by his birth, is the incarnation of obscurity and ill-fortune will turn out, on the contrary, to be the one who restores light and happiness.
The rule of meaningful antimonies, however, does not apply universally. There are cases where it does not work, and the normal logic (that similar things have similar outcomes) applies. Hence:11
Will be born from gulf, and city without end
Born of obscure and tenebrous parents:
Who the power of the great king revered
Will wish to destroy at Rouen and Evreux.
In this instance, the obscure birth of the individual in question will only bring evil and gloom in its wake. This alternative logical configuration appears in yet a further example, in which obscurity signifies once more the doom to come:12
When the inscription D.M. found
In ancient vault by lamplight discovered,
Ulpian Law, King and Prince tested
Pavilion, Queen and Duke under the cover.
When the inscription D.M. (Deis manibus – i.e. ‘in the hands of the gods’, the inscription on Roman tombs) is discovered and the ancient tomb beneath it is explored by means of a lamp, the Ulpian law relating to marriages will be put to the test, or found wanting, the queen and the duke being hidden together in a tent under a sheet, perhaps engaging in an adulterous relationship. The logic here is, once again, that of similitude, because Nostradamus wants to say that the revelation of a hidden place is the prophetic metaphor for an action that is adulterous, secretly carried out in the confines of a tent. Similitude prevails too, with the premonitory sign of a ‘change in empire’, characteristic of the mutability of human existence:13
Before the change of empire occurs,
A great marvel will occur:
The field shaken, the porphyry column,
Placed, translated on the knobbly rock.
In simple terms, an earthquake will occur. But this shaking of the earth is only cited because it announces another great mutation, adding up to a transfer of rule (translatio emperii), for a porphyry column (an obelisk) will be transported onto a ‘knobbly rock’ signifying the relocation of the See of Rome. The allusion here is to Constantine's choice of Byzantium as his capital after the defeat of Emperor Licinius I, who had sought to maintain the paganism of the East. The new capital was dedicated to the Virgin on 11 May 330 CE and a porphyry column was brought from Egypt to be installed in the forum there. At its pinnacle was placed a statue of the emperor, whose head bore the nails of Christ's Passion. The ‘great marvel’ is thus here the ‘new Rome’ (nova Roma).14
Tempests involving water are notable at presaging efforts to undermine the city by subversion or popular movements. When that water is caused by sea storms, it signifies banishment and invasion:15
By two heads and three arms separated,
The great city attacked by sea:
Its exiled leaders scattered abroad,
By blue-headed Byzantium much harried.
The leaders will be sent into exile whilst Byzantium is menaced by the Persians (those with the blue ‘heads’, or ‘turbans’). The next two quatrains confirm the point:16
The year that Saturn out of bondage,
The Frankish land shall be flooded with water;
Of Trojan blood will be its marriage,
And will be sure surrounded by Spaniards.
Upon the sand by a hideous deluge,
A sea monster found from other seas:
Near to the place a refuge will be made,
Holding Savona slave to Turin.
When Saturn is ‘out of bondage’ is the time when the territory of the Franks will be inundated with water. Trojan blood will make ‘its’ marriage but it will be surrounded by the Spanish. The water which covers the earth here is synonymous, by the effect of similitude, with treason which is carried out in secret, because it is covered. Then again, there are the two quatrains that evoke the Meuse flooding the land of Luxemburg, when Saturn and three other planets enter into Aquarius, and a deluge will soak the mountain and plain, towns and villages of Lorraine, a treason being then carried out in broad daylight.17 Or consider the quatrain in which the countryside around the Straits of Gibraltar, there where Christians will be almost reunited (if that is how to construe the line in question), a large number will be drowned by a flood of water when the two planets Mars and the Sun enter into Pisces.18 Yet there are also moments when the initiative passes back into human hands, and human violence transforms nature. The quatrain where a terrible war will break out in the West is a case in point. The war will be followed a year later by bloodshed and fire in France, and an outbreak of such a severe and deadly plague that humans, young and old, as well as animals will fall prey to it – it all occurring in the conjunction of Mercury, Mars and Jupiter.19
These two rules of similarity and dissimilarity can also be combined. In one quatrain, the sudden arrival of an individual will cause a major fright. In consequence, the principal leaders of the ‘enterprise’ – a conspiracy, no doubt – will pretend that nothing has happened. Thus, Venus will no longer shine forth, which will be a presage that, little by little, the ‘grandees’ will be annoyed.20 On the one hand, the quatrain contains the antimonic opposites of the revealed and the hidden, of presence and absence. On the other hand, a similitude seems to result from the primary antimonic opposite, for when the star of love (Venus) loses its brightness, concord will end, and dissension will overcome the ‘grandees’, who are perhaps the same as the ‘leaders’ of the conspiracy. And, in another quatrain by way of a final example, exiles, who had been deported to the islands, are put to death following the coming to power of a crueller monarch.21 Two exiles will be burned at the stake for having spoken out. Death awaits those who cannot speak out, and those that do as well.
At all events, Nostradamus’ style of writing rests on a lack of order (ordo neglectus), in the multiplication of possible outcomes, and in their implications and contradictions. He relies on what one might term linguistic anarchy, or rather an extreme freedom accorded to words, and to the conjunction between plots and deeds. And yet there is more to the flow of the decasyllables of these quatrains. The peculiar quality of Nostradamus’ prophetic utterance is that it does not conform to a fixed grammar. Whatever the rules are to which it might seem to conform, there is always an exception. That said, there is sometimes a stylistic mode that comes to the fore, a moral discourse of the kind that is to be found in contemporary books of emblems (emblemata). Whenever something links the past to the future, the foreknowledge that it implies carries negative connotations because it is linked to the consistently wretched human condition. Thus, in this quatrain:22
At midnight, the leader of the army
Shall save his skin, vanishing suddenly,
Seven years later, his fame unblemished
At his return, will say no more about it.
At midnight, the army leader will save his own skin, no doubt abandoning his soldiers to a miserable fate, and disappear suddenly into thin air. When he reappears seven years later, his reputation intact, no one will breathe a word about the event. It is as though Nostradamus short-circuits his own prophetic discourse before the obvious fact that, whatever the epoch, time obliterates everything, great and small, powerful and powerless, and that human beings are as incapable of judging the past aright as they are of remembering what happened in it. At all events, it is not the future which is the central focus of his concern, but more the inconstancy of mankind, symbolized by a fickleness of mind, which is a way of revealing to the reader his own weakness as he tries to make sense of what he is reading.
Nostradamus uses the same strategy in this quatrain:23
Triremes full all ages captive,
Time good for evil, sweet for gall:
Prey to Barbarians, too soon they will be hasty,
Greedy to see the feather begrudge the wind.
The triremes are full of prisoners of all ages, but the times will be ill disposed to them, and sweet things will have a bitter taste. Pleased with their plunder, the seafarers will come back to port too hastily, without giving thought to the risks that they run. They will thus be easy prey to barbarians, so greedy have they been to see ‘the feather begrudge the wind’. The moral of the story is, it would seem, not far from a sense that whoever thinks they are close to the object of their quest, risks losing everything; or whoever believes in himself will lose everything, including himself.
We could continue in this same, more proverbial than prophetic, vein. It symbolizes the deconstruction of meaning that must occur for all who think that they have found such meaning. Thus, it will come to pass, says Nostradamus, that wrongs will be perpetrated and in public, and that the just will be put to death. But this judgement will be followed by a reckoning for the authors of that injustice, for there will arise a great plague ‘in this place’ and those responsible for this unjust verdict will be forced to flee.24 Whoever visits death upon someone else will soon find it nearby, or himself become its victim. Whosoever judges will themselves be judged. Whosoever believes that they possess the truth will be caught out by it, and find themselves in the same position as those whom they have hitherto condemned because of it.25
The Duke, wanting to exterminate his kin,
Shall despatch the strongest to foreign parts,
By tyranny to ruin Pisa and Lucca,
Then the Barbarians shall harvest grapes without wine.
The Duke, in other words, will exterminate his own kinsmen and exile the most powerful abroad to ruin Pisa and Lucca through his tyranny. Then the Barbarians will harvest the grapes without wine, i.e. will conquer the lands without shedding their own blood. The quatrain ressembles once more a proverb or dictum to the effect that the desire for power is self-destructive, and that man, the prey to blind passions, is unable to comprehend both the consequences of his own actions and the train of his own thought. This is also the import of another quatrain that seems to evoke a forthcoming transfer of imperial power to a ‘little place’ which will rapidly grow in size to become a county whose significance belies its size, amid which imperial authority will be established.26 The message is that one should not judge by appearances, and that the greatest power can reside in the smallest of places. That message occurs in another quatrain, where a young child, born of poor parents in the depths of Western Europe, will beguile by his utterances a ‘huge gathering’ of people and gain wide renown.27 Everything seems to point the reader, both implicitly and symbolically, towards the feebleness of those who believe in their own capacities – what Marguerite of Navarre termed their presumptive pride (‘cuyder’).
One of Nostradamus’ leitmotifs is that life is nothing if not unjust. It takes no account of individual virtue, pushes it to one side or casts it into the shadows. Almost aphoristic quatrains encapsulate this injustice, this ingratitude.28
Three members of the order of Quirites
Banished, their goods given to their enemies,
All their good deeds will be as of nought
Fleet dispersed, surrendered to the Barbary pirates.
In another quatrain, unwilling to give his consent to a divorce, which would later be regarded as illegitimate, the king will be forced to flee the Islands, and replaced by someone who does not have the appearance of royalty.29 Or, again, there are quatrains which depict societies and rulers that take no account of gratitude and mercy, and reward hatred, as in the case of a ‘great senate’, which lauds the achievements of someone who, shortly afterwards, will be defeated and banished. His followers will be chased out as enemies at the sound of trumpets and their wealth confiscated and sold off.30 Everything takes place as though this earthly life could be summed up in the proverb: ‘what starts well, will finish badly’. An ill-fated marriage will be celebrated with great joy; but it will come to no good end, for the husband and his mother will spurn the bride (‘la nore’) and only after the death of his ‘Phoebe’ (‘Phybe’) will she become the object of pity.31 The lesson is that there is no respite for any of us, and that no one can escape human violence, not even the savage, the hermit or the fugitive. One of the quatrains reads:32
In a goat cave near Saint-Paul de-MAUSOLE,
Hidden and then caught, pulled out by his beard,
Dragged off captive like a mastiff dog
By some people from Bigorre not far from Tarbes.
No doubt he would then be humiliated publicly, if not put on trial. The anecdote suggests that, in this world, security is nowhere to be had, not even as a hermit, far from human society, for that runs the risk of being treated inhumanly, like a wild, savage animal. Even the wildest hairy savage was not safe in his own wilderness!
By that means, and going a stage beyond the deliberate lack of order that defies all logic, Nostradamus deconstructs his own writing. In affirming that his words do not have true meaning he symbolizes that objective, emphasizing that whoever looks for truth in what he writes is seeking in vain, and will be forced to live in error.33
To enter the city, access denied,
Duke shall enter by determined subterfuge:
To weak gates secretly the army led,
Will put it to the torch, cause untold bloodshed.
The surrender of the city by negotiation does not prevent the massacre that unfolds. The besieging army is initially refused entry, but their ‘duke’ gains access by using ‘persuasion’, thus presumably offering clemency to its citizens. Shortly after, through its weak defences, the army enters and the soldiers set it alight, bringing death and bloodshed in their wake. The language of the quatrain is a snare and delusion, itself the instrument of evil and sin. We can only conclude that all the quatrains have an emblematic value. They describe human behaviour, highlighting the inherent risks in human passions, making us aware of hypocrisy, lies, ingratitude, false-dealing, cupidity, envy and wickedness. This is true, even in the instance when the conqueror's leniency is also indicated, as in the case of the ‘great lion’ who, near a ‘big bridge’ adjacent to a vast plain besieges a city which opens its gates to his forces in fear.34 The message of the quatrains to all those who attempt to comprehend them, is that this is to misunderstand their purpose. Their message is that whoever thinks that they can comprehend the enigma of the human world, and explain it, is barking up the wrong tree.
Nostradamus has this further particularity, which is that he leads the reader along, with topics that become wild goose chases. Thus a great queen, vanquished, will take flight upon her horse. She will show ‘more than manly courage’ and cross the river naked, but she will be pursued by the sword and commit suicide.35 Here is seemingly another example of the kind of modification that Nostradamus likes to employ in order somewhat to disorientate his reader. The quatrain doubtless takes its inspiration from the story about Clelia, taken hostage by the Etruscan king Porsenna, who fled through the snow, to be found in Boccaccio's On Famous Women (De mulieribus claris). But the story is altered because Clelia does not kill herself after her heroic deed in his account. And there is a modification, too, in the fact that several of the quatrains are anecdotal in the way they are presented, which puts them in the category of factual incidents which have no enduring logic to them like those we have examined so far, beyond that of contingency. Repetition is set against difference, and particularity is contrasted with regularity. So, there is a woman who dies for joy at the return of her son alongside poison in a letter carried by a messenger.36 There is the procession of the Holy Sacrament brought to a full stop when the ‘divine word’ is struck by lightning; whoever dares to reveal it shall have his lips sealed and will find themselves marching hither and thither.37 Pierre Brind’Amour has identified the potential source for the little prodigy story contained in this quatrain:38
In two lodgings at night fire shall break out,
Many shall suffocate and roast within:
Near two rivers for one alone it shall happen:
Sun, Sag[itarius]. & Capri[corn], all shall die.
It probably referred to the incident of a fire that broke out in Lyon on the rue de la Grenette between the Saône and the Rhône in November 1530.39 In a further example, a poor man, a potter, becomes rich; looking for clay, he finds precious metal. A large number of silver statues of Diana and Mercury are fished out of the lake and the ‘potter’ (‘figulier’) and those around him are sated with riches.40 Perhaps one should put this quatrain in a broader perpective, picking out from its singular occurrence the underlying allegory – that true wealth is to be found among the poor. Or does the allegory signify, rather, that true riches do not come to those who seek them, but they are simply a gift which has to be received as such? What at first sight seems highly mysterious can thus be turned into something very simple. In this following example, the story can be reduced to a straightforward anecdote, based on a judicial case from Provence, so long as one keeps to the main line of transforming, or reducing, it to its simplest:41
Garden of the world, near the new city,
On the road to mountains cavernous,
He will be seized and hurled into the Vat,
Forced to swallow sulfur-poisoned waters.
The ‘new city’ is doubtless Villeneuve-lès-Avignon, and the ‘garden of the world’ close by is perhaps the Comtat Venaissin, or even Provence. A man is caught walking along the road to cavernous mountains, where fugitives from justice hang out, or where minerals are mined. The anecdote hints that it is someone suspected of false coinage, who is then subjected to the punishment traditionally meted out to those found guilty of false coining – namely, that they will be drowned in ‘the Vat’ used for making base metal look like gold, and forced to imbibe the poisoned, boiling sulfur in it.42 It is just one anecdote among so many in Nostradamus’ text, and such profusion is no doubt a reference to the humanist notion of copia. It is also, perhaps, as we will investigate in due course, a demonstration of his erudition, or even a game by which he aims to test the reader's own knowledge, giving him clues by which he can pick up the author's own points of reference. The game leads the reader to realize, however, that Nostradamus’ knowledge disintegrates of its own accord because he has specifically chosen his points of reference to highlight, by means of a disconcerting collage, or series of allegories, the limitations of all human knowledge.
So, Nostradamus writes in riddles. He composes what seem enigmas, not to encourage the reader to find an inner meaning, but to convey, in almost maieutic (or Socratic) fashion, gently, that one should not seek to understand, that the secret of human wisdom is that there is no wisdom. He wants us to understand that those who think they know the truth are the most ignorant, and will lead humanity to evil and misfortune, because in the sublunary world there are always a multiplicity of ways of looking at things. Nostradamus’ thought appears, then, as a thinking of doubt, of casting doubt on knowledge, antithetical to all those futurological approaches that have, from the end of the sixteenth century, taken it over to subvert it for more immediate, short-term and ever more fantastic, ends. There are various reasons for this but the main one is that it is difficult to let go of the idea that the prophet of Salon has a positive message for the world, hard to accept the enunciative tension in his thought, which is part of the epistemological context of his own time. Nostradamus fits into a society that wants to believe, or rather that part of it whose fideism took its roots in a pessimistic view of human self-knowledge, which led to the perception that mankind is at the absolute antithesis of any aptitude towards self-knowledge, and that, in the face of God, mankind is sinful, ignorant with nothing to commend him. God endlessly reminds us of that fact, through the doings and wrongdoings that occur in our lives, and through the signs that appear in the heavens above and around us on earth, in order to bring us back to Him in faith, and detach us from our pride. Take away this starting-point and all that is left is dehistoricized events, about which the perpetual fluidity of the utterances and signs that come and go in prophetic writings can only exude anachronism. The prophet is above all someone who proclaims things as they are, and for Nostradamus the abiding reality is the omnipotence of God, the absolute antithesis of human weakness, and especially in a time of crisis about belief.
This is the context in which to set out some of the quatrains, chosen somewhat at random (though the choice could have been much larger), which are particularly opaque. Read one after another, however, they bring to life a great spectacle of human cruelty, and therefore (by logical extension) a panopticon of human folly:
In great sorrow shall be the French people,
Vain lightheartheadness shall be seen as temerity:
No bread, salt, wine, water, wine, beer:
The grandee captive, hunger cold, necessity.43
[The French nobility will be in great sorrow, for whoever has a vain and lighthearted heart will always show more foolhardiness and, moreover, there will be no bread, salt, water, wine or beer. The grandee will be a prisoner, and there will be famine, hunger and dearth.]
After rest, they will sail to Epirus,
Great assistance will come towards Antioch:
Blackbeard shall take the side of the Empire,
Bronzebeard shall roast him on a spit.44
[After a pause ‘they’ will make for Epirus, and the great rescue will set forth near Antioche. Blackbeard will aspire to be overlord, but Bronzebeard will be roasted on a spit.]
With the rage of one who reaches the water,
With great fury, all the troops are stirred up:
Seventeen boats laden with nobles,
Messenger late come along the Rhône.45
[By the rage of a person who reaches the water, all the army will be stirred up into a fury; seventeen boats will be loaded with nobles but the messenger along the banks of the Rhône will arrive too late.]
The great Celtic Prelate suspected by the King
By night shall quit the realm running away:
By duke fertile to his great British king,
Byzance by Cyprus, Tunis unsuspected.46
[The great Celtic Prelate will be held in suspicion by the King and he will flee the kingdom by night. Thanks to the duke, Brittany will remain faithful to its great king; Byzance will be held in suspicion by Cyprus and Tunis.]
The great folded tapestry will not show,
More than half at the most the story:
Chased far from the realm cruel will appear
That in warlike matters everyone will take his word for it.47
[The great tapestry will be folded such that it will not display more than at ‘most half the story’. The one who is cruel, who has been banished from the realm, will appear such that everyone will eventually believe the reality of his warlike enterprises.]
Through the wildernesses wild and savage
Shall come to wander the nephew of the great Pontiff:
Murdered by seven with a heavy stump,
By those who afterwards shall occupy the ‘cyphe’.48
[In the midst of wild and savage wildernesses shall come to wander about the nephew of the great Pontiff (the pope?). He will be set on and hit with blows from a heavy stump by ‘seven’ who will then occupy a mysterious place called the ‘cyph’.]
The citizens of Mesopotamia,
Will go against friends of Tarragona:
Games, laughter, feasts, all manner of people put to asleep:
Vicar in Rhône, city seized by those of Ausonia.49
[Citizens of the region between two rivers, you will go against the friends of Tarragona; people will be put to sleep by games, laughter and banquets. The vicar will be thrown in the Rhône and the city seized by those of Auxonne.]
A blazing light at Lyon appears
Lustrous, Malta seizes, suddenly it will be extinguished,
Sardinia the Moor shall treat with deceit:
Geneva to London, to cock, treason feigned.50
[A blazing light will shine above Lyon, and suddenly disappear when Malta is taken. In Sardinia the Moor will negotiate duplicitously, and Geneva will be the origin of a treasonable conspiracy against the cock (the king of France?) in London.]
The lieutenant standing at the gate
Shall batter to death the lord of Perpignan:
Thinking Montpertuis a safe haven,
Will be deceived, the bastard of Lusignan.51
[On the threshold of the gate, the lieutenant will batter to death the lord of Perpignan. Expecting to find safe haven in Montpertuis, the bastard of Lusignan will be killed.]
I am not setting out to argue that, because Nostradamus’ syntax is ‘chaotic’, broken down into various linguistic units that invite questions, his text is incomprehensible. I simply want to suggest that it frequently turns into a kind of puzzle that is structurally insoluble. Even when his writing looks as though it is open to intelligibility, that turns out to be artificial, and it has just not manifested its contradictions and incomprehensibility. The writing collapses under the accumulated weight of its prophetic utterances, leaving the reader with a sense of complete disorientation. Such a style of writing creates panic in the mind of the reader; it fills him with bemusement. Its impact is, in some ways, nihilistic – such is the impact of the sheer accumulation of possible outcomes, each more dire than the other, one on top of the other. This emerges especially in part of the ‘epistle’, dedicated to the ‘most invincible’ King Henri II:52
After this the Barren Lady, greater in authority than the second one, shall be received by two peoples, by the first rendered stubborn by him who once had power over all, by the second, and by the third which shall extend its forces toward the perimeter of Eastern Europe, towards the already scattered and subdued people of Pannonia, and shall by seapower spread its sway to Adriatic Trinacria [Sicily] with its Myrmidons and utterly conquered Germans, and the Barbarian sect shall be mightily afflicted and utterly vanquished by the Latins. Then the great empire of the Antichrist shall commence in Attila, and Xerxes shall descend upon the earth with an immeasurably massive force, such that with the coming of the Holy Ghost, proceeding from the forty-eighth degree, shall experience transmigration, chasing out the abomination of the Antichrist, making war on the prince who is the great vicar of Jesus Christ, and against his church, and his reign shall be per tempus & in occasione temporis [for a time and to the end of time], and this shall be preceded by a solar eclipse more intensely dark than any between the creation of the world and the death and passion of Jesus Christ, and from that time to now. And it shall be in the month of October that some great translation shall take place, such that one shall reckon that the earth has lost its natural movement and that it is plunged into an abyss of endless darkness. During the preceeding Spring and thereafter there shall be extreme changes, transformations of kingdoms, great earthquakes, and the proliferation of the New Babylon, that wretched daughter, shall be augmented by the abomination of the first holocaust, and this shall last for no less than seventy-three years, seven months. Then there shall burgeon from that lineage, long barren, proceeding from the fiftieth degree, one who shall renew the whole Christian Church. And great peace, and union and concord, shall be established between one of the offspring of the rejected line, separated by different kingdoms, and such a peace shall be made that the promoter and fomenter of armed factions shall remain chained up in the deepest churn by the different religions, and the Kingdom of the Rabid One, who will play the sage, shall be united. And the countries, towns, cities, realms and provinces which shall have let slip their original ways to gain liberty, only to find themselves more in thrall, shall be secretly fed up with the loss of their freedom and their perfect religion, and shall start striking out on the left flank, then turn to the right, and reestablishing their long-profaned holiness with their pure scriptures, so that the great mastiff shall then go forth one fine morning and destroy everything, even that which has previously been perpetuated, and the temples shall be rebuilt as in olden times, and the priesthood shall be restored to its former state, and shall start fornicating and luxuriating, and committing countless crimes. And on the verge of another desolation, when she (the barren Lady?) shall have attained her highest and most sublime dignity, military potentates and their armies shall rise up against her, and her two swords shall be removed, leaving behind only her banners, and from the crooked path that so lured them, these forces shall be brought back to the straight and narrow by the people, unwilling to submit themselves to those at the opposite extreme with their hand bent back touching ground, wanting to spur things on until from a lineage of that long-barren Lady shall be born one who shall deliver all the nations from their meek and voluntary enslavement, placing himself under the protection of Mars, robbing Jupiter of all his honours and dignities, for the sake of that free city set up and located in another Mesopotamian fastness. And the chief and governor shall be cast out from the middle and strung up on high, ignorant of the conspiracy mounted against him with the help of the second Thrasybulus, who had been plotting it all for some time, and the most shameful deeds and abominations shall be exposed and laid bare in the shadows of the veiled light, which shall cease toward the end of the overthrow of his empire, and the chief priests of the Church shall fall short of God's love, and many of them shall renounce the true faith, and of the three sects, the middle one shall fall into decline because of its adherents. The first shall spread throughout Europe, most of Africa shall be wiped out by the third, on account of those poor in spirit whom madmen shall corrupt by encouraging them into luxurious extravagance. The common people shall rise up in support, chase out the supporters of the legislators, and from the way kingdoms are undermined by those from the Orient, it shall seem that God the Creator has loosed Satan from the infernal prisons to give birth to the great Dog and Dogam. That shall create such an abominable schism in the Churches that neither the reds nor the whites (being without eyes or hands) shall know what to make of it. Their power shall be removed from them, and then more persecutions shall be visited upon the Church than ever before. Meanwhile, there shall arise a plague so great that more than two-thirds of the earth shall be wiped out, so much so that it will be impossible to ascertain the rightful owners of fields and houses, and weeds in the city streets shall grow higher than people's knees. And the clergy shall be obliterated and the warmongers shall usurp all the revenues from the City of the Sun, from Malta and the Stechades islands [off the coast of Provence by Toulon], and the great chain of the port which takes its name from the sea-calf shall be opened. And the beaches shall see a new sea-borne invasion, hoping to deliver the Saltus Castulensis [Sierra Morena] from its first recapture by the Muslims. And their assaults shall not all be in vain, and the place which was once the abode of Abraham shall be beseiged by those who hold the Jovialists in veneration. And this, the city of Achem [Hashem?], shall be surrounded and assailed from all sides by a most powerful host. And those from the West shall enfeeble their great fleets at sea, and great desolation shall be visited on this kindgom, and its grandest cities shall be emptied of people and those who enter into them shall be subject to God's wrathful vengeance. And the sepulchre, long an object of such great veneration, shall remain there in the open, under clear skies, visible to the eyes of heaven, the sun, and the moon. And the holy place shall be converted into a stable for herds large and small, and converted to profane purposes. O what calamitous afflictions shall occur to women with child at this juncture, and then shall the main leader of the Orient be vanquished by those from the North and the West, and most of his people, stirred up, shall be put to death, overwhelmed and the rest put to flight. His children by various women shall be imprisoned, and then shall be fulfilled the prophecy of the Royal Prophet: Vt audiret gemius compeditorum, vt solueret filios interemptorum [That he may hear the groaning of the prisoners and deliver up the sons of those doomed to die]. What great oppression shall then be visited upon the princes and governors of realms, especially those maritime and eastern ones. And their languages will become mixed up with one another (the Latin and Arabic tongues through communication with the Punic), and all these Kings of the Orient will be vanquished, overthrown, exterminated, not at all because of any action on the part of the forces of the Kings of Aquillon [the North], and because of the drawing near of our own age through the three secretly united in their search for death, plotting ambushes against one other. And the renewal of the triumvirate shall last seven years, and the renown of such a sect shall spread through the world, and the sacrifice of the Holy and Immaculate Host shall be maintained. And then the Lords of Aquillon (two in number) shall be victorious over those from the Orient, and such a great noise and tumult of war shall they make that all the East shall tremble in fear of the fraternity (although not brothers) of Aquillon.
The only effect of continuing to set out Notradamus’ quatrains and prose texts like this would be to reinforce still further the sense of vagueness and disorientation that is structurally rooted in Nostradamus’ thinking. To read Nostradamus is to succumb to the sense that his writing has a negative, self-contradictory, power, one whose purpose is to destabilize the reader's hermeneutic appreciation of what he reads. The power of Nostradamus’ writing is its capacity to awaken the reader to the realization that he should not read it for what it means to him, that meaning being what a feeble, sinful creature like him can make of it. The reader must passively allow Christ, present in His Word and Omniscient, to possess him and convey the message of salvation. Does not the potter who searches for clay to make his pots find gold, allegory for Truth, precisely because he has not been looking for it? Does not Truth come to those who do not seek it out, who do not think it will indwell in them? At the heart of Nostradamus’ prophetic pronouncement there is a desire to deconstruct the immediate readability of the text so that God's grace, unearned by human beings, a grace to which we are deaf because it seems so obscure, can enter into us. It is only in that silence of sense that we are open to reach out and grasp in faith alone (Sole Fide) in our hearts that God is All. And in our hearts there is something which is signified by a treasure buried under an oak tree . . .