My work on Nostradamus

I remember when I first started on my work on Nostradamus. I had this book, a hardbound version with the two epistles, one to Cesar, the other to Henri. A friend of mine and I bantered around, trying to figure it out. We decided quickly to focus our game, for such it was at that time, on one key part of the Epistle. I remember how it was translated. For God had long noticed the sterility of the Great Dame, who conceived two principle children. My friend and I made it a game trying to figure out just who the Great Dame was. We tried everything since the time of Nostradamus, including such luminaries as Louis XIV and Napoléon, such incendiaries as Hitler, and others. However, none of them succeeded in the 18 and 36, key tests to know that we had the Great Dame. We even made the right guess and overlooked it. However, that night, I tested out all of our guesses of that day. To my shocked surprise, one of the guesses fit the 18 and 36. I did not have all the details right then, my confirmation was, admittedly, accidental, and an accurate analysis of the 18 and 36 would not come until I was years older. But that proved to be immaterial. By accident, I had figured out the Great Dame.

The proof of this was when I tried to apply this knowledge to the rest of the prophecy. To my surprise, it was as if I was reading history itself. The French Revolution. The reign of Napoléon. The second Republic and Second Empire. The Third Republic. The rise of the German Empire and the unified Italian State. The First World War. The rise of Hitler and the horrors of the Second World War. The darkness that was Soviet Communism. The rising of Benito Mussolini and his Roman ambitions. Due to the nature of the epistle, I had to do some work at it to understand what Nostradamus was saying. And where it went into the future, while I did not understand it in full detail, yet I was able to get an understanding of what was predicted. To use a modern American idiom, it was as plain as day.

Shocked, I started to turn my attention to the quatrains. This was not so easy. Many of the quatrains were, obviously, fulfilled. Others were not so fulfilled. I had to hunt and peck through many of the quatrains. I obtained a copy of a controversial Seve edition of Nostradamus, a photocopy from the Bibliothèque de National de Paris. I did not know about the reputation of this copy, but it had all the quatrains, the presages and the Sixains. It even included a quatrain in Century 6 that the other, earlier quatrains did not have, moving the Incantation from the 100th quatrain to between the 6th and 7th centuries. It also had the two epistles. Time has forced me to dispose of this original copy from the Bibliothèque, but the work continued.

In my work, I have tried to avoid the obvious mistake that most commentators have made. The tendency, even among some of the best, is to make the translation fit the interpretation. They translate and interpret it at the same time, sometimes coming up with some very interesting interpretations that, while interesting, are definitely unrelated to what the original quatrain even says. I have focused instead on translating first as literally as possible, then applying an interpretation upon the translation. That said, I may have failed a few times and imposed a translation based on the interpretation. It is an unfortunate perversity of human nature to try to make things fit. If I am guilty of this, I beg forgiveness from you, the reader. At least I have tried my best to avoid it, even if it did prove to be impossible.

I also have had access to several originals. No, these were not the actual originals themselves. They were photocopies of the originals. But having access to the Bonhomme, the Du Rosne, the Benoist Rigaud and Seve editions were priceless to me. Being able to see the differences between all four editions, especially in some quatrains, and sometimes differences within the same edition, allowed me to try to determine exactly what Nostradamus himself intended. Because it is evident that each of the editions has errors, I may have been wrong in some places. While I have tried to minimize this to the best of my ability, my unfortunate inability to question the prophet himself forced me to rely on the likely erroneous works. This is, of course, not his fault, but the fault of the publishers. Still, I think I have minimized the mistakes and has allowed me to put down as close to exactly what the prophet intended as is possible. For obvious reasons, I have relied upon just the Seve edition only in a few places.

In my interpretation of the quatrains, I have tried to follow three simple rules: First, try to interpret it as literally as possible. Second, try to find names and sources that we human beings came up with. Third and last, rely on some unknown code of Nostradamus. Following these rules has, surprisingly, allowed me to interpret many of the quatrains without any need of codes and strange interpretations. In fact, I was able to quickly dispense with the third and last rule, for the so-called code quickly became not only unnecessary, it became actually detrimental to understanding the quatrains. The quatrains often lay themselves open to me like a book. For those that I was unable to interpret, the locations were often so clear and obvious, based on the flavor of the quatrain, that I was able to locate places with great precision – for instance, the twenty sixth quatrain of the eight century. I was able to locate the Monserrat and Pamplonne that Nostradamus actually meant – the abbey of Montserrat Mountain and the city of Pamplona, both in Spain. So successful has this approach been that I have yet to have need of the use of any Nostradamian “code.”

Finally, I have kept myself guided by a single rule that Nostradamus himself gave. In his Epistle to Cesar, he states that each quatrain deals with a specific event, a specific place or a specific time. To this, I found that some of the quatrains dealt with fourth criteria, a specific individual. But the specificity of the quatrains had to be ensured. No quatrain could ever refer to two events in two different places unless there was a specific person or specific time to tie the two events together. And no quatrain could ever refer to two times unless there was a specific individual or specific place that the quatrain was referring to. Unless the interpretation had something specific, something individual, something that tied the quatrain together into one unifying whole, the interpretation was rubbish. This helped me a great deal.

However, this rule that Nostradamus gave himself has also hindered me. The fact that Nostradamus is wrong in some of his quatrains has lead me to mark ambiguous some quatrains that will never happen. Of course, if I knew what quatrains they were, I would mark them as failed quatrains; their ambiguity prevents me from doing this. Also, sometimes a quatrain is so obviously a specific person or event that I have declared it so, even though there may be one or two lines that I do not understand. This could be a failure on my part, I freely admit this, I may not know enough about a specific event to write about the ambiguous line. That said, it could also be that Nostradamus was himself confused and wrote something about the event that did not happen. I have tended to give Nostradamus the benefit of the doubt, but you, the reader, need to be aware.

If the translations in the two epistles are sometimes rough and hard to read, I do apologize. But it is hard for me to understand the older French which, it is honestly said, sometimes had multiple ways to spell a single word. Considering that in those days French was studied at home and not in any school, that there were no rules by which the language was spoken or written, it is a wonder that the language finally superseded Latin, the studied language of the day. I have done my best. With that I must rest content.

Please also note that this work is the result of over 30 years of labor. Some of these interpretations were made when I was young, others when I was older. I cannot claim, with all certainty, that I wrote them with my mature view of Nostradamus in mind. The earlier ones I was of the opinion that he could do no wrong. While making this website, I did work on fixing these, but I cannot guarantee that I found them all. For those quatrains I interpreted like that, I do apologize.