The Prophecies of Nostradamus
Jan. 15th, 2023 08:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
ndrosenAs background, I am a skeptic, and I was at the age of sixteen. When I was sixteen years old, I accompanied my parents and younger siblings to France, where we lived for some months in a house in Castagniers, a village in the hills above Nice, while my father was a visiting professor at Nice; this was in the late winter and spring of 1981. The house was rented from a British (I think Welsh) couple who were away for a time. Fortunately, there were plenty of books in the house, and I remember reading things ranging from Medieval Welsh poetry in translation, to Conor Cruise O’Brien’s States of Ireland, to How Green Was My Valley and its sequels. One other book that I read was about the prophecies of Nostradamus, written by a pair (I think) of people who believed that Nostradamus had really foreseen the future, and that at least some of his predictions were sound, and had come true.
I was not persuaded. Sure, some of his prophecies corresponded well to actual events in later centuries, but if you write enough predictions in often ambiguous languages, and without dates and details, you will score some hits even if you don’t have the gift of prophecy. Other predictions were less clear; I remember saying to my mother that if you assume that when Nostradamus said Armorica (Brittany), he meant America, and when he wrote Arton, he meant NATO, a near anagram, and when he wrote about Hister defending Poland and Hungary, he referred to Hitler attacking them, then you could take a number of his verses as a guide to twentieth century events, but this required arbitrary, ad-hoc assumptions.
Even the authors of the book admitted that some of the predictions were wrong, including, “When there are red roses in France, there will be blood in the Vatican.” This was in 1981, remember, when Francois Mitterrand was elected President of France, the symbol of his Socialist Party being a red rose. Later that spring, after I had read the book, Mehmet Ali Agca shot and wounded Pope John Paul the Second, and I remember some newspaper or magazine article mentioning that believers in Nostradamus saw this as fulfilling that prediction.
Weird. I still don’t believe that Nostradamus foresaw the future, but I have to admit that the conjunction of events is weird.
I was not persuaded. Sure, some of his prophecies corresponded well to actual events in later centuries, but if you write enough predictions in often ambiguous languages, and without dates and details, you will score some hits even if you don’t have the gift of prophecy. Other predictions were less clear; I remember saying to my mother that if you assume that when Nostradamus said Armorica (Brittany), he meant America, and when he wrote Arton, he meant NATO, a near anagram, and when he wrote about Hister defending Poland and Hungary, he referred to Hitler attacking them, then you could take a number of his verses as a guide to twentieth century events, but this required arbitrary, ad-hoc assumptions.
Even the authors of the book admitted that some of the predictions were wrong, including, “When there are red roses in France, there will be blood in the Vatican.” This was in 1981, remember, when Francois Mitterrand was elected President of France, the symbol of his Socialist Party being a red rose. Later that spring, after I had read the book, Mehmet Ali Agca shot and wounded Pope John Paul the Second, and I remember some newspaper or magazine article mentioning that believers in Nostradamus saw this as fulfilling that prediction.
Weird. I still don’t believe that Nostradamus foresaw the future, but I have to admit that the conjunction of events is weird.
