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Nostradamus: Quatrains
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Nostradamus was a French physician and astrologer who dabbled in prophecy. His volume Centuries, a big set of vague and often cataclysmic predictions set in quatrains, made quite a sensation in his day. (Charles IX even made him court physician.) A few people continue to believe that Nostradamus really could predict events of the future, from the rise of Adolf Hitler to the assassination of John F. Kennedy and the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center in September of 2001. In truth, there is no real proof that Nostradamus could accurately predict the future, and many of the circulating "predictions" attributed to Nostradamus were not even written by him at all.
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Nostradamus was in his late 40s when, it is told, he frequently went into a meditative state and had visions of the future. He began to document the visions in a mixture of Lain, French, and Greek quatrains, publishing his famous "Centuries" in 1558.
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Nostradamus had visions for many years, but he didn't start documenting them until he was 27 years of age. He did this very carefully by encrypting them in poetic quatrains so as not to incriminate himself as a witch or someone possessed. A few months before his 27th birthday his friend and mentor, Bernard, died suddenly at the age of 72. Bernard had not counted on dying so soon and had not managed to arrange a suitable inheritance for Nostradamus.
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In reference to Nostradamus's writings, a "century" referred to a grouping of one hundred verses, each verse being a four-line poem called a quatrain. It was this work that brought Nostradamus his fame. The 1555 edition contained the first three centuries and 53 quatrains of "Century Four." A second edition two years later had 640 quatrains and Centuries Eight through Ten were published as a separate volume in 1558. The first English edition, published in 1672... had eight additional quatrains from the "Century Seven" not in the French editions. As a result of the success of the first edition, in 1556 Nostradamus was invited to Paris as a guest of the French queen Catherine de Médicis.
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Nostradamus began writing about his visions when he wrote the first of his almanacs. It contained predictions of things to come in the next year. The almanacs appeared each year from 1550 to 1565. They were very popular with the public. The Almanacs spoke of astrological phases of the coming year and contained quatrains, or rhymed four-line verse, offering hints of upcoming events. The published works served to spread his fame across France to an even greater degree.
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One example: Nostradamus is said to have predicted the death of King Henry II of France before the monarch died in a jousting tournament in 1559, accidentally pierced through his visor by the lance of the Comte de Montgomery. The king was 40 and his jousting opponent — who shared with him a lion mascot on his shield — was 29. The quatrain (CI, Q35) goes:
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Quatrains