We have now authenticated this spasm of panic, linking the enigmatic writing of the astrophile from Salon to a desire to convert people to a God in whom sinful man can place all his faith, dispossessing himself of his ‘predilections’ (‘cuyder’) and his malevolent passions. We now should try to situate Nostradamus in a period of quintessential tension in French hermeneutics after 1520, a period of crisis marked by semiotic ambiguity, which displaced or destabilized the relationship between word or signs, and what they mean. As Michel Jeanneret has written: ‘It seems that meaning is adrift, with the initiative resting with the recipients. A further indication, serving to confirm the crisis, is that fiction seems to become an appropriate means to reflect on hermeneutic issues. When it comes to exploring the theoretical problems and questions of interpretation, Rabelais and Marguerite of Navarre adopt a narrative, playful mode of expression, using paradoxes and imagined scenarios’.1 Should we not propose that Nostradamus too, involved in wanting to let his reader be guided by Christ, had recourse to the strategem of the prophetic quatrain, each carrying its charge of panic, to incite in the reader a quest for the Divine? Moreover, the lack of determinacy in the meaning of each quatrain creates a sort of infinity of possibilities in time and space which can but lead the reader towards the realization, as we have already said, of his own insignificance, in the face of which he is led to take refuge in the mercy of Almighty God.
Nostradamus was echoed by other evangelist humanist writers. So, when Barthélémy Aneau sets down his reflections after translating the first three books of Ovid's Metamorphoses, he writes: ‘The truth … must remain secret, in order that it escape the “sluggish and profane intellects” and, on the contrary, stimulate the curiosity of the “good and divine minds” ’, for ‘difficult matters are the most exquisite’.2 It is secret because it is silent. The great evangelist hopes that are discernible in the pages of Gargantua and Pantagruel are henceforth at an end and it is a time of confessional walls, of persecutions and massacres. The darkening world is not a reflection of its tipping towards religious confrontation; rather it is an instrument, fashioned to recoup history, inciting men to comprehend that they are set out on the worst of roads, that of passions and calamities. But, for all that, Christ is always at the believer's side, in whom He reveals Himself.
The Prophecies are thus a spiritual device, aimed at inciting the reader, on his own, to transit from the temporal (the world) towards God. This transition is expressed in the symbolism of the ‘permutation’ of reigns and centuries. The perpetuum mobile of the ‘mobile sign’, evoked in 1:54, needs to be understood here in its Neoplatonic context. For Marsilio Ficino, the One is ‘so perfect an absolute, so enigmatic, that, as the God of mystics, He eludes all logical determination and defies the significant power of words. He can be apprehended by intuition, but one can only speak to Him indirectly, by paradoxes, by interposed figures, or by the mediation of signs’. The quatrains seem to have a role, we are tempted to suggest, as a ‘sign’. As Michel Jeanneret has put it: ‘Vehicles for a diffuse truth, these signs can never be anything other than inadequate substitutes. The more ambiguous and opaque the more they are heeded’.3 The tortured world of Nostradamus begins to resemble much more than we might have imagined, that of Rabelais, with the magic of Her Trippa, the Ennasins, the Chicanous, and the inhabitants of the Island of Ruach. Rabelais created tall stories, saturated with meaning and strangeness. But the aberrations of meaning are so disparate and discursive, and the non-sense so prolific that it is difficult to make sense of. The quatrains of Nostradamus pull together scenes from a human universe which has been given over to evil, and in just the same way the larger-than-life adventures of the Quart Livre assemble ‘images of savages … liberated by the signs of myth, the picture of a humanity delivered up to bestiality and freed from all taboos’.4
So, although there are some encounters in the Quart Livre, such as those where we meet the Papimanes or the Chicanous, which are open to a ‘historical decoding’, other episodes remain shrouded in mystery. There is a hermetic echo in Rabelaisian writing, such as with the Andouilles, and messere Gaster, for example, ‘among others, which allow us to pick out, here and there, contemporary allusions, but leave us nevertheless with gaps of meaning which no erudition, and no subtle interpretation, can fill’. Michel Jeanneret links this to Rabelais’ ‘fundamental semantic heterogeneity’. The hermeneutic challenge in Rabelais reaches its peak in the strange behaviour of the inhabitants of Ruach, the visits to the islands of Medamothi and Ennasin, and no one will ever know whether what he describes is farce or a hidden representation of something. Traditional symbolic representations are thrown up in the air and it is as though Rabelais, in the Quart Livre, has become somewhat ‘nostradamized’, leading one on to suppose that ‘all conjectures are possible, and that the question of meaning is perpetually put off’. This is what is crucial, and what brings Nostradamus out of the solitude of being a hermeneutic prophet. The Rabelaisian semantic uncertainty is of a piece with the flight from sense which is structured into Nostradamian thought, and which places the believing individual in a cogito of silence. This is what one might term the paradox of the gigantic tall story which, in the tortured world of Nostradamus is a panic paradox, opening up to an encounter with the self.
Should we not see Nostradamus’ Prophecies as aimed at making the reader comprehend that God lies beyond the words, even though it is the word which expresses, more or less enigmatically, the direction of a world in the grip of Fortune's caprice? Had not Guillaume Briçonnet, Marguerite of Navarre's spiritual counsellor, writing in an Augustinian tradition, taught her that the knowledge of God lies beyond human words, transcendent, and that silence is the pathway by which ontologically she must apprehend Him? The prophetic engima appears, therefore, like a coded sign to the path which we must take. As the literary scholar Robert D. Cottrell has written: ‘All language, either literal or metaphorically verbal, is replicated in the Word, which transcendant linguistic phenomena represent as a “meant” silence’.5 Parabolic writing is intrinsically intended to produce no meaning beyond that of effacing all meaning in favour of one unique Truth, that of a God that demands our love whatever the anxieties that our forebodings induce in us. The very essence of the quatrains is to designify prophecy, since whatever is written has to be embraced within He who is the Word, and the individual has to grasp that he must no longer concentrate his thoughts on himself but that he must immolate himself in God.6 What the words say is not what they signify, and the more so because the quatrains contain a large dose of obscurity produced by what Marie-Madeleine Fontaine describes (in the case of Barthélémy Aneau) as an ‘evasive erudition’ and the paradoxes, whatever the somewhat far-fetched interpretations make of it, reflect a culture so highly elaborate that it exceeds Renaissance cornucopia.7
The question which arises is why Rabelais and Nostradamus, two physicians trained at the University of Montpellier, come together in deploying such discursive ‘designifying’ strategies. We should recall that the Quart Livre had no doubt been written in 1547–8 and that its first published edition appeared in Lyon in 1552. So there is a certain synchrony with the first astrological publications of Nostradamus, acknowledged as such from 1550 onwards. Michel Jeanneret hesitates in the case of the Quart Livre between hermeticism and zaniness, between mystification and mystery, but he takes as important the evolution towards all that is strange, which brings it close to the Prophecies of Nostradamus, even though in Rabelais the drama is played out differently and the eschatological obsession seems to be absent. Michel Jeanneret writes of the Quart Livre as follows
The more Rabelais progresses in his writing, the more he resorts to the category of the strange. Ridiculous figures, deformed beings, bizarre behaviour invades the space of the story. It seems as though the imagination is at the helm and, with no regard for known codes, it sets free what cannot be said in rational discourse. Monstrous effigies, creatures from dreams (notably in the Quart Livre) offer troubling images which takes us into the obscurities of the unconscious. One thing is clear; to dislodge simple certainty, Rabelais adopts another logic, that of the phantasmagoric, one which sidesteps all the norms involved in reading. What he explores has perhaps a significative value; there is meaning to it, but the meaning defies all analysis. What he tells us is not true, but it is not untrue either. It is not futile, but neither is it serious. It is not irreal, and yet it is. Symbols with strongly emotive associations confront the reader, giving rise to all sorts of interpretations, but it overflows the normal channels of communication and, by virtue of its own superabundance, prevents the establishing of an interpretation.8
It is the implosion of the real, as though it was a way of implying to the reader, once more, that all that is here-below is more than ever before a fake, and that God alone is Truth, in his Word. God Alone. The God who is over All, the God of St Paul in the First Epistle to the Corinthians (1 Cor. 15:28): ‘That God may be all in all’. The panic-stricken dimension carries us forth towards a consciousness of God's greatness and mercy. But that dimension is paradoxical because its role in Nostradamian writing is to dispose us towards the quietude of the soul who is at rest in Christ. Nostradamus repeats his injunction; we human beings ignore God's warnings at our peril, and we are often blind or deaf to God. That is the cosmic drama which occupies his energies. We have to listen attentively to the inwardness of Quatrain 3:44 in this respect:9
When the pet animal comes up to the man,
After yelps and leaps proceeds to speak:
Lightning to the virgin will be so malevolent,
From earth swept away and suspended in thin air.
When Nostradamus writes that the domestic pet will come to speak to the man with yelps and jumps, it is to warn him of the dangers of an imminent storm. And it will be because no one has paid any attention to this dog, endowed with a premonition, that lightning, the attribute of Jupiter and thus a manifestation of divine almighty power, will manifest itself as terrifyingly ‘malevolent’ for a ‘virgin’ who will be raised from the ground and ‘suspended in thin air’. A symbolic reading of the quatrain is possible here, one which cements (if that were necessary) the impression of a ‘higher meaning’ in the quatrains, or at least in some of them. The domestic animal, a dog, is emblematic of fidelity, and thus of faith. Not to give heed to the appeal to faith, not to know that it is given freely to us, is to ignore the almighty power of God, and to expose ourselves to His justice. And here, it is difficult not to think back to the evangelist logic that pervades chapter 5 (‘The Discourse of the Drinkers’) of the 1542 edition of Rabelais’ Gargantua. The drinkers are those who are drunk with God. Their thirst, says Rabelais, is what makes them as one with the creative power of God. This thirst for God, synonymous with faith in the free gift of salvation, necessarily inextinguishable, is compared by Rabelais with that of a dog:10
The great God made the planets, and we make the platters neat. I have the word of the gospel in my mouth, Sitio. The stone called asbestos is not more unquenchable than the thirst of my paternity. Appetite comes with eating, says Angeston, but the thirst goes away with drinking. I have a remedy against thirst, quite contrary to that which is good against the biting of a mad dog. Keep running after a dog, and he will never bite you; drink always before the thirst, and it will never come upon you. There I catch you, I awake you. Argus had a hundred eyes for his sight, a butler should have (like Briareus) a hundred hands wherewith to fill us wine indefatigably.
In the ‘author's prologue’ Rabelais goes still further in identifying as a dog someone who goes beyond the surface appearances and explores the back-eddies of the philosophia Christi:11
In imitation of this dog, it becomes you to be wise, to smell, feel and have in estimation these fair goodly books, stuffed with high conceptions, which, though seemingly easy in the pursuit, are in the cope and encounter somewhat difficult. And then, like him, you must, by a sedulous lecture and frequent meditation, break the bone, and suck out the marrow, – that is, my allegorical sense, or the things I to myself propose to be signified by these Pythagorical symbols, with assured hope, that in so doing you will at last attain to be both well-advised and valiant by the reading of them: for in the perusal of this treatise you shall find another kind of taste, and a doctrine of a more profound and abstruse consideration, which will disclose unto you the most glorious sacraments and dreadful mysteries, as well in what concerneth your religion, as matters of the public state, and life economical.
To go still further depends entirely on supposing once more that Nostradamus was writing a kind of parable, and that the dog is to be equated with the Word of God, which speaks to the man who hears it within, and who allows its voice to guide him through the vicissitudes of this violent and cruel world to the safety of salvation.
There is, however, no doubt that we should read the Centuries in the light of Rabelais, and with Erasmus in mind. In Erasmus’ conception, Christ was the ‘great Silenus’ (in the famous Adage, ‘Sileni Alcibiadis’).12 ‘If one measured by the external appearance of the Silenus, who could have been more ordinary or of less account in common estimation? Of lowly parents, from a humble background; himself, poor, with few disciples and those poor, emerging not from lords’ palaces or the pulpits of Pharisees, or the Schools of philosophers, but straight from a familiarity with fishing tackle. And how remote his life was from one of ease! It was famine, fatigue, insults and humiliations that accompanied him to the cross’. Erasmus then quotes Isaiah as a way of invoking the Silenus in Christ: ‘This is the perspective from which the holy prophet foretold his coming [Isaiah 53]; “he hath no form nor comeliness; and when we shall see him, there is no beauty that we should desire him. He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows” and all that follows that phrase’.
The Silenus was thus, for Erasmus, the human being who provides us with a deciphering principle that we can put into practice, a way of going from the exterior to the interior. It invokes a kind of foolishness in respect of the reality, because he who attracts mockery, indifference and contempt is he that has the greatest worth, and the greatest Truth within. Hence the hypothesis that the dog, although it is an animal deprived of reason and language, is (through the signs that it emits) a Silenus after the model of Christ. Not to pay attention to him, like the virgin who is struck by lightning, is to refuse to see the Truth, and to carry out the act of Christ-like folly which involves an acceptance that the one who is mad can convey the truth. ‘But if only one had the good fortune to look at him more closely this Silenus, once open, i.e. if he so much as deigned to show himself to us, to our eyes purified by our soul, Immortal God! What ineffable treasure would we find there; in such dross, what jewels; in such humility, what sublimeness; in such poverty, what wealth; in such frailty, what incredible strength; in such humilitaion, what glory; in such ordeals, what absolute repose!’ Erasmus establishes, then, the principle that invisibility is the only perspective from which we human beings can conceive of the secrets of the Divine. The visible is what puts man in peril, for it takes him away from a logic of meaning which is inscribed in Creation. It is the visible that leads him into a world of illusions which can but put in jeopardy his salvation, the world of superstitions, and of practices that contradict the simplicity of the Word. Rabelais, in short, has an approach to nature as a language of the relationship between the visible and the invisible which is not far removed from that which Nostradamus expounds in his translation of the Horus Apollon.
The signified is not an end in itself. It can have a ‘higher sense’. The signified must produce in human beings a necessity to go towards what the sign portends to, hieroglyphically, towards the pythagoric ‘midst’ (moelle) that Rabelais speaks of. The Christian turns himself into an ‘abstractor’ of that meaning, apprehending something as though by a process of distillation. Here, once again, is Erasmus:13
Flowers and the foliage are what flatter our sight of trees; their evident bulk is what is apparent to us. But the seed from which everything finds its power, what a minute thing it is, how it is hidden, how it is secluded from seducing us, how scant it cares about its exterior appearance! Nature has closeted away gold and precious stones in the deepest hidden places of the earth. In that one calls the elements, for example air and fire, the more we look up, the more we are deprived of meanings. … In the Gospels, if we take the parables only by what they mean on the surface, who would not decide that they are the sayings of a dolt? But if one cracks open the nut, then we shall surely find the mysterious, and truly divine, wisdom within, and something which is alike in all respects unto Christ Himself.
We should imagine, then, that the quatrains need to be situated within this way of thinking and their language too, hiding what is most precious. Beyond the words there should be a meaning, comparable to the seed from which come flowers and without which they do not exist. It is no coincidence that Nostradamus should have chosen to represent a virgin suspended in mid-air by the lightning opposite the dog with the premonitory instincts. In Erasmus’ Colloquies does not one find the various faces of Catherine, as the virgin who hated marriage, or the repentant virgin?
More explicitly, Nostradamus invited his reader to become aware of the eschatological significance of what divine marvels have to tell us. God speaks to those whom He allows to open up the ‘kernel’ of His presages not only to guide them in the sufferings of life, to avoid the snares of sin, and to tell them of the punishment which is in store if they do not. He also speaks to them to announce that He is near and that His coming is nigh. It is Nostradamus’ vision in 2:46 that, after a great human massacre, something much greater still will come to pass.14 The ‘great motor’15 (God) will then renew the ages, and a rain of blood and milk, famine, war and plague will manifest His will, a ‘fire, trailing sparking in its wake’ appearing in the sky. Quatrain 4:43, relying on the rhetoric of decrypting the signs, evokes the sounds of armies in combat in the skies.16 That same year, God's enemies will cast doubt on the holy laws in an injust way. By war and fire ‘true believers’ will be ‘struck down’. Although it is not made clear who the ‘true believers’ are, one can imagine that this is an allusion to the (eschatological) persecutions of those who will remain faithful to God. Then, as recounted in Julius Obsequens, the sky (in 9:63) will be filled with wailings, tears, cries and great screams somewhere near Narbonne, at Bayonne and in the county of Foix.17 Here, too, it is a revolution that will come to pass, Nostradamus exclaiming: ‘O what terrible calamities and changes’, which will happen before the age of Mars ‘has completed several rounds’. There was, in fact, an astrological transit between 1525 and 1533 from the dismal cycle of Mars to the more positive one of the Moon, and one has to wonder if the quatrain does not refer to this period which was still ongoing.
The res mirabilis seems to resituate present time in that of the Hebrew captivity in Egypt, or in Rome at the time of Julius Obsequens.18 In Nostradamus’ quatrains, locusts twice make their presence felt. In 3:82 they arrive, carried on a favourable wind, and Fréjus and Antibes and the towns around Nice will be ravaged by fire, Men will be captured and put to death without any respect for the rules of war.19 In 4:48, the large and fertile Ausonian plain will similarly be invaded by horseflies and infested by locusts which will eat everything in sight. The sun's light will become ‘cloudy’, and a great plague will result from this infestation, which appears to take up one of the portents in Julius Obsequens about the pandemic resulting from the coming of locusts to Cyrenaica.20 Elsewhere, 8:10 alludes to a terrible stench coming out of Lausanne, and ‘no one knows where it comes from’. The smell is symbolic of the fact that the town is expelling foreigners. And then ‘fire’ will be ‘seen in the sky’ and ‘the foreigners will be conquered’.21 We should recall that in the Apocalypse (Rev. 9:2), just before the locusts cover the earth, ‘there arose a smoke out of the pit, as the smoke of a great furnace; and the sun and the air were darkened by reason of the smoke of the pit’.
In 2:62, a mysterious person called ‘Mabus’22 – a clone of Magog and Ahenobarbus, perhaps – will die and there will be a terrible massacre of men and beasts.23 Then suddenly it will be a time of vengeance, heralded by ‘the’ comet. It will be then that hunger and thirst will stalk the land, along with a ‘hundred-hander’, a centimane from the banks of the misty Tartare River, bringing war in its wake. The sky will be filled with terrifying signs, like those celestial fires announcing the coming to power of tyrants in Naples, Palermo and Syracuse, or like the flaming meteorite which, when it hits the earth will turn the waters ‘stony’ (i.e. turn them dry and lifeless). Two contrasting situations give rise to explanations which bring once more to the fore the relationship between the Church and temporal authority. In 3:17, the Aventine Hill is seen to be aflame during the night, whilst by contrast, in Flanders the sky will suddenly turn dark, probably because of an eclipse.24 This fire on one of the hills in Rome, formerly the site of the temple of Juno Regina, signfies that ‘then the ecclesiastics will make a racket’, whilst the disappearance of the Sun presages that a king will drive out his nephew. Meanwhile, in 3:7 the fire in the sky will crash down on to the pikes of the refugees and the ravens will fight it out in the sky, presaging a coming civil war.25 These divine warnings are aimed at urging those in whom they incite fear not to delay in seeking God's forgiveness. For it will be only when the enemy is almost at the gates of the city that men, raising their hands to the skies, will decide to implore God in His celestial mercy to help them. The urgency is there.
All the prodigy narratives in the quatrains are not, however, so readily explained as the raising of the alarm to God's will. In 2:52, for example, we are told that the earth will quake for several nights and then, at the beginning of Spring, there will be two further shocks, Corinth and Ephesus will find themselves swimming ‘in two seas’ whilst a war will break out between two brave warriors.26 What matters in Nostradamian rhetoric is his search for a cumulative effect, over and above the geographical locations of apocalyptic signs, and beyond the lack of signifying precision, which serves to remind us that it is not for us to know or divine everything about the divine language. The prophet in Nostradamus furnishes an image of the world which is hypercharged with congruent marvels, everywhere in accordance with an irreducible logic, to make us see that divine judgement is nigh. Eschatology is unleashed, or spread about, and it necessarily has the effect of making Christ's Second Coming seem imminent, of the fulfilment of Christ in the reunion of man with the Word. In a further quatrain (9:31) a town close by Pavia, Portara, suffers an earthquake, and the ‘cassich’ of St George will be half demolished. Although all was at peace, the war will start up again when the abyss (catacombs?) of a church at Easter opens wide.27 Should we not read into this quatrain the opening of the Abyss predicted to occur in a church in the Apocalypse (Rev. 9:1–2)? Is it not from the Abyss that the Beast will emerge in the latter days to bring slaughter and war upon those who have succeeded in witnessing to God's truth? In 10:67 an earthquake will occur when Saturn is in Capricorn and Jupiter and Mercury in the Bull. Then there will be a terrible hailstorm at Annonay and the hailstones will be larger than eggs.28
One could cite once more here Quatrain 2:76 where lightning strikes in Burgundy, which will be a bad omen the like of which the human mind cannot readily conjure up.29 In 4:100 lightning hits the royal palace when the cycle of Mars will be at its end. Seven months of warfare will follow, men dying a malignant death, and Rouen and Évreux the King shall not fail’.30 Lightning and floods go hand in hand in the prodigy calendar. In 3:6 lightning will crash into a closed church, and the citizens within will be badly wounded. The waters will overwhelm the horses, cattle, walls and human beings. The weakest will fall victim to hunger and thirst.31 Quatrain 3:56 predicts that plague, thunder and hail will afflict Montauban, Nîmes, Avignon and Béziers at the end of March. Then a bridge will collapse at Paris and walls will tumble down at Lyon and Montpellier ‘after seven hundred and forty-three parts’.32 Nostradamus spreads the eschatological markers widely in space and time.
The same extraordinary phenomenon of a huge inundation like a second Great Flood occurs at ‘Sardon Nemans’ in Quatrain 10:6. The River Gard overflows its banks at Nîmes and most of the inhabitants will take up shelter ‘in the Colosseum’, i.e. in its Roman amphitheatre. It ends: ‘Vesta tomb extinct flame now burning’, viz. the extinct flame of Vesta will be seen to be burning in a tomb.33 There was a historical tradition that the Maison Carrée in Nîmes had been constructed originally as the temple of Vesta, and this flame, which needed to be kept alight by a pure source of water, could well be the sign of a renaissance of purity in mankind. It is not irrelevant at this point to bring into play the vestal virgins, who were walled up in a tomb because of their lack of chastity, and that it is in a tomb that the sacral flame of the altar to Vesta is found to be alight once more. Could this not be a symbolic allusion to the sacrificial virginity of the vestal virgins, whose perpetual innocence is a propitiation for man's impurities. And the flame found once more alight, is it not then the symbol of the fire of new-found faith, of a pure faith? That would be to suggest that Nostradamian eschatology was less the panic eschatology of divine wrath and more like the imaginary of a faith that each of us should carry within themselves, a faith which should lead each Christian towards God, which should enable him to live in the hopes of salvation. From out of the shadows of a panic eschatology, another interiorized eschatology emerges, capable of re-establishing the love which the creature should have towards its Creator.