To discover what prophesying entailed in the middle of the sixteenth century we have to study closely the ‘Preface’ by M. Michel Nostradamus to his Prophecies, ‘To his son César Nostradamus, Life and Happiness’. The appropriate moment to carry out auguries was defined from the outset as during a night-time of ‘vigil’ for the ‘common profit of mankind’, so as to communicate to the latter ‘that which the divine essence by astronomical rotations has given him to know’. The Prophecies are addressed to his son César and they sought, by virtue of being ‘written down’, to enable him to preserve this remarkable insight after his father's death. They functioned, therefore, as a kind of private memorial transferring knowledge from one generation to another. But the transfer was incomplete for there was still ‘the hereditary word of occult prediction’ which was, and would remain ‘locked in my entrails’ – trapped in my mouth – because it could not be written down. There was the written word, but there was also its unwritten penumbra. Essential here was his evocation of the principle of a unique gift, an innate disposition, which Nostradamus thought he had inherited from his Jewish forebears.1 It was ‘my natural instinct, given me by my ancestors’, ‘the feeling (coming) from my progenitors of old’.2 He conceived of himself without any doubt as an initiate, descended from initiates, the guardian of a grace, descended to him by blood in corpore, to which was added a grace in spiritu which came from Christ alone. He was thus, in fact, doubly chosen – in flesh and in spirit. If he emphasized that he had the gift of being able to predict, ‘in past times, and oft, far into the future, what would come to pass’, he attributed it to ‘virtue and divine inspiration’. But in the message he communicated to his son, Nostradamus declared that he no longer wished to express himself literally, and justified that stance in the words of Christ as a means of exalting his refusal to align himself with ‘popular’ forms of understanding:3 ‘Give not your sacred things to dogs, throw not your pearls before swine, lest they trample them down, and then return to tear you to pieces’ (Matthew 7:6). What serves as his guide is thus first and foremost the ‘Word of the true Saviour’. The techniques of prediction are a second-order issue.4
The cryptic dimension running through the Prophecies is, he adds in the Epistle to King Henri II, a necessity, a ‘cloud of obscurity’ linked to ‘a natural infusion appoximating the phrases of one of the thousand and two Prophets who have existed since the creation of the world, according to the computations and ‘Punic Chronicle of Joel’: ‘I will pour out my spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy’.5 There is perhaps an obvious explanation for why this obscurity was necessary. For those observing the dogmatic contentions of the day dividing Christians into sects or rival confessional groupings that looked upon each other with fear and dread, there was in due course a realization that this religious division was the consequence of precisely that over-familiarity of the faithful with the Word of God. Erasmus himself went through great turmoil in 1525 whilst coming to terms with the fact that his great hopes for his Philosophy of Christ (philosophia christi), spread abroad among the people of God, had returned to haunt him in the nightmare of a schism that was growing ever wider and putting at risk the fundamental rationale for all that he had worked for. His apprehension that, by a sort of ratcheting back, the worst of all possible worlds had resulted from the project of evangelist restitution itself, implied, perhaps, a return to an enigmatic form of writing, albeit one that cannot be called in any straightforward way ‘nicodemite’.6 Faced with a Logos that was profaned by people pitching themselves against one another, whilst its message was one of love, evangelist humanists tried to protect the mysteries of the faith through the devices of a symbolic language, impenetrable to all except those who had received the gift of true faith, and who did not live under the authority of Christ, the interior ‘master’. This was a language that was their language. So we should situate Nostradamus in the sphere of a cryptic discourse that tried to restore hope to all those who believed in one God, the God of love and mercy.7
We should consider, too, that just as Nostradamus was undoubtedly well-read in the works of Marsilio Ficino and his commentary on the Symposium of Plato, he had also read closely Girolamo Savonarola's Revelation of the Tribulations of our Times (1496) and Compendium of Revelations (1495) – or, at least, those parts which found their way into the anonymous Mirabilis Liber, or ‘Book of Miracles’, published anonymously in France in 1522. So, his thought was structured around the theme of an accumulation of tribulations leading up to a chastisement, a flagellum Dei.8 Further, it was from the Compendium that he would develop and assimilate, often by paraphrasing the text, prophecy and clairvoyance. Significantly, Savonarola (and Nostradamus following him) cited 1 Samuel 9:9 – ‘he that is now called a Prophet was beforetime called a Seer’ – and glossed it as follows: ‘He is called prophet who, by a natural wisdom had a vision of things hidden from common mortals’.9
Numerous interpreters have, however, emphasized the claim that Nostradamus drew his inspiration from Apollo at Delphi. He himself recounts how at night, devoting himself to ‘secret study’, he prophesied ‘seated alone on the bronze stool’. There, upon this tripod:10
Wand in hand set amidst the branches,
From the waters he casts both hem and feet:
Vapour and voice quiver through his sleeves:
Splendour divine. The divine sits close by.
He seems here, when he uses the phrase ‘on the bronze stool’ (‘super æneam sellam’) to have appropriated one of two sources of inspiration related by Cornelius Agrippa in his Three Books of Occult Philosophy (first printed in 1533).11 According to Pierre Behar, the first two quatrains of the first Century are a linked pair, and it is no coincidence that they end with the phrase: ‘The divine sits close by’. He thereby announces, like the Syrian Neoplatonist philosopher Iamblicus that God is henceforth present, and that it is He who will pronounce the following quatrains. This utterance inaugurates the revelation which follows. But we should not take it for other than it is. If the tripod placed aloft the blessed spirits of the earth takes its inspiration from Apollo, the Apollo at Delphi or Didyma, Nostradamus had no wish to imply that he dabbled in natural magic to achieve his predictive vision, and it would be an error to think otherwise. He simply seems to have been a humanist who sought to play upon the readers’ senses and place his experience of prophetic utterance in a holy symbolic space, that occupied by the Delphic oracle ‘Know thyself’, and not some other Pythian transgression. He wanted the utterance to become part of an introductory ritual, structured around a humanist strategic device signifying that the discursive effort is located in the space defined as that of the renovatio of learning and the quest for the betterment of mankind.
It has been implicit in what has been said so far that Nostradamus wanted his readers to work out for themselves that they should read the quatrains not as enigmas for the times, which is what they seemed to be, but as a linguistic game in which those who think they are wise find themselves apprehending something other than what there seems to be to learn. In a nutshell, all those that deploy the arsenal of their scientific learning to crack open the mystery of the words will discover that they become lost in a vanity of vanities, in the flux and reflux of vana scientia. They are to apprehend that the truth of his prophetic discourse is other than where initially they thought it would lie. In this Apollo-like image of the astrophile sitting on his tripod, there is a playful allusion, a warning jibe aimed at those who might believe that Nostradamus took his inspiration from a revival of pagan manticism. To say that ‘the divine sits close by’ is another way of saying that the divine is present in the words, but that his majesty lies in the gaps between the utterances in the quatrains that follow. He thus valorizes the use of a discursive mode, whose aim is to signify that all the writing is allegorical and parabolic. The encoding of the Prophecies take place with symbolic reference to Apollo, but it is a trompe-l’œil. This is a crucial point on which commentators on the Nostradamian corpus have stumbled, for they have taken as literal what should be understood as figurative, and this has dictated the reading of the Prophecies from 1555 onwards. They have preferred the letter over the spirit, whilst in these two initial quatrains he says that they need to be read symbolically. And Nostradamus as a magus or magical practitioner, immersing himself by means of almost hallucinogenic incantations in a sacred delirium, is all in the imagination.
Humanists delighted in playing with the figurative. To represent God as Jupiter did not imply a belief in the existence of the pagan gods of antiquity. To imitate Plato's banquet did not mean that the protagonists believed themselves to be reincarnations of the friends of Socrates, Alcibiades, or Plato. To represent the astrophile seated on a tripod with a laurel wreath on his head was not a way of saying that he aspired to transcendent inspiration by inhaling sulfurous fumes from the depths of the earth. Nor was the poetic ‘furor’ a trance, but rather a metaphor for the creative impulse, for the theme of its wellspring in enthusiasm. In his early ode To his Lute, Ronsard compares poetry to a ‘fire, consuming / by great ardour the mind of his lover …’. Poetry burns like the sun of Phoebus (Apollo):12
But God is just, apportions
All in all, and makes them chant,
In recompense, the future
To amaze the world.
These alone, the poets, are
The exegetes of Gods on high,
The prayers they offer thus,
Are not Gold, clamouring to the Gods,
Nor transient riches,
But a foerever eloquent luth
The Muses’ art excelling
To render grace to Those above.
The Poetices libri septem (1560) of Jules César Scaliger are extremely interesting on this point, because, in them, reason becomes the Creator's guide. Enea Balmas has offered a remarkable analysis of the text:
It is not a matter of waiting for this spark of the divine, which sometimes transforms man into a ‘vates’ (Latin for ‘sooth-sayer’), to descend from above; it is a question of finding the spark deep within ourselves and releasing it, with the aid of an investigatory tool of rational nature, i.e. grace, aided by reason. Between poetry and rational understanding, between illumination and reason, there is a dialectic relationship, which is the very essence of the poetic act … . the poet is a ‘soothsayer’ so long as he is the one to transmit a superior wisdom.13
We will discover in due course that the ‘exiguous flame’ which descends from heaven to initiate the astrophile into the ‘secrets of the future … and the past’ is a conveyor of the ‘divine spirit’. But we should understand it other than the way it appears on the page, namely, as a violent ecstasy provoking vain prophecies resulting from being possessed by a cosmic fire descending from the great ethereal sphere. On the contrary, it is an admonition, warning the reader to set out on another path, a mimesis of the evangelist cogito. Nostradamus repeats the message in his letter of 27 August 1562 to François Bérard. In it, he sets in train ritual objects destined symbolically to produce a sacral effect, viz. to capture by means of a ring an influx of astral benign influences: ‘There, then, are the revelations which, nine nights in succession, sitting from midnight until four o’clock in the morning, my head wreathed in laurel and on my right finger a blue gemstone. I have snatched them from this good genie in your ring as though from a tripod. Seizing a swan's feather – three times, in fact, the genie refused the feather – I have, following his dictates, as though seized by a poetic fury, burst out with these verses here’.14 The important words here are: ‘as though’.
I come back to that last point with another phrase he uses. What does ‘the exiguous flame exuding from solitude’ symbolize for Nostradamus and, above all, what does its source – light, the sun – symbolize? God is the sun, shining through the cosmos, and the sun is also the ‘ray of the divine spirit’. We need here to allude to something which underlay Neoplatonic mysticism. For the Portuguese-born Renaissance poet and physician Leo the Hebrew (Judah Leon Abravanel, or Leo Hebræus, c.1465–1523), it was through the Platonic theory of vision that the important relationship between the sun and God was clarified. The eye is not merely a receptacle for light coming from without; it also reflects a luminous ray onto the object which it sees.15 Everything hangs, therefore, on this solar metaphor. In Denys Sauvage's 1551 French translation of Leo the Hebrew's Dialoghi d’amore, he states that the eye sees everything in ‘sending out its rays towards the object’. The same illuminatory and spectative role is ascribed not only to the sun, but also to the seven planets, which ‘are named the eyes of God in Holy Scripture, because of their capacity to see’. The sun is thus ‘eye’, and the seven planets are the ‘eye of the sun, these celestial eyes see just as they illuminate: and through that sight, they understand and have knowledge of everything in the corporeal world, and its mutations’. ‘The sun, light and candle of the heavens, [is] after God the governor of the world astrologically speaking, the maker of time, the great Spirit of the heavens, in that the signs in them come alive through it’.16 The sun is therefore divine intelligence and Nostradamus depicts the communication of it (albeit paradoxically he lives nocturnally) as a kind of warmth …, ‘a subtle spirit of fire’. His visions have the same effect as a warming heat suffusing through his soul, making the latter of a piece with the soul of the world, embracing it in the very mystery of Created life. So these are not mysteries inspired by the ancient Oracle of Delphi or the Cumaean Sibyl (the priestess who presided over the Apollonian oracle at Cumæ) that the astrophile would claim, like a magus, to have reanimated, ‘by concomitant Heraclean agitation’, for the ‘suasive odour’ which pervaded his ‘long calculation’ by night is not synonymous with wafting aromatic incense. Rather, they relate to the nocturnal studies to which Nostradamus devoted himself, and which have, for him, a perfume, a soft, delicious fragrance. God is the sole ‘irradiant’ beam of the prophetic vision, as Paolo Cortesi put it.17 It is to Him alone that Nostradamus, as a ‘mortal man possessed of revealed inspiration, whoses senses are no less distant from heaven than his feet from the earth’ makes his appeal.18
Nostradamus, poetically (and thus metaphorically), wants to indicate that, when he looks up to the stars in the night sky, stars that are the eyes of God and beams of celestial light, he is able to penetrate the secrets of the Cosmos, and thus of time, because their light communicates an understanding to him which is that of a divine intelligence. Although he enjoys throwing in references to Iamblichus and his mantic, as recounted by Cornelius Agrippa, his oracular science was in no way magical, but rather seems close to rational. Pursuing further his use of metaphorical language (a topos in itself in the Renaissance), Nostradamus recounts (in the letter he wrote to François Bérard) how he had recourse to his ‘guardian angel’, his good genie, conjuring him to reveal things to him, by the Moon, by Mars, then by Christ, the Virgin Mary, and ‘the Archangel Michael, my indomitable patron’. Faith furnishes and fashions the vision, more especially as Nostradamus declares that he has already surrendered the sense of the future to ‘obstruse and perplexing pronouncements’. His prophecies are just that: pronouncements, judgements, parables, aphorisms, and proverbs which break with the literal meaning of the words since, as he said, ‘everything is written in nubilous figures, rather than palpably prophetic’. Prophecy, in the sense which he uses it, is enigma, in the mode of the direct gifts that Christ used to make to the poor and ‘humble’, and ‘to the Prophets: by the grace of everlasting God and the good angels, these have received the spirit of prophecy, by which they see distant causes and come to foresee future events’.19 This gift, which flows directly from the fact that nothing is accomplished on this earth without God's intervention and from the fact that our natural understanding is incapable of penetrating the secrets of the divine, is like a ‘prophetic heat and power’, which is compared to the sun, ‘whose influence works upon bodies both elemental and non-elemental’. What is said comes not from man but from the ‘almighty power of Eternal God, from whom all bounty proceeds’.20
Thus, Nostradamus refuses to utilize explicitly the word ‘prophet’ about himself. There is no great risk in supposing (because he comes close to saying so himself) that this is, above all, to avoid the suspicions and condemnation of the Church. But there is also an impression of humility that flows from the relation to the divine that prophecy implies:21
Note, however, my son, that if I have made mention of the term prophet, far be it from me to arrogate to myself this exalted, this sublime title in these present times: for he who propheta dicitur hodie, olim vocabatur videns [‘is now called a Prophet was beforetime called Seer’, 1 Samuel 9:9]; for a Prophet, my son, is properly speaking someone who sees distant things with the natural knowledge possessed by all creatures.
Here we need to pause to consider the reference to 1 Samuel. The significant context to this passage from the Bible gives it even more importance than the passage from Nostradamus suggests. The events concerned the journey undertaken by Saul into the land of Zuph, where Samuel lived, at the request of his father Kish, in search of asses, lost far from the land of Benjamin. When Saul proposes to turn back, his servant points out that there is a ‘man of God’ in the nearby town, who is honourable because ‘all that he saith cometh surely to pass’ [1 Samuel, 9:6].22
The servant suggests to Saul that he go and inquire, that ‘he shew us our way that we should go’. He wanted to know the truth, not the future. The prophet in the land of Zuph is a ‘seer’, inhabiting a high place, but he does not give them the reply they expected because God, the day before Saul arrived, told him that a man would come from the land of Benjamin who would be anointed as the leader of the people of Israel, and who would save them from the Philistines. The seer has thus foreseen, by means of a revelation from Yahweh, something that Saul had not, so preoccupied was he with recovering his asses and the road that would lead him back to the land of his father. Rather than seeing what Saul wanted him to see, he perceived another destiny for him. Clairvoyant and interrogator are thus in an antithetical relationship to one another, the response being out of step with what was expected and, essentially, the very opposite of it. To see is not only to discern over and beyond what human understanding is naturally capable of, but to perceive what God alone allows us to perceive, and thereby to communicate through this gift of ‘clairvoyance’. In due course Saul felt that he had a change of heart and began to prophesy in the tradition of the prophets.
Prophecy, understood in the sense of clairvoyance and of going beyond the natural order of human knowledge, is a matter of saying what must be so (saying, i.e. that Saul is and must be king of Israel), and not what will be so. That distinction is worth emphasizing because, by establishing his vocation as a prophet in the conceptual tradition of ‘clairvoyance’, Nostradamus turned his back on the Biblically-adduced prophetic conception of hard-line Catholic preachers, self-proclaimed divine ‘ambassadors’, recipients of a sacred ‘virtue’, an immediate inspiration from God which turned them into His mouthpieces or ‘trumpets’. Preachers like François Le Picart, Jean de Hans or Simon Vigor did not hesitate to lay into the powers that be, accusing them of governing contrary to divine Law. By contrast, Nostradamus wanted to be no more than the one who set down what he had seen by the light which the ‘eyes’ of God afforded him, a mediator whose writings accorded Christian people the privilege of accessing an insight that only God was capable of giving them. He is the man with ‘insight’ not the inspired Prophet (the ‘ha-nabi isch ha-ruah’).23 Therefore he went no further than uttering, through the instrument of language, enigmatic pronouncements. These confront us with questions, which is just like the experience of being exposed to the dazzling power of celestial light. True revelation will come to those who, embracing God's grace, can comprehend it. Above all, the prophet who claims to be a ‘seer’ must, in some way or other, have an infectious influence on the person to whom he communicates his vision, drawing him into the very mystery of divine language and imbuing him with the capacity to receive it himself.
In the dedicatory Epistle to Henri II, Nostradamus dwells on what he calls the ‘cloud of obscurity’. True to his rejection of an Old Testamentary sense of being a prophet, he does not attribute it to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit because there was no ‘divination’ at work in his presages. All that he has seen has come to him from God, and:24
to Him I render thanks, honour and everlasting praise … most of this accompanied by the movement of the celestial heavens, as though seen in a burning mirror, and as in a clouded vision, those immense portentous events and wretched calamities that now begin as their principal protagonists draw nigh. These shall befall, firstly, the temples of God, then, second, those who depend on the land, who shall fall into such a decline, with a thousand other calamities, which shall, with the course of time, be understood to come to pass.
Nostradamus leads us to surmise that the divine inspiration induced by his study of the stars is the divine Word. What he has seen in the heavens is nothing less than a reactualization and reformulation in planetary significations of the approaching apocalyptic calamities, the sky being a kind of duplication, or reflective medium, of the divine Logos.
Nostradamus goes on to lay out chronologically the eschatological tribulations which are to come, evoking a ‘barren Lady’ (perhaps the collapsing Church, or again the people of God), the ‘great empire of Antichrist’, the deepest and darkest solar eclipse the world had ever seen ‘up until the death and passion of Jesus Christ’, and the flourishing of a new Babylon. There will be oppression, extermination, affliction, and desolation and:25
the great Vicar of the cope shall be restored to his original state, but desolate and completely abandoned, he shall return to find the Holy of Holies [perhaps a reference to the San Lorenzo in Palazio chapel in the Lateran palace at Rome, known to contemporaries as the Sancta Sanctorum] destroyed by paganism, and the Old and New Testament thrown away and burned, and thereafter the Antichrist shall be the Prince of Hell, and again (for the last time) all the kingdoms of Christendom; and those of the infidels shall tremble for the space of twenty-five years, and there shall be yet more grievous wars and battles, and towns, cities, castles and all other buildings will be burned, sacked and obliterated, with great shedding of virgin blood, wives and widows raped, suckling infants dashed to pieces against city walls, and so many evils shall be committed by the hand of Satan, Prince of Hell, that almost the whole world shall find itself destroyed and abandoned. And before these events shall come to pass a number of fabulous birds shall cry Huy, huy in mid-air, and then swiftly vanish, and after this has gone on for some time, there shall be as it were a renewal of another age of Saturn, or Golden Age, and God, heeding the afflictions of his people, shall command Satan to be bound and thrown deep into the bottomless abyss, and then a universal peace shall commence between God and man, and Satan shall remain bound for about the time of a thousand years, and turning all his might against the power of the Church, he shall then return unleashed. That all these figures are accurately applied from the Sacred Scriptures to the visible celestial spheres, namely, Saturn, Jupiter, Mars and others conjoined, might be demonstrated at greater length by various quartiles, and adapted, each one to the others.
This long passage serves to demonstrate what has already been noted in passing, namely, that predictive writing has its own rhythms. It oscillates between repetition, enumeration, and variation. To analyse further this vision, which is a sort of reprojection of Biblical eschatology, we must explore how Nostradamus’ astrological imagination is constructed on the basis of a mimesis of Biblical diction through parables and paraphrases to utter what the ‘eyes’ of God have allowed him to see, projected in the form of a parabolic mirror, a ‘burning mirror’.26