Nostradamus, as Always
Recently a post on Facebook went viral claiming Nostradamus had predicted the Corona pandemic. Promptly, fact checks by several agencies debunked the post. Here is how it went:
Nostradamus wrote in the year 1551 that There will be a twin year (2020) from which will arise a Queen (CORONA) who will come from the East (CHINA) and who will spread a plague (VIRUS) in the darkness of night on a country with seven hills (ITALY) and will transform the twilight of men into dust, to destroy and ruin the world. It will be the end of the world economy as you know it. – Nostradamus
Of course, it was the creation of a fertile mind that wanted to throw in some amusement in the time of Corona. No such lines were ever written by Nostradamus. But the creator had managed to put in all the ingredients that are the trademark of Nostradamus’s prophecies – unclear time, unclear location, followed by a more or less clear disaster. Such hazy identifications by Nostradamus give interpreters the leeway to fit in any event, often catastrophic ones, to one or the other of his quatrains.
Ever since the death of the astrologer in the year 1558, exponents have surfaced with regularity, projecting themselves as soothsayers on his behalf. Unfortunately, not one of them has unravelled and foretold a single incident before its occurrence. It’s always after a catastrophe that the interpreters pore over his book and dig out a quatrain that is supposedly the ‘hit’.
Did Nostradamus prophesy anything at all? Or was he a master conman? Who was he?
Nostradamus (Michel de Nostredame) was a French astrologer, physician and a seer born in 1503 in Provence. He worked as an apothecary and later earned fame as an astrologer. With an incomplete education in medicines (due to his expulsion from the University of Montpellier), he dabbled in the occult, horoscopes and apothecary. His works as a physician and astrologer and maker of horoscopes drew flak from contemporary professionals. Critics have revealed that much of his writings were copied from other reputed philosophers and physicians. Nonetheless, he had one ability that has stood him well through the centuries – the ability to cash on the penchant of the masses for getting drawn towards the horrific plight of other people. He gave them content to gossip by claiming he could foresee such horrors. He started writing Almanacs from 1550 onwards publishing more than one a year. Almanacs are yearbooks that give information on sun, moon, tides and certain other natural phenomena. Nostradamus combined them with his predictions of natural disasters and other calamities. The first almanac earned him a measure of success, and he went on to write more, 11 of them in all, with emphasis on catastrophic events that would occur that year. These he wrote in the form of quatrains and disguised or omitted the dates and locations. His popularity sore as gullible people fell for the few events that materialised through skilful interpretation, but in the scholarly circles, he was dubbed as evil and fake.
Nostradamus was well on his path as a psychic who prepared horoscopes and cautioned people about their impending misfortunes. Later researches have revealed his astrological predictions were often copied word for word from several previously published sources such as Livy, Suetonius' The Twelve Caesars, Plutarch, and Richard Roussat. He was severely criticised by professional astrologers of the day such as Laurens Videl for incompetence. Astrologers found birth charts prepared by him full of errors. For his part, later, he too came down heavily on astrologers in his book, Les Propheties.
He is also credited with two books on medical science. One turned out to be a paraphrased version of The Protreptic by Galen and the other, Traité des Fardemens is basically a medical cookbook containing materials borrowed mainly from others. His shorter works also include a purported translation of an ancient Greek work on Egyptian hieroglyphs. We now know that the ancient Egyptian script was deciphered only in the 19th century by Champollion.
Despite censures by the intelligentsia, Nostradamus had the gullible masses eating out of his hands. With rising popularity, he soon came to the notice of nobility who wanted their fortunes foretold. Among his notable admirers was Catherine de Medici wife of King Henry II of France. Subsequently, she appointed him as Counsellor and Physician-in-Ordinary to her son, the young King Charles IX of France.
All his previous works have been forgotten with a few surviving documents preserved in libraries. But the one book which gained Nostradamus immense popularity is The Prophesies (Les Propheties), a collection of his long-term predictions, first published in 1555. The next three editions added on more number of quatrains. The fourth edition published in 1558 contains the complete 946 quatrains and a preface in the form of a letter to King Henry II. The book, though much paraphrased by now, has never been out of print and has undergone a staggering 200 editions and translation into scores of languages including Hindi, Malayalam and Marathi. The first English translation of the book came 114 years later, in 1672, by Garencieres. And there has been a flood of it ever since. Besides, there have been 2000 commentaries, several films, documentaries and serials, not to mention the you-tube videos. A more well-known English translation is Henry C. Roberts' The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus of 1947, which has seen eleven reprints.
Let’s take a quatrain that is supposed to predict the death of King Henry II.
“The young lion will overcome the older one,
On the field of combat in a single battle;
He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage,
Two wounds made one, then he dies a cruel death.”
Who would ever make out that these innocuous lines point to the death of the reigning king, who died in 1559 in a friendly joust on horseback due to a wound in the eye from a splintered lance? Analysts can always find explanations to fit a phrase to an event. Thus, they interpreted – old lion was King Henry II, young lion was the nobleman Gabriel Montgomery, and the golden cage became the helmet that the king donned. But what about the ‘field of combat in a single battle’ referred to? The two of men were engaged in a friendly joust. But importantly, why did Nostradamus NOT warn the king of his impending doom, especially when he served directly under him in his court? The fact remains that this quatrain found its way into print only in 1614, 55 years after the event, and is undoubtedly apocryphal.
We can’t blame Nostradamus for the occurrence or non-occurrence of events predicted by him. By keeping the prognostics vague, he has absolved himself of all responsibilities. Indeed, much of the commentaries are by followers and believers who were too enthusiastic to prove him correct and gain some mileage for themselves, just like our Facebook member. In any case, no one ever identified a single quatrain before an occurrence. It was always a retrospective explanation of an incident by forcibly matching it to some quatrain. Of what use is a prophecy if no one can be forewarned?
Since his death, the Prophecies have continued to be popular. Analysts claim to have successfully unravelled random quatrains, albeit in hindsight. Apart from foreseeing the end of Henry II, which we discussed earlier, commentators credit Nostradamus with the predictions of nearly all the significant catastrophes after his time – the great fire of London, the French Revolution, the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte, both the World Wars, Hitler's reign of terror, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Louis Pasteur's discoveries, Charles De Gaulle's leadership, JFK's assassination, Apollo moon landings, the death of Princess Diana, and the 11th September 2001 attack on the World Trade Centre.
Let’s study just one quatrain that supposedly foresaw the terrorist attack of nine-eleven:
The sky will burn at forty-five degrees.
Fire approaches the great new city.
By fire, he will destroy their city,
A cold and cruel heart, blood will pour. Mercy to none.
It cannot get any vaguer than this. Only the most far-fetched of imaginations can correlate this quatrain to the nine-eleven incident. Should we say the man truly predicted the event 450 years in the future, or was it the imaginative creation of an enthusiastic Nostradamus fan?
The seer is said to have predicted the exact date of the exhumation of his body. He was exhumed 60 years after his death, and upon his chest, they found a brass plaque with the exact date and time of the exhumation. A few questions need to be answered though: What happened to the brass plaque? Didn’t they notice the plaque at the time of his funeral ceremony? Who could have placed it on his chest or in the coffin?
By analysing each of the contemporary incidents that the astrologer claimed to have foreseen, it is apparent that he had an enthusiastic coterie of colluders to testify for him. And for the events that happened long after his lifetime, many people were too eager to be associated with his miraculous prophecies. It included his family members, commentators, translators, and storytellers. Middle French gave way to Modern French in the early 17th century. Translators and commentators of the later period were not fully conversant of the older version of the language. In many cases, they took advantage to suitably twist words and phrases in the new renderings to fit what happened. The academics have concluded that not one of the incidents listed above is substantiated by any contemporary documentary evidence. Most of them were the handiwork of later commentators, such as Etienne Jaubert (1656), Guynaud (1693) and Eugene Bareste (1840). Some stories came out of misunderstandings of the 16th-century French, and some were sheer tall tales.
Why did Nostradamus choose to be vague? Some accounts say that he was afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition. But it is far from the truth. He occupied an exalted post by royal decree – Counsellor and Physician-in-Ordinary to King Charles IX and Physician to King Henry II. Besides, who could question him for his predictions of events centuries into the future? On the contrary, had he been forthright and his predictions come true, he would have gained admiration as a sage with clairvoyant powers. Indeed, a man posing to possess such abilities would only choose to guise his prophecies with ambiguity, lest his fraud gets blown. And so did Nostradamus. He obscured the dates, places and meanings and even inserted Latin, Greek and Italian words in his quatrains. But his vagueness got him precisely what he wanted out of it. It brought him popularity that has lasted him four and half centuries and counting, thanks to the myriad exponents.
This writer has but one question for all the so-called interpreters and analysts engaged in explicating The Prophecies – Can they find out from the book one single incident that is going to befall humankind between today and 2030 AD? Surely, the decade is not going to pass uneventfully.
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