No doubt you've heard of him...but just how much store can we place in any of Nostradamus's so called 'prophecies'. I have to say that I'm extremely skeptical of ANY of his alleged prophecies ever having come true. Of course there are millions of people who would disagree with me but here's why I think his 'prophecies' are no more valid or true than anyone who chooses to predict the future....

His first book of major predictions was printed in 1555 and two subsequent volumes appeared thereafter (1557 and 1558). These predictions were based as he himself acknowledged on Judicial Astrology being applied to 'past events and predictions and projecting them forward' which in itself is a questionable base for making any kind of claims to truth or reality. Indeed of those who practised and believed in the power of astrology to divine the future, he was labelled inept and incompetent by his peers when he first published his predictions. Straight away then we appear to have a man who made questionable claims, using questionable methods and who was described as being inadequate in his understanding of the subject - it doesn't augur well for anything substantial being found within his claims then, does it?

What is less known to people today is that it is highly unlikely Nostradamus actually wrote or was responsible for most of the prophecies he is claimed to have made (more on this later) - The vast majority of his predictions can be found in the works of much earlier authors and seers - notably Pseudo-Methodius, the Tiburtine Sibyl, Joachim of Fiore and Savonarola, that's without counting all the biblical references of which Nostradamus's work is choc-a-bloc with.

Is there anything else which would weaken any claim to validity of Nostradamus's so called predictions...well, actually there is......

Many folks would argue that regardless of how he arrived at his predictions if the predicitions themselves come true, then that is proof enough of his talents, abilities as a seer - Not so.

Again few people realise that he was so afraid of persectution for heresy that he cryptically encoded his work by using varying languages (often to write the same paragraph) but his work was NEVER EVER EVER intended as a work of prophesy espoused by him.....what he did was take collections of predictions from any and every source he could find and printed them in book form for people to read - At no time did he even claim that they were 'His'.

Indeed he refuted time and time again that he was a prophet or that he was a seer. He didn't want to be associated with them in that sense at all - they were not his predictions, all he did was gather them together for other folks to read in the same way an editor would gather a book of 'quotations'.

I have no idea why people persist in promulgating the myth of Nostradamus (other than financial gain)...he personally made no predictions...he certainly published many but they were not his. And of those which have supposedly come true - Academics can point to the original texts and show clearly where his words have either been deliberately mis-translated so as to fit the scenario being touted, or have innocently been mis-translated to render them so vague and obscue that they could mean anything.

Nostradamus and the legend of Nostradamus is a myth.

Hands up those who agree...

Ben

Good post Ben. Very informative. Im not a believer in seers and such anyway, but I hadnt known that about Nostradamus.

You know -the way he wrote the quatrains...they easily fit many different scenarios. And boy, people sure do try to make them fit..
The fact that Reuters released a now famous (false) quatrain that is supposedly a direct Nostradamus prediction of 9/11...is just wild.

This was published after 9/11..supposedly his exact words.


Then along came this...


He never said "In the year of the new century and nine months."
The quatrain reads like this...
"In the year 1999 and seven months, from the skies shall come an alarming powerful king" (Century 10:72)

I don't think anything really big happened in 1999...

Then we get to..."twin brothers" being "torn apart."
It actually reads as such...
"Two royal brothers shall war so much one against the other" (Century 3:97).


People grabbed it hook, line and sinker..

He did say...

What city?
How does this actually pertain to anything?

My father loves quatrains and says them so often, I know many by heart.
I once asked him if he believed they were direct prohecies..and he quickly said "No, they are a jumble of words a man collected which happen to sound good strung together."

Books people have written about Nostradamus are best sellers since the 9/11 attack. His name is also one of the top search words on the internet. People make money just writing books about the man.

What's interesting is that, in his own time, Nostradamus was less famous for his predictions than he was for his work with victims of bubonic plague. He had a medical degree and was known to visit houses that, due to bubonic plague, no other doctor would visit. He was also known to have developed some very simple, practical and effective remedies that basically included: cleanliness, sunshine, fresh air and vitamin C.

I do agree that seeing the future in Nostradamus's prophecies is a little like reading tarot, or looking at clouds: there's so much interpretation involved that it could be applied to all kinds of things. Also remember that we've had nearly 500 years to find things to apply his prophecies to. For example, I could make a Nostradamian prophecy right now:

The seedless grapefruit rots beneath the tree.
It shrinks and grows dark in the sun.
Is is attacked from all sides by the ants.
The one-armed gardener with his hoe of gold
will strike the grapefruit and rend it into compost.
After, the three of spades perseveres.

Now, wait five hundred years and tell me how many catastrophic world events this idiotic drivel could be applied to.

Hmmm it's very hard not to talk about Nostradamus's predictions but in all honesty we must not think of him as being the person who made them - he was a pharmacist with a passion for the occult who COLLECTED prophecies - yes he produced almanacks with predictions in them which were his own, but they were an annual thing.

In the foreword to so many of his works and in his letters to Royalty and Nobility, he quite clearly states 'I am not a prophet or a seer'.....

The more and more I read of him - the more I think he took prophecies of other people which it appeared to him were unfulfilled and simply used what he knew of astrology to try and pin point when they were supposed to happen. He wasn't responsible for the prophecies, only trying to figure out using a system he thought akin to a science when they would happen. In that respect he's been wrong time and time again....and if a prophesy perchance can be discerned as 'true' then he wasn't responsible for it.....

You have to go back to the authors I quoted above or the Bible to find out who was responsible....

Ben

Yeah see, when my father (the most brilliant man on the planet -me thinks=) said "No, they are a jumble of words a man collected which happen to sound good strung together."
I realize now, he chose the word collected in its literal form.

Go search on the man though and most of the bio's out there say nothing of him not being the original author of his books. I'm still searching...

Well undoubtedly the one man who knows more about Nostradamus than anyone alive is Jacques Halbronn - He is the man who has researched Nostradamus all his life and is responsible for unearthing many of his 'lost' works...he is the man whom any Academic needing to know about Nostradamus starts with - and his view? He believes that NONE of the works of Nostradamus were ever even compiled by him...he believes they are an elaborate hoax created by political activists but even I tend not to agree with this view...but most academics are agreed that at least Nostradamus DID collect the prophecies....

Ben

I should also add that when ALL the prophecies were produced in one edition the title was not The Prophecies OF M Michel Nostradamus - but The Prophecies BY M Michel Nostradamus....a small difference with huge implications....

Ben

Excellent point..
Yeah, okay so if he did just collect them -I wonder if that changes the scope of anything. I don't readily believe the quatrains..as it stands.

Sooo..
We therefore, go into the political aspect of the entire thing.
And now you are onto something, boyo.

Great dig Ben! Thanks...
What’s weird (and sad) is that just 1 quatrain coming close to a real world event will get more attention then the info you have provided us.
People’s need to believe in the ‘supernatural? Quite a phenom in that alone… ~rore

His doomsday senerio is very simialr to the Global warming therory that if we dont stop it the world will end. i don't buy into that.

you don't "believe" in global warming and the effects of it!?

Yeah well...
When there are no more fish in 50 years and so the seals die off, then the polar bears..and all the dolphins have tumors the size of soccer balls, it will pretty much begin to dawn on people that the slope has gotten too slippery to climb back up.

Quick, somebody find a pertaining quatrain...heh.

And you don't think that that kind of stuff has ever happened before. I belive some of it but not in ma made global warming. We add to it, we are not the one who started global warming. Like a race car accelerating is the best example I can think of.

Has there ever been too many people -making the Earth choke on herself?
40,000 children die every single day due to starvation.

Every Single Tragic Day...
And no, we have never had a reality that all the fish will soon be gone.
Once we grasp that concept and realize all the things which will die with it....yeah.

We are not helping -oh nono...we are accelerating, you nailed it there.

(Sorry Boyo, for drifting your thread...you can do it to one of mine=)

Notice we are accelrating it, not causing it in the first plae. That's where they are wrong and msot sceientists still are not 100% sure that global warming is happeneng.

Which scientists are these? The scientists in the White House?

Contrary to what certain people in the government have said: global warming is a documented and verifiable fact.

I could go on here and list those facts, but quite frankly, it would take a long frigging time. The earth is getting warmer. More uv rays are reaching the surface. This is not a hypothesis or a theory or a plank in somebody's political platform. This has been researched, measure, verified, documented and reported by independent teams from around the world

Although Michel de Nostradame was kicked out of school before receiving a medical degree, his approach to treating plague victims was revolutionary for its time. Aside from that, he never really did anything noteworthy. Prophecies? I think not.

yes but that's becuase that's the only side you listen to. Of course you would say that.