by J H Brennan
On February 21, 1431, Joan of Arc was taken before her judges and promptly proved as defiant as she had ever been with her military commanders. She demanded to attend Mass,9 insisted she was morally free to attempt an escape, and refused to divulge any details of her conversations with the Dauphins.10 One consequence of her stubbornness was that she was chained to a wooden block and watched day and night by guards assigned to her cell. She faced a total of seventy charges, including those of prophecy, disobeying commands of the church, endorsing her letters with divine names, and wearing male clothing. After a staunch defense, the original seventy charges were reduced to twelve, which were then forwarded for consideration to various eminent theologians in Rouen and Paris.
While the deliberations were in progress, Joan fell ill and clearly thought she was dying. (She asked to confess, to receive Holy Communion, and to be buried in consecrated ground.) Her captors reacted by threatening her with torture if she continued to evade the question of obedience to the Church, but she remained so stubborn that they eventually voted 10 to 3 that torture would be useless. On May 23, she was finally informed that if she persisted in her heresies, she would be turned over to the secular authorities—the ecclesiastical equivalent of a death sentence. The following day, she was taken to the graveyard at the church of Saint-Ouen for the sentence to be formalized. She asked leave to appeal to the pope, but her request was ignored. As her judges began to read the document that would transfer her to secular power, she recanted and declared she would do everything the Church required of her. She then signed an official form of abjuration and was formally condemned to life imprisonment. A few days later, Joan again put on men’s clothes, then told her captors that the voices of Saints Catherine and Margaret had censured her for the treason of her abjuration. On May 29, her judges agreed unanimously to hand her over to civil authority. The following morning, she was taken to the Place du Vieux-Marché and burned at the stake. Her last request was for a crucifix to be held high so she could see it as she burned.
Her beliefs were eventually vindicated. On his entry into Rouen in 1450, Charles VII belatedly ordered an inquiry into the trial. Two years later the cardinal legate Guillaume d’Estouteville made a second, more thorough, investigation. In 1455, Pope Calixtus III instituted proceedings that revoked her sentence. Joan was canonized by Pope Benedict XV on May 16, 1920. Spirit guidance had made her a saint, and its influence reverberated down the corridors of time.
Guided by her spirit voices, Joan of Arc chose to be burned alive rather than recant their teaching.
9. THE EVOCATIONS OF NOSTRADAMUS
WITH THE ADVENT OF THE RENAISSANCE, SPIRIT INFLUENCE BECAME increasingly overt—although the Inquisition remained brutally active—and the numbers of grimoires in circulation actually increased under the stimulus of Renaissance Neoplatonism. Scholarly investigation of the occult arts and spirit evocation became widespread. This spirit renaissance is felt to the present day, due to the activities of a man who arguably became the world’s second most famous prophet.
Michel de Nostradame was born at St. Remy in France on December 14, 1503, at the stroke of midnight. He was the elder of two brothers and studied mathematics, Greek, Latin, Hebrew, and the humanities at the feet of his maternal grandfather, Jean de St. Remy. He was also taught how to use an astrolabe, an instrument used by astronomers and astrologers for predicting planetary positions, and may have picked up some herbal lore through watching his grandfather—a physician—compounding potions and ointments. When Jean de St. Remy died, the boy moved back to live with his parents at St. Remy-en-Crau and was subsequently sent to the university at Avignon. To gain entrance, he had to pass examinations in grammar, rhetoric, and philosophy. He did so well that his examiners made him a teacher. His father later arranged his transfer to Montpelier Medical School where he remained for three years.
At the time, medical school examinations were conducted by dispute. For his finals, Michel sat from 8:00 a.m. to noon, arguing points of physics and logic with his professors so successfully that he was awarded the scarlet robe of a scholar. But to achieve the status of physician, he had to teach under supervision for three months and then survive a further, more rigorous, examination by dispute. For the ordeal, he presented himself in turn to four different professors, each of whom questioned him about the treatment and cure of a specific illness. This was followed, just over a week later, by a visit to the chancellor, who stuck a pin at random into a huge medical text in order to select the next disease for which the student was to prescribe. When he survived these tests, an aphorism of Hippocrates was selected—again at random—and he was required to prepare a thesis on it for delivery within twenty-four hours. His professors formally disputed his thesis for four hours in the Chapel of St. Michel. A week later, Nostradamus received his license to practice as a physician. Shortly afterward, bubonic plague swept through his native France.
Michel, now known by the Latin version of his name, Nostradamus, began to establish a medical reputation in his twenties when he devised treatments for plague that proved remarkably effective. By the time he was fifty, his name was known throughout Europe. In 1554, there was an outbreak of plague in Marseilles and Nostradamus was called in. Within days he was feted throughout the city as successful cure followed successful cure. The plague, known as the Blue Sickness or Black Death, hit Aix-en-Provence. Months into the outbreak, its parliament had closed down and courts and churches ceased to function. More than half its citizens fled and weeds began to grow in the streets. The city gates were shut and remained closed for a year in an attempt to isolate the disease. After a deputation begged Nostradamus for his help, he took up residence in the stricken city and soon the outbreak began to abate. Grateful authorities loaded him with gifts and voted him a permanent pension. The plague struck at Salon and again Nostradamus was called in. A rival doctor accused him of magical practice. The authorities ignored him and when the outbreak died down, Nostradamus was given more gifts.
By now in middle age, he had become a wealthy man. His first wife was dead for more than ten years and he had fallen in love with another woman, the widow Anne Ponsart Beaulme (née Gemelle). With a strong desire to marry again and settle down to a less hectic lifestyle, he proposed to Madame Beaulme and she accepted. But the less hectic lifestyle proved elusive. He continued his practice of medicine but soon added on a new and very different career, as a publisher. What he published (and wrote) was an almanac.
The first known almanac appeared in Europe in 1457 and set the style for those that followed. They were typically based around an annual calendar of events and usually contained seasonal tips for farmers. But much of their content was devoted to weather forecasting and other astrological predictions. Nostradamus embarked on his own venture cautiously, publishing a trial edition designed to gauge public reaction. He found himself with an immediate success on his hands, largely due to the predictive four-line poems he had assigned to each month of the year.
The Black Plague, depicted here as a rampaging demon, first ushered the prophet Nostradamus into public prominence when his remedies proved effective against the disease.
Emboldened by his success, Nostradamus turned the almanac into an annual. His work on the publication seems to have given him a taste for prophecy, for he began to write a book called Les Propheties containing Centuries and Presages devoted to his predictions for a more distant future. Like the poems in his almanac, each presage was written as a quatrain.
The term Centuries refers not to a time period, but rather to a grouping of one hundred prophecies. By his death in 1566, he had written ten Centuries, or just short of a thousand prophecies (since one of the Centuries fell short of the requisite one hundred). His secretary at the time, Jean-Aymes de Chavigny, claims he was afraid of public reaction and kept his prophecies to himself for a long time before publishing them. However, the Lyons printer Macé Bonhomme eventually brought out a first edition in 1555. It contained three Centuries and fifty-three qua
trains of a fourth.
The book was an instant success, despite its many obscurities. It was written in a mixture of French, Greek, Latin, and Italian, crammed with anagrams, initials, cryptic terms, and mysterious abbreviations. With few exceptions, the predictions were undated. Nonetheless, the work quickly found its way into influential circles. The French queen, Catherine de Medici, certainly had a copy. The book was issued toward the end of 1555. In the early months of 1556, Catherine wrote to the governor of Provence demanding that Nostradamus be sent to the Royal Court. By the time he received the summons, it was summer. He set out on July 14, 1556, for the court’s summer seat at St. Germain-en-Laye. There Nostradamus had a brief meeting with the king (Henri II) before being closeted for a longer period with Queen Catherine. What happened at these meetings is not known, but Nostradamus obviously impressed the royal couple since he was given a gift of 130 écus.
Nostradamus’s warm reception may have had something to do with an earlier prediction made by the Italian astrologer Luc Gauric. Gauric had forecast Henri’s accession to the throne, a sensational duel in the early part of his reign, and the probability that Henri would lose his life in a similar event. By the time Nostradamus was summoned to court, the first two parts of this prediction had already come true. Henri was now king, and a sensational duel had indeed marked the early part of his reign. It took place between two nobles, Guy Chabot Jarnac and François Vivonne la Châtaigneraie, at St. Germain-en-Laye on June 16, 1547. King Henri attended and watched Châtaigneraie die. A phlegmatic Henri recalled the remainder of the prediction and remarked, “I care not if my death be in that manner more than any other. I would even prefer it, to die by the hand of whomsoever he might be, so long as he be brave and valiant and that I keep my honor.” Catherine took the whole thing a lot more seriously. She called on Gauric to provide more details, and Gauric cast a horoscope that advised the king to avoid all single combat, particularly during his forty-first year, since he would be particularly susceptible to a head wound that would certainly blind him and might even cost him his life.
With this ominous prediction hanging over her husband, Catherine discovered that Nostradamus had, in his very first Century, written the quatrain:
Le lion jeune le vieux surmontera
En champ bellique par singulier duelle
Dans cage d’or les yeux lui drevera
Deux classes une, puis mouris, mort cruelle.
(The young lion will overcome the old one,
On the field of battle, by means of single combat
In a cage of gold his eyes will be pierced.
A double wound, a cruel death.)1
King Henri’s emblem was the lion, and it occurred to the queen that Nostradamus was also predicting the king’s death in a duel. Others came to a similar conclusion. At one point, the quatrain was so widely discussed at the French Court that the English ambassador alerted Queen Elizabeth I. When, three years later, Henri was indeed killed in single combat during a jousting accident that cost him the sight of one eye before he finally succumbed, Nostradamus’s reputation as a prophet was firmly established. No one had the slightest doubt that this was the event he had foretold. As news spread, an angry crowd stormed through the Paris streets to burn him in effigy and demand he be turned over to the Inquisition on charges of sorcery. Only Queen Catherine’s intervention saved him.
Despite the immediate reaction, Nostradamus’s influence spread. All sorts of stories began to circulate about his prowess as a seer. One recounted how a servant of the wealthy Beauveau family lost a valuable hound that had been left in his care and called on Nostradamus to help him find it. Nostradamus was in his study, determined not to be disturbed, but after a time the noise of the man’s knocking got too much for him. He opened an upstairs window and, without waiting to find out what the problem was, shouted down, “You’re making a lot of noise over a lost dog—look on the Orleans Road: you’ll find it there on a leash.” According to the story, the servant subsequently found the dog where Nostradamus had predicted he would.
Nostradamus’s reputation provoked challenges. On one occasion he was a guest at Fains Castle in Lorraine when his host, the Seigneur de Florinville, defied him to predict the fate of two pigs in the farmyard. Nostradamus told him the black pig would be eaten by the seigneur, while the white one would be eaten by a wolf. According to the story that circulated afterward, the seigneur issued secret instructions to his cook that the white pig should be slaughtered and served to his guests that night at dinner. When the pork was carried in, de Florinville remarked that no wolf was likely to get the white pig now since they were about to eat it, but Nostradamus insisted they were actually about to eat the black pig. His host then summoned the cook and invited him to prove Nostradamus wrong. But the embarrassed cook explained that while he had started to roast the white pig as instructed, a pet wolf cub belonging to one of the castle guards had stolen the meat off the spit. Not wanting to disappoint his lordship’s guests, the cook then killed the black pig, which the guests were now about to eat.
Another story about Nostradamus came closer to genuine prophecy. While in Italy, he was on the road near Ancona when he met a group of Franciscans. To the astonishment of the monks he threw himself at the feet of one of them—a young friar named Felice Peretti—and addressed him as “Your Holiness,” a term reserved for the pope. In 1585, less than twenty years after Nostradamus’s death, Peretti became Pope Sextus V.
While it is possible, perhaps even likely, that these stories are apocryphal, there is no doubt at all about his influence. Both his book and the ongoing prognostications in his almanac—a total of more than six thousand predictions—spread his fame throughout France and led to requests for horoscopes and psychic consultations from members of the nobility and various influential people inside the country and beyond. After his death in 1566, his fame and influence actually increased. His prophecies remain in print to this day and have been translated into every major language of the world. During World War II, Nostradamus’s prophecies (some faked, all skewed in their interpretation) became part of the Allied propaganda effort to diminish Nazi morale. Following the 9/11 attack on New York’s Twin Towers, Nostradamus predictions of the event—many highly suspect—flooded the Internet.
Despite an interest that has endured for centuries, very few people are aware of the source of Nostradamus’s prophecies. When the question arises at all, most will readily accept the prophet’s own claim that he had used only “judicial astrology”—a perfectly respectable art in his day—to produce them. But there is clear evidence that Nostradamus was lying when he made this claim. He was not even a particularly good astrologer: the surviving charts he drew up contain numerous errors.2 The reason for his deception seems to have been fear of the Inquisition. Scholarly detective work has shown that the predictions were dictated to him by a spirit—and one that he evoked by means of magical ritual.
The first clue emerges in a document known as the Epistle to César, a public letter to his son, no more than a few weeks old at the time, which appeared as the preface to the first edition of his Centuries. Here Nostradamus wrote:
And further, my son, I implore you not to attempt to employ your understanding in such reveries and vanities which wither the body and bring the soul to perdition, troubling the feeble sense: even the vanity of that most execrable magic, denounced already by the Sacred Scriptures and by the Divine Canons of the church—from which judgment is excepted judicial astrology, by means of which, and the divine inspiration and revelation, by continual calculations we have reduced our prophecies to writing. And, not withstanding that this occult philosophy was not reproved by the church I have not wished to divulge their wild persuasions, although many volumes which have been hidden for centuries have come before my eyes. But dreading what might happen in the future, having read them, I presented them to Vulcan, and as the fire began to devour them the flame, licking the air, shot forth an unaccustomed brightness, clearer than natural flame
, like a flash from an explosive powder, casting a strange illumination over the house, as if it had been in sudden conflagration so that none might come to be abused by searching for the perfect transmutation, lunar our solar, or for incorruptible metals hidden under earth or sea, I reduced them to ashes.3
