The Prophecies

by Nostradamus

  In this quatrain as in others, Nostradamus left no domain untouched. He wrote about princely marriages, losses of property, and religious councils. This was a world in which all lives, eminent as well as base, were interconnected, and all human activities had an impact on one another. Nostradamus piled it on, but he also created connections between all realms, from the highest political reaches to the ordinary concerns of everyday life. His enumerations and repetitions express the abundance of his world as well as the dread of emptiness—what contemporaries called horror vacui. Nostradamus did not invent a literary form—other writers penned prose prognostications or quatrains—but he stretched the boundaries of existing ones and filled them with words that were at once precise and evanescent. His taut, bulging concentrates of the mundane and the arcane are filled with infinite possibilities and a forcefulness that belongs to Nostradamus alone.

  In one respect, we may read the Prophecies as exactly what their title indicates: perspectives on the future. Certainly many readers were awed by his apparent predictive powers, even if Nostradamus was less precise here than in his almanacs. The book mentions only nine dates, from 1588 until 3797, which some have linked to the end of the world and others to the end of a world. And yet, nothing was straightforward. The author explained that he could distinguish neither the present from the past nor the past from the future. The book contains a cyclical notion of time, in which past figures and political states return at set intervals, with cycles of growth, renewal, and decline. There is also a biblical conception of time, with its progressive unveiling of a hidden message and the ineluctability of the Apocalypse. Finally, there is the Roman idea of Fortuna, with unpredictable yet formidable disturbances. Nostradamus spoke in one of his almanacs of “transmutations of time,” as if time had a dynamic energy of its own and could alter, perfect, and destroy. While time moves in some quatrains, there is no flow, no steady progression, no sense that the words are confined to any single era. Nostradamus sometimes uses the present tense and sometimes no verb at all, giving his verses the feeling variously of predictions, comments on current affairs, and considerations on human passions and interactions. They tell universal stories about human choices, conflicts, emotions, and consequences—the present, future, and eternal stuff of life.

  In terms of geography, too, the book straddles boundaries. Editions of the Prophecies often included the following subtitle: Represents Part of What Is Now Happening in France, in England, in Spain, and in Other Parts of the World. The innumerable place-names contained within the book are stopovers in a far-flung exploration that begins in France and ranges from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, via eastern Europe and Italy and the Ottoman Empire. The Prophecies are at once a screen on which realms distant in place or time are projected and a mirror on which the European maelstrom of the time is reflected. Many of Nostradamus’s contemporaries recognized in the pages of the Prophecies depictions of the era’s hardships and the major shifts that altered the way they saw the world. The Copernican revolution was removing humanity from the center of the universe while providing a rational purchase on the cosmos. The discovery of the Americas and its pagan inhabitants emboldened new conquests while shifting the borders of the known world and making some people wonder whether Christ had truly spread the good word to all. The printing press broadened the intellectual landscape and spread ideas while undermining dominant institutions. The Protestant Reformation’s assault on Catholicism, finally, fed yearnings for true spirituality and social equality while outlining strikingly different ways of being a good Christian.

  Everything was in flux, and so was Nostradamus. The man and the words that hovered between realms captured this founding moment of Western modernity in its full tension, with its shifting fault lines and the conflicting forces that propelled the Renaissance in chaotic and often disconcerting ways. Nostradamus seemed to have special knowledge about the emotions of sovereigns and the hidden forces that governed people’s lives. There were other such cornucopian texts, but the Prophecies had a scope, a sharpness, a plasticity, and an urgency of their own. The cryptic book distilled sinister moods and anxieties into fragmented yet meaningful stories, as if their author, the man who circulated across realms without fully belonging to any one of them, had grasped each one from the inside and from the outside. The references to strange figures, plots, and collusions unveiled the workings of this chaotic world. The hundreds of quatrains named the era’s confusion, made it visible and tangible, and expressed what readers sensed but could not—or dared not—put into words. Opacity and darkness could prove meaningful for people who contemplated the present and future with bewilderment or trepidation—especially with the verses anchored in regular, codified series of quatrains, in which surprises and reversals take the same form and the same words recur again and again. Everything holds together in the Prophecies. And, in Nostradamus’s view, things happen for a reason.

  Some writers responded to formidable calamities by accepting the limitations of language, its inability to express what was unspeakable. They wrote about what they could not express, or told readers that the meaning of such catastrophes was that there was no meaning. The Prophecies, in contrast, spoke about catastrophes head-on, endowed them with dramatic form, and placed them in continuums that exuded mysterious power. His words resonated during the French Wars of Religion (1562–98) and continued doing so afterward—when the French monarchy faced a political rebellion around 1650 (the Fronde), in the midst of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution, in the wake of the fire of London in 1666, during the French Revolution, and then throughout most modern wars. (The appendix delves into Nostradamus’s presence during such collective crises.)

  The French poet Guillaume Apollinaire once referred to these wars and other collective crises as “Martian periods”—in which people feel they are living through an era of anxiety, with time growing slower and denser, obsessional concern with future developments, the norms that regulate what is acceptable and what is not changing almost overnight, events seeming to unfold outside one’s sway, and outlets for action hovering out of reach. Apollinaire wrote about this in 1915, from the trenches of World War I; earlier that year, he had lauded Nostradamus as a great poet. Why do people consult the Prophecies during such periods? To name and make sense of cataclysms and forces that seem distant. To feel the tremors of events that, however violent and irrepressible, acquire a majestic, world-historical grandeur. And to uncover horrendous tidings about other people, countries, or even eras and then return to their own hardships with greater fortitude. Immediate and yet distant, Nostradamus’s vast predictions make it possible to reframe distressing circumstances and substitute a specific, imminent fear for floating anxieties. Whereas anxiety tends to draw people apart, fear pulls them together. Nostradamus’s evocative words can thus make fear palatable as a controlled, communal feeling that displaces the solitary terror of the unknown. The book’s presence in the West has changed over the centuries, and so have the ways in which people from different countries and backgrounds have perceived and made sense of the quatrains. But some things have endured.

  By World War I, Nostradamus’s original almanacs and prognostications had vanished, but his Prophecies continued to circulate across western Europe. There have been hundreds of editions since his death. Unlike most classics, which rarely change once they are in print, this book was at once fixed and unstable. The quatrains and prefaces remained, but competing publishers added subtitles, biographical sketches, and guides to his anagrams and metaphors. Some publishers even inserted new predictions (including fifty-eight six-line poems, the sixains, in 1605). If there is a parallel, however distant, it is the Bible, but there is a major difference, too. No institution or collective group embraced the singular Prophecies, and this left it free from norms and controls. Open and open-ended in all senses of the words, the Prophecies could thus lure all kinds of people, from different backgrounds and religions. Besides publishers, there have been compilers, translato
rs, forgers, and innumerable interpreters. These individuals have tended to reside or end up on the fringes of society, within a Nostradamian underworld, as it were. They have conversed and competed with one another, reframed the Prophecies, and sometimes broken the book down into its component parts. But they have also kept Nostradamus visible and vibrant within the mainstream.

  This autonomy has freed the Prophecies from gatekeepers. No one has decreed who could parse these predictions and how. This is not the kind of book that one needs to read silently, or in one go. One may start anywhere, stop and resume at any time, and engage with it as one sees fit. Over the centuries, its readers have ranged from monarchs to prelates, lawyers to military officers, social workers to retirees. Some have relished the challenge of decoding arcane predictions, gaining confidence in their interpretative powers and making their own world legible. Others have beheld with awe mesmerizing words and forces that they could not understand but that still proved meaningful. Others have approached the quatrains as a political template, fodder for whatever ideological or religious cause they embraced, or a source of delight and entertainment. And still others have delved with a mix of feelings into a supernatural realm that hovers precariously between prophecy and superstition. Curiosity and ambivalence could overlap with sentiments of shame that people did not always acknowledge to themselves. These men and women have both read the words of Nostradamus and done things with them, whether annotating its margins, sharing quatrains and debating their meaning, or even imitating them for themselves or others. Many have also moved from one way of apprehending Nostradamus to another. Words that speak to such distinct yearnings, that lend themselves to so many relationships between words and their readers—without external constraints or policing—are bound to appeal across social, cultural, and religious divides.

  The Prophecies are too mystifying, however, to provide easy or rapid access. One nineteenth-century commentator—his name was Pierre Chaillot—asked his readers whether they had “the noble courage to venture into the labyrinth of the Centuries.” Courage might help, though other readers presumably yearn for something more tangible, such as a road map. There are plenty to be found. A cottage industry of interpreters has long come into being, fully convinced that Nostradamus had seen or said something of importance but expressed it in coded language. By using the right method, it is possible to untangle this thicket of words and provide clarity of meaning. It is all about the key. Chaillot’s resided in what he called the “torch of erudition.” Drawing from his knowledge of Latin and mythology, he linked quatrains to past events and clarified their grammatical constructions, their classical references, and the true meaning of their anagrams. He and others have suggested, for instance, that the great “Chyren” designates King Henri or Henry (Henryc in Provençal), “Rapis” Paris, and “Car.” or “Carcas.,” the French town of Carcassonne. The “lion” is a warchief; the “Castulon monarque” is Emperor Charles V. “Snakes” stands for heretics, “hell” for the Châtelet prison, and “whites” and “reds” for French magistrates who wore robes of those colors. Other interpreters have insisted that, below the surface of the quatrains, there lies another, deeper layer of meaning. Take quatrain 1.53:

  Alas one shall see a great nation bleed

  And the holy law & all of Christendom

  Reduced to utter ruin by other creeds,

  Each time a new gold, silver mine is found.

  According to one François Buget in 1862, the references to gold (d’or) and silver (d’argent) in the last verse pointed to the d’Orléans family, New Orleans, and the marquis d’Argenson, president of the Council of Finances. Having established this, Buget considered numbers. He added 153, 1555 (the Prophecies’ date of publication), and 5 and 3 to arrive at a total of 1716. This was the year in which the Scottish economist John Law—recently appointed Controller General of Finances by the French regent Philippe d’Orléans—had set up the Banque Générale in Paris. Shortly thereafter, Law issued handwritten notes for the development of Louisiana—a scheme that led to a bubble that burst in 1720. The marquis d’Argenson resigned after the collapse. Nostradamus, Buget concluded, had seen it all two centuries earlier.

  Readers of the present edition will decide for themselves what to make of this and other keys, and whether Nostradamus looked to the past or commented on the present or projected himself into the future. Perhaps he did all three. Regardless, the arcane Prophecies remain open to all readings and projections. This has been a central reason for its enduring appeal over the centuries.

  Success has not, however, endowed the book with legitimacy and cultural worth. The elusive author and his predictions seemed suspect and came under attack from the start. They were too powerful and popular, too seductive and dangerous. Many people recoiled before the prognosticator who was everywhere and nowhere, before verses that captured the contradictions of the modern West, and before predictions that said so much and yet could not be pinned down.

  In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, detractors went after the Prophecies and the man himself—a poor astrologer, a false prophet, an impostor, a satanic envoy, or a charlatan. By the eighteenth century, they targeted credulous, superstitious followers who trusted their passions rather than reason. A century later, they denounced the interpreters and publishers who used Nostradamus to attack science, spread magical thinking, and become celebrities in their own right within a consumerist society. By the twentieth century, finally, Nostradamus captured the fear and panic that, like a disease, fed conspiracy theories and predictions of world’s end while whittling away at modern civilization from the inside. For close to a half millennium, then, the all-encompassing Nostradamus has also proven appealing as a way of denouncing threats linked to change and modernity, distancing oneself from offensive yet seductive forces, and reaffirming norms. In this respect, too, the Prophecies reside at the core of the modern West.

  Which brings us back to the Modern Library’s 1942 edition. It is easy to include Oracles of Nostradamus in a story in which the media and propaganda outfits exploit and distort the quatrains, play up the darker overtones, dismiss their wondrous or moral dimensions, and oftentimes leave the verses themselves behind. All that remains, from this vantage point, are unfathomable pronouncements that frighten people into accepting irrational forces instead of contemplating the injustice of the world. The elusive quatrains thus accrue power during an era that is governed by fear, an era that searches in vain for trustworthy authorities, an era that pledges allegiance to recognized facts while lacking the time or desire to ascertain them.

  And yet, to immerse oneself in the dense, unsettling Prophecies is also to witness the immensity of time and history in the making. The verses continue to dramatize the haphazard and sometimes catastrophic violence of our world and the pain, the afflictions, the sorrow that ensue—all of them marks of the human condition. In so doing, they remind us of our frailty, allow us to express oft-concealed vulnerabilities, and put us in touch with emotions that, from resentment to desolation to empathy, we cannot always pinpoint. As in the Renaissance, they provide deeper knowledge and reprieve from too much information. We can still delve into horror while keeping it at a remove; we can still participate in our own fate while securing protection and a sense of community. At once ephemeral and covered with the dust of ancient origins, Nostradamus’s cascade of words draws us into past worlds, the worlds in which we must live and those that we anticipate, and perhaps deeper within our internal world as well.

  This is enough to meet some definitions of a classic. Unless of course it is the opposite, and the Prophecies deserve our attention as an anticlassic, a work that has endured by charting a course of its own. After all, the writers who have found the quatrains most enthralling belong to avant-gardes that, by definition, distrust canons and academies and the very idea of a classic. In 1916, the Romanian artist Marcel Janco came across the Prophecies on the shelves of a Zurich bookstore. Janco, a founder of the Dada movement, was so enth
used that he purchased the book and promptly read selections during one of the group’s soirées at the Cabaret Voltaire. His fellow poets and artists, he later related, were astounded by this suggestive, mystic, abstract verse. “The sound, the associations, the alliteration—it was these that made it a true new poetry.”

  The Dadaists felt a shock of recognition before opaque mash-ups that upended grammatical and social conventions and unleashed the playful and corrosive powers of language. By fusing high and low cultures and pushing against the outer limits of expression and understanding, the Prophecies invited readers to consider their world, and themselves as well, with greater discernment. The poet Tristan Tzara found these verses so powerful that he slipped fragments into his writings. “[T]o the north by its double fruit / like raw flesh / hunger fire blood.” Tzara circulated in different circles from Bennett Cerf, but he would have agreed with the American publisher on one point: Nostradamus makes for fascinating reading in a world in crisis.

  STÉPHANE GERSON

  Suggestions for Further Reading

  Over the past two decades, several French editions of the Prophecies have been reissued with some form of scholarly apparatus. The first edition of 1555 can be found in Les premières centuries, ou Prophéties, ed. Pierre Brind’Amour (Geneva: Droz, 1996). For the second edition, of 1557, see Prophéties, ed. Bruno Petey-Girard (Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 2003). Michel Chomarat provides a facsimile of the 1568 edition in Les Prophéties: Lyon, 1568 (Lyon: Michel Chomarat, 1993). The standard English-language edition has long been Edgar Leoni, Nostradamus and His Prophecies (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000 [1961]). See also the translation by Peter Lemesurier, The Illustrated Prophecies (Alresford, Hampshire, UK: O-Books, 2003). Bernard Chevignard collects and analyzes all of Nostradamus’s portents (the quatrains that he included in his almanacs) in Présages de Nostradamus (Paris: Le Seuil, 1999). Nostradamus’s original letters (in Latin) and French summaries can be found in his Lettres inédites, ed. Jean Dupèbe (Geneva: Droz, 1983). English translations by Peter Lemesurier and the Nostradamus Research Group are available at http://bit.ly/mNdCOK.