Monsters and marvels leap out of the pages of the disjointed progression of Prophecies.1 So, to take an example, Nostradamus warns that, after a terrible downpour, a sea-monster from distant seas will be found on a sandy shore.2 In Seville there will be interlocking marvels; the first prodigious event will occur when a ‘true flame’ will engulf the lady who sought to burn the innocents. Then, in a second prodigy, an army will be consumed in flame before the assault, after which a ‘monster bull’ will be seen in Seville.3 A similar conjunction serves to intensify the significance of the portent elsewhere too. In 6:44 a rainbow will appear over the city of Nantes by night. It will signify the coming of a great storm of rain. The second prodigy will happen in Saxony with the birth of a monster from the coupling of a bear with a sow. There is no way of understanding what the impact of this unnatural event is on the naval event alluded to in the Arabian gulf in the same quatrain, where a great fleet will sink.4 In a further remarkable quatrain (2:82) it all begins when a wolf, lured in by hunger, is captured, which means that the assailant will fall into grave distress.5 The second prodigy is when the death of a great lord who is not able to flee ‘in the midst of the fray’ is preceded by the birth of a child having its backside on the front of its body. There is the same binary structure in the quatrain (9:3) which predicts that the ‘magna vacqua’ (which might be identified with Magnavacca, the place called ‘Mange Vache’ in the Po delta) will provoke a great commotion in the city of Ravenna, when men will arrive, guided by ‘fifteen’ who had been previously hidden on the island of Fornase.6 Parallel to this highly dramatic episode, when two monsters with two heads come to be born in Rome there will be ‘blood, fire, flood, the leaders cut to pieces’.7
In the vision of Nostradamus, the dead also serve as portents by rising up from their graves. He who was buried will step out of his tomb (7:24) before ‘wrapping up the strong of the bridge in chains’. Quatrain 3:36 conjures up the scene of the man buried alive who will be found to have eaten his own hands. This will be the sign that the city will condemn to death the heretic who, ‘so it seemed to them’ had changed the laws.8 That is to say, that the laws are perhaps here identified with the hands of the body, which is the city. Then there is the case, already referred to, of the faint sound of a lady's voice heard beneath the hallowed ground of a cemetery.9 Then people will take this human flame (the voice) as divinely inspired and this will signify that the ground will be stained with the blood of the monks and that the holy temples will be destroyed by the ‘profane’.10 Comets and drought arrive in tandem. So, in 2:84 not a drop of rain will fall for a period (no doubt symbolic) of six months and nine days from Campania to Tuscany, in Siena and Florence. At that moment a comet – a ‘strange tongue’ – will streak across the sky in Dalmatia, laying the land to waste.11 There will also be a bearded star which will appear to the north, not far from Cancer, in June, and a great Roman lord will die (doubtless the pope), night having given way to day as a result of the marvellous light.12 Shortly before a monarch is killed, Castor and Pollux will appear ‘on ship’, and a bearded star.13 To which we should add the vision of a meteorite falling to earth in 6:97.14 The sky will burn at the forty-fifth degree and the fire will threaten the great ‘new city’ – no doubt Naples. At that moment a scattered flame will leap out when someone seeks assurance from some Normans.15 Cities are places where prodigious events take place – as with the great maritime ocean city (Antwerp?) in 9:48, surrounded by crystalline marshes. At the time of the winter solstice, it will be buffeted by ‘gale-force’ winds.16
The problem, when confronted by these prodigy stories, is the inclination to misconstrue what has to be understood in the meaning of the divine message of these signs on earth and in the sky, and which Nostradamus presents to us in his elliptical language. One of the quatrains (3.34) testifies to precisely the meaning of these presages. As already said, it is not a divination of the future but a lesson in the power of the Almighty, and we should not be misled on that point. So, when a solar eclipse takes place a monster will be seen in broad daylight; but it will turn out, says Nostradamus, that people will interpret it the wrong way.17 They will not grasp the hidden meaning of the relationship between the temporary disappearance of the light and the appearance of a monster. They will therefore have made no preparations, gathering in provisions as they ought to have done, for the famine which will automatically follow. That famine is perhaps a synonym for the price to be paid for not having proper respect for the divine will. Having lived without divine light, they will suffer the consequences. The meaning of the Prophecies in these monster-quatrains is evident. Nostradamus sets himself the objective to alert his leaders to his complex language, whose grammar and lexicon he lays out for us, deciphering its connections and implications. What it is critical to understand is how he deploys a natural philology, on the basis laid down in, amongst other places, the Horus Apollon. Nostradamus’ attentiveness in the Prophecies to the prodigies happening in the heavens and on earth, in the seas and in the clouds, invites us to read them in the light of his Hermetic culture. The prodigies are hieroglyphs which contain a specific divine teaching. They are not just expressions of divine anger through the disordering of nature and its sometimes catastrophic consequences. They serve as the means by which human beings can approach God's wisdom, and for which they are a lesson, which inexorably leads us to the evangelical Word, to his Son.
There are prodigies in the sky, associated with terrestial signs, as in Quatrain 1:64 when men will imagine that they have seen the sun at night, which is also when they will see a ‘half-human pig’.18 It is no doubt once more an allusion to the Book of Prodigies of Julius Obsequens, translated in 1552 by Conrad Lycosthenes, and which tells of three cases of pigs born with human feet and hands, at Tarquinia, Sinuesse and Géré.19 Yet is was in 163 BCE, under the consuls Tiberius Gracchus and Marcus Juventius, that the sun was seen at night over Capua and Pisaurum (Pesaro) and coupled with the birth of an animal that was half-pig and half-human whilst a heavenly host was heard in the skies at Cephalonia. Nostradamus thus links together several prodigious events in drawing up his own prophecy.20 Julius Obsequens recounts that, at the later date of 134 BCE, the sun appeared for a time in the middle of the night at Aminterne, an ox spoke, and at the Capitol, a bird uttered groans that sounded like those of a man – which corresponds to the last line of the quatrain in question (‘and brute beasts will be heard to speak’). Over and above the allusion to the Book of Prodigies, we should take these marvels as announcing a period when men will live in a world turned upside down, hearing irrational beasts speak, and allowing themselves to be carried away by their own brute senses. But here again it is essential to take into account that Nostradamus does not define these beings strictly. The whole art of Nostradamus is to leave everything fluid, thus letting them signify that they are generic figures, incarnations of all that is meant by forgetting the will to peace and love of the One who is ‘above all’.
The marvels themselves give structure to the prophecy since they rely on inversion, the sun appearing at night, the human becoming animal, the sky full of singing and battles, things which should normally take place on earth. God originally created the sun to shine by day, and not the night:21 ‘The day is thine, the night also is thine: thou hast prepared the light and the sun.’ Nostradamus asks his reader in Quatrain 3.34 to be aware of the time which is approaching, when man's falsehood will overwhelm him, persuading him to give credence to stereotypes that are the stuff of illusions. It is a warning, paraphrasing those in the Bible, which implies that Nostradamian writing functions as a sort of puzzle to awaken the reader to the Word of God, allowing him to comprehend that the supernatural in nature is God's language, that it is a divine message helping him to set in train a movement towards the Word, probably through echoes of the warnings by Old Testament prophets.22 It could be that the First Epistle to the Corinthians gives us the lead into the hermeneutic ambiance of the quatrain: ‘Therefore judge nothing before the time, until the Lord come, who will both bring to light the hidden things of darkness, and will make manifest the counsels of the hearts; and then shall every man have praise of God’ (1 Cor. 4:5). In opposition to the siren voices on all sides, the teaching of the prophetic quatrain is not to let oneself by subverted by the illusions which it conveys. God alone is the source of Truth because God alone is at the origin of the language of res mirabiles, of marvels.
But the philology of marvels and prodigies seems to lead Nostradamus’ discourse in the direction of Biblical allusions. That seems of a piece with the sense of a nature which reflects the Word of God, and for which, as we have seen, it is a mirror. Nostradamus provides a highly expressive description of a lunar eclipse in 1:84.23 The moon is obscured by ‘profound shades’ whilst its ‘brother’, the sun, grows wan, ‘rust-coloured’. The prodigy signifies, at first sight and if the quatrain is read literally, a crime in the future, in the conjunction between the hidden planet and the ‘great lord’ who will long be concealed ‘in the shadows (“latebres”)’, and will then plunge his sword into the ‘bloody wound’. It is as though Nostradamus has engaged in a game of semantics whose origin lay seemingly in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 4:19–21): ‘And I will show wonders in heaven above, and signs in the earth beneath – blood and fire and vapour of smoke. The sun shall be turned into darkness, and the moon into blood before that great and notable Day of the Lord come. And it shall come to pass that whosoever shall call on the name of the Lord shall be saved.’ Quatrain 1:84 also contains the motif of inversion, for it is the moon which is in shadows and the sun which becomes blood-coloured. But what matters to Nostradamus is to declare that the time of the prodigy coincides with a manifestation of divine omnipotence, and with an eschatological moment which will announce murderous violence that should not, however, frighten us. At this time Christians must again and again call upon the Lord. It is also possible to discern a kind of paraphrase of the cosmic cataclysms prefiguring the Coming of the Son of Man: ‘But in those days, after that tribulation, the sun shall be darkened, and the moon shall not give her light, And the stars of heaven shall fall, and the powers that are in heaven shall be shaken’ (Mark, 13:24–5).
A similar linguistic homology crops up in another quatrain, also concerning the heavens. In 2:23 some birds will first be chased away by another bird within reach of a palace.24 Although forewarned, and although the enemy had been repulsed at some distance from the river, ‘the prince’ will be struck down by a plumed arrow. As Pierre Brind’Amour writes, ‘the bird of prey which falls upon its victim prefigures the arrow that fells the prince’. There, once again, Nostradamus puts together a collage from a passage furnished by Julius Obsequens relating how, in the reign of Tarquin the Elder in the year 244 BC, the palace rafters provided a nesting place for eagles; but then some vultures fell upon their eaglets and tore them to pieces. The event was treated as a presage of imminent catastrophe, especially as there was a war going on against the Rutuli, and Ardea was besieged. Nostradamus simply adds the death of the ‘prince’, which follows the logic of the identification of the bird with the ‘plumed flight’ of the arrow. It is a motif which appears again in 2:75.25 The voice of the ‘fabulous’ bird will be heard in the ‘flue of the chimney’. That will announce an increase in the price of a bushel of corn so steep that men will become anthropophagi. The bird in question is probably a night-bird, accustomed to solitude, inhabiting a space which is not the air. And there is an implied link between this bird – Julius Obsequens mentions an ‘avis ignota’ – and men gripped by famine which displaces them and turns them into something that they are not – cannibals. The reading of the prodigy, as always, proclaims a terrible inversion in the human order of things, in this instance by means of a bird, which might be a false prophet, thereby serving to warn mankind of this frightful eventuality. A bird can also symbolize the evil in mankind. Nostradamus thus adopts the posture of someone who speaks to the world at large, to the sceptics, so that they take on board the fact that they are forever at risk of losing sight of God in their worldly pursuits, and that (on the contrary) they should convince themselves of the need to enter into His wisdom. He speaks out the destiny of man, and the quatrains, in different ways and in no particular order, are a kind of psalmody of God's wisdom, moving between prayer, praise, judgement, execration, warning, invocation and lamentation. For there is also an element of parody that should not be overlooked. It is as though Nostradamus is playing a game of consequences on the basis of the curse pronounced by Ezekiel (32:4): ‘Then will I leave thee upon the land, I will cast thee forth upon the open field, and will cause all the fowls of the heaven to remain upon thee, and I will fill the beasts of the whole earth with thee’.
The prodigy-event that is evoked in 2:44 describes an eagle which, perched on a tented encampment, is chased away by other birds. This is the sign for the noise of cymbals, trumpets and bells, announcing the approach of an army, to restore to her rational faculties a ‘lady’ who has lost her senses.26 The martial hullabaloo perhaps recalls the captains following David in the Bible who were ‘under the hands of their father for song in the house of the Lord, with cymbals, psalteries, and harps, for the service of the house of God’ (1 Chron. 25:6). Is Nostradamus not offering us a metaphor in this quatrain of the saving Word which will lead the people of God back to the path of reason through glorifying Him? And the Lady in question, is she not the symbol of the Church which has forgotten its mission and its responsibilities, or even of Christendom more generally? What should, perhaps, be read into the sequence of this prodigy-event is a sense of the liberation to come for all those who have had to know the overshadowing of the Truth, and to endure its oppression. There is a further parallel with the construction of the Temple in the time of Joshua and his brother in the Book of Ezra (3:3–13).
There is a similar instance in 1:100, where a grey bird circles the air in Dôle and (simultaneously?) in Tuscany, holding in its beak a green branch, which is when a great lord will die and when the war will be ended.27 Perhaps it is a reference to the dove, whose coming back to Noah in the Ark was the sign of the end of the Flood and of God's anger. More precise, perhaps is the royal bird in 5:81, the eagle that will appear as a divine nocturnal augury for months at a time above the sun-city (Rome?), an augury of thunder, lightning and the collapse of the city's eastern wall and, above all, of the fact that, seven days later ‘to the hour’, the enemy will be within the gates.28
The motif of chastisement is primordial when interpreting the references to abnormalities. It is the God of the Old Testament who sounds forth, which is how Nostradamus had already evoked the storms in 1555 in the closing passage of his Preface to César
Then, at several points during these ominous storms, the Lord will say: ‘I will not pity, nor spare, nor have mercy, but destroy them & therefore will I also diminish thee: neither shall mine eye spare, neither will I have any pity,’ and many other things shall occur through the flood and continual rains, as I have set out more clearly in writing in my other prophecies which are composed throughout in the form of prose, in which I stipulated the places, the times, and the preordained ends which those who after me will be able to see, realizing how these events infallibly occurred just as we have noted them down in other prophecies, speaking more clearly: even though their meanings are hidden in a cloud: ‘But when ignorance is cast aside’ the matter will become clearer.
The marvels (res mirabiles) are part of the diction of God's anger, but an anger which Christians must not take the wrong way, because it is aimed at testing them out, and it must be interpreted as inviting them to look inside themselves, retrospectively. The world is a mirror of the self.
Under the sky, the sea. Once again the portents in the quatrains are overshadowed by the Book of Job, as a sort of paraphrase at a distance aimed at instructing Christian people about God's almighty power with the aim of putting them on a path towards penitence. To summon forth the marvels of earth, sea and skies, was this not, for Nostradamus, a way of summoning forth this God, terrifying certainly, who stirs souls through the display of His marvellous works?29
At this also my heart trembleth, and is moved out of his place. Hear attentively the noise of his voice, and the sound that goeth out of his mouth. He directeth it under the whole heaven, and his lightning unto the ends of the earth. After it a voice roareth: he thundereth with the voice of his excellency; and he will not stay them when his voice is heard. God thundereth marvellously with his voice; great things doeth he, which we cannot comprehend. For he saith to the snow, Be thou on the earth; likewise to the small rain, and to the great rain of his strength. He sealeth up the hand of every man; that all men may know his work. Then the beasts go into dens, and remain in their places. Out of the south cometh the whirlwind: and cold out of the north. By the breath of God frost is given: and the breadth of the waters is straitened. Also by watering he wearieth the thick cloud: he scattereth his bright cloud: And it is turned round about by his counsels: that they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world in the earth. He causeth it to come, whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy. Hearken unto this, O Job: stand still, and consider the wondrous works of God.
The torrid heat of the sun, in the atmosphere of prodigies conjured up by Nostradamus, also plays its part in making known the ‘wondrous works of God’, making the waters so hot that the fish around Negroponte, the island of Euboea, in 2:3 are half cooked.30 The inhabitants will come and eat them when the provisions coming from Rhodes and Genoa run out.31 Or perhaps they are reduced to eating them because they can wait no more, or no longer hold out. Here, once more, Nostradamus reworks the inner logic of a prodigy from Julius Obsequens, who relates how, under the consuls Marcus Emilius and Lucius Aurelius in 628 BCE, Etna erupted and the waters around the island of Lipari began to boil up, and some ships were burned. Dead fish in large quantities were washed up on various shores and the inhabitants ate them, many of them dying consequently. If we think about this quatrain in relation to this source, the question which comes to mind is this: should we not see these men who eat half-cooked fish without waiting for relief supplies as metaphorical? Is their death not a death to God in the sense that they had lost their confidence in the promise of salvation, and fallen for the imperfect but immediately available nourishment, superficially available as though by a miracle, the nourishment of the here and now, the succour of an incomplete faith of which these cooked fish are the symbol? This is the ‘God of our salvation; who art the confidence of all the ends of the earth, and of them that are afar off upon the sea’ (Ps. 65:5), the foster-God from Whom we must await, without presumptuousness, our salvation, in prayer and removed from the world's snares. In Psalm 59:12 the ‘sin of their mouth and the words of their lips’ comes from the lips of the impure, the words being those who ‘let them even be taken in their pride: and for cursing and lying which they speak’.
For the evangelists of the first half of the sixteenth century, the word of God had to be eaten ‘raw’, as a kind of spiritual ingestion that was the direct opposite to the pre-chewed word which is what the clergy took upon itself to profer to the faithful, reduced to the status of passive recipients. To put it in a nutshell, the semiotics of this quatrain seem to function as a kind of trompe l’oeil. Is there not in a simulacrum here, a literary sense of a hunger which refuses to wait upon events, and which devours what providentially seems to come to hand, but which is unwholesome food because it leads to death? Should we not authenticate the prophetic or ‘hidden’ meaning in the passage, one which requires us to discern in the quatrains the figuration of a parable which will draw the reader, by its very mystery, into an evangelist perspective?32 Should we not read this as a metaphor about human impatience, nurtured by the temptations of this earthly life, refusing to have the patience to await the nourishment which makes us ready for the life beyond death, eternity, the Word of God? In which case, their death by poisoning is God's punishment, an allegory for eternal death. This portent text seems to conceal within it a parable, which is perhaps itself conceived, in consequence, after Christ's own Word. It is a text-Revelation. Is not the reader here situated in the interpretative mode that was distinctively that of the evangelists in the years 1520–50, that of ingesting the Word of God internally (just as one took the bread at communion, or ‘manducation’) as an act constitutive of one's own conscience?33 And is that not because there is no life outside of one lived in patience, which will be put to the test by the ordeals sent by God? How otherwise to interpret 5:98 where, at forty-eight degrees of latitude, at the end of Cancer, there will occur such a great drought that the fish in the lakes, rivers and seas will slowly stew?34 Then Béarn and Bigorre in the Pyrenees will feel the terrible effects of a fire in the sky (lightning).
How, pursuing this interpretation, should we consider a quatrain already encountered (3:21) in which it is said that, on the banks of the Adriatic Sea at ‘Crustumin’,35 a hideous fish, with a human head and a fishlike tail will be pulled out of the sea on a fish-hook?36 What is Nostradamus seeking to evoke in the hideousness of such a creature, described as a ‘great and horrible nereid’ in Nostradamus’ Almanac for 1554, a monster from the deep resembling a mermaid, in a quatrain which does no more than lay out the bare bones of a prodigy event?37 What is the point of the fact that this monster is brought out of the depths on what is no more than a simple fish-hook? It is, in fact, the fish-hook which should grab our attention. If one goes back to Habakkuk (ch. 1), it is not without significance to read there that the prophet turns to God, punishing his people for their oppression of the Chaldeans, saying:
wherefore lookest thou upon them that deal treacherously, and holdest thy tongue when the wicked devoureth the man that is more righteous than he? And makest men as the fishes of the sea, as the creeping things, that have no ruler over them? They take up all of them with the angle (fish-hook), they catch them in their net, and gather them in their drag: therefore they rejoice and are glad. Therefore they sacrifice unto their net, and burn incense unto their drag; because by them their portion is fat, and their meat plenteous. Shall they therefore empty their net, and not spare continually to slay the nations?
The Hebrews are, in the ‘word by which Habakkuk speaks forth the vision which he had had’, fished out with a hook, ensnared in the net by the Chaldeans, ‘a ferocious and impetuous people’, like fish caught by a fisherman. God has surrendered them into the power of his enemies, withdrawing from them his protection and love. He has ceased to be their king, at least in appearance. Is not the half-human, half-fish monster possibly an allegory of this people in captivity, subjected to the wicked machinations of the evil, and thus put to the test by God? Is this not a people unfaithful towards its God? Is not the quatrain aiming to make evident this dramatic situation? Should we not discern, in the Biblical intertext, an exhortation to the reader, to fall in penitence before God and bewail his helplessness in the face of the suffering and violence endured, because he has been captive to his sins?38
Nostradamus spends some time, at various moments, on monstrous births, beginning with the case of a child born ‘with two teeth in its throat’ among those ‘deported to the islands’.39 The teeth symbolize here the act of eating, voracity, and because they appear precociously in the mouth of the new-born, they are a presage of a terrible famine, in which people will die of hunger, the trees around ‘nibbled’ by the famished. Human beings become like beasts of the field in their famishment. Yet, and this is the vital point to add, the deported do not stop there, because a new king will mount the throne, and will issue an edict of pardon. Therein we read, couched in a further semantics within the prodigy event, the theme of forgiveness in the wake of a paroxysm, a period of suffering, hardship and misery. It is a kind of forgiveness which comes to those who have persevered and not given up hope, the famine being in this case possibly an allegory of being prevented from being able to live fully in faith, or even of a time of persecution aimed at denying the faithful their nourishment by the Word. And this new king who reverses the course of history is perhaps not a temporal ruler, but rather a Christ-like figure, One whose Word is nourishment and whose mercy is for ever. Here, perhaps, the marvellous birth prodigy stories enable Nostradamus to say once more, in the guise of a game in which enigmas multiply and thus disaggregate the various ways of saying it, that God is All to he who gives himself up entirely to His mercy, he who perseveres in the face of deadly obstacles to be nourished by God in the free grace of His faith. The quatrain is perhaps trying to signify to us something in the contrast between cosmographic insularity and fideist interiority. Is this not one of the keys to the whole prophetic edifice – in this instance the production of a text destined to help the reader to sustain a hope in faith, in the face of all tribulations, a hope which is this hunger, a hunger for God and His Word? We should not forget the imprecation in Psalm 58:7, aimed at the evil-doers: ‘Break their teeth, O God, in their mouth: break out the great teeth of the young lions, O Lord’. Should we not draw the inference that the new-born baby in this quatrain is the incarnation of original sin, and that its teeth are those of the sin, filled with the venom of aspic, which holds man back and prevents him from knowing God? In Rabelais’ Quart Livre, the voyage to the islands is a catalogue of the monstrousness in earthly life separating man from the path towards Truth. In the Nostradamian quatrain in question, the island is such a monstrous place, and still more so in that it is the place of death, symbolizing spiritual death. But what the astrophile wants to emphasize is that, at the very heart of this place of death and punishment, there is hope in a Providence that can, at any moment, interrupt the train of misery. That is because, as Nostradamus writes, God ‘is over all’, and everything can be accomplished ‘by God alone’ (Soli Deo). Divine punishment is the sign hidden within the signs to the degree that it puts men to the test, to the degree that there will be blessings upon those who remain firm and faithful in the ordeal, in whom Christ reigns through His evangelical Word. From this it follows that the sombre, pessimistic, monstrous, Nostradamian universe, should perhaps be seen as a tool destined to open the imagination to the very opposite, to hope, because Christ is hope.
This theme of punishment is reinforced by 2:45, which recounts how, with the birth of an androgenous child, a deluge will follow and human blood will be shed ‘near this sky’:40
The heavens weep plenteously the Androgyne's birth
Near this sky human blood is shed:
By death too late a great people is recreated:
Soon and late the awaited help arrives.
The monstrous birth thus announces misfortunes and murders. This is the primary meaning which Nostradamus attributes to the text, following as usual in the tradition of Julius Obsequens. But we have to keep in mind that, by a death which comes all too late, the ‘great people’ will at length be given new life, and justice and peace no doubt will be restored. By saying that it occurs both ‘soon’ and ‘late’, it means that it will happen in a way that we cannot foresee, and that it will come to pass through God's mercy. As always, salvation comes in hope and patience. The only posture that the faithful should adopt is that of begging God to assuage his anger, a God who knows the secrets of what is to come, secrets kept from human beings, the vessels of iniquity. It is a God who is absolute justice to the Christian who identifies himself with Job, afflicted but always penitent. This is still more the case in 1:69 where, if the reader follows the account of the volcanic eruption it recounts he will learn that ‘the great mountain, seven stades round’ will ‘roll far’, destroying peace, by war, famine and flood, the latter engulfing ‘great tracts of land’ and ‘ancient ruins and mighty foundations’.41 Divine wrath can lead to utter destruction; that is doubtless the message that Nostradamus wants to underline in this free paraphrase of the Book of the Apocalypse (8:8): ‘And the second angel sounded, and as it were a great mountain burning with fire was cast into the sea: and the third part of the sea became blood’. Misfortune stalks human kind endlessly in the message of prodigious signs, as Nostradamus tells us repeatedly, and when they occur our only recourse it to prayer. In 2:6 plague and famine will reign within the walls of two cities, the like of which will never have been seen before. Moreover, ‘people will be cast out’ and there will be nothing left to do except to call upon ‘immortal and mighty God’ for help.42 God is, ever and always, ‘all’. Soli Deo.
More explicitly, the apprehension inherent in prodigious events can be conveyed through a linked sequence of marvels, suggested in a more direct fashion how the Church is involved in God's warnings. This is the case, for example, in 2:32, which begins with an evocation of ‘milk, blood, and frogs’ raining down upon Dalmatia.43 As in the text of Julius Obsequens, it is a presage of divine wrath, with war and plague ‘near Balenna’ and a great cry of anguish overwhelming Sclavonia. Above all, Nostradamus correlates this panic with the birth of a monster near to and within Ravenna, which can but refer the reader to the hermaphrodite monster which appeared there on 6 March 1512, a monster whose body was simultaneously a description of the sins of Italy and of the Church, and a divine warning to make people aware that the world was wallowing in vice and took delight in doing so. The image had circulated throughout Europe, including France, and gave rise to its being interpreted as a description of a world plunged into everything bad – pride (the horn on its brow), inconstancy (the wings on its back), egoism (the absence of arms), avidity (the claws at the end of the legs), and attachment to earthly affairs (the eye on the knee, looking downwards), the other leg being covered with fish-scales and a palmed foot at the end of it. The monster has two sexual organs, signifying intense debauchery inclining to sodomy. At the same time, it is depicted as having on its chest, besides the crescent of a moon, a cross and a ‘Y’, signifying what should guide the Christian in his desire to seek divine grace, cleaving to the martyr of the Redemption and what follows from ‘divine power’, the ‘Y’ being the first letter of the Hebrew tetragrammaton (YHJH).44 But there is also a Pythagorean symbolic interpretation of two divergent paths, virtue and vice, Good and Evil.45
There is also, perhaps, in the Nostradamian symbolic encoding a discursive logic emphasizing the monstrous body as an allegory for sin, as in 2:58, which figures the birth of a child without hands and feet, but with one sharp and pointed tooth and having a protuberance on its forehead.46 In this latter configuration, as we have already seen, this large and singular tooth is a symbol of untruthfulness, the protuberance on its brow being a sign of pride, and the fact that it has no hands and feet is a way of describing human kind at present living in an absence of charity and faith. In this quatrain, Nostradamus inscribes the presage that, under the light of the Moon, a traitor will open the gate of the town or fortress and that everyone, ‘great and small’ will be led away to captivity. In the portent we can just make out, once again, to the degree that Christendom is always compared to a place that is besieged by vices, a reference to a Babylonian captivity, either present or in the immediate future. Such a reading would once more displace the reader's imaginary to comparing his immediate circumstances with the time of trial of God's chosen people. Quatrain 3:42 introduces us to another child, born this time with two teeth in its throat, and whose appearance heralds a hail of stones: ‘A few years later there will be no barley nor wheat to feed those who are desperate from hunger’.47 Misfortune is here present in the form of this famine, which sends us back to the motif of the hunger for God, and of an obstacle placed in the way of reaching the Word of God. In 1:80 it is a thunderclap in Burgundy after ‘the sixth bright celestial splendour’, which is the prelude to the birth of a ‘monster of hideous bestiality’, which presages in the months of March, April, May and June great divisions and a massacre.48
God's wrath is reiterated in the form of a presage of a second Great Flood in Quatrain 2:31, inundating Campania and all the land through to Capua. The rain will go on for ages, ‘before, after’.49 Apart from the tops of the trees, nothing else green will be visible. The trees are the only vestiges of life and they recall, as their branches reach up to the sky, Psalm I, which, praising man for not having followed the advice of the wicked, leads him back to the study of the Law: ‘And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper’. The wicked, on the other hand, will not be left standing at the Day of Judgement. Their voices will be lost. And the verdant trees symbolize once more the Cross towards which all the thoughts of the Just should be directed. The trees say out the confidence in God's redeeming grace and in the power of the Resurrection to overcome all worldly snares. But the anxiety which these prodigies manifest is registered in what I would like to call a panic paradox.