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Nostradamus: Quatrains
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Nostradamus was catapulted to fame in 1557, two years after the publication of volume one of his prophecies. It all had to do with the accidental death of France's king, Henry II, who was wounded in a jousting contest and died ten days later. (10) This event was proclaimed to be a fulfillment of a prophecy contained In Century 1, Quatrain 35:
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Nostradamus did not write the quatrain now being attributed to him. (One wonders how a guy who died in 1566 could have written an item identified as being penned in 1654 anyway.) It originated with a student at Brock University in Canada in the 1990s, appearing on a web page essay on Nostradamus. That particular quatrain was offered by the page's author, Neil Marshall, as a fabricated example to illustrate how easily an important-sounding prophecy can be crafted through the use of abstract imagery. He pointed out how the terms he used were so deliberately vague they could be interpreted to fit any number of cataclysmic events. (And no, this quatrain didn't appear in the 1980 Orson Welles documentary The Man Who Saw Tomorrow. Welles used a different piece of writing to posit a conflict between the U.S. and a Middle Eastern country -- no great feat of prognostication given that at the time, the U.S. and Iran were at loggerheads over the Iranian takeover of the U.S. Embassy in Tehran, a move that many people at the time ... felt was tantamount to an "act of war.")
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Nostradamus died in June 1566 of congestive heart failure. He was succeeded by a colleague, Jean-Aimé de Chavigny... a physician, who immediately began work on a biography. De Chavigny also published his interpretations of 126 of the quatrains. Over the centuries a number of additional interpreters have arisen (including Theophilus de Garencieres, who translated the quatrains into English (1672)), all of whom have championed the reputed accomplishments of Nostradamus as a seer of future events and emphasized those quatrains presaging events soon to occur. Garancieres's effort was marred by his acceptance of two fake quatrains written to attack French Roman Catholic Cardinal Jules Mazarin, who also served as the French prime minister.
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Nostradamus prophecy was written primarily in French, although he threw in some Latin, Greek and Italian to murk some meanings. He ... used other devices to obscure his quatrains, including symbols, metaphors and purposely-misspelled words. Most interestingly, many of the so-called Nostradamus prophecies circulating today are merely urban legends -- often his original quatrains are cut and splice to sound good after major world events. For instance, shortly after the September 11th terrorist attacks in the U.S., a large number of alleged Nostradamus prophecies began circulating the Internet and news media. Here are a few of them:
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As with everything else concerning Nostradamus, things are very likely not what they seem. Furthermore, the variance of opinion in the interpretation of this quatrain represents a great dilemma with everything Nostradamus wrote. The quatrains are so cryptic that different writers interpret them differently. There are nearly as many interpretations as they are interpreters. People are trying to see something in them that is not there.
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Pierre Brind'Amour, Nostradamus et l'histoire romaine, dans Hommage à la mémoire de Ernest Pascal (dans Cahiers des Études anciennes, t. 23), 1990, t. 1, pp. 55-65. Élucide diverses allusions à l'histoire de la Rome antique éparses dans les Prophéties. Semble ignorer qu'il a été précédé par Dumézil dans l'interprétation des quatrains V, 6 et V, 75.
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