The structure of each quatrain in the Prophecies is, with some exceptions, readily summarized. They each begin by referring, more or less explicitly, to a stable past, which then becomes immediately pitched into horrendeous evil.1 The horror is one in which human passions are unleashed in all their atrocity, blood being shed, bodies torn apart, the beginning of the ‘games of Hecatomb’.2 There is nothing remarkable in the fact that, as has already been noted, historical events serve as reference points to all this, conceptualized by Nostradamus as ‘signs of the times’ (signa temporis) in an age of the world in which Fate (Fatum) is leading it towards a seemingly inevitable revolution, to which we need a wake-up call. What has happened in the past is not so much about to occur again. Rather it allows the Christian to develop an awareness of the perpetual nature of evil, and thus to become part of a perpetual momentum which will lead him or her to rise above earthly eventualities and towards the Love Divine. It is paradoxical, but only superficially so, that the quatrains, following one after the other in the sequence of the Centuries, induce in the soul a semiotic aporia, a blank space, a nothingness which is the nothingness of man, from which there is no other hermeneutic resolution than God.
Warfare is a succession of endless atrocities that afflict even the largest cities, not even sparing the capitals. It is there, in the towns and countryside all around a great city that soldiers are encamped. They will put it to the sack, following the example of what happened in Rome in 1527, and there will be terrible carnage on the bridge across the river.3 Rome still has the upper hand when it comes to aggression, however, when Nostradamus launches this plea: ‘Flee, Flora [Florence], flee the Roman close at hand, / At Fiesole shall the war be declared, / blood shall be shed’ and the mighty taken prisoner ‘at hand’.4 Nostradamus prophesies once more the imminent sack of a town by firestorm, ‘blood shed around and into the River Po’ as a result of the efforts of the ‘herdsmen’.5 The Nostradamian vision is terribly repetitive, rendered the more sombre by his syntax, stripped almost entirely of verbs, leading to a kind of concertina effect:6
Tears, shrieks and cries, moaning, afright,
Inhuman heart, cruel, black, transfixed:
Leman, the greater islands of Genoa,
Blood shed, famished, mercy to none.
Repetition has a cumulative effect:7
I weep for Nice, Monaco, Pisa, Genoa,
Savona, Siena, Capua, Modena, Malta:
Blood and sword above shall rain down upon you,
Fire, earthquake, flood, unhappy nolte [Nolita?].
It is the same in this third quatrain: ‘Weep Milan, weep Lucca, Florence as your grand duke mounts his war-chariot to advance upon Venice and break the siege when Columne at Rome will change’ – when, perhaps, a member of the Colonna family will overwhelm the city.8
The Nostradamian vision is of an emerging Antichrist. In its literality, it is one of utter catastrophe, of death, disease and suffering. That is how contemporaries also read it. As Yvonne Bellenger has noted, the bestiary of animals referred to in the Prophecies is made up entirely of snakes, leopards, wild boar, eagles, and griffins, aggressive animals that tear people apart, bite them, tear at them. When human beings are mentioned, they are butchers, monsters, or victims. Objects and subjects of violence, they never enjoy peace for long. Death and blood, in black and red, abound in his depictions.9 The potential for this discourse to induce panic in the reader is provided by the violence of the images and the suggestive power of their explicit elements, and also by their lack of immediate intelligibility. Anna Carlstedt has noted, in a parallel fashion, how Nostradamus’ pronouncements, over and beyond the binary opposites that are a feature of the Prophecies, ‘present an almost total absence of themes with a positive connotation’.10 Nostradamus’ predictive time is one in which all is possible, where every conceivable sort of violence and suffering might take the stage. But the result is tragically a hypertrophy of anguish since the poetics of his discourse engenders such a polysemy.11 Every real event in the past and present is susceptible to be dragged in. That, in turn, reflects back upon the reader's consciousness the undeniable reality of a tortured and torturing world, burgeoning with the potential and reality of Evil, a dismal storehouse of it.
By 1550, this discursive economy of horror was already in place, acquiring eschatological overtones when it was predicted along Biblical lines that, in the month of January 1555, ‘many would-be prophets will win over the people’.12 In addition, from 1555 onwards, Nostradamus began to insert fourteen prophetic quatrains into his almanacs – twelve for each month of the year, a further one illustrating the beginning of the year and another final one heading up an epistle. In these, his thoughts and dreams conjure up an age in which all the most terrible and testing things imaginable are veritably stockpiled in the most shocking juxtaposition of words, each of which evokes an imminent divine wrath. That for the year 1555 reads:
By Spirit divine, the soul predicts affliction,
Trouble, famine, plague, war run wild:
Waters awash, land and sea with blood besmirched,
Peace, truce, Prelates born, Princes die.
What seems, at least at first sight, to link Nostradamus to the text of the Lyon cathedral canon Richard Roussat, who published in 1550 a Book of the state and mutation of the times (Livre de l’estat et mutation des temps (Lyon: Guillaume Rouillé)), and from which textual borrowings have been detected on the part of the astrophile from Salon, is that his astrological science seems to evoke in him a similar eschatological anxiety, a similar register of dark forebodings. He also was caught up, as it were, in the emergence of a collective consciousness, inward-looking if not positively stuck in a time of mystic trance, marked by a kind of extreme violence that was imparted to readers, and which is a discursive system far-removed and distant from the mindset of rational thought. A fantasmagorical mental world is turned into an objective reality, a world which does not even own up to the hell-time of entrapment that it is become, almost totally encased by evil and misfortune.13 The innocent are presented as dying, wounded, torn apart. It is a terrifying and hallucinatory mental world in which the initial violence is that done to the language itself, to the signifying logic of words, through unusual associations, surrealist poetic images, and by a sudden overload, at least for the reader, of facts, places, real and fictional characters, metaphors, anagrams and enigmas, or just the sapping away of meaning.
Even though, in his Almanac for the Year 1557 (l’Almanach pour l’An 1557) Nostradamus ventures to predict a reign of universal peace for Catherine de Médicis in 1560, his semantic register seems to reduce it to ‘confusion’ and ‘revolution’.14 His New Prognostication for the Year 1558 (Pronostication nouvelle, pour l’An Mil cinq cens cinquante et huict) lays out a vision at the heart of which the astrophile distinguishes the ‘sword of eternal God’ in a ‘shimmer’, wreaking plagues and famines, wars, and change of rulers upon the world.15 At the outset of 1558, the plague from Africa will be so horrible and ‘unbearable’ that ‘most of the world will come to be reduced’ and rare will be the birds who escape death from it. There will be then some periods of remission from this distressing time but that simply gives our astrologer the moment, having described winter, to invite his readers to beg God to spare his people from these harmful events and give them peace. Then, by a perpetual motion, earthquakes, plagues, bloody seas, death, ruin, ‘parched earth’, wind all reappear. The ‘fear’ of men is one of the prophetic themes of 1559, with ‘loyalty traduced’, the ‘cruel act’, unquenched or satiated ambition, poisonous discord and internal injuries. They are all associated with ‘faith falsified’ and, in June, with a ‘hail, tempest, pestilent illness, fury’.16
Nostradamus then drew up The Significations of the Eclipse, which will take place on 16 September 1559 (Les Significations de l’Eclipse, qui sera le 16. Septembre 1559). The effect of this eclipse will make themselves felt in the year 1560, he writes, in which Mars will be in the ascendant. If God does not raise His hand to stop it, ‘I predict great and diverse treasons, perditions, deceptions, abuses, closet factions; and also that various great secrets among the Martials [the men of war] and Jovialists [men of justice] by plots, factions and ruptures will be found out and revealed’.17 A queen will be the target for a rebellion of the common people. Parties, sects, conspiracies, divisions, factions will be followed during the year 1560 by dearth, and then by a great famine, whilst plague will visit one region after another. What Nostradamus is at pains to insist on is the eschatological instability of the immediate future, and that profound change is the order of the day – change affecting political power, from kings through office-holders to military leaders. That change turns into a ‘state of collapse’ (‘pereclitation’) and, when it happens, it will be for the worse. The vocabulary is entirely negative; hatreds, ‘quarrels’, ‘insinuations’ and ‘infidelities’ will abound among ‘persons of dignity and ecclesiastical religion in a diversity of sects’ as well as among the grandees and nobles.18
In 1560, the agenda is ‘fury’, ‘rage’, revolt, plotting, an edict disobeyed, ‘feigned kindness disguising cruelty’, a sinister ‘hair-tailed’ comet, ‘burning fever’, plague, famine, mourning, and ‘unquenched fire and heat’. All this takes place as though the writing is intentionally putting the reader into a sort of closed circle in which the only movement propels him to something worse. For April 1561 his pronouncement was such that it opened the door to every possible panic response: ‘For this month infinite evils are prepared for us’.19 The images of violence that accompany the predictions for 1563 vie with one another in increased intensity, Nostradamus intending implicitly to focus on the present, and on the violence that had overcome the realm in the civil wars. He raises the level of horrific violence in what shall transpire. Mankind's future is, and remains, in the space beyond the explosion of human violence, the unleashing of nature and the pouring forth of God's wrath:20
… Endless murders, prisoners, dead, accused
So many by water and plague … .
So many dead, so many moved to take up arms
Nothing agreed, the Grandee held captive:
That human blood, rage, fury, the urge to have:
Late penitent plague, motive war.
Humanity has entered into an order of time when an infinitude of rage will fall about its ears, and in ever increasing intensity (‘Numberless fathers and mothers dead from mourning’). Everyone, whatever their station, is liable to be caught up and carried off in this impulse which seems endless and which may well spare no one. It is not merely the opening quatrains to each month which contribute, through their ‘occult philosophy’, to the dynamic of things getting ever worse, and which turn what is predicted as coming to pass into a way of exploding what our senses can conceive. An analysis of the Almanac for the year 1561 (l’Almanach pour l’an 1561) provides a particular example of how the unfurling of the months and seasons allows that explosion to happen:
The fortress which will be besieged will be able to hold out; but help will come very late, by the Lions and by the Rats, greater war than ever before menaces […] then be great conflagration, and great born-forth victory, enemies I say overcome, and sacrificed in tombs. The ancient Royal and Consular tombs will shortly be opened up: but to the close at hand one will be ranked, the line will follow straight, concerning the fact of the procuration.
Once the new moon is over, a heatwave and drought take over from warfare:21
However, the conjunction of Saturn with the Sun signals, in human terms, a detrimental impact on people, both in terms of illness as well as other sinister and very nasty events, and what will come to pass will be by brothers, sisters, relations, friends and children. Journeys, faith not faith, feigned religion, and not holy, hands, neck and adjacent members of the body, some people will preserve them and others will have them severed from them . . .
It is a series of possible events, pictured for us, that pass before our eyes at an ever increasing pace, as though a dictionary of evil is in the making. Each one picks out from the ambient frightful darkness, one by one without let-up, in an almost automatic fashion, the possibilities for evil. For it is the son who rebels against the father, the father who massacres the son, the young nephew who kills his old uncle, the young queen who is imprisoned. Everything is overturned at the level of the family, just as it is at the level of political obedience, where people rebel against their rulers, the foreign or barbarous tyrant defeats the peace-loving prince, and plots, massacres, treasons and tortures follow on one after the other. And that is when the dreadful scene being conjured up is not focused on plague, the infidel rape of virgins, or heretics profaning sacred places, and when the earth is not strewn with the bodies of innocent people, and when the blood of clerics is not running in the gutters ‘like water in great abundance’.22 In Nostradamian space and time, evil and violence stop at nothing: holy places, cemeteries, funerary monuments, and new-born babies are all targets, just as palaces are destined to pillage and destruction, cities bound to be torn down by earthquakes, bridges and fortresses vulnerable, and the prospects for peace ever more slender.
As for human passions, they ebb and flow: luxury, ‘libidinousness’, adultery, hideous vengeance, outlandish ingratitude, insatiable ambition, hypocrisy, cruelty, cupidity, anger, hatred, double-dealing, sharp practice. At the opposite end of the scale, the innocent are slaughtered and pursued in justice whilst all that is holy is ‘too dissembled and corrupted’.23 And ‘distress’ ebbs and flows between people too. No pact or peace is to be relied on, ‘all the negotiators will proceed in bad faith’.24
This is exactly what Nostradamus calls ‘the fatal order sempiternally enchained’ which ‘will come about by consequential order’.25 It is a dehumanizing order of things whose unfolding nothing can prevent. Quatrain by quatrain he details that unfolding, portraying how life here below will become a time of hell, a secularized hell of mankind consumed by the illusions of the present, a mankind that does not surrender itself totally to the mercy of almighty God. Some of the torments which he details are not far removed from those reserved for sinners in hell, as in the instance of the enemies camped out on the mountain, thirty of whom will be ‘put on the spit’ – which is what is depicted in the scene of the Last Judgement on the tympanum of the abbey church at Sainte-Foy de Conques.
Yet this frightful hell has perhaps an implicit objective, which is to lead the reader towards a religious message. There is so little place for human wisdom in this cumulative account of heartbreak and folly that we should perhaps read the underlying message, running through the quatrains, as an implicit restatement of that in the Book of Job, proclaiming the glory of a God who ‘makes councillors walk bare-foot’, who makes judges mad, who imprisons the rulers who are free and who liberates those who are imprisoned, who overturns the powerful, who deprives old men of their wits, who raises up nations and then lets them perish:26
He increaseth the nations, and destroyeth them: he enlargeth the nations, and straiteneth them again. He taketh away the heart of the chief of the people of the earth, and causeth them to wander in a wilderness where there is no way. They grope in the dark without light, and he maketh them to stagger like a drunken man.
This is a bleak world, exuding heartbreak, in which wickedness and envy run through and through. Nostradamus’ writing is to be regarded as prophetic only in the sense that it lays out in detail the potential for human beings. It is only prophetic to the degree that it aims to point the reader back in his memory to a Biblical point of reference. Nostradamus’ capacity to nudge the reader in the direction of that possibility is capital. When one tries to enter into the spirit of his text, does it not inexorably lead the reader, overwhelmed with sadness by this infernalization of his world, to the inner contemplation of God? In just the same way, when he realizes that there is no way that he can minimize his own suffering, when he realizes the immensity of the persecution to which he is the victim, Job has no choice but to turn to God. The essence of the problem in understanding Nostradamus is to appreciate that his text has a dynamic, that the words are not to be read in and of themselves, and that the sense of them leads one towards somewhere else. As in Job's case, that somewhere else is God:27
God hath delivered me to the ungodly, and turned me over into the hands of the wicked. I was at ease, but he hath broken me asunder: he hath also taken me by my neck, and shaken me to pieces, and set me up for his mark. His archers compass me round about, he cleaveth my reins asunder, and doth not spare; he poureth out my gall upon the ground. He breaketh me with breach upon breach, he runneth upon me like a giant.
In the face of this warrior God, the Christian can but put on sackcloth and ashes as a sign of his penitence and contrition, and ‘defile his horn in the dust’, his ‘face foul with weeping’ and his eyelids carrying ‘the shadow of death’. One could go on to say that Nostradamus is implicitly haunted by the humanity of Job, and that infratextually he identifies himself with him. Nostradamus, like Job, evokes the extremes of God's anger before the wickedness of man; for him, too, the just man must suffer before blessing comes upon him. Consolation comes the instant he becomes conscious that God has manifested himself to him, that his ‘eye’ has seen the Lord, and realizes that it only remains for him to abase himself in the ‘cloth and ashes’ of repentance.28 We should be in no mistake that this infra- or inter-textual reference to Job, in relation to both the writing and reading of Nostradamus is absolutely critical since it is by means of it that he makes the transition towards the free gift of salvation by a God who reveals himself as a God of love, requiring only that man justify himself before Him at the end of a long and painful journey, one that has been patiently endured.29 Nostradamus’ predictions impress on the reader's consciousness the bleakness of our earthly life, and therefore aim to teach us that our misery should not give way to doubt or despair. On the contrary, it should give rise to the certainty that: ‘also now, behold, my witness is in heaven, and my record is on high’.30
It is the ‘pessimism’ of the Renaisance which, paradoxically, activates and agitates Nostradamus, that same pessimism which, for example, emerges in Michelangelo's ‘Last Judgement’, as analysed by André Chastel.31 This allusion is not coincidental because it allows us better to penetrate the semiological strangeness and grotesqueness of the Prophecies. Whoever sits down to read them cannot but be taken up in a sort of vortex from which there is no escape because all manner of evil and suffering appear in various guises, linked one to another. It is as though humanity is imprisoned in the horror of its own sinfulness. Earthly life is utterly captive to evil. This is a Nostradamus whose augural imagination overflows with depictions of mankind's destiny to live in depravity, just as the paintings of Hieronymus Bosch depict humanity immersed in folly, blind stupidity and avarice. This is a humanity which is its own worst enemy, man against man.