Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Nostradamus (Encore)

Starting point is 00:00:00 The following is an encore presentation of Everything Everywhere Daily. In 1555, a French physician and astrologer named Michelle de Nostradam published a book of poems titled Le Prophecy. Ever since, people have been trying to interpret world events through his writings. Was Nostradamus a prophet? Was he a fraud? Or are people just reading way too much into a bunch of vague random statements? Learn more about Nostradamus and how his writings have been interpreted on this episode of

Starting point is 00:00:31 Everything Everywhere Daily. What if your perceptions about the past were wrong? ThruLine is a podcast that takes you back in time to uncover the parts of the story that may have gone unnoticed. It effectively turned day into night. And how it shaped the world now. Time travel with us every week on the ThruLine podcast from NPR. The man we know as Nostradamus is just the Latinized name for Michelle de Nostradam. He was born in 1503 in Provence, France, to a family which had converted from Judaism to Catholicism a generation earlier.

Starting point is 00:01:25 The family name was changed from Gassonet to Nostradam, which means Our Lady, in what was believed to be an attempt to avoid the Inquisition. His father was a grain dealer, and his family was rather well off. He was academically inclined. He was educated as well as anyone probably could be in the 16th century, having been instructed in mathematics, classical Greek and Latin, as well as astrology. He attended the University of Avignon for a year, but had to leave after an outbreak of the plague closed the school. He then attended the University of Montpellier before being expelled when it was found out he was making money as an apothecary. In 1531, he was married and had two children. However, both his children and his wife were killed in a plague outbreak in 1534. He spent several years

Starting point is 00:02:09 in Provence fighting the plague and developed techniques that would seem far more modern than what was being done by most physicians at the time. For starters, he didn't bleed his patients, and he encouraged the removal of corpses from city streets. He also developed a treatment he called a rose pill, which was basically a lozenge with vitamin C. He remarried in 1547. His second wife was a wealthy widow by the name of Anne Ponsard, and together they had six children. Up until this point in his life, there was nothing about him that would have been worth doing a podcast episode about. By this time, he had developed a fascination with the occult, however. And in 1550, he wrote and published an almanac. The book was a surprising success. His almanacs contained astrological information for the upcoming

Starting point is 00:02:55 year, as well as prophecies which he made. The success of his almanac resulted in it being an annual publication. He also published an annual calendar, which had January 1st as the start of the year. And I'll refer you to my episode on why January 1st is the start of the year, because many people back then still celebrated the new year in March. His almanacs developed him a following and resulted in people asking him for personal astrology readings. Soon after the publication of his almanacs, he began to work on the thing that would make him a household name. It was a series of poems, all written in the form of quatrains. And a quatrain is simply a poem that has four lines. The quatrains were cryptically written prophecies. The annual prophecies in his almanac were always

Starting point is 00:03:40 his most popular feature, so he figured he might as well go all in. The quatrains would often use wordplay and would mix words from other languages. The first collection of 353 quatrains was published in 1555 under the title Le Prophecy. It was around this time that he captured the attention of one Catherine D'Medici, of the Florence D' Medici family, which was one of the wealthiest and most powerful families in Renaissance Europe. However, most people in France at the time knew her by a different name, the Queen of France, wife to King of France, Henry II. She took a liking to Nostradamus due to prediction he made in his almanac about the royal court. She brought him up to Paris, where he eventually got a position at court as the physician to her son, who would be King Charles

Starting point is 00:04:25 the 9th of France. He eventually succumbed to gout from which he suffered for years, and he passed away in 1566 at the age of 63. The interest in Nostradamus, however, isn't in his biography. It's in his prophecies. He published another edition of Le Prophecy in 1558, which had more quatrains, and then a final version was published in 168 after his death. In total, he wrote 1,000 quatrains. The quatrains were placed in groups of 100 called centuries. Of the 1,000 quattrains he wrote, 942 have survived. 58 quattrains from the century number seven have been lost. So, let's get to the juicy bits. What's the deal with these prophecies and just how accurate were they? Most of the quatrains were not at all original and were taken from other sources. They weren't

Starting point is 00:05:18 necessarily plagiarized word for word, but many of the general themes and stories came from other texts. Many of his sources came from classical literature. He took bits from the stories of Romans such as Nero or Sulla, and he lifted portions from texts of Livy, Soutonius, and Plutarch. In the mid-century, most people had never read these authors and would have had no clue that they came from there. Likewise, he also may have plagiarized some astrologers who were his contemporaries. And he might have also gotten some of his prophecies

Starting point is 00:05:46 from the Mirabalus Liber, which was a book of prophecies from early Christian sources in the Middle East. The book was published in Europe in 1522, but only published in Latin. So he could have read it, but most people couldn't. Some have suggested he practiced bibliomancy, which is where you randomly open a book and work from whatever you happen to find on the page.

Starting point is 00:06:07 Noosterdamas' use of many of these ancient sources didn't come to light until almost 100 years after his death. It should also be noted that the additions of Le Prophecy were all different from each other. Given the state of printing at the time, there were differences in how the words were laid out on the page and how they were spelled. The differences in spelling causes huge problems

Starting point is 00:06:27 for people who try to interpret the quatrains and find meaning where there is often a single character difference between some words. Most of the quatrains deal with disasters, wars, or other calamities. However, they do so in a very vague and general sense. Over time, most Nostradamus enthusiasts have been able to find support for almost every major event that had ever happened. They found quatrains which they claim predicted the rise of Hitler, the French Revolution, landing on the moon, the September 11th attacks, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. In fact, some quatrains have been interpreted to have prophesized multiple different events.

Starting point is 00:07:03 Given how vaguely they're worded, this is not surprising. Yet, some people claim that his prophecies have been uncannily accurate, at least some of them. Perhaps the most famous quatrain is where he supposedly names Hitler by name. There are almost 4,000 lines of quatrain, so I'm not going to go through most of them. But I will read the passage with the supposed Hitler prediction. It comes from Century 2, Quatrain 24. Quote, Beast ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers.

Starting point is 00:07:32 The greater part of the battlefield will be against Hister. Into a cage of iron will the great one be drawn when the child of Germany observes nothing. End quote. What people go nuts about with this quatrain is the word Hister, because it's one letter away from the word Hitler. Well, what most people don't realize is that Hister is one of the Latin names for the Danube River. We know that Nostradamus used quite a bit of Latin, so the use of a Latin term shouldn't be surprising.

Starting point is 00:08:03 The big thing is that beyond the close spelling of one word to Hitler, the rest of the quatrain really doesn't mean much of anything. The word Germany's in there, which I suppose really cements the association in the mind of some people, but there isn't a whole lot else. When you move beyond the individual words, it doesn't make much sense. Beasts ferocious with hunger will cross the rivers. Okay, what does that mean? Some think that this is referring to the United States, having to cross the oceans to fight in World War II. If Hister is referring to the Danube, a place,

Starting point is 00:08:38 then the inclusion of the word river makes more sense. In fact, the entire meaning of the quatrain is completely different. In fact, there are several other mentions of Hister in the quatrains, most of which are ignored by Nostradamus fans because they clearly aren't talking about a person, let alone Hitler. And this is precisely the problem. All of the interpretations of Nostradamus are backward-looking. They're engaging in what some have called retroactive clairvoyance. There hasn't been a single forward-looking prediction that has been proven correct based on Nostradamus.

Starting point is 00:09:12 Most of the popularity of Nostradamus has come since the end of the Second World War, when translations became widely available. Most of the translations of lay prophecy are translations that are considered poor at best, and none of the English translations were based on the original 16th century books. As with English, 16th century French is very different than it is today, and most of the translations lack the subtlety which would be necessary to do a translation properly. And this is on top of the problems of spelling found in the original printed volumes. Some of you might be thinking that you've read uncanny predictions that Nostradamus made about 9-11 or about COVID.

Starting point is 00:09:51 Well, those quatrains that were making the rounds on Facebook, were all fake. They aren't real quatrains and sort of hammers home the point about how vague his writing was. Some of you might also remember a 1981 movie titled The Man Who Saw Tomorrow, which was narrated by Orson Wells. I remember watching it at the time and being fascinated by the predictions that Nostradamus made. However, when you take a step back and actually look at what Nostradamus actually wrote, it doesn't really hold water. Moreover, the now 40-year-old predictions of what would come in the future from the movie have not held up at all. The idea of a prophet who predicted the future certainly sounds compelling. However, when you

Starting point is 00:10:30 scratch the surface, the prophecies of Nostradamus aren't much more than ambiguous plagiarism. It turns out, if you write a thousand vague prophecies, over 500 years, a few of them are bound to bear a vague resemblance to actual events. The executive producer of Everything Everywhere Daily is Charles Daniel. The associate producers are Thor Thompson and Peter Bennett. I just want to thank everyone, including the show's producers, who support the show over on Patreon. If you'd like to support the show, just head over to patreon.com, which is currently the only place where you can get show merchandise. Also, if you want to talk to other listeners about the show, head over to our

Starting point is 00:11:09 Facebook group or Discord server, both of which have links in the show notes.

Everything Everywhere Daily: History, Science, Geography & More - Nostradamus (Encore)

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