All things pass away, and nothing endures in this earthly life. Discord will inevitably follow concord.1 We should not rest on our laurels, having discovered the moral message in these quatrains. We need to realize how the Nostradamian preoccupation with the capriciousness of destiny takes us back to his conviction that the created being is utterly feeble before its Creator. The Creator deceives the strong as well as the weak, human spite coming into play, forever ready to make things worse. Human liberty is the object of constant attacks, forever subject to breakdown.2 Held in check in most of the examples given by Nostradamus, human liberty also, no less paradoxically, when it is back in their hands, gives free rein to the unleashing of savage human violence.3 We therefore need to envisage the imaginary in Nostradamian writing such that his use of enigma is intentionally pleonastic (i.e. composed of built-in redundancy). His enigmas, even when they attempt to say something significant, aim to make us understand that human life has to be a seen as itself an enigma, that it has to be a negation of the self, an apprehension of that negation of self in the face of God's absolute power. The self to be negated is the one whom Nostradamus calls, in the Almanac for the year 1554 ‘the human and lapsed animal’, the Fallen human being.
Although bad people generally triumph and earn the highest rewards for their crimes, history is, at the same time, paradoxical; for it also shows that one crime leads on to another, and that a chain of evil is set in motion which draws unto death those who are responsible for doings bad things. In just that fashion, Nostradamus sketches out a temporality which seems to be pitched forever towards things getting worse. In 9:53, the young Nero organizes three fires in which to cremate his page-boys alive. Happy the one, says the prophet Nostradamus, who lives far from such cruel times, for it is three of that one's kinsmen who will ambush him and put him to death.4 In 10:90 the person who is called the ‘inhuman tyrant’ will be doomed to pay dearly for the evil that he has perpetrated. He shall die ‘a hundred times’ whilst a governor of learning and good counsel will be set in his place.5 But nothing stops the hand of evil and inexorably it will return for, although the Senate is in complete control, its actions will be thwarted by a reckless good for nothing, filled with malign intentions. Evil's temptations know no limits. In 8:65 they overwhelm someone whose age should have taught him wisdom and it is particularly telling that his actions create a rhythm since the one who succeeds him will be yet more evil than he ever was.6
Horror attracts horror, even when it dresses itself up in legitimacy for having put a tyrant to death. In the name of justice or liberty, holy places can be profaned. That is what will happen in the ancient city founded by Antenor (which might be Padua), and which will find that it can no longer put up with the tyrant who rules it. Someone with only one arm (the ‘manchet’) will cut his throat in the holy temple and the people will set about massacring his followers.7 Poison serves as an instrument. In 7:42 two newcomers will be caught in the act of pouring out poison in the great prince's kitchen. The scullion will catch them both red-handed and the one who was believed to want to put the ‘elder’ to death will be imprisoned.8 The wickedness that surrounds people on all sides, in the past as in the present, transforms them and turns them wicked too, making them do things which are not just or right.9 There is a further correlation too. Terror uses cruelty as an exemplary instrument in order to keep people obedient. That is what Nostradamus means when he observes in 10:92 that ‘the child will be killed before the father's eyes, and then they will tie the father up hand and foot in rush-twine. The people of Genoa will thus be incited to virtue through seeing their leader (the doge?) lying dead in the midst of the city like a logs.'10
So the mechanism which unleashes outbursts of oppression and violence, and which sets in motion the unfurling of passions is essential. Nostradamus depicts it as either leading individuals to their own death, or making them the instrument of the deaths of others. In 10:35 the young prince is infatuated and lusts after his first cousin. He does not hesitate to make his way into the temple of Artemis (at Ephesus?) dressed as a woman, which is where he is murdered by an unknown girl ‘from the Marne’ (i.e. Mare Negro, the Black Sea?).11 In 7:9, a lady is solicited in love by the viceroy whilst her great captain is absent. A false promise and an unlucky gift will fall into the hands of the great prince from Bar, Nostradamus leaving the reader in suspense at the end of the story although one is led to suppose that it ends badly.12 Honour turns to dishonour. In 8:14 the huge mass of gold and silver will make the honorable man blind to his actions and he will surrender to his base instincts. But his adultery will end up being public knowledge, and that will cause him grave dishonour.13 In the next person's case, chosen from 10:10, it seems that a kind of sexual frenzy is at the roots of the evil that he carries out, his countless adulteries being accompanied by murders which turn him into a great enemy to the whole human race, for he will be worse than all his ancestors and by sword, by fire and by flood his actions will be bloody and inhumane.14 A fall from favour can also bring out the worst in people, and explain treasonable behaviour; the just can become unjust through their resentments.15 On the other hand, those who remain just, and refuse to descend into injustice, pay a heavy price – for that is the moral of 6:45, where the governor of the land, a most learned man, is unwilling to bow to the royal commands, and he becomes the target of revenge. The fleet from Melilla, despite contrary winds, will hand him over to his most disloyal enemy.16
Inversion is not restricted to human beings, transforming themselves into wild beasts. This is the fate of the princes in the almanac for 1554, who act the very opposite of how rulers should. Instead of being just, and protecting those whom they govern, they become ‘irate, implacable, foolhardy, audacious, impudent and wild; robbers, despoilers, ravishers and traitors, using all sorts of violence towards their subjects and sentencing many of them to death without appeal’. Inversion is not merely the sudden emergence of a time when ignorance triumphs over knowledge, when culture is devalued, and when those whose learning earned them a place in the realm found themselves impoverished following a change of regime. Some are exiled, deprived of influence, excluded from rewards, their learning no longer highly regarded.17 The high become low, and the low shall become high.18 There are other forms of inversion too, such as fratricide or parricide. ‘Seven branches are reduced to three’ in 6:11, the eldest of the line being ‘surprised by death’. The ‘two’ will be ‘seduced into fratricide’ and the conspirators shall die asleep in their beds.19 Fratricide can also occur as a climactic end to a tragic story. So, in 9:36 a great king shall fall into the clutches of a ‘youth’ and, at Easter-tide, a knife attack willl cause great confusion. Those who are captured will be kept in prison for life, and the mast will be struck by lightning. It is in these circumstances that ‘three brothers will maim and murder one another’.20
Parricide is also very present in the Nostradamian picture of what shall transpire. In 10:15 the son of the duke his elderly father, consumed with thirst and at the point of death, refuses to pass him the flask so that he can have a drink, and instead pitches him still half dead into a well in mocking jest of his thirst. The Senate will eventually reward his parricide with a ‘long and light death’ (perhaps the strappado).21 Several accounts of infanticide find their place in the Nostradamian obsessionally tragic universe. The first concerns the case of a lover whose heart is given over in clandestine love to another, and who will ravish the lady over some water-course. The lady in question will fail to hide her carnal activities from her father, who will put them both, her and her lover, to death.22 Then, in 8:63, the adulterer, wounded without having received a blow, will murder his wife and son out of spite; then, having knocked his wife out he will strangle their child.23 Finally, in a place called ‘DRU’ (9:57) a king shall take his rest, and try to reverse the law concerning sentences of anathema. However, the heavens will thunder overhead, no doubt in protest at his impious project, and he will kill his offspring with his own hands, probably because they had become heretics.24 Intrafamilial violence seems to take on every conceivable shape and form. The stepmother commits incest.25 The rough and disobedient royal scion despises his mother and hits her in the eye and feet – an aggressive lack of respect which is, in this instance, a sign of a more dramatic calamity in store since it will come as a strange and bitter surprise to the lady that ‘more than five hundred of her men shall die’.26
To bring to a close this listing of the various ways in which fundamental taboos are transgressed by Nostradamus, there is his warning, addressed to the ‘gallic king’ in 8:32. He should beware his own nephew who shall act such that ‘your’ only son will be murdered whilst in the act of making love, protected at night by an escort of only three to six individuals.27 A similar fate awaits the Frenchman who will occupy the empire by invading it, and will be betrayed by his adolescent brother-in-law. He will be dragged along by an untrained leaping horse and for his act he will be long held in ignominy.28 Friendship, too, will cease to have any meaning. When, in 8:83 the biggest fleet leaves the port of Zara and engages near the port of Bisance, inflicting casualties on the enemy, friends will no longer be friends and a third party shall descend on the other two, and pillage and take prisoners from them both.29
Inversion also occurs because the natural world behaves the opposite of the way that it should. There will be a drought, beginning in July 1554 that shall last thirty-six months (the number being divisible by four and by nine) and that shall, because water has become so scarce, be moistened with blood. That is important because water is the principle of life and blood is the sign of death. Rivers alter course, and change direction; the ‘Celtic river’, the Rhine, will no longer flow through Cologne in 6:4 and all will be transformed except the ‘ancient tongue’, whilst Saturn, Leo, Mars and Cancer will be ‘en rapine’ (in retreat?).30 Nothing except the true Word of God will survive from past ages is perhaps the message.
Inversion plays a role when someone finds it impossible to stay alive, overwhelmed by a malady which, although famine is not at the root of the problem, starves him in the midst of prosperity and brings him to death's door. Diivine wrath spares no one, striking down (in the Biblical narrative) the rich and proud. This is exactly what Nostradamus lays out when he asserts that it is not because of their poverty that men will die, but because, rich as they are, they are unable to eat. The Almanac for the year 1554 offers the enigmatic proposition that ‘in our country at the Durance here before, there will occur as strange and prodigious case as has ever been seen in the life of man’. It is near Avignon that the prodigy will take place, and then, towards the end of summer, ‘a whole new malady’ (or, rather, a malady which has all the makings of something ‘wondrously new’) when many will die of hunger despite their living in plenty and luxury, quite simply because they are no longer able to eat properly. One might well read into this the theme of divine wrath, as in: ‘Their soul abhorreth all manner of meat; and they draw near unto the gates of death’ (Ps. 107:18), or ‘So that his life abhorreth bread, and his soul dainty meat’ (Job 33:20). Rather than referring to an anorexic epidemic, Nostradamus seems to be alluding to the figure of a God who punishes the proud by depriving them, by analogy, until they develop the need and taste for what nourishes them, that is to say the saving Word, the gates of death being conceived as the equivalent to being condemned to eternal damnation.
Men are not alone in being embroiled, voluntarily or otherwise, in their attraction to evil, locked away in the horror that forever invites still more horror. Women can also be at the origin of the violence which agitates the powerful and afflicts the innocent. In 8:73 the soldier-barbarian, perhaps in a quarrel over booty, shall strike the King unjustly and almost kill him. Behind the deed, however, is the mother's avarice, and the realm and the schemer shall end up in great remorse (trouble?).31 Treason can have a female face, as in 5:12 where near Lake Geneva some woman will be led astray by a foreign ‘maid’ to betray the city. Before she is murdered at Augsburg, the great assembly (of soldiers) will join with the Rhinelanders and invade the city.32 Treason also takes the form of infidelity leading to the sovereign undertaking a bloody repression. In 6:59 the ‘lady’, mad with adulterous rage, will deny her guilt before her Prince. But her ‘shame’ will soon become public knowledge and seventeen men will be martyred.33 Seventeen is an unlucky number in Antiquity, used to signify here the calamity that the woman has brought about. And the desire for vengeance which stirs in male hearts can also be active in female breasts. Women, too, are subject to the highs and lows of fortune, as in 6:74 where she who was banished returns to power, whilst her enemies are treated as conspirators. More than ever before she will ride high, for seventy-three of her adversaries will certainly be put to death.34 Nostradamus often sees women, however, in a tragic light. In 9:77, for example, the realm is seized, the king will conspire, and the lady will be captured and put to death by lot. The life of the queen's son will not be spared either, and the ‘pellix’ (the concubine) will supplant the ‘consorteria’ (the family).35 In the following quatrain, a Greek damsel, blessed with the beauty of the courtesan Laïs, has innumerable suitors at her beck and call. But then, for reasons that Nostradamus does not elaborate, she is despatched far off to the kingdom of Spain, and there held captive until she dies a wretched death.36 The image emphasizes the fragility of people's destinies, but also the transience of worldly beauty.
That fragility is reinforced by the observation that history is not linear, and that the most sombre moments of the past can always return to haunt the present, and do so in the most horrific ways. One example of this is through the revival of paganism and of human sacrifice, coinciding with great persecution.37 In 1:44, those who do not object to paganism will be subject to martyrdom and monks, abbots and novices will disappear from the scene, whilst ‘honey shall become more expensive than wax’.38 That was a way of saying that this is a period in which the Flesh will triumph over the Spirit; for Denys the Areopagite identified honey with the teachings of God, with the Word of God which is pure and sweet, and wax as the symbol of earthly life. So the time when honey costs more than wax is the time of persecution for all those who want to remain faithful to true beliefs. This is by no means the only manifestation of this theme of paganism, in which it is difficult to determine whether it is metaphorical for the trials and tribulations of Nostradamus’ day over religion. In 9:74 there will be homicides in the city of Fertsod, and plough-oxen will be sacrificed on the altar. There will be a return to the cult of Artemis, innocent people will be sacrificed, and the dead will be buried in honour of Vulcan (i.e. they will be cremated).39 It is worth noting that the first three letters of ‘Sodom’ make up the last three of the enigmatic city of ‘Fertsod’. And these sacrifices of innocent people seem to evoke the analogous remarks that religious dissidents in Nostradamus’ time tended to make, the Protestants comparing their persecution to the burnt offerings to Moloch or Baal, whilst Papal propagandists accused their adversaries of being born-again Philistines or Amalekites. Furthermore, Nostradamus identifies a time (in 2:30) which will witness an ill-fated man who shall cause ‘Hannibal's infernal gods’ to be reborn, a great fear for human kind – an allusion to the cult of Baal and to the supposed Punic sacrifice of children practised by the inhabitants of Carthage.40
There will be days, too, of absolutely unparalleled horror, which will come to pass ‘through Babel to the Romans’. The astrologer twice identifies the event that will launch their reemergence, manifested by a rejection of taboos and the overturning of order. In the first, it is a matter of human remains, found at the bottom of a well, which augur a stepmother's incest. Then the state, having been changed, ‘they’ will seek glory and renown, and they will have Mars in the ascendant (i.e. there will be war).41 In the second configuration, the bones of the ‘great Roman’ are discovered when a ‘new sect’ is founded. His sarcophagus will emerge, covered in marble. In the earthquake that will take place in April the bodies of those who have been badly interred will become visible.42 The symbol of death here is of the neglect, the forgetting, of God. To reveal is to reveal that there is no knowledge. To prophesy is to say that there is nothing to say, beyond that man is but nothing since his time is one that sees him forever plunged into the temptation to be evil, to do wrong. His predicament is that he imagines himself endowed with a capacity to penetrate the secrets of the divine. His ultimate calamity is to want to use violence in the sphere of religious faith.