I have long regretted, these last three or four years, my decision to embark on a study of ‘Master Michel de Nostredame’, Michel Nostradamus. It has been an arduous task, verging on absurdity, even aberration. On the one hand, the prophetic astrologer remains a mystery, because the documents and sources that deal with him are scarce; on the other, because his prophecies remain impenetrable, they are unclear, and make no sense. The history, therefore, to the extent that it is feasible, is bound to remain fragmentary.
The reader will find at the back of the book a chronology of what historians know about Nostradamus, linking the few biographical details that have survived to the broader events of his time.
It will be evident that the biographical details are piecemeal and that there is little enough to go on in order to write about the most celebrated astrologer in history. That, however, is not the only problem. More importantly for the historian, the fragmentation applies also to the work of Michel Nostradamus, and so to his imaginary. There is a disjunction that baffles us, and which lies at the heart of his main work, the Prophecies; perhaps even, to use a stronger term, a dilution of meaning. Every quatrain in each of the ten centuries comprising the Prophecies can be likened to a bottomless pit, where anything that might serve as a foothold on which to resolve the enigma posed by Nostredamus crumbles or disintegrates, each quatrain beginning to oscillate and vibrate, becoming unreadable or evanescent. The meaning is lost in contradiction and polysemy; it leaches away into a sort of unbridled linguistic extravagance.1 Nostradamus, the prophet from Salon-de-Provence, creates just such a quicksand for the reader, luring him into it by the fascination of his writing. Once sucked in, he leaves the reader struggling, avoiding or dodging his questions and possible answers, dragging him down into ‘a whole range of variations and permutations’, like a metaphor for the absurd.2 That absurdity is doubled, moreover, by the way that charlatanism has always been inherent in prediction, i.e. in the presumption that there is a dynamic knowledge of what is to come, hidden in the disconcerting agency of Nostradamus’ words. Anachronism haunts Nostradamus’ Prophecies, takes hold of them, overworks their meaning, and endlessly refashions them in the light of present-day events and current hopes and fears. It leads the historian to doubt his own calling, which relies on quite the reverse premise, namely, to try humbly and to the degree that it is possible to do so, to penetrate the imaginaries of the past. The historian's task is to recreate the imaginary with all its fragility and potentiality in the most plausible way possible.
I should add in passing that this is a subject where dyed-in-the-wool fundamentalists and augury merchants from temples of divination of every hue are much in evidence, outdoing one another in their hallucinatory delusions. My starting-point has been to ignore them, and their eschatological lunacies serving only to second-guess catastrophic events, even when I have experienced my own dark nights of doubt. That is because one must remain both rational and agnostic when confronting Nostradamus and the misuses to which he has been put. There are those who will be irritated by this approach but that is not my problem. They have no understanding of history, its methods or its hermeneutics. As Erasmus, the humanist whose presence will be felt throughout this book, put it in his Praise of Folly, ‘better to pass over them in silence without “stirring the mud of Camarina” or touching that noxious weed’.3 I shall be equally deaf to the recriminations of devotees of fact-ridden and realist history, those (Erasmus again) ‘whose beard and cape inspire respect, and who proclaim themselves alone wise whilst all other mortals are mere fluttering shadows’. A little idealism, in the Marxist sense of the term, does not come amiss from time to time in the human sciences.
To summarize, whilst also emphasizing the limitations of my astrological erudition and my conclusions regarding the authenticity of the different editions of Nostradamus’ Prophecies, I find myself compelled, so as to preserve the identity of the past and go in search of the astrophile from Salon-de-Crau, to follow the presuppositions of Alphonse Dupront, who wrote:4
To live and not to take account of what one is living, is a commonplace of existence. The grace of history is precisely to permits us, with the benefit of hindsight, to understand those depths that are generally a closed book to contemporaries, assuming that the essential function of history is, as it were, to keep a register of the shifts from non-consciousness to consciousness. Yet we still know that we cannot pretend – or rather ought not to pretend – that we can penetrate to the heart of the mystery. The mystery makes itself felt, is tangible, locates itself; it does not explain itself lest it should cease to be mysterious … Ultimately, every explanation of a mystery appears a negation of the mystery.
I shall be applying the ‘mystery’ that Dupront saw as encompassing what is ‘myth’ to the imaginary of Nostradamus.
That is something to which I will return. I have thus spent endless difficult hours, day and night, because everything had to be repeatedly thought through again, where dwelling on a word, a couplet, or a quatrain, forever coming up against a brick wall, or rather feeling I was meandering in a maze, I was often sidetracked by the fabulous world of symbolic thought or by the pursuit of possible historical points of reference. I began to wonder, too, if I was truly engaged in a work of history or whether I too was being led astray into enigmas or puzzles, a fantasy world of epistemology, richly polysemous to the extent of disguising what was nothing other than a game. When there is such a multiplicity of signifiers, such a fragmentation of meaning, where is the history? How to coax Nostradamus into historicity if all that remains at the end of the day is an art of stylistic deconstruction5 focused on an approaching time of anxiety – ‘for God's forgiveness will n’er be spread forth, my son, but when my Prophecies are mostly come to pass and in the fullness of time accomplished’.6 My problem was that I persisted in my belief that Nostradamus had a meaningful objective, and that I struggled to grasp the meaning of the words as if each of them was a nut shell that could be cracked and opened. I struggled to believe it without suspecting that the text itself, like the time frame it constructed, was of a ‘cyclical’ nature, framed after the fashion of sybilline verse, whose symbolic principles revolve around enumeration and repetition. It is a poetry of incantation, which is evident when read as a continuum, but which is paradoxically concealed under the artificial labyrinth of a factual varietas, proceeding by a succession of myriad snatches of writing, isolated and separated one from another.7
And yet it became apparent to me after reading and re-reading Nostradamus that, in order to understand his enigmatic world, and grasp his intentions, we must (and this is often the case with the discursive logic of Renaissance thinkers) not allow ourselves to become obsessed by the need to interpret him. That would be to imagine that Nostradamus wanted to captivate his readers by furnishing them with the wherewithal to decrypt, unambiguously and with certitude, and reconstitute what he wanted to say. It is less a matter of reading Nostradamus and more one of deconstructing the principle of such a readability, and therefore of a hidden knowledge.8 There is a genuine ‘occult’ philosophy buried in the prophet's writings, but it is a philosophy of non-knowledge, of an awareness of aporia. Nostradamus himself encourages this, by a number of indicators or markers inserted here and there in his writings. So, the final lines of the ‘Preface’ to his son César, are written ‘notwithstanding that their comprehension has been wrapped up under a thick cloud: sed quando submovenda erit ignorantia [but when the time comes for the removal of ignorance] the instance shall become clearer’. Nostradamus gives his reader to understand that he must allow himself to penetrate beyond the words. Quo de futuris non est determinata omnino veritas – i.e. ‘As to the future, none can be determined with absolute truth’. The path probably taken by Nostradamus throughout his writings is the one sketched out by Erasmus, that of Folly. As described by Jean-Claude Margolin, it is that of an ‘ironic awareness of the self’, an inverted discourse whose ‘momentum, from the closed and sclerotic world of dogma and appearances, summons up a world of infinite freedom and openness for man, for whom all truth, inward and outward, is a labour of research towards greater profundity’.9 I have eventually emerged, therefore, with what might seem to be a reductive hypothesis in the face of the infinite possibilities of Nostradamus’ oracular thought. For intelligibility is never complete, even when a quatrain seems to be completely straightforward. Full understanding is never achieved, and the meaning is always left hanging in the air.
So, what Nostradamus calls his ‘nocturnal and prophetic calculations, composed more out of a natural instinct, accompanied by a poetic fury, than according to the strict rules of poetry’10 must be a hermeneutics of semiotic excess. The only way in which the history of Nostradamus can make any sense is to accept that it has to be a history that is structured outside the linearity of language, beyond the words themselves, and therefore outside the received norms of historical analysis. I shall begin my analysis on that assumption.