‘Man is his own aggressor’ (‘Solus homo sibi insidiatur’) wrote Nostradamus à propos of Spring in his New Prognostication and Portentous Prediction for the Year 1555 (Pronostication nouvelle, et prediction portenteuse, pour L’an M.D.L.V). He uses Biblical paraphrases to represent human calamity. Thus, in an apocalyptic vision, ‘the great famine which I sense approaching, / Often turning, then to be universal’, he conjures up as ‘[s]o great, so long that one will end up tearing / Roots up from the woods, and babes from the breast’.1 More precise still is the Biblical resonance in Quatrain 10:80, which tells of how, in the reign of a great ruler of a mighty kingdom, the king and the head of the army will join forces to ‘break open the gates of brass’, demolishing the port and sinking the ships in it, on a day of ‘clear blue sky’.2 Prophetic writing is one of intertextuality, but it is overshadowed by what seems, at first sight, to be simply a historical occurrence. In this instance, the narrative is constructed around the capture of a walled town and the destruction of its port and shipping. What, however, most stands out is the motif of the gates of brass, that close it off from the outside world, and it is that motif which takes one back, plausibly enough, to the ‘Canticle of the Redeemed’, Psalm 107. In that Psalm, those who have broken God's commands live in iron fetters in a city which constitutes their prison, in the ‘shadow of death’ from their anguish, and ‘where there was none to help’. God is praised by the Psalmist, for it is by His love that He broke the chains by which their neglect for the Law kept them captive. It is by His miracle that deliverance is granted to those who were deprived, symbolically, of the liberty of light and truth: ‘For he hath broken the gates of brass, and cut the bars of iron in sunder’.3 The gates that the king and his military commander break asunder, are the gates of death, the gates of a terrestrial city living in sin and ignorance of God. Nostradamus’ presage does not offer its own foreclosure. Rather, it relies on the reader to call to mind the praise of the Psalmist to supply the second term of the equation, for only then can the king and his military leader become the embodiment of divine Might, acting eternally against the forces of Death and on behalf of those who raise their prayers to heaven, and to whom:4
He sent his word, and healed them, and delivered them from their destructions. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children of men! And let them sacrifice the sacrifices of thanksgiving, and declare his works with rejoicing.
Nostradamus’ ‘occult philosophy’ is not so much inscribed into the textual content of his writing which, by its obscurity, then invites questions from the reader. It is rather that its inductive implications orientate the reader towards a possible outcome, which is within himself, within an awakening in his own consciousness. To put it in a nutshell, the Prophecies belong to a kind of introspective writing which leads the reader into identifying the sinfulness within himself or herself, because the human world is ceaselessly subverted by sin. The town in Quatrain 10:80 is closed off to the outside world, no doubt proud of its maritime power, and it might well serve as an allegory of the human soul, closed off to Truth, that sinful soul which trusts in the power of its own ‘vessels’, symbols of an over-confidence in human works. The allegory is of a soul closed off to the Truth. It is no coincidence that a significant number of Nostradamus’ quatrains focus on the curse of the aristocrats who, by their terrible exactions, bring about misery and suffering to the poor and meek. As the Psalmist puts it (Ps. 107:40): ‘He poureth contempt upon princes, and causeth them to wander in the wilderness, where there is no way.’ So, in 8:74 the king is about to enter a new land and his subjects are preparing a royal welcome for him; but then, says Nostradamus, his ‘perfidy’ turns out to be so gross that it becomes a substitute for their festive reception of him.5
Princes, their counsellors, counts, dukes, and ‘leaders’ have, in Nostradamus’ writings a sort of instinctive inclination to be a curse to others. Should we not read this, too, as a Biblical encoding of the blind state in which God maintains those who ignore His commands, in the assurance that their own power, ambition and cupidity give them, and which is the corollory of the struggle for power? Prophetic violence in the Bible is perhaps typified by Ninevah, the impious city abandoned by God's Word to its fate. There is a poetics deep at work in the Prophecies which makes it so that it would seem that, beneath the succession of multiple factual narratives, there is a deeper discursive order, hidden within the construct of ‘occult philosophy’. It is a poetics of humanity's inexorable slide into the dark shadow of its crimes and evil, from which human beings can only escape by becoming aware in their consciences of a salvation ‘by faith alone, by Scripture alone’ (sola fide, sola scriptura). The key word here is ‘consciences’. There are other indicators of this theme which is destined to appear periodically in the Prophecies. There is, for example, the occurrence of a great volcanic eruption from ‘the great mountain, seven stades around’ in 1:69 whose lava flows will obliterate ancient streets and buildings, putting an end to a time of peace, which will be followed by ‘war, famine, inundation’.6 The past will be covered up, fossilized, transformed so that it looks like something else, and it is this which will unlock a phase of tragic consequences. It is as though what epitomizes sin are the twin motifs of covering up and transformation.
There is an obsession with the hidden, the occult, in the predictive discourse of Nostradamus. That is not only, as we have seen, because the hidden or occult is what characterizes the language of signs he deploys, and because, if human beings seek the meaning of the signs they will avoid the ills that lie in wait for them. It is also because a number of Nostradamus’ scenarios involve characters who are not what they seem, or who, willingly and unwillingly, make a play of their outward appearance. So, in 6:14, far from his own lands, ‘the’ king will lose the battle. He will swiftly take flight, hotly pursued, and will be captured by someone ‘following’ him, who accompanied him in flight, a servant in whom he had placed his confidence, and who will not hesitate to betray and seize him.7 The defeat to which he is subjected has as its immediate consequence the inversion or obliteration of the hierarchical register of obligations, for it is the one who is ‘under’ the sovereign, the inferior servant, who will end up capturing him. The socially superior, once no longer in a position of power, falls immediately at the mercy of his inferior. For the powerful, treason seems a constant in the mental landscape of Nostradamus, and he recounts how another king is put to death by conspirators as he takes flight down the Rhône valley.8 In 6:14, the king's face is, above all, hidden ‘beneath’ the honorific protection of a golden coat of mail which the ‘ignoramus’, the one whom no one knows and who knows nothing, who is socially a nobody, is captured whilst ‘in false habit’ (i.e. in disguise), the enemy having seized him by surprise. In 7:2, when war is declared by Mars, Arles will not resist and it will be at night that soldiers will be caught by surprise. They are black and white all together, no doubt because they are camouflaged in grey so that they cannot be made out at night, disguised to blend into the landscape like Indians so that ‘you’ will just make out the traitors in the faint light.9 In 1554, it is a preacher who will betray a city. In the Prognostication for the Year 1555, it is the liquid in which he is hidden, ‘he’ being the one who is called the ‘Crocodile’ and who will appear in March, which is when ‘the merry days will be sad’. And this evil person will also be deceitful: ‘The promise will be great of that which will be nothing’. One treachery leads to another, as, for example, in 6:60 when the Prince, on leaving his celtic land, will be betrayed by an interpreter, whilst Rouen and La Rochelle will be duped by those from Brittany at the port of Blaye by a monk and a priest, those whom one might have hoped would speak and act trustworthily.10 Times and places are run through with people like the individual with the ‘pale visage, a dagger hidden at his side’ who is going about with criminal intent.11 And death by ‘treachery’ is no quiet way to go: ‘by treason’, says Quatrain 6:32, ‘he’ will be beaten to death with sticks.
Nostradamus’ pen also singles out for attention those who choose to mutiny rather than obey. When soldiers break out in seditious rage against their command in 6:68, they ‘flash their swords at night’.12 The enemy of Alba, accompanied by a furious army, will then humiliate Rome and dupe its principal citizens. Still more, the future overturns things, giving primacy to debility, to word over reason. So, in 1:14, slaves, kept captive in prisons by princes and lords, sing songs, chant and pray which, in the future, will be regarded as divine supplications, words uttered by ‘headless idiots’.13
In Nostradamus’ universe of ill-intentioned trickery, human beings become allegories of two contrasting stereotyped ways of behaving; one of appearance or semblance, and the other of being in the real world. His human beings turn, above all, into allegories for a linguistic device in which there is an underside to words and plots. It is at this point that it has to be asked whether Nostradamus’ scenarios are not just a sequence of artifices. What are they really, given their enigmatic character, asking us to comprehend? Are they not telling us, over and over again, that all is not what it seems, that there is a perpetual subversion of identities at work in them, and that human beings must have recourse to doubt when faced with what they perceive, with what they are told and taught, and with what they are, in themselves? Are they not reminding us that our lot is to be at the risk of being fooled, disillusioned, and taken for a ride because man is an evil creature? Does not Nostradamus endlessly make the case for our putting distance between ourselves and the world, and does he not, like Henry Cornelius Agrippa, evoke the vanity and uncertainty in man's understanding, in those who believe that they can arrive at a stable and assured scientific wisdom, and who deduce that it can be found on the basis of our knowledge of ourselves and of things, an assurance that is inexorably shot through in this sublunary world by wickedness? What is he trying to signify when he writes in 6:15 that ‘beneath’ the tomb will be found the Prince who shall have triumphed over Nuremberg, or when he proposes that the Spanish king, at the entrance into Capricorn, will be let down and betrayed by the ‘great’ of Wittenberg?14 One might see it as an allusion to Charles V and the Luther Affair, but the important point is perhaps that, once more, he is restating the omnipresence of illusion and mendacity in this world, and the duplicity which characterizes all human beings and their behaviour in the world, and their penchant for sinfulness. Treason is ever-present, as in the quatrain for September 1555, where Hannibal ‘does his tricks’ whilst the sea makes ready to ‘make the heavens weep’. Some treacheries are premeditated and organized a long time in advance. In 5:37, ‘three hundred’ will agree secretly among themselves to commit themselves to carry out their plot. Twenty months will pass and then they will betray their king having hidden their hate.15 In 1:13 the configuration is different, and it is exiles ‘in rage and civil hate’ who conceive of a great plot against the king. They arrange for his enemies to infiltrate the city by means of a tunnel, and the result will be an uprising beween them and their supporters and the old retainers of the sovereign.16 Nostradamus seems, in this perspective, to incorporate and adapt the story of the plot of Ulysses and his companions to escape the clutches of the cyclops Polyphemus. In 10:13 the soldiers enter the heart of the ‘grassy town’ by hiding amidst ‘grazing cattle’, bringing with them the sound of arms, ‘tempted by the city of Antipolique not far away’.17
The quatrain for August 1555 returns to the theme of treason, this time giving it a female slant.18 It is important to see that Nostradamus reckons that the whole human order stands in grave danger. It results from human malignancy in conjunction with that of Saturn, the planet which Richard Roussat thought presided over all the hatred, rancour, avarice, treasons and dissimulation, the characteristics that prevailed from as early as the lost prognostication of 1550, no doubt published in Lyon in 1549, and preserved in fragments compiled by Jean-Aimé de Chavigny in a collection of Nostradamus’ predictions.19 The human order will nowhere be able to escape from the intensity of these malign forces. ‘The heavenly bodies above threaten great spilling of blood at the two extremities of Europe, to the east and the west, and beween them there will be the most uncertain trepidation’. At the core of this peril, as a result of which human evil is both within and without mankind, there is the ‘variation of fortune’, which will lead one to suppose that ‘the century of Scylla or of Marius is returned, and that it is not yet in its ultimate phase’. Happy the man, Nostradamus adds for good measure, who keeps himself far away from ‘his blood’ (i.e. his native land) and who, we must suppose, will be spared the horrors of its civil war. We should not overlook this last point, for it would seem that, well before the politico-religious situation in France seemed destined towards civil conflict, Nostradamus already foresaw that there would be no other outcome than war.
His prediction for 1552 follows the same lines.20 ‘O how the march of time will be harmful and pernicious!’ And ‘In the Autumn there will be be some negotiations beween the Princes which will be such that they will not last long … Notwithstanding they will not cease to bring each other to wrack and ruin’. When Mars is involved, the threat is even more alarming. In 1:15 that fateful or malignant planet threatens ‘us by its martial force’. Human blood will flow seventy times – perhaps because in Genesis 10 that is the number of tribes that will be dispersed throughout the earth after the destruction of the Tower of Babel.21 Once more there emerges a Biblical allusion which the reader is invited to bring to mind and which will bring him to contemplate the universality of approaching death, and how it will spare none of the nations. Or is it an invitation to call to mind the seventy years of the Babylonian captivity pronounced by Jeremiah? Whichever it is, the quatrain seems to predict a universal punishment over all the earth of a humanity at war. But the ascendancy of Mars aims at another target as well, predicting the rise and eventual ruin of the ‘Ecclesiastic’, and still more those who will not listen to his (or its) teachings. In 9:63 Mars is once more the focus of attention. ‘Wailings and tears, screams and great howlings’ will be heard near Narbonne, at Bayonne and in the County of Foix. ‘O what horrible calamities, changes, / Before Mars has completed several revolutions’.22 As for ‘the’ foreign land in 1:83, it will share the spoils when Saturn is in angry opposition to Mars. A horrible massacre will upset the Tuscans and the Latins (the inhabitants of ‘Latium’) because the Greeks are eager to intervene.23 This is his prediction for 1555:
The captive changelings will be sustained by a vain hope, he who will be taken prisoner, and whom one would never have imagined so, after the repurchase of the other, will do more damage than ever, he who is newly arrived will feign to be a friend and will turn out to be a mortal enemy and wicked traitor, by whose falsity and dissimulation the innocent will return to shed their blood, some who are ill will die, and many who are high-born and notable will be angered: but the death of two of them will be found to be more sought after than lamented; however truly and for various reasons that are most evident, enemies who are more pernicious to us will suffer a loss more grievous to them than to us. Others’ death was scarcely anticipated, and the others wanted to carry out what their opponents did. The blood of the just cries out for expiation. Gusty, clear, pure, tranquil and serene air will abruptly turn about to bring harm, and he who was raised up all of a sudden, will find himself, as long planned, abruptly transformed. Ô infelix infelix (‘O unhappy, unhappy one’) I dare say; but regions and their inhabitants will suffer for him, both to the West and the East as in part of the South.
Nothing is therefore stable or definitive in his prognostications; nor is it in the Prophecies, when interpreted as a theme and variations on the game of Fortune and evil, with Nostradamus addressing the reader to warn him to be on his guard. As 5:32 puts it, even when everything is going well, when the sun and moon are in the ascendant, and wealth abounds, ‘you’ should be aware that ruin awaits just round the corner. Fortune varies ‘with the sky above’ and is ready to deceive you, and scatter your wealth such that it be ‘in the same estate as the seventh stone’.24 It is the seventh stone, perhaps, because of the seven signs of the Apocalypse in the Revelation, but it is also no doubt an allusion to the Tarpeian Rock, the cliff on the southern face of the Capitoline hill, the seventh hill in Rome, from which criminals were despatched to their death. It was therefore a symbol of the Fall. Misfortune is never far away in human life. It always makes its come-back. Even the most rich and powerful are subject to it. Just at the level of moral exemplum, the lesson is that Fortune brings down the mighty. In 1:63, Nostradamus supposes enigmatically that, when the scourge has passed, and the world has shrunk, then peace will endure on earth, amidst its inhabitants who will ‘walk’ safely everywhere; but then wars will once again break out and there will be no more serenity.25
Our prophet seems to be paraphrasing here, once more, the Old Testament, in particular Psalm 90:6: ‘In the morning it flourisheth, and groweth up; in the evening it is cut down, and withereth’. He certainly seems to want to underline the ephemeral nature of human life, the terrifying fact that it can be abruptly cut short, and that its glory is of brief duration. Above all he seems to want to underline the inexorability of human affairs, and that one cycle of time is inevitably followed by another, that after peace always comes war. Time does not stand still and human evil is always on the march. Nostradamus’ fortuna would seem, therefore, to take us back to the irremissible reality of God's almighty power, embedded in the heavenly stars, a power which relentlessly raises up the great and then brings them low, in the past as in the future, among his chosen people. In 8:17, the well-off – perhaps the Biblically ‘proud in their hearts’ who are opposed to the humble and meek – will be suddenly brought low, and the world shall be troubled by three brothers – which might be allegorized as plague, war and famine, the three scourges of the Apocalypse. The enemies will seize the ‘maritime city’ which will experience a multiple dose of famine, fire, blood and plague.26 The appearance of the new Moon in May 1554 will bring ‘rejoicing’ to the human world but it will not last long, and for some countries it will become a nightmare, with shedding of blood in the direction of Africa and ‘uprisings, pillage, incursions’ on the Mediterranean shores. Again there is the lament for the horrors meted out to the innocent afflicted: ‘O what hideous and unhappy torment’ – and, alongside it, he conjures up the image of drunken butchers torturing three innocent victims who have fallen into their clutches, and ‘suspected empoisoning’, ‘lax prison guards’ and treason.27
The prodigy of a monstrous birth in 2:58 allows us to advance deeper into the Nostradamian vision of a world absolutely dominated by evil, and in which there is no order in human affairs. The case of the child born without feet and hands, to which it perhaps refers, was taken from Conrad Lycosthenes, who cites it occurring in ancient Picenum, as Roman geographers called a region of Eastern Italy. Nostradamus adds that, instead of feet and hands, the infant had one large tooth and a lump on his forehead, symbolic of cupidity and pride. Above all, the prodigy foreshadows a ‘disloyal’ person who will stand close by the gate whilst, by the light of the moon, great and small are led off.28 Again, as so often, the topic of dissimulation is linked to that of powerlessness in the face of the powerful. Is it not an allegory for original sin, lurking in mankind's innermost depths, and forever ready to strike, from within or without? The theme is reworked in 1:10, which tells of seven royal offspring locked up in an iron cage in which are placed some snakes. Their father and forefathers will emerge from the netherworld to lament the sight of the death of their offspring.29 It is a highly symbolic quatrain, whose orthography should not be corrected in the way proposed by Pierre Brind’Amour. Nostradamus’ objective is to signify to what extent innocence is victimized in this world, how much it has to endure. The figure of ‘seven’ may well play a part in dramatizing this image of suffering. Are not these seven children, faced with a serpent, an allegory for the seven virtues, subjected to an attack of the devil? Are they not an image for an understanding of human history as dominated by evil?30
Richard Roussat expounds at length the significance of the number seven, which he regards as a number with supernatural power, essentially on the basis of the Revelation of St John the Divine and its evocation (Rev. 1:20) of ‘The mystery of the seven stars which thou sawest in my right hand, and the seven golden candlesticks. The seven stars are the angels of the seven churches: and the seven candlesticks which thou sawest are the seven churches.’ But the number ‘seven’ is also the sign of repose and beatitude, a reference to the seven sheep who sealed the peace between Abraham and Abimelech (Gen. 21). This leads us to yet another question: when Nostradamus wanted to create an allegory of the moment when Original Sin descended upon man, the moment when humanity lost its innocence in this mortal world for ever, did he not deliberately choose to do so in a Pythagoreanizing way, making the number seven the ‘vehicle and conductor of human life’?31 Did he not want to recall the divine power of the Almighty by means of a parable (in this instance, the parable of the number ‘seven’)? ‘God hath spoken once; twice have I heard this; that power belongeth unto God’ (Ps. 62:11). Just so, because the Biblical Word contains many significations, and that because it must express the Inexpressible, it must render the Infinite finite. God can say a great deal in a single world. This is perhaps what lies behind the extraordinarily virulent attack which Jules César Scaliger launched on his former friend and which was published later in his posthumously printed Poemata (1584), when he scurrilously linked Nostradamus’ assertion to be a prophet to a claim to have ‘arisen from the prophet Benjamin’ and denounced his ‘enthusiasm’ as derived from ‘the Judaic art’.32
The misfortune of some, the great and less than great, is also bound up in the Nostradamian scheme of things with the passage of comets. So, in 6:6, the bearded star appears in the northern sky, not far from Cancer, over Susa, Siena, Boeotia and Eretrion. Its brightness will banish the night and Rome's lord (perhaps a pope) will die.33 In 2:70, a ‘dart’ will streak across the sky whilst many will die talking, and there will be a big massacre. Stone will be found in the tree and ‘the proud people handed back, / brute, man-monster; purge, expiation.’34 In 5:59, the English chief overstays his welcome in Nîmes whilst en route towards Spain to lend assistance to Ahenobarbus. On that same day, many will die because of Mars, when a bearded star will shoot in Artois.35 All the while that the ‘bearded star’ is visible in 2:43, ‘the three great princes will be made mortal enemies. / Lightning from the sky, peace on earth trembling: Po, Tiber[?] overflow, snake on the shore deposited’.36
If we follow the interpretation of Pierre Brind’Amour of this quatrain, it is about the ‘tailed comet’ appearing in the constellation of Auriga at the moment when Gaius Octavius proclaimed himself the successor of Gaius Julius Caesar and Gens Iulia, and entered Rome. There were ‘numerous earth tremors’ and a whirlwind knocked over the statue of Cicero at the temple to Minerva and uprooted the trees in the temple to the goddess Ops. The Po burst its banks and vipers were left behind as the waters receded. The comet is the augury for a civil war, but, in the crucially important Quatrain 2:46, a marker for the renewal of time. A period of great violence is followed by one which threatens to be still more destructive. The ‘great mover of the centuries’ is setting about the cycle of renewal and in an apocalyptic environment: ‘Rain, blood, milk, famine, sword and plague’ abound, whilst there is ‘fire in the sky, trailing sparks in its wake’.37