Nostradamus, dead prophet or dead loss?

Reported by Peter Lemesurier

How did the famous 16th century French seer Nostradamus manage to predict Hitler, or 9/11, or the end of the world in December 2012, as many people believe? According to Peter Lemesurier, widely regarded as the English-speaking world’s leading Nostradamus expert, he didn’t. All the media hype and the lurid TV ‘documentaries’ to that effect are so much hot air, often put out by Big Money just so as to make more. In fact, the real question is not how he managed to predict them, but how he managed not to predict them. After all, if you’re writing at least 7280 prophecies, as Nostradamus did (most of them in his annual almanacs, which of course are specifically dated), you ought to be able to score more than a mere couple of dozen ‘hits’, which is all that he appears to have achieved.

How, then, did he write his famous book The Prophecies – which contains 942 of them divided into ten ‘Centuries’, or books of 100 verses (except for one of them, which only contains 42)? Nostradamus himself used to claim that he was divinely inspired, or that he summoned up angels, or that he used astrology, or even that he simply ‘slept on it’. Lemesurier suggests that these claims were just smokescreens, designed to protect him from enemies such as the Inquisition. In other words, they were precisely the methods that he didn’t use.

So what method did he use? Not scrying with a crystal ball or a bowl of water, it seems, despite all those gloomy movies about him. So it has to be the only other major one that he doesn’t mention. And that is what is sometimes called the ‘Janus principle’, plus the ancient technique of ‘bibliomancy’. Janus was the Roman two-faced god of endings and beginnings after whom January is named, this being the month when we often look back at the old year and forward to the new. Nostradamus, similarly, believed that, by looking back at the past, he could tell what was going to happen in the future. The idea was common at the time, and went back far into the past. History, as they say, tends to repeat itself – even though it usually doesn’t. Not exactly, anyway.

Thus, one day a ‘new Julius Caesar’ should theoretically be assassinated, Spain and Italy should be invaded by a ‘new Hannibal’, and Central Europe should be invaded from Turkey by a ‘new Suleiman the Magnificent’. And so Nostradamus predicted all these – repeatedly. While, theoretically, he could have dated these future events on the basis of astrological recurrence – i.e. by working out when the astrological patterns that coincided with each of the original events would be repeated – for the most part he didn’t, even though he claimed to have. As a result what we are left with, in effect, is a series of 942 ‘catch-alls’ – alleged ‘prophecies’ that can in fact be fitted (and frequently are) to a whole series of events, and especially recent ones that stick especially in the mind such as 9/11, especially if you twist either the words or the events to fit, or even make up your own (both of which actually happened at the time).

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