Prophecies of Nostradamus
The Prophecies
From 1551 onwards Nostradamus published yearly Almanacs and Prognostications, some of which have survived. They predict local happenings, agricultural and weather lore, and similar topics. But a large number of similar almanacs forged in his name soon flooded the market. His reputation suffered greatly from these spurious publications.
In May 1555 his major work went to press, Les Propheties de M. Michel Nostradamus. This edition was incomplete, containing only three and a half 'centuries'. The complete work did not appear until 1568, published at Lyons by Benoist Rigaud. The Propheties were divided into ten Centaines, not chronological centuries, but so called because each contained one hundred individual prophecies, known as quatrains, collected together in no apparent sequence.
The style is crabbed and obscure, archaic even for its period. The vocabulary is a polyglot mixture of French, Provencal, Romance, Greek and Latin words and their derivatives. The obscurity was deliberate. Nostradamus intended it to camouflage his secrets so that they could be understood only by the initiated.
Nostradamus's fame had by now spread across Europe. The year after his publication of the Propheties he was sent for by the Queen at Paris. Catherine de' Medici had read a quatrain (I. 35) which many believed applied to the death of her husband Henri II in a forthcoming duel, which actually did take place in 1559. Fortunately, Nostradamus managed to explain the quatrain satisfactorily, and the Queen then ordered him to draw up the horoscopes of all the Valois children, on whose tragic fates he had also touched. Another similar quatrain seems to have been recognized by courtiers during this period (X. 39) which referred to the fates of Francis II and Mary Queen of Scots.
Nostradamus returned as soon as possible to the quiet life of Salon, having found court life rather precarious and worried by the interest the Justices de Paris had taken in his activities. He continued working as a doctor and in 1557 his only medical and philosophical work was printed at Lyons, a translation into French, the Paraphrase de C. Galen.
Nostradamus remained in Salon until 1564, when he was visited by the Queen and her second son, Charles IX, and was created Medecin du Roi. This was the final accolade. By 1566, already ill with gout, Nostradamus developed dropsy. He recognized his approaching death and predicted where his friends would find his body. He died on the night of 1 July and was buried in the walls of the Church of Cordeliers at Salon. During the French Revolution his bones were disturbed and then reburied in the Church of St Laurent, also at Salon, where the plaque donated by his wife Anne can still be seen.
The popularity of Nostradamus's Propheties is perhaps difficult to understand when one considers their obscure style, but this same quality does allow for varied interpretations. Nostradamus wrote that he composed the quatrains in a trance-like state gazing into a bowl of water on a tripod, an old method of prediction probably taken from the 4th-century De Mysteriis Egyptorum of lamblichus. He appeared to both see and hear the 'Divine Presence' who inspired him as he wrote the quatrains at night in his study.
The most famous of the predictions are those which are easily recognized either through events (Le Senat a Londres mettront a mart leur roy, 'The London Parliament will put their king to death') or linked names of people and places, sometimes even a date. In these 'easier' quatrains one can read of Louis XVI's flight to Varennes (IX. 20), of Nostradamus's amazing comprehension of the French Revolution, of the accession of an Emperor called Napoloron (VII. i, 57) linked with his crest of bees (IV. 26); and to these may be added the Hister or Hitler quatrains. This hard core of prediction is difficult for even the most rational person to ignore completely. Nostradamus probably owes his bad reputation to the complexity of the more obscure quatrains.
Nostradamus was frequently used for propaganda purposes; as early as 1649 by the anti-Mazarin faction in France, and as late as the Second World War. Selected quatrains were interpreted for the Nazis by the Swiss astrologer Karl Ernst Krafft, who was employed in the Propaganda Department at Berlin. Nazi Germany needed prophecy to order, not the inspirational kind. In 1940 Krafft's researches were used by the Germans who wanted to clear the Paris roads as they crossed into France from Sedan. Pamphlets of altered quatrains were circulated indicating that south-eastern France would not be troubled by the damus's quatrains, purportedly published in Germany, over the occupied countries: they indicated that Germany would lose the war, and were not ineffective as propaganda.
The Propheties appears to be one of the few books which have been continually in print since 1555. Whether Nostradamus was a genuine prophet may be in some doubt, but the interest he has aroused through the centuries is beyond question.