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Nostradamus
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Michel de Nostredame (14 or 21 December 1503
[1] – 2 July 1566), usually
Latinized as
Nostradamus, was a French
apothecary and reputed
seer who published collections of
prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book
Les Propheties,
the first edition of which appeared in 1555. Since the publication of
this book, which has rarely been out of print since his death,
Nostradamus has attracted a following that, along with much of the
popular press, credits him with predicting many major world events.
Most academic sources maintain that the associations made between world events and Nostradamus's
quatrains
are largely the result of misinterpretations or mistranslations
(sometimes deliberate) or else are so tenuous as to render them useless
as evidence of any genuine predictive power.
Nevertheless, occasional commentators have successfully used a process
of free interpretation and determined 'twisting' of his words to predict
an apparently imminent event. In 1867, three years before it happened,
for example, Le Pelletier did so to anticipate either the triumph or the
defeat of Napoleon III in a war that, in the event, begged to be
identified as the Franco-Prussian war, while admitting that he could not
specify either which or when.
[5]
Biography
Childhood
Born on 14, or 21 December 1503
[1] in
Saint-Rémy-de-Provence,
Provence,
France, where his claimed birthplace still exists, Michel de Nostredame
was one of at least nine children of Reynière (or Renée) de Saint-Rémy
and grain dealer and notary Jaume (or Jacques) de Nostredame. The
latter's family had originally been Jewish, but Jaume's father, Guy
Gassonet, had converted to Catholicism around 1455, taking the Christian
name "Pierre" and the surname "Nostredame" (the latter apparently from
the
saint's day on which his conversion was solemnized). Michel's known siblings included Delphine,
Jean I (c. 1507–77), Pierre, Hector, Louis, Bertrand, Jean II (born 1522) and Antoine (born 1523).
Little else is known about his childhood, although there is a
persistent tradition that he was educated by his maternal
great-grandfather Jean de St. Rémy
[10]—a
tradition which is somewhat undermined by the fact that the latter
disappears from the historical record after 1504, when the child was
only one year old.
Student years
At the age of 15 Nostredame entered the
University of Avignon to study for his baccalaureate. After little more than a year (when he would have studied the regular
trivium of
grammar,
rhetoric and
logic, rather than the later
quadrivium of
geometry,
arithmetic, music and
astronomy/
astrology), he was forced to leave Avignon when the university closed its doors in the face of an outbreak of
the plague.
After leaving Avignon, Nostredame (according to his own account)
travelled the countryside for eight years from 1521 researching herbal
remedies. In 1529, after some years as an
apothecary, he entered the
University of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled shortly afterwards by the university's
procurator,
Guillaume Rondelet, when it was discovered that he had been an apothecary, a "manual trade" expressly banned by the university statutes,
[12] and had been slandering doctors. The expulsion document (
BIU Montpellier, Register S 2 folio 87) still exists in the faculty library.
However, some of his publishers and correspondents would later call him
"Doctor". After his expulsion, Nostredame continued working, presumably
still as an apothecary, and became famous for creating a "rose pill"
that supposedly protected against the plague.
[15]
Marriage and healing work
In 1531 Nostredame was invited by
Jules-César Scaliger, a leading
Renaissance scholar, to come to
Agen. There he married a woman of uncertain name (possibly Henriette d'Encausse), who bore him two children. In 1534 his wife and children died, presumably from the
plague. After their deaths, he continued to travel, passing through France and possibly
Italy.
On his return in 1545, he assisted the prominent physician
Louis Serre in his fight against a major plague outbreak in Marseille, and then tackled further outbreaks of disease on his own in
Salon-de-Provence and in the regional capital,
Aix-en-Provence.
Finally, in 1547, he settled in Salon-de-Provence in the house which
exists today, where he married a rich widow named Anne Ponsarde, with
whom he had six children—three daughters and three sons. Between 1556 and 1567 he and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge canal project organized by
Adam de Craponne to irrigate largely waterless
Salon-de-Provence and the nearby Désert de la
Crau from the river
Durance.
Seer
After another visit to Italy, Nostredame began to move away from medicine and toward the
occult. Following popular trends, he wrote an
almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from Nostredame to Nostradam
us.
He was so encouraged by the almanac's success that he decided to write
one or more annually. Taken together, they are known to have contained
at least 6,338 prophecies,
as well as at least eleven annual calendars, all of them starting on 1
January and not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in
response to the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons
from far away soon started asking for horoscopes and "psychic" advice
from him, though he generally expected
his clients to supply the
birth charts on which these would be based, rather than calculating them
himself as a professional astrologer would have done. When obliged to
attempt this himself on the basis of the published tables of the day, he
always made numerous errors, and never adjusted the figures for his
clients' place or time of birth.
[a]
Century I, Quatrain 1: 1555 Lyon Bonhomme edition
He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand mainly French quatrains,
[26]
which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most
famous today. Feeling vulnerable to opposition on religious grounds, however, he devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "
Virgilianized" syntax, word games and a mixture of other languages such as
Greek, Italian,
Latin, and
Provençal.
For technical reasons connected with their publication in three
installments (the publisher of the third and last installment seems to
have been unwilling to start it in the middle of a "Century," or book of
100 verses), the last fifty-eight quatrains of the seventh "Century"
have not survived into any extant edition.
The quatrains, published in a book titled
Les Propheties (The
Prophecies), received a mixed reaction when they were published. Some
people thought Nostradamus was a servant of evil, a fake, or insane,
while many of the elite thought his quatrains were spiritually-inspired
prophecies.
[citation needed] In the light of their post-Biblical sources (see under
Nostradamus' sources below), Nostradamus himself encouraged this belief.
Catherine de' Medici, wife of King
Henry II of France,
was one of Nostradamus' greatest admirers. After reading his almanacs
for 1555, which hinted at unnamed threats to the royal family, she
summoned him to Paris to explain them and to draw up horoscopes for her
children. At the time, he feared that he would be beheaded,
but by the time of his death in 1566, Queen Catherine had made him
Counselor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, the young King
Charles IX of France.
Some accounts of Nostradamus's life state that he was afraid of being persecuted for
heresy by the
Inquisition, but neither
prophecy nor
astrology fell in this bracket, and he would have been in danger only if he had practiced
magic to support them. In fact, his relationship with the Church was always excellent.
His brief imprisonment at Marignane in late 1561 came about purely
because he had published his 1562 almanac without the prior permission
of a bishop, contrary to a recent royal decree.
Final years and death
Nostradamus' current tomb in the
Collégiale Saint-Laurent, Salon, into which his scattered remains were transferred after 1789.
By 1566, Nostradamus's
gout, which had plagued him painfully for many years and made movement very difficult, turned into
edema,
or dropsy. In late June he summoned his lawyer to draw up an extensive
will bequeathing his property plus 3,444 crowns (around $300,000 US
today), minus a few debts, to his wife pending her remarriage, in trust
for her sons pending their twenty-fifth birthdays and her daughters
pending their marriages. This was followed by a much shorter
codicil.
On the evening of 2 July, he is alleged to have told his secretary Jean
de Chavigny, "You will not find me alive at sunrise." The next morning
he was reportedly found dead, lying on the floor next to his bed and a
bench (Presage 141 [originally 152]
for November 1567, as posthumously edited by Chavigny to fit what happened). He was buried in the local Franciscan chapel in Salon (part of it now incorporated into the restaurant
La Brocherie) but re-interred during the
French Revolution in the Collégiale Saint-Laurent, where his tomb remains to this day.
Works
In
The Prophecies he compiled his collection of major, long-term predictions. The first installment was published in 1555 and contained 353
quatrains.
[35] The second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557.
[35]
The third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly
printed in 1558, but now only survives as part of the omnibus edition
that was published after his death in 1568. This version contains one
unrhymed and 941 rhymed
quatrains, grouped into nine sets of 100 and one of 42, called "Centuries".
[35]
Given printing practices at the time (which included type-setting
from dictation), no two editions turned out to be identical, and it is relatively rare to find even two
copies
that are exactly the same. Certainly there is no warrant for
assuming—as would-be "code-breakers" are prone to do—that either the
spellings or the punctuation of any edition are Nostradamus' originals.
The
Almanacs, by far the most popular of his works, were published annually from 1550 until his death. He often published two or three in a year, entitled either
Almanachs (detailed predictions),
Prognostications or
Presages (more generalized predictions).
Nostradamus was not only a diviner, but a professional healer. It is
known that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was an
extremely free translation (or rather a paraphrase) of
The Protreptic of
Galen (
Paraphrase de C. GALIEN, sus l'Exhortation de Menodote aux estudes des bonnes Artz, mesmement Medicine), and in his so-called
Traité des fardemens
(basically a medical cookbook containing, once again, materials
borrowed mainly from others) he included a description of the methods he
used to treat the plague – none of which, not even the bloodletting,
apparently worked. The same book also describes the preparation of cosmetics.
A manuscript normally known as the
Orus Apollo also exists in the
Lyon
municipal library, where upwards of 2,000 original documents relating
to Nostradamus are stored under the aegis of Michel Chomarat. It is a
purported translation of an ancient Greek work on
Egyptian hieroglyphs
based on later Latin versions, all of them unfortunately ignorant of
the true meanings of the ancient Egyptian script, which was not
correctly deciphered until
Champollion in the 19th century.
Since his death only the
Prophecies have continued to be
popular, but in this case they have been quite extraordinarily so. Over
two hundred editions of them have appeared in that time, together with
over 2,000 commentaries. Their popularity seems to be partly due to the
fact that their vagueness and lack of dating make it easy to quote them
selectively after every major dramatic event and retrospectively claim
them as "hits" (see
Nostradamus in popular culture).
Origins of The Prophecies
Nostradamus claimed to base his published predictions on
judicial astrology—the
astrological 'judgement', or assessment, of the 'quality' (and thus
potential) of events such as births, weddings, coronations etc.—but was
heavily criticized by professional
astrologers of the day such as Laurens Videl
for incompetence and for assuming that "comparative horoscopy" (the
comparison of future planetary configurations with those accompanying
known past events) could actually predict what would happen in the
future.
Research suggests that much of his prophetic work paraphrases collections of ancient
end-of-the-world prophecies (mainly Bible-based), supplemented with references to historical events and anthologies of
omen
reports, and then projects those into the future in part with the aid
of comparative horoscopy. Hence the many predictions involving ancient
figures such as
Sulla,
Gaius Marius,
Nero, and others, as well as his descriptions of "battles in the clouds" and "frogs falling from the sky." Astrology itself is mentioned only twice in Nostradamus's
Preface and 41 times in the
Centuries themselves, but more frequently in his dedicatory
Letter to King Henry II. In the last quatrain of his sixth
century he specifically attacks astrologers.
His historical sources include easily identifiable passages from
Livy,
Suetonius,
Plutarch and other classical historians, as well as from medieval chroniclers such as
Geoffrey of Villehardouin and
Jean Froissart. Many of his astrological references are taken almost word for word from
Richard Roussat's
Livre de l'estat et mutations des temps of 1549–50.
One of his major prophetic sources was evidently the
Mirabilis Liber of 1522, which contained a range of prophecies by
Pseudo-Methodius, the
Tiburtine Sibyl,
Joachim of Fiore,
Savonarola and others (his
Preface contains 24 biblical quotations, all but two in the order used by Savonarola).
[b]
This book had enjoyed considerable success in the 1520s, when it went
through half a dozen editions but did not sustain its influence, perhaps
owing to its mostly Latin text, Gothic script and many difficult
abbreviations. Nostradamus was one of the first to re-paraphrase these
prophecies in French, which may explain why they are credited to him. It
should be noted that modern views of plagiarism did not apply in the
16th century. Authors frequently copied and paraphrased passages without
acknowledgement, especially from the classics. The latest research
suggests that he may in fact have used
bibliomancy for this—randomly selecting a book of history or prophecy and taking his cue from whatever page it happened to fall open at.
Further material was gleaned from the
De honesta disciplina of 1504 by
Petrus Crinitus, which included extracts from
Michael Psellos's
De daemonibus, and the
De Mysteriis Aegyptiorum (Concerning the mysteries of Egypt...), a book on
Chaldean and
Assyrian magic by
Iamblichus, a 4th century
Neo-Platonist. Latin versions of both had recently been published in
Lyon,
and extracts from both are paraphrased (in the second case almost
literally) in his first two verses, the first of which is appended to
this article. While it is true that Nostradamus claimed in 1555 to have
burned all of the occult works in his library, no one can say exactly
what books were destroyed in this fire.
Only in the 17th century did people start to notice his reliance on earlier, mainly classical sources.
[c] This may help explain the fact that, during the same period,
The Prophecies reportedly came into use in France as a classroom reader.
Nostradamus's reliance on historical precedent is reflected in the
fact that he explicitly rejected the label "prophet" (i.e. a person
having prophetic powers of his own) on several occasions:
Although, my son, I have used the word prophet, I would not attribute to myself a title of such lofty sublimity – Preface to César, 1555 (see caption to illustration above)[47]
Not that I would attribute to myself either the name or the role of a prophet – Preface to César, 1555[47]
[S]ome of [the prophets] predicted great and marvelous things to
come: [though] for me, I in no way attribute to myself such a title
here. – Letter to King Henry II, 1558[48]
Not that I am foolish enough to claim to be a prophet. -- Open letter
to Privy Councillor (later Chancellor) Birague, 15 June 1566
His rejection of the title prophet is consistent with the fact that he entitled his book
Detail from title-page of the original 1555 (Albi) edition of Nostradamus's
Les Propheties
(a title that, in
French, as easily means "The Prophecies,
by M. Michel Nostradamus"—which is what they were—as "The Prophecies
of
M. Michel Nostradamus", which, except in a few cases, they were not,
other than in the manner of their editing, expression and reapplication
to the future).
Given this reliance on literary sources, it is doubtful whether Nostradamus used any particular methods for entering a
trance state, other than
contemplation,
meditation and
incubation. His sole description of this process is contained in
letter 41[51] of his collected Latin correspondence.
The popular legend that he attempted the ancient methods of flame
gazing, water gazing or both simultaneously is based on a naive reading
of his first two verses, which merely liken his efforts to those of the
Delphic and
Branchidic oracles.
The first of these is reproduced at the bottom of this article and the
second can be seen by visiting the relevant facsimile site (see External
Links). In his dedication to King Henri II, Nostradamus describes
"emptying my soul, mind and heart of all care, worry and unease through
mental calm and tranquility", but his frequent references to the "bronze
tripod" of the
Delphic rite are usually preceded by the words "as though" (compare, once again, External References to the original texts).
Interpretations
Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, such as plagues,
earthquakes, wars, floods, invasions, murders, droughts, and battles—all
undated and based on foreshadowings by the
Mirabilis Liber.
Some quatrains cover these disasters in overall terms; others concern a
single person or small group of people. Some cover a single town,
others several towns in several countries. A major, underlying theme is
an impending invasion of Europe by Muslim forces from further east and
south headed by the expected
Antichrist, directly reflecting the then-current Ottoman invasions and the earlier
Saracen equivalents, as well as the prior expectations of the
Mirabilis Liber. All of this is presented in the context of the supposedly imminent end of the world—even though this is not in fact mentioned
[54] – a conviction that sparked numerous collections of
end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by
Christopher Columbus.
Nostradamus has been credited, for the most part in hindsight, with predicting numerous events in world history, from the
Great Fire of London, and the rise of
Napoleon and
Adolf Hitler, to the
September 11 attacks on the
World Trade Center.
In 1992 one commentator who claimed to be able to contact Nostradamus
under hypnosis even had him 'interpreting' his own verse X.6 (a
prediction specifically about floods in southern France around the city
of Nîmes and people taking refuge in its
collosse, or Colosseum, a Roman amphitheatre now known as the
Arènes) as a prediction of an undated
attack on the Pentagon, despite the historical seer's clear statement in his dedicatory letter to King Henri II
[d] that his prophecies were about Europe, North Africa and part of Asia Minor. Skeptics such as
James Randi
suggest that his reputation as a prophet is largely manufactured by
modern-day supporters who fit his words to events that have either
already occurred or are so imminent as to be inevitable, a process
sometimes known as "retroactive clairvoyance" (
postdiction).
Thus, no Nostradamus quatrain is known to have been interpreted as
predicting a specific event before it occurred, other than in vague,
general terms that could equally apply to any number of other events.
This even applies to quatrains that contain specific dates, such as
III.77, which predicts 'in 1727, in October, the king of Persia [shall
be] captured by those of Egypt' — a prophecy that has, as ever, been
interpreted retrospectively in the light of later events, in this case
as though it presaged the known
peace treaty between the Ottoman Empire and Persia of that year.
[58] Similarly, Nostradamus's notorious '1999' prophecy at X.72 (see
Nostradamus in popular culture)
describes no event that commentators have succeeding in identifying
either before or since, other than by dint of twisting the words to fit
whichever of the many contradictory happenings they are keen to claim as
'hits'. Moreover no quatrain suggests, as is often claimed by books and films on the alleged
Mayan Prophecy, that the world would end in December 2012. In his preface to the
Prophecies, Nostradamus himself stated that his prophecies extend 'from now to the year 3797'—an
extraordinary date which, given that the preface was written in 1555,
may have more than a little to do with the fact that 2242 (3797 − 1555)
had recently been proposed by his major astrological source
Richard Roussat as a possible date for the end of the world.
[62]
Alternative views
A range of quite different views are expressed in printed literature
and on the Internet. At one end of the spectrum, there are extreme
academic views such as those of
Jacques Halbronn, suggesting at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus's
Prophecies are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to grind.
[64] No other major source accepts this view [see reference-list].
At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous fairly recent
popular books, and thousands of private websites, suggesting not only
that the
Prophecies are genuine but that Nostradamus was a true
prophet. Due to the subjective nature of these interpretations, however,
no two of them agree on exactly what he predicted, whether for the past
or for the future. Many of these do agree, though, that particular predictions refer, for example, to the
French Revolution,
Napoleon,
Adolf Hitler,
[e] both
world wars, and
the nuclear destruction of
Hiroshima and
Nagasaki.
There is also an evident consensus among popular authors that he
predicted whatever major event had just happened at the time of each
book's publication, from the
Apollo moon landings, through the
death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, and the
Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986,
[67] to the events of
9/11: this 'movable feast' aspect appears to be characteristic of the genre.
Possibly the first of these books to become popular in English was
Henry C. Roberts'
The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus
of 1947, reprinted at least seven times during the next forty years,
which contained both transcriptions and translations, with brief
commentaries. This was followed in 1961 (reprinted in 1982) by Edgar
Leoni's
Nostradamus and His Prophecies. After that came
Erika Cheetham's
The Prophecies of Nostradamus,
incorporating a reprint of the posthumous 1568 edition, which was
reprinted, revised and republished several times from 1973 onwards,
latterly as
The Final Prophecies of Nostradamus. This served as the basis for the documentary
The Man Who Saw Tomorrow
and both did indeed mention possible generalised future attacks on New
York, though not specifically on the World Trade Center or on any
particular date.
[68] A two-part translation of Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's
Nostradamus: historien et prophète was published in 1980, and John Hogue has published a number of books on Nostradamus from about 1994 onwards, including
Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1999) and
Nostradamus: A Life and Myth (2003).
With the exception of Roberts, these books and their many popular
imitators were almost unanimous not merely about Nostradamus's powers of
prophecy, but also about various aspects of his biography.
[69] He had been a descendant of the Israelite tribe of
Issachar; he had been educated by his grandfathers, who had both been physicians to the court of
Good King René of
Provence; he had attended
Montpellier
University in 1525 to gain his first degree: after returning there in
1529 he had successfully taken his medical doctorate; he had gone on to
lecture in the Medical Faculty there until his views became too
unpopular; he had supported the heliocentric view of the universe; he
had travelled to the north-east of France, where he had composed
prophecies at the abbey of Orval; in the course of his travels he had
performed a variety of prodigies, including identifying a future Pope;
he had successfully cured the
Plague at
Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere; he had engaged in
scrying
using either a magic mirror or a bowl of water; he had been joined by
his secretary Chavigny at Easter 1554; having published the first
installment of his
Propheties, he had been summoned by Queen
Catherine de' Medici to Paris in 1556 to discuss with her his prophecy at quatrain I.35 that her husband
King Henri II would be killed in a duel; he had examined the royal children at
Blois; he had bequeathed to his son a 'lost book' of his own prophetic paintings;
[f]
he had been buried standing up; and he had been found, when dug up at
the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date
of his disinterment.
Curiously, this particular story seems to have been first recorded by
Samuel Pepys as early as 1667, long before the
French Revolution. Pepys records in his celebrated
diary
a legend that, before his death, Nostradamus made the townsfolk swear
that his grave would never be disturbed; but that 60 years later his
body was exhumed, whereupon a brass plaque was found on his chest
correctly stating the date and time when his grave would be opened and
cursing the exhumers.
[71]
From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in,
especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus's private
correspondence
and, during succeeding years, of the original editions of 1555 and 1557
discovered by Chomarat and Benazra, together with the unearthing of
much original archival material revealed that much that was claimed about Nostradamus did not fit the documented facts. The academics
[74] revealed that
not one
of the claims just listed was backed up by any known contemporary
documentary evidence. Most of them had evidently been based on unsourced
rumours relayed as fact by much later commentators, such as Jaubert
(1656), Guynaud (1693) and Bareste (1840), on modern misunderstandings
of the 16th century French texts, or on pure invention. Even the
often-advanced suggestion that quatrain I.35 had successfully prophesied
King Henri II's death did not actually appear in print for the first
time until 1614, 55 years after the event.
Additionally, the academics,
[74]
who themselves tend to eschew any attempt at interpretation, complained
that the English translations were usually of poor quality, seemed to
display little or no knowledge of 16th-century French, were tendentious
and, at worst, were sometimes twisted to fit the events to which they
were supposed to refer (or vice versa). None of them were based on the
original editions: Roberts had based his writings on that of 1672,
Cheetham and Hogue on the posthumous edition of 1568. Even Leoni
accepted on page 115 that he had never seen an original edition, and on
earlier pages he indicated that much of his biographical material was
unsourced.
However, none of this research and criticism was originally known to
most of the English-language commentators, by function of the dates when
they were writing and, to some extent, of the language in which it was
written.
Hogue was in a position to take advantage of it, but it was only in
2003 that he accepted that some of his earlier biographical material had
in fact been apocryphal. Meanwhile some of the more recent sources
listed (Lemesurier, Gruber, Wilson) have been particularly scathing
about later attempts by some lesser-known authors and Internet
enthusiasts to extract alleged hidden meanings from the texts, whether
with the aid of anagrams, numerical codes, graphs or otherwise.
