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Nostradamus

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   Nostradamus original portrait by his son Cesar
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   Nostradamus original portrait by his son Cesar

   Nostradamus ( December 14, 1503 – July 2, 1566), Latinized name of
   Michel de Nostredame, was one of the world's most famous publishers of
   prophecies. 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 and has always been hugely popular throughout the
   world, Nostradamus has attracted an almost cult following. His many
   enthusiasts, to say nothing of the popular press, credit him with
   predicting numerous major world events.

   In contrast, most of the academic sources listed below maintain that
   the associations made between world events and Nostradamus' 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. Moreover, none of the
   sources listed offers any evidence that anyone has ever interpreted any
   of Nostradamus' quatrains specifically enough to allow a clear
   identification of any event in advance.

   Nevertheless, interest in the work of this prominent figure of the
   French Renaissance is still considerable, especially in the media and
   in popular culture, and the prophecies have in some cases been
   assimilated to the results of applying the alleged Bible Code, as well
   as to other purported prophetic works.

Biography

Childhood

   Nostredame's claimed birthplace before its recent renovation.
   Enlarge
   Nostredame's claimed birthplace before its recent renovation.

   Born in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence in the south of France on December 14,
   1503, where his claimed birthplace still exists, Michel de Nostredame
   was one of at least eight children of Reynière de St-Rémy and grain
   dealer and notary Jaume 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).

   His known siblings included Delphine, Jehan (circa 1507–77), Pierre,
   Hector, Louis (born in 1522), Bertrand, Jean and Antoine (born in
   1523).

   Little else is known about Nostradamus' childhood, although there is a
   persistent tradition that he was educated by his maternal
   great-grandfather Jean de St. Rémy — which is vitiated 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 fifteen Nostradamus 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.
   In 1529, after some years as an apothecary, he entered the University
   of Montpellier to study for a doctorate in medicine. He was expelled
   again shortly afterwards when it was discovered that he had been an
   apothecary, a manual trade expressly banned by the university statutes.
   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,
   Nostradamus continued working, presumably as an apothecary, and became
   famous for creating a "rose pill" that supposedly protected against the
   plague.

Marriage and healing work

   In 1531 Nostradamus 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 death, he continued to travel, passing through
   France and possibly Italy.
   Nostradamus' house at Salon-de-Provence.
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   Nostradamus' house at Salon-de-Provence.

   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, who bore him six more
   children — three daughters and three sons. Between 1556 and 1567,
   Nostradamus and his wife acquired a one-thirteenth share in a huge
   canal project organized by Adam de Craponne to irrigate largely
   waterless Salon and the nearby Désert de la Crau from the river
   Durance.

Seer

   After another visit to Italy, Nostradamus began to move away from
   medicine and towards the occult. Following popular trends, he wrote an
   almanac for 1550, for the first time Latinizing his name from
   Nostredame to Nostradamus. 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 January 1 and
   not, as is sometimes supposed, in March. It was mainly in reaction to
   the almanacs that the nobility and other prominent persons from far
   away soon started asking for horoscopes and advice from him, though he
   generally expected his clients to supply the birth charts on which the
   horoscopes would be based, contrary to the normal practice of
   professional astrologers.

   He then began his project of writing a book of one thousand quatrains,
   which constitute the largely undated prophecies for which he is most
   famous today. Feeling vulnerable to religious fanatics, however, he
   devised a method of obscuring his meaning by using "Virgilianized"
   syntax, word games and a mixture of 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 — as, in the light of their post-biblical sources (see under
   Literary sources below), Nostradamus himself was indeed prone to claim.
   Catherine de Médicis, the queen consort of King Henri 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, Catherine had made him Counselor and
   Physician-in-Ordinary to the King.

   Some biographical accounts of Nostradamus' life state that he was
   afraid of being persecuted for heresy by the Inquisition, but neither
   prophecy nor astrology fell under this bracket, and he would have been
   in danger only if he had practised magic to support them. In fact, his
   relationship with the Church as a prophet and healer was 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' tomb in the Collégiale St-Laurent, Salon.
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   Nostradamus' tomb in the Collégiale St-Laurent, Salon.

   By 1566, Nostradamus' 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 July 1, 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). He was buried in the local Franciscan
   chapel (part of it now incorporated into the restaurant La Brocherie)
   but re-interred in the Collégiale St-Laurent at the French Revolution,
   where his tomb remains to this day.

Works

   Copy of Garencières' 1672 English translation of the Propheties,
   located in The P.I. Nixon Medical History Library of The University of
   Texas Health Science Center at San Antonio.
   Enlarge
   Copy of Garencières' 1672 English translation of the Propheties,
   located in The P.I. Nixon Medical History Library of The University of
   Texas Health Science Centre at San Antonio.

   The Prophecies. In this book he compiled his collection of major,
   long-term predictions. The first installment was published in 1555. The
   second, with 289 further prophetic verses, was printed in 1557. The
   third edition, with three hundred new quatrains, was reportedly printed
   in 1558, but nowadays 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".

   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, these 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, too. It
   is known that he wrote at least two books on medical science. One was
   an alleged "translation" of Galen, 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 the advent of 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 200 editions
   of them have appeared in that time, together with over 2000
   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).

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 persons. 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 (that is, Arab)
   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, a conviction that sparked numerous collections of
   end-time prophecies at the time, not least an unpublished collection by
   Christopher Columbus.

   Some scholars believe that Nostradamus wrote not to be a prophet, but
   to comment on events that were happening in his own time, writing in
   his elusive way — using highly metaphorical and cryptic language - to
   avoid persecution. This is similar to the Preterist interpretation of
   the Book of Revelation.

   Nostradamus enthusiasts have credited him with predicting numerous
   events in world history, from the Great Fire of London, by way of the
   rise of Napoleon and Adolf Hitler, to the September 11 attacks on the
   World Trade Centre. See 'Alternative views' below.

   Skeptics such as Randi suggest, however, 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 known as " retroactive clairvoyance." There
   is no evidence in the academic literature (see Sources) to suggest that
   any Nostradamus quatrain has ever 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.

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 (see and ), suggesting
   at great length and with great complexity that Nostradamus' Propheties
   are antedated forgeries written by later hands with a political axe to
   grind. Although Halbronn possibly knows more about the texts and
   associated archives than almost anybody else alive (he helped dig out
   and research many of them), most other specialists in the field reject
   this view.

   At the other end of the spectrum, there are numerous fairly recent
   popular books, and thousands of private websites, suggesting not only
   that the Propheties are genuine but that Nostradamus was a true
   prophet. Thanks to the vagaries of interpretation, no two of them agree
   on exactly what he predicted, whether for our past or for our future .
   There is a consensus among these works, however, that he predicted the
   French Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, Hitler , both World Wars, and
   the nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. There is also a
   consensus 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 and the Challenger
   disaster, 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 truly popular in English
   was Henry C Roberts' The Complete Prophecies of Nostradamus of 1947,
   reprinted at least seven times during the next 40 years, which
   contained both transcriptions and translations, with brief
   commentaries. This was followed in 1961 by Edgar Leoni's dispassionate
   Nostradamus and His Prophecies, which is universally regarded as by far
   the best and most comprehensive treatment and analysis of Nostradamus
   in English prior to 1990. After that came Erika Cheetham's well-known
   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 went on to serve as the basis for Orson Welles'
   celebrated film/video The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Apart from a two-part
   translation of Jean-Charles de Fontbrune's Nostradamus: historien et
   prophète of 1980, the series could be said to have culminated in John
   Hogue's well-known books on the seer from about 1994 onwards, including
   Nostradamus: The Complete Prophecies (1999) and, most recently,
   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' powers of
   prophecy, but also about various aspects of his biography. 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 Médicis to Paris in 1555 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 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.

   From the 1980s onwards, however, an academic reaction set in,
   especially in France. The publication in 1983 of Nostradamus' 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 simply didn't fit the documented facts.
   The academics pointed out 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 retailed 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 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.

   On top of that, the academics, 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, certainly, were based on the original editions:
   Roberts had based himself on that of 1672, Cheetham and Hogue on the
   posthumous edition of 1568. Even the relatively respectable Leoni
   accepted on his page 115 that he had never seen an original edition,
   and on earlier pages 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 it was
   written in. Hogue, admittedly, 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 the
   scholars were particularly scathing about later attempts by some
   lesser-known authors (Hewitt, 1994; Ovason, 1997; Ramotti, 1998) to
   extract 'hidden' meanings from the texts with the aid of anagrams,
   numerical codes, graphs and other devices.

Popular culture

   The prophecies retailed and expanded by Nostradamus have figured
   largely in popular culture in the 20th and 21st centuries. As well as
   being the subject of hundreds of books (both fiction and nonfiction),
   Nostradamus' life has been depicted in several films and videos, and
   his life and writings continue to be a subject of media interest.

   There have also been several well-known internet hoaxes, where
   quatrains in the style of Nostradamus have been circulated by e-mail as
   the real thing. The best-known examples concern the collapse of the
   World Trade Centre in the attacks of September 11, 2001, which led both
   to hoaxes and to reinterpretations by enthusiasts of several quatrains
   as supposed prophecies.

   The September 11, 2001 attacks on New York City led to immediate
   speculation as to whether Nostradamus had predicted the events.
   Nostradamus enthusiasts pointed to Quatrains VI.97 and I.87 as possible
   predictions, but the scholars universally discounted these as
   irrelevant (compare the relevant sections of the Lemesurier and Snopes
   websites listed under External Links).

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