Dan Snow's History Hit - Nostradamus

Episode Date: February 7, 2025

For centuries, Nostradamus has been hailed as the man who saw the future—his cryptic quatrains allegedly foretelling everything from the French Revolution and the rise of Hitler to the 9/11 attacks and the Covid-19 pandemic. But how much is true, and how much is myth?Joining Dan in this episode to unravel the true history of the French soothsayer is John Hogue, a renowned Nostradamus scholar. Together they explore Nostradamus' life as a plague doctor, the occult during the Renaissance, his most famous predictions and why they still captivate us today.You can learn more on John's website here: http://www.hogueprophecy.com/With special thanks to listener Tamarah Palmer.Produced by Mariana Des Forges and edited by Dougal Patmore.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe.We'd love to hear from you. You can email the podcast at [e-mail].

Welcome, everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. Imagine a world with no widespread acceptance of the scientific method. A world in which opinions and ideas were shaped by whispers and myths and superstitions and preachers. Wouldn't that be a thing? Imagine a world where medicine is part prayer and part folk remedy and part something a little darker. Imagine this world dominated by the medieval church with a prescriptive worldview. That is the world we're heading back to today, folks. We're heading back to the Renaissance in this episode to talk about one of its most colourful figures.

Now, the word Renaissance may mean to you a sort of flourishing time of art and science, a sort of creeping towards modernity, but this is a story about a very different Renaissance Europe. This is a story about the magic, the occult, the alchemy, the astrology that gripped people in the Renaissance. It was a time where our line between what we might call science and what they called natural magic was blurred to the point of not existing at all. And this is the world of Nostradamus. who in very uncertain times appeared to provide glimpses of the future, a source of guidance. Nostradamus was a healer, he was a doctor, he fought the plague and other diseases, he had some success and he did so by embracing some rather modern ideas

and I think were it not for his later writing career he might be remembered perhaps only by scholars but still remembered as an important medical practitioner but then he set his hand to prophecy. Some believed he was a complete fake, others thought he was insane, others a heretic But he became a huge figure of the age. He was protected from the church. He was favoured by the French queen, Catherine de' Medici. She was one of his biggest fans. She invited him to court to look after members of the family

and do her children's horoscopes. Well, he made predictions about the future. You can look them up. Some are absurdly vague. Bad things will happen to France, kind of vague. Well, he made predictions about the future. You can look them up. Some are absurdly vague. Bad things will happen to France, kind of vague. All of them are open to enormous interpretation. He wrote in a very cryptic fashion.

And many of his interpreters have been very generous to him over the centuries, as you'll hear here. But plenty of people at the time and since have been impressed by their prescience. I must say, I am a fan of his OG, his original and most famous prediction. He called the death of the French King Henry II, the husband of Catherine, who I mentioned. In 1555, he wrote his book, Les Prophéties, The Prophecies. And he wrote, the young lion will overcome the older one on the field of combat in a single battle. He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage. Two wounds become one and he dies a cruel death. Four years later in 1559, Henry II lined up in a jousting tournament

against the much younger Count of Montgomery. During that joust, Montgomery's lance splintered and it pierced Henry II's eye through the helmet's visor as he also sustained a crushing blow to the back of the head. Two wounds become one. He suffered terribly for ten days before dying on July 10th, 1559. And he dies a cruel death. Nostradamus' prophecy seemingly fulfilled. And while his contemporaries certainly thought so,

with that his career was made and people have been pouring over every word he wrote ever since. And if you are into it, then friends buckle up because he saw in our future global thermonuclear war, interstellar settlement, and the sun swallowing the earth. So choose your own adventure there. I've always wanted to know more about the man at the heart of this furore. I wasn't alone because we had a request from listener Tamara Palmer. She's in Victoria, Australia. So hello, Tamara. And we were thrilled over here at History to make it happen.

We found the world's greatest authority on Nostradamus, and he's right here on the podcast now. He's John Hogue, a leading expert. He's written several books on the subject, including Nostradamus, A Life and a Myth. So whatever you think of the prophecy, folks, here's the history. Enjoy. John, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Glad to be here. Tell me about the very specific context in which Nostradamus is born and in which he grows up, this idea of, well, forced conversion and what it was like to be Jewish in this period.

He was born in 1503 in Provence, in Saint-Denis. And it was ruled until 1480 by King René the Good. He was called the Good because he was a very enlightened king, Saracens and Jews. And as Provence has always been a great doorway to the Mediterranean world, he was grown up in a beautiful space of that. But then René's son, the Duke of Calabria, was poisoned and that line was ended. And then it went over to Charles VIII of France. First, Charles said, no more Jews, you either convert or go. But his son, Louis XII, made it very clear that you will suffer severe penalties. So they loved Provence. And so they decided to go underground with their Judaism

and become Christians. Wow, fascinating. And this would have to go underground with their Judaism and become Christians. Wow, fascinating. And this would have been, well, the entire community would have had to make that decision. That's extraordinary. He presented as a Christian and he was able then to study and have a career, I guess, which should have been denied to him as a Jew. Well, it's interesting how so many Christianized Jews ended up being doctors. interesting how so many Christianized Jews ended up being doctors and his love for astrology. Also, he had the gift that his family had. His grandfathers were his teachers at first, and then he went to Avignon to do high school, I guess you would say. And then he also had a passion. He was a proto-botanist. That is why later in his life, he ended up running into Scalegi in Agen and becoming kind

of a disciple of Scalegi, who was considered by history a proto-botanist. So he said, I want to search the world and wander through Paris as an apothecary. So he was an apothecary, so he distributed drugs, he was a medical man, and he's obsessed with plants. I guess those two are very closely connected and the properties of plants, but also the planets as well. And is this typical of a sort of Renaissance scientific life? He was truly a Renaissance man

in the high French Renaissance period. He also made cosmetics. He also wrote his book, The Treatise on Pharmacies, Pharmacists, where he chronicled his journeys all over France, Lorraine, southern Germany, Spain, and Italy, northern parts of Italy, especially in Florence, where he got a lot of his equipment, I think, for his magical studies. So it was his day job to be a doctor. So that's interesting you say they were all astrologers and then stargazers. I guess that's what, because early astronomy, the interest

was how the movements of these planets and stars affect us down on Earth. Yes. It was permitted for a doctor to use astrology, and that's his way in to making it his living and also use it. He was a remarkable judicial astrologer is what they used to call it in those days. That would be what we would call political or mundane astrology, reading the world, nations, the lifetimes of nations, people. And that's how he structured his prophecies through a lot of astrology. I just want to ask a bit more about his work as a medicine man, because the plague was still sending successive waves across Europe as it had been doing since the 14th century. He was able to treat the plague. Was he using

slightly more effective techniques than had been tried in previous centuries? The great outbreak that happened in his day was in 1546, 1547 of the bubonic plague. And it was very severe after great floods had set lots of animals and people down the rung. And then the pestilence came from that, he thought. And so he was asked by the city fathers of the capital to go there and help them. He got there, all the doctors had fled or died. He set up with a couple of apothecaries in the Hotel de Ville. And for the next 270 days, he fought the plague single-handed. The main thing was that he was very big on hygiene, clean water, good food, no bad smells. He was very much about, you got to stay away, be six feet away from people.

So you got that bit right? Yeah, he did. Everybody had an idea that hygiene was important, that there seems to be rats whenever there's plague, so let's kill the rats. And they didn't know about the fleas. But he had a lozenge that he gave people, a rose lozenge with roses and pine and things. It was more a placebo to help people. But he sequestered people, nobody gathering in groups. It was just like what we do now, knowing about germs. So he does some interesting progressive things with this Aix-en-Provence outbreak of plague. Is he, by this stage, getting quite famous across France, across Western Europe, just for his medical work? Is he celebrated?

Yes. If Nostradamus had never written a word of prophecy, he would have gone down as one of the famous plague battlers of history because he didn't just stay at Aix-en-Provence. He then went to Salon-Provence and did a similar work there and fell in love with the town. But then he was summoned up to Lyon to fight Wuppinghoff. And so, yes, he was getting well known. So alongside his medical work, presumably seen as part of his medical work, is the occult. What did the world of the occult mean to the European elite, the French elite in this period? The term occult means hidden, hidden secrets. So it's been a thread throughout all periods of history.

And the Renaissance was an interesting crossroads where classical knowledge was being regenerated in interest, the classics. That's what the Renaissance means. That's what the Renaissance means. And so all things of the classical Roman or the Hellenistic world, or even the Middle East, was also included. They all come up. And of course, one of the things that happened that was open in the times of Rome and the times of Greece, ancient Greece, were seers.

The Oracle of Delphi was a mainstream thing, so it was not a hidden thing. So it has, in history, a long legacy of resistance to the reactive Christian conversions of things that wants to suppress it. When you suppress something, it only makes it stronger, but it makes it secret. And that fundamentally is what the occult sciences are. They were also pursued, as was alchemy during the Renaissance. But alchemy played it interestingly. They kept people at bay by saying, we're trying to make base metal into gold. And playing on the greed of more unconscious people, royals down to the lower people, the peasants, we're all interested in, oh, well, continue that and keep in touch with us so that we can also have the Midas touch without

the curse. But what it really was, was a mystical group that were taking the base metal of your ego, of your subconscious, of your lower ideas, and to turn it into the gold of enlightenment. So the alchemy was about the soul, not about making gold. Becoming the potential that every soul has. So Nostradamus is dabbling in the occult, but sort of keeping it on the down low. But he publishes these prophecies. What led to the publication of that book? Nostradamus' journey as the most famous prophet all around the world started with this quatrain that actually foresaw in 1554 the jousting accident and the details of what happened to the king, which was the cause for the wars of religion, which were why he was writing these prophecies to prevent it. You're listening to Dan Snow's History. I'm talking about Nostradamus. More coming up.

I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and Popes.

Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit, wherever you get your podcasts. and this book of prophecies ends up on the desk of the queen of france the queen of france was a medici catherine de medici she was deeply involved in occult study. So she advised the royal censors no book could be published in France unless the king's censor approved it and stamped it. So she made sure that if any book on the occult came through that she was the first person to read it. So it's quite possible that the first person to read Le Prophetie, the prophecies of Nostradamus, was her.

And what she saw not too long into it was Quatrain 35 of century one. And she thought that this was about her husband, King Henry II. It starts by saying, The young lion will overcome the old one on the field of combat in single battle. He will pierce his eyes through a golden cage, two wounds made one, then to die a cruel death. The young lion is the Count de Montgomery, Gabriel de Lorge.

He's doing a joust, the final joust. And these jousts were done in a big tournament in the Rue de Tournelle. And it was a big jousting thing with members of the Spanish court and because of the big peace treaty that ended the Italian-French wars. And wives were going to be given by proxy as well, and it was a big thing for them. So he was going to joust in a three-day joust at the end of June 1559. When sundown was coming, he said, no, I want one more joust. They broke some jousting sticks, and he wanted to go at Delorgia one more time. And so he did.

And then Delorgia had a problem. He didn't lower his jousting stick just right. It hit the cuirass of the king, and a big splinter slid up and passed through the gilded cage of his helmet, piercing him right here. The eye survived, but the retina nerve was destroyed, this big splinter. It was like this huge stick of wood. Everybody was screaming.

The queen fainted. He somehow managed to get himself up and get to his bed in the Chateau Tournel and laid there. They had Gabriel Paré was his physician, one of the great physicians of the 16th century. And they tried to save him, but the wounds were two. What happened is the wound one was the one that hit his eye. Wound two was the counter shock that fractured his skull from the back end and he got infection. And so 10 days later, he died in agony. What then

happened that night is a great mob gathered outside of Paris to the Roman Inquisition offices and they were carrying effigies and they were very demanding of the people as they walked out on the stairs in the firelight to see effigies of Nostradamus. And they're saying, we want you to burn this man. But unfortunately for him, he was already back 300 miles or so back in Provence. So he becomes super famous at that point because he seems to have prophesied this death. What alerted Catherine de' Medici even more was that the Medici family back in Florence had a astrologer that they very much respected called Luke Gericus. And he had also written her a message months before of his concern looking at the stars

of Henry II that he might find himself in 1559 in an accident with jousting. He should quit jousting or not joust in the year 1559 in an accident with jousting. He should quit jousting or not joust in the year 1559. So hundreds of miles south in South France, Nostradamus is writing about it. Way off in distant Florence, another great prophet of the era is writing about it. The two never knew each other. So she said to her husband, Henry II, I want to see this Nostradamus, this doctor from Southern France, and have him have an audience with you. And he said, okay, send this Nostradamus fellow. Now, it usually took three months for anybody to ride a horse or a bumpy carriage to get to Paris. She made sure that he had the Royal Liberty stallions to harness his coach. So it only took

one month. When he got there, he went to the Ile de France. He went and prayed for his life in mass in the Notre Dame, named after him. And he then went to his hotel, but he was telling his publishers when he stopped over in Lyon that he was afraid he was going to lose his head. You know, he was very afraid of what would happen. And on the morning that he was going to have his audience at the Palace of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, outside of Paris at that time, he hears a knock on the door and he opens the door of his hotel room and there is the constable of France, Anne de Montmercy, who

was in a lot of his prophecies, his future and his fate during the wars of revolution between Catholics and Protestants. Big strappling man. He was pushing 70, looked like 30 or 40, and he was the man, the commander of all forces of France who escorted him to the palace. Now, he walked by all the people, and they were making the usual things that people sneer at, even to this day, about people who work in this kind of field. And he just was very polite he was always a very

polite man and he went in to the audience he came out with his head on his shoulders and with several hundred crowns crown gold coins which unfortunately wouldn't pay for the only half of the journey so he had to to do astrology while he was there in Paris to make up enough money to go home. But what happened after that, he was invited to the Chateau Bois in the beautiful Bois countryside, which was a summer resort for Catherine de' Medici, and there he drew charts, astrology charts, for all of her children.

And there he drew charts, astrology charts, for all of her children. He liked Margot the best, but she ended up being Lauren Margot in the infamous St. Bartholomew Day Massacre, which he also predicted. Now that we're talking about the prophecies, tell me about some of the other ones he made that you feel have, well, come to pass. Yes. One of the most interesting ones is a prose prophecy, which he wrote and finished, signed off in March of 1558. He saw the French Revolution coming.

He's called it the advent of the commoners, the vulgus, you know, the commoners, the peasants, because he is a royalist, true and true. So he's telling Henry II that there will become a great persecution when this happens, the Christian church. So he was already foreseeing how the churches would be closed down and taken by the French Revolution. And he says they will feel in that time that it's a new era. And so they'll create a calendar. And it would be in the year 1792. Now, he's a little wrong about the churches being ransacked. That happened a little earlier.

But the First Republic created a revolutionary calendar in 1792. So that's one. There are hundreds like this. Now, many, I got to say, to qualify, so many of them are open to interpretation because either they're wrong or they're about things that could have happened but will never happen because he talked about alternative futures. So a lot of them may never happen. Yeah. so a lot of them may never happen. So some of the others that are just wowers are, you know,

his prophecies about the three antichrists. He saw three. No one else in prophecy sees three, but he saw three. One he called Napolanois, which is from Paul Né-Laurent, which is an anagram. And Napolanois is Napolé is Napoleon Roi, King Napoleon. So he wrote, Paul Né Laurent, King Napoleon, will be more of fire than of the blood, to swim in praise, the great one to flee to the confluence. Now that's the pious, Pope Pius VI, who was arrested by the French Revolution. And of course, he had a lot to do with it because he basically conquered Italy for the French Revolution. Because the next line says, the Piuses, the Piuses, the Magpies, these are the two popes, entry will be refused. The depraved Durrance will keep them imprisoned. It was near Durrance that the

first Pope Pius VI died. And the other, of course, was denied his freedom. He was sent to the Fontainebleau Chateau by Emperor Napoleon, and he stayed there for many years as his guest. People like to think he predicted the atomic bombs. Yes. He said there would be a terrible scourge that would hit two harbors a scourge unlike any that had been seen before and it had a invisible plague from within and he was horrified he was absolutely horrified by this and of course it's also some of his future prophecies see that we're not out of danger of that. The great flying fleets that use the dreadful globes, that's a nuclear trigger, fission trigger over the fusion and make the sun and the earth. march up from the south. Well, that's usually where nuclear weapons land. The first that would be from south going north on both American and Russian territory. But it also implies these new

Russian weapons, the Sarmat-2 and others, the Avangard, that can fly at Mach 29 and go around the South Pole so they can evade all the U.S. radars pointed north. Could you just give me the sort of one that seems to predict 9-11? Well, one that defined my life because I started seeing it coming in his prophecies back in 1983. And I wrote a book about it, Nostradamus' Premonitions of 9-11. The two prophecies are at 45 degrees latitude, the sky will will burn fire to approach the great new city instantly a huge scattered flame will leap up when they want verification from the norman what happened is there were no longitudes in uh nostradamus's time and he was into maps it's a

great new city at somewhere around latitude 45. So you got to give or take several, like three or four degrees because there's no longitudes. And that was the problem with latitudes in those days. That's coming centuries later. So I looked to see if there's any new city that literally did not exist at all in his time.

And the only one I found was New York. It wasn't New Amsterdam for a long time. So I thought, well, maybe this is about New York. Now, the other thing is 45 degrees latitude. It's double entendre. He loves layered and layered meanings. If you look at both jet impacts on the North and South Tower, they're at angles of 45 degrees. So it approached the great new city, great explosion in the air. I mean, I literally saw it live as it happened. I was asleep and I was being woken up by my Australian literary agent at the time who was in London calling me. I said, what happened? And he said, it's happened, mate. The terror attacks happening on the two towers. And so I dropped the phone and went out, turned on the TV just to see

the second plane hit the South Tower alive. Well, let's come on to what he might have. I'm sure listeners are curious to know what he thinks about the future, our future, not just his future. So nuclear war, great, good news. What about extraterrestrial colonization and leaving this planet? He talked about sometime around in the year 3797, his last dated prophecy, he said that there'd be a great conflagration where mountains would be destroyed, the oceans would be destroyed, because the sun is devouring the earth. It's becoming a red giant, basically, is what he's saying. And he has it go up to the orbit of earth. The races, the races of man will move towards Aquarius for a period of time. Others will move to Cancer. And so he's saying that we are going

to live on new Earths that are orbiting the stars of Cancer. So it's quite a remarkable prophecy. So the prophecies make him famous. How did he spend the last few years of his life? He was healthy, pale and hearty, right up to the end, except the last few years. And then he kind of very rapidly declined. He had dropsy, which is pulmonary edema. And he knew, okay, he's swelling up, his leg was swelling up. He knew that his time had come. And his leg with gout was so severely swollen that they had to build him a bench so that he could prop up his swollen leg on it when he was in the bed. And by the way, he hadn't slept for months. He never slept much, but he hadn't slept for months.

And he was propped up in his bed, which they moved the bed and the bench up into his beloved secret study. He wanted to leave there. the bed and the bench up into his beloved secret study. He wanted to leave there. And in early July, just as he was saying his goodbyes to Chauvin, he was his secretary. Chauvin was the last person to see him when he said farewell to the rest of the family. Chauvin said basically, when he said, well, I see you tomorrow morning, master. And he said, you will not see me alive. morning master and he said you will not see me alive so they all creeped up there at dawn and they found him had rolled off the bed and his body was between the bed and the bench which brings me to the final prophecy of Nostradamus which said on his return from the embassy this would be in Aix-en-Provence, the king's gift put in place,

so some business he was doing for Charles IX, he will do no more. He will be gone to God. Close relatives, friends, brothers by blood found him completely dead near the bed and the bench. dead near the bed and the bench now maybe when he felt it coming he rolled you know to fulfill his prophecy but the other prophecy said and this has actually been rediscovered this prophecy it is authentic he said about the world he was leaving he said a sad state will be all states and sects so he's talking about the wars of religion. Between brothers and sisters, enmity, discord, civil war. He's talking about treasures and free, more apparent, the tests. It's kind of a cryptic line.

It's a hard one to figure out what he's trying to say. The summer arid, this line to expire. I mean, after his son Cesar and his uncles died, the bloodline ended in the early part of the following century and might only have survived with his female bloodline into the 20th century. As he died, was he more remembered for his prophecies as an author or for his medical work? What was his reputation? What was his legacy when he died? Well, he's definitely said one of his prophecies that even his fiercest skeptics can't deny. He said, I shall become far more famous after my death than I ever was while alive.

And certainly it eclipses anything else that we know about him is his prophecies. Because in a way, the device that he used keeps people engaged. That kind of cryptic way, people want to decode it, people want to study it. So all the generations up to the present, up to me, are fascinated by this man and his prophecies. So by that literary device that he used, he kept people engaged, people that hate him, people that love him, which are passionate on both sides. I love it. Thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Thanks for having me.