The Prophecies of Nostradamus

The most famous of all non-biblical prophets, Michel de Nostredame, or Nostradamus, was born at St. Remy in the south of France in 1503. He first became famous for his medical work with victims of the plague that broke out at Aix-en-Provence and Lyons in 1546-47 and only after this began making prophecies. His first collection was published as an almanac of weather predictions in 1550, and in 1555 he published the first of 10 collections of prophecies (almost 1000 in all) under the title of Centuries. He died at Salon, in southern France, in 1566.

Nostradamus wrote his prophecies in verse, for the most part in a highly symbolic style. This, and the fact that he chose not to arrange them in any particular order, makes their interpretation, in many cases, a matter of conjecture. Nonetheless, a number of the prophecies do seem to point rather clearly to events that had not yet occurred when Centuries appeared.

The first prophecy to bring Nostradamus fame as a seer was the following:

The young lion will overcome the older one, in a field of combat in a single fight: He will pierce his eyes in their golden cage; two wounds in one, then he dies a cruel death.

Four years later, in July 1559, King Henry II of France, who sometimes used the lion as his emblem, engaged in a jousting contest. The lance of his young opponent pierced the king's gilt helmet and wounded him; Henry died after prolonged agony.

Few of Nostradamus's prophecies contain anything so precise as a date, or even a partial date. But he seems to have given one for the great fire of London in 1666, saying it would occur "in three times twenty plus six."

Most of Nostradamus's prophecies concern large-scale political movements and the affairs of the high and mighty. The French Revolution seems to be the subject of several verses, including this:

From the enslaved populace, songs, chants and demands, while Princes and Lords are held captive in prisons. These will in the future be received by headless idiots as divine prayers.

The first sentence is straightforward. The "headless idiots" of the second sentence are thought to refer to the early leaders of the revolution, who perceived the demands of the French populace as "prayers," and who, ultimately corrupted by their new power, were themselves overthrown and guillotined.

In a letter to King Henry II, Nostradamus also predicted 1792 as a key date in the affairs of state. In September of that year, at the culmination of the revolution, France was declared a republic. The deaths of Queen Marie Antoinette and Madame Du Barry, a mistress of Louis XVI, also appear to have been forecast by this remarkable seer.

Like most prophets, Nostradamus seems to have had a particular talent for predicting disasters and falls from power. He is held to have described the fate of Napoleon, whose rule over the French Empire ended with his imprisonment on the tiny island of St. Helena in 1815, and to have predicted the abdication of King Edward VIII of Great Britain in 1936.

In two quatrains Nostradamus came close to naming Adolf Hitler and described his calamitous activities with some accuracy. According to the first one:

Liberty shall not be recovered, a black, fierce, villainous, evil man shall occupy it, when the ties of his alliance are wrought. Venice shall be vexed by Hister.

The second quatrain was even more vivid:

Beasts wild with hunger will cross the rivers, the greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister. He will drag the leader in a cage of iron, when the child of Germany observes no law.

In content the verses are remarkably apt. Liberty was seized, or occupied, by an evil (black-hearted and black-haired) man. Venice, along with the rest of Italy, was indeed eventually "vexed" by her former ally. Hitler's troops did cross rivers, and other boundaries, like ravening beasts, even though the majority of countries were against them. The last sentence is unclear but may refer to the German naval blockade of Britain, which, before Pearl Harbor, was the lone leader of the free world's battle for survival.

See: Erika Cheetham, The Prophecies of Nostradamus

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