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Though widely regarded as a prophet,
many who have studied Nostradamus's works find that most of the amazing
prophecies attributed to him are merely the result of poor linguistic and
historical scholarship
The writer Michel de Nostredame,
better known as Nostradamus, is widely known as a French physician, astrologer
and prophet.
Nostradamus remains famous over four
hundred years after his death mostly for a 1555 book he wrote titled
"Centuries," a collection of one thousand quatrains (four-line
rhyming verses) which are said to foretell the future.
Depending on which source you
consult, Nostradamus has been credited with accurately predicting the bombing
of Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945; the Space Shuttle Challenger accident in 1986;
the French Revolution in 1789; the Apollo moon landing in 1969; the death of
Princess Diana in 1997; both World Wars, and so on.
In fact you'd be hard pressed to name
some significant global event that Nostradamus was not said, by someone, to
have foreseen.
Nostradamus and
9/11
Perhaps the most famous assertion
made in the past 20 years was that Nostradamus predicted the September 11, 2011, terrorist attacks.
It's a story that circulated widely
in late 2001, and is still widely believed. One verse in particular went viral
on the Internet:
"Two steel
birds will fall from the sky on the Metropolis, The sky will burn at forty-five
degrees latitude Fire approaches the great new city Immediately a huge,
scattered flame leaps up Within months, rivers will flow with blood The undead
will roam the earth for little time."
Could "steel birds"
be interpreted as airplanes? Could New York City be the "Metropolis"
that lies at about 40 degrees north latitude?
Many people thought so; however, it
was later revealed that this piece is a hybrid of real Nostradamus verse and
fiction.
Not only is it not in quatrain form,
but the phrase "two steel birds" is particularly revealing, as
steel suitable for airplanes wasn't invented until 1854 — nearly 200 years
after Nostradamus died.
Another quatrain read:
"In the city
of God there will be a great thunder Two brothers torn apart by Chaos while the
fortress endures The great leader will succumb The third big war will begin
when the big city is burning” — Nostradamus 1654
Given the fact that Nostradamus died
in 1566, eighty-eight years before the quatrain was supposedly written, it
would be a remarkable piece indeed.
This was actually published on a
Canadian website as part of an essay on how easily important-sounding prophecy
can be created using vague imagery.
It is ironic that what began as an
essentially skeptical, anti-prophecy piece circulated as the real thing.
Say what?
In 2007, John
Hogue, author of several books about Nostradamus prophecies, stated that the
following year a global famine would kill millions of people: "the era
of global famine foreseen by Nostradamus will begin in 2008," he
wrote.
The prediction of a global famine
obviously (and thankfully) was one of many that didn't come true, but the
faulty prophecy highlights another aspect of the Nostradamus industry: there's
little or no general agreement about what exactly he meant.
Nostradamus wrote in Middle French,
using vague words, metaphors, and obscure, dated references.
There are dozens of different
translations of his "Centuries" book, with many variations on
different words and phrases.
This wide variety of interpretations
helps the prophecies come "true," since if one translation doesn't
really support the historical evidence, another can often be found that fits
better.
Often even Nostradamus scholars can't
agree on what he was trying to say. Several of the prophecies have been the
result of simple ignorance of the language, history, or both.
For example, one
famous line widely interpreted as referring to Adolf Hitler mentions "The
major battle shall be close by the Hister / He shall cause the great one to be
dragged in an iron cage, while the Germans shall be looking at the infant
Rhine."
It mentions Germany, and a war, and
Hister (which kind of sounds like Hitler to modern ears): amazing prophetic
powers?
No; in fact "Hister" (which
can also be translated as "Ister" or "Iter") is not the
name of Adolf Hitler or anyone else; it is another name for the lower Danube
River, a word that Nostradamus also used in his 1554 "Almanac."
In his book "The Complete
Prophecies of Nostradamus," Henry S. Roberts offers the following
translation of Century VIII (2):
"Condon and
Aux, and about Mirande I see a fire from heaven that surrounds them. Sol, Mars,
in conjunction with the lion, and then Marmande. Lightning, great war, wall
falls into the Garonne."
What in the world does this mean? Sol
and Mars may refer to the Sun and Mars (or not). Condon and the other proper
nouns are place names (probably).
And a fire from the heaven could be
anything from a comet to an exploding sun. What do you think Roberts made of
it?
If you guessed
alien contact, you're right; according to Roberts's learned interpretation "Fire
from heaven suggests extraterrestrial spacecraft landing amid a great war on
Earth."
Since no date is given it may yet
happen of course — or maybe it was referring to Halley's Comet, which is seen
about every 75 years and certainly has appeared in times of strife — or any
number of other things.
In his book "Nostradamus,
Bibliomancer: The Man, the Myth, the Truth," Peter Lemesurier, a former
Cambridge linguist and author of nearly a dozen books on the French seer,
concludes that Nostradamus was neither a doctor nor an astrologer, nor even (by
his own admission) a prophet.
He merely believed that history
repeats itself, and thus projected known past events into the future.
Lemesurier laments that "Most of
those who make such [predictions] — including the English-speaking authors of
many popular books on the subject — know next to nothing either about
Nostradamus, the texts, or even the sixteenth-century French in which they are
written.
Few of them have ever seen an
original text, or even know sufficient French....
As a result [such predictions] are
the result of not reading what the texts actually say, but of shamelessly
twisting half-understood words retrospectively to fit the proposed event, or in
some cases even twisting the event itself to fit the words."
Nostradamus couched his quatrains in
such vague terms that people read whatever they want into them.
Nostradamus did not in fact make
predictions (statements that are read and known about before they happen);
instead he made post-dictions (statements that appear to come true only after
the events already happened).
If Nostradamus had truly predicted
the September 11 attacks, World War II, or the Challenger shuttle accident, for
example, the world should have known about them decades (indeed centuries)
before they occurred.
Predictions that only make sense
after the event they foretell are no predictions at all.
Accurate or not, for a man who hasn't
written anything in well over 400 years, Nostradamus's works and biographies
show no signs of slowing down.
Benjamin Radford
Live Science Contributor
Benjamin Radford is the Bad
Science columnist for Live Science. He covers pseudoscience, psychology, urban
legends and the science behind "unexplained" or mysterious
phenomenon. Ben has a master's degree in education and a bachelor's degree in
psychology. He is deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer science magazine and has
written, edited or contributed to more than 20 books, including
"Scientific Paranormal Investigation: How to Solve Unexplained
Mysteries," "Tracking the Chupacabra: The Vampire Beast in Fact,
Fiction, and Folklore" and “Investigating Ghosts: The Scientific Search
for Spirits,” out in fall 2017. His website is www.BenjaminRadford.com.
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