Notes on Nostradamus

WARNING:This deals with the Prophecies of Nostradamus from a critical point of view, critical both pro and con. For the purely secular point of view, please check the section On Precognition. For the purely religious point of view, please check the section On Prophecy.

Since the first prophecies came out in the Almanac and the 1555 Bonhomme edition, people have been trying to figure out exactly what the prophecies meant. References to the planets, to animals, to bodily parts, seem to refer to some sort of code that Nostradamus came up with. The presence of words that did not exist seemed to demand some sort of anagram system whereby the letters of words were deliberately rearranged. The deliberate obscurity seemed to ensure that the quatrains could refer to anything.

And yet the seemingly apparent references to specific people who were already alive. These were quite enough to set tongues wagging and people scratching their heads in curiosity.

There was that quatrain that referred to the young lion overcoming the old, the thirty fifth quatrain of the first century; did that refer to the death of good king Henri who was rightly regarded as a lion? If so, who was the young lion? Montgomery was a Scotsman whose national heraldic crest was that of a lion, he could be, but it was inconceivable that the Captain of the King’s Scottish Guard would kill his liege; almost certainly it had to refer to some war, likely with England whose crest was also that of a lion, in which Henri would fall in personal battle.

And what about the forty first quatrain of the third century, the one that refers to a hunchback? Louis de Condi, the prince of the Blood, was a hunchback, though only a slight one. It was true that Condi was “of the religion” as Calvinists were referred to in those days by Catholics, yet he was a very important person in the affairs of the crown. It was inconceivable that he would go against his king, likely this quatrain referred to someone else, yet who else could it refer to?

Idle readers would read about another quatrain, the one predicting great events in the year 1700. Those of the East subjugating almost the whole northern corner? Well, the Ottoman’s were of the East, did this mean that they were going to stretch their empire all the way north to the Nordic lands? Of course, there was that barbarian nation, the people of Rus, who were rapidly developing. Under their autocrat Ivan, they had recently built a standing army, had overthrown and conquered their overlords the Khanate of Kazan and had become powerful in their own right – maybe this was the people referred to.

As the years rolled by, it became increasingly obvious that there was a problem. His detractors were claiming that all of the quatrains were so vague and obscure that they could refer to anything. And with some of the predictions actually being vague, there was something of a basis for the claim.