The Prophecies

by Nostradamus

  When the ever-burning lamp is unearthed

  Within the Temple of Diana’s walls,

  Flame found by a child, working with a sieve :

  Floods destroy Nîmes, Toulouse’s market halls. (9.9)

  A potter digging away for fresh clay

  Shall unearth silver likenesses untold

  Of Hermes & Diana in the lake :

  He & his ilk shall have their fill of gold. (9.12)

  These thematics of concealment echo another quatrain apparently evoking contemporary Spain’s disastrous greed for the fabulous reserves of silver and gold lying buried in the New World—although, as Gerson points out, one nineteenth-century commentator preferred to read the following lines as intimating the Louisiana Bubble of John Law. Whatever the case may be, Nostradamus seems to be presciently registering the emergence of a whole new gold-driven colonial era :

  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. (1.53)

  One of the archaeological discoveries that most fired the prophet’s imagination was the unearthing of the bones of Emperor Augustus in his Roman mausoleum in 1521 (which he may have read about in Bandini’s Dell’ obelisco di Cesare Augusto of 1549). The ruins of Glanum near Michel de Nostredame’s birthplace also included a celebrated mausoleum—hence his frequent allusions to the local place-name Saint-Paul-de-Mausole throughout the Prophecies, a site better known today as the location of the mental hospital where Van Gogh spent his final days. But to open a tomb—or to interpret or translate these tombeau-like quatrains?—is to risk desecration of the dead :

  The bones of the Triumvir shall be found

  While seeking cryptic treasures of the dead :

  No peace for those who lie in nearby ground

  When they go digging for marble & lead. (5.7)

  Read as a malefic portent, the uncovering of Augustus’s bones in 1521 was historically conjoined by Nostradamus to the (equally disastrous) emergence of Protestantism in Europe—Luther had just been threatened with excommunication by the pope the previous year :

  At the founding of the sect deemed so new,

  They shall dig up the great Roman’s remains :

  The marble-clad tomb shall come into view :

  Earthquake in April, burial in May. (6.66)

  In another quatrain, Nostradamus similarly connects the ominous reappearance of ancient artifacts (sometimes referred to in his French as simulachres) to the sham and deceitful (faincte) philosophy of the new Protestant sects whose Reformation threatened to bring about a complete reversal of traditional values :

  The scythe shall expose the topography,

  Earthen pots revealed at the ancient sites :

  Sects pullulate, & sham philosophy :

  New mistaken for old, & black for white. (7.14)

  In what is believed to be a quatrain about the city of Toulouse (Sodom?), a city associated with the ancient Roman sacrifice of bulls and in the mid-sixteenth century a redoubt of French Protestantism, the forces of change are denounced as mere atavistic regressions to barbarous heathen practices—a common trope in anti-Protestant pamphlets of the day (just as it was in Huguenot polemics against the pagan idolatries of the Catholic Church):

  In the city of Fertsod most murderous,

  Where plow-ox risks sacrifice on altar,

  They’ll return to the worship of Artemis,

  And bury their dead in Vulcan’s honor. (9.74)

  Characteristically, the eruption of the archaic into the present, or of myth into the real, is registered as taking place in the future. All tenses are simultaneous in the great time warp of the Prophecies. History, a nightmare from which the prophet is trying to awake, offers itself as a single, unremitting trauma.

  After the extraordinary flowering of its medieval chansons de geste, the history of French literature is dotted with a series of failed (or utterly arid) verse epics: with the possible exception of Hugo’s Légende des siècles, it possesses nothing on the order of Ariosto, Tasso, Camões, Spenser, or Milton. In his manifesto for the modernization of national culture, La deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), Du Bellay had called for a “long poem” that might exemplify the new vernacular literature while vying with the epics of the Ancients. Ronsard promptly took up the challenge and in the following year began to sketch out what would eventually become La Franciade, an account of the adventures of Francus, the son of Hector who had escaped from the sack of Troy and gone on to establish the Frankish kingdom. In this foundation myth, the French were thus descended from the Trojans and could therefore claim kinship with the Romans, who owed their origins to Aeneas, another survivor of Troy. Modeling himself on Virgil, Ronsard hoped to publish his epic as an homage to the nation-building of the current king, Henri II, but, all attempts at securing royal patronage having failed, he had to wait until 1572 to bring it out, thanks to the generous influence of the queen mother, Catherine de Médicis, on the new young monarch, Charles IX. Though considered among Ronsard’s least successful poems, the incomplete Franciade had at least provided the house of Valois with its legitimizing epic—and its poet received a handsome priory in exchange.

  As the Epistle to Henri II preceding the final three Centuries of his poem demonstrates, Nostradamus likewise sought to put his Prophecies at the service of the Valois dynasty. Filled with fawning allusions to his visit to the court in 1555 and dated June 1558, this epistle was rendered nugatory by Henri II’s unexpected death in a duel the following year—a singular lapse of prophetic foresight on Nostradamus’s part (which may account for the fact that it had to wait ten years for posthumous publication). Henri II’s demise notwithstanding, the seer remained in the good graces of the court, as evidenced by the ever-superstitious Catherine de Médicis’ visit to his hometown of Salon in October 1564, accompanied by her fourteen-year-old son, Charles IX—during which Nostradamus performed a series of astrological consultations that were rewarded by three hundred crowns and his appointment as Counselor and Physician in Ordinary to the King.

  As a long poem written to glorify (and instruct) the Valois dynasty, the Prophecies would seem a poor candidate for epic. Its crabbed and willfully archaic idiom—which at times slips into the poet’s native Provençal—hardly represents the streamlined vernacular advocated by Du Bellay for the celebration of a modern nation-state under a centralized monarchy. Furthermore, the poem as a whole lacks that most minimal requirement of an epic—a hero whose noble exploits and tribulations take place within a culturally intelligible grammar of narrative. Instead of epic sweep, Nostradamus provides scattered miniatures.

  A dramatic naval battle that another poet would have taken pages to develop is condensed into four telegraphic, imagistic lines :

  Night shall overtake the battle at sea,

  Fire shall devastate the Western ships :

  Newly ruddled red shall the galleon be :

  Merciless defeat : victors in the mist. (9.100)

  Instead of the leisurely catalogs and enumerations of epic description, we are assaulted by a fusillade of monosyllables whose only grammar is the shriek :

  Pleurs, crys & plaincts, hurlement, effraieur,

  Coeur inhumain, cruel, noir, & transy :

  Leman, les iles de Gennes les majeurs,

  Sang espancher, frofaim, à nul mercy.

  Tears, shrieks & moans, vociferation, fright,

  Inhuman heart, cruel, & blacker than stone :

  In Leman & Genoa’s greater isles,

  Bloodshed, no wheat to eat, no mercy shown. (6.81)

  Nostradamus’s profound agrammaticality is evident at every level of the work. Just as its individual quatrains are disrupted from within by punctuation and rhetorical figures (syllepsis, hypallage, hyperbaton, asyndeton, etc.) designed to cloud their syntactical clarity—he wrote his son that he intended to shroud his poem “sous figure nub
ileuse”—so their larger sequencing into Centuries appears utterly aleatory, following no discernible narrative pattern. The poem as a whole observes what in the Renaissance was called ordo neglectus—digressive and dispersive in the serial fashion of Montaigne’s Essais. Like Montaigne’s immense cento of citations, it thereby gradually acquires the density of a palimpsest: events or texts quoted from the past or from earlier portions of the poem are constantly cut up (in William Burroughs’s sense) and recycled throughout its pages to create a bleakly Nietzschean (or, more precisely, Benjaminian) vision of the Eternal Return of the Same—history petrified into brittle allegory, with mankind bound, Ixion-like, on the relentless wheel of Fortuna.

  And yet from this virtually Dantescan Inferno, there occasionally flash forth a few eschatological gleams of hope. Much of Nostradamus’s 1568 Epistle to Henri II is taken up by a rambling, apocalyptic prophecy in prose concerning the future of the Barren Lady—presumably the Church—in which, somewhat incoherently, at least three different advents of the millennium are predicted, in conjunction with the arrival of at least three separate antichrists. Much of this material is patchworked together from the Mirabilis liber, a popular compilation of prophecies ranging from Pseudo-Methodius and Joachim of Fiore to Savonarola and Fra Bonaventura. Originally published in Paris in 1522, this volume (as Alexandre Haran has shown in his Le lys et le globe: Messianisme dynastique et rêve impérial en France) was assembled as part of the propaganda effort to create an aura of messianic inevitability around the Valois reign of François I—especially urgent, given that his Hapsburg archrival, Charles V, had just recently been anointed Holy Roman Emperor in 1519. The core myth of the Messianic King—subsequently used to justify ventures as dubious as the Crusades, the expulsion of the Jews from Spain, and the conquest of America—reached back to a fourth-century prophecy attributed to the Tiburtine sibyl (also included in the Mirabilis liber). A leader descended from the Greeks and Romans by the name of Constans would reestablish the unity of the Roman Empire, vanquish the infidels, baptize them by force, and take possession of the Holy Land; there he would rule in peace and prosperity, before handing over his empire to God the Father and Jesus Christ his Son; the end of this millennium would then usher in the final battle with the Antichrist, eventuating in the Last Judgment. This dream of an enlightened temporal monarch who would institute a lasting world peace transcending the corrupt and divisive politics of the papacy was first influentially formulated in the fourteenth century by Dante’s De monarchia and then subsequently developed in Ariosto’s equally Ghibelline idealization of Charles V as a solar Carolingian emperor in his epic Orlando Furioso (1516–32)—which in turn inspired Spenser’s encomium of Astraea-Elizabeth, astral virgin queen of the golden age, in The Fairie Queene (1590–96). Rooted in the same politico-prophetic soil as these other Renaissance epics, the Prophecies anagrammatize Henri II into the larger-than-life figure of “Chyren” (from the Provençal spelling of his name, “Henryc”), a mythic, “selenian” moon-king destined to institute universal harmony and justice on earth and, more importantly, to bring about that Saturnian “renovation” in which a Valois monarch would finally displace the Hapsburgs (as well as the papacy and the Ottomans) as the wise and peace-loving restorator orbis—Restorer of the World.

  An epic, as Ezra Pound once observed, is “a poem including history.” By this definition, the Prophecies, nonnarrative though the poem may be, certainly deserves inclusion at the margins of the genre. Jean-Aimé de Chavigny, Nostradamus’s secretary and general amanuensis—who had gotten his job with the prophet through the good offices of Jean Dorat, erstwhile mentor of the Pléiade poets and later appointed Poète du Roy—was the first to present Nostradamus as a genuine historian-prophet in his 1594 anthology, La première face du Janus françois, subtitled, “Summarily Containing the Troubles, Civil Wars & Other Remarkable Things that Occurred in France from 1533 to the End of the House of Valois in 1589.” Though one might remain skeptical about Nostradamus’s predictions of the establishment of the Bourbon monarchy by Henri IV in 1589—after all, he finished writing his Prophecies some thirty years earlier—Chavigny nonetheless seized upon the Janus-like “retrospective future” that was his master’s most head-turning trope. Veiled in allegory (the French are often called “Trojans,” the Spaniards “Hesperidians,” the Milanese “Insubrians,” and the Turks “Punics” or “Barbarians”) and jumbled almost beyond recognition, the Prophecies are nonetheless permeated with allusions to history past and present. Threaded throughout their quatrains lies a hidden tapestry of sixteenth-century Europe, some of whose scope I have tried to indicate in my annotations.

  The “matter” of the poem, as one says of the old French epics and romances, revolves around a titanic clash of civilizations (the Christian West vs. the Islamic East), internecine European strife (Protestants vs. Catholics), and the shifting alliances and conflicts among Spain, France, and England for imperial supremacy over land and sea. Here is a sample of some of the military and political matter rehearsed within the great (and troubled) memory theater of the poem—the historical “facts” behind Nostradamus’s great phantasmagoria of the Disasters of War: the French triumph over the Holy League at Ravenna (1512); Turkish gains in the Balkans, Austria, Hungary, and the capture of Rhodes (1521–22); the Hapsburg-Valois wars in Italy, resulting in the French loss of Milan and Genoa (1522); Charles V’s subsequent invasion of Provence and Italy (1524); the crushing defeat of the French at Pavia (1525), leading to the imprisonment of François I in Spain and his forced signing of the Treaty of Madrid (1526); the sack of Rome by the Imperial forces (1527); Süleyman the Magnificent’s invasion of Hungary and besieging of Vienna (1529); the corsair Hayreddin Barbarossa’s predations along the North African, French, and Italian coasts (1533–38); Charles V’s reconquest of Tunis (1535) and triumphant entry into Rome after having ravaged southern France (1536); Barbarossa’s defeat of the Spanish fleet under the command of Andrea Doria (1538); the sack of Buda by the Turks and Calvin’s establishment of a theocracy in Geneva (1541); the massacre of the French Protestant Waldensians in the Lubéron and the convening of the Council of Trent to counter the Reformation (1545); the death of François I (1547); the revolt in southwestern France against the new king Henri II’s salt tax, leading to fears of English invasion (1548); the decision of Henri II, allied with the Protestant elector of Saxony, to go to war against Charles V, with the battle for Metz pitching the Duke of Guise against the Duke of Alba (1552); the defeat of the French fleet by Andrea Doria in Corsica (1553), etc.

  All these events, even if conjugated in the future, took place years before Nostradamus embarked upon his Prophecies in 1554. As the poem progresses, however, its historical ground grows asymptotically ever closer to the present, particularly in the last three Centuries. After Charles V abdicated in 1555, leaving his son Philip the Spanish empire and his brother Ferdinand the crown of Holy Roman Emperor, Nostradamus predicted (falsely, it turned out) that tensions between the two would open an avenue for French ambitions (9.35). Toward the end of the poem, however, the Spanish have entered into alliance with the English as a result of Philip’s marriage to Queen Mary: their combined forces would inflict a devastating defeat on the French at Saint-Quentin in 1557, which led to the capture of Montmorency (9.18), even though the fortress would be retaken by the dashing Duke of Guise the following year—together with Calais, England’s last surviving enclave in France (9.29). In April 1558, just as Nostradamus was bringing his tenth Century to a close, the fourteen-year-old dauphin François married Mary Stuart, Queen of Scots and niece of the Duke of Guise (10.55), inspiring Nostradamus’s hope that this union might allow the Valois to diplomatically outflank the Hapsburgs as leaders of a new Catholic Anglo-French empire. Which might explain the rather curious concluding quatrain of the Prophecies:

  By England shall great empire see the day,

  More than three hundred years’ powerful sway :

  To the discomfort of the Portuguese, />
  Its great forces shall sweep over land & sea. (10.100)

  But for the house of Valois, ever more mired in France’s grim Wars of Religion, this world-historical mission envisaged by the prophet would remain forever unrealized: Henri II was killed in a duel in 1559; his son François II ruled for a mere eighteen months, dying at age sixteen; François’s brother Charles IX assumed the throne at age ten and, after being married off to a Hapsburg by his mother, Catherine de Médicis, died at twenty-three; Charles was succeeded by another brother, Henri III, without issue. By 1589, the dynasty was extinct.

  During Nostradamus’s actual composition of the Prophecies, however, the future still looked relatively auspicious for the Valois. Though the prophet warns, Cassandra-like, against France’s continued foreign involvement in the Italian Wars (e.g., 3.23) while condemning its savage persecution of the Protestants (4.63), he remains optimistic that it will produce a ruler capable of ushering in a golden age :

  Born in shadows & day as dark as night,

  With sovereign benevolence he shall rule :

  From the ancient urn he’ll refresh his line,

  Remake the age of bronze an age of gold. (5.41)

  The name he most frequently applies to this messianic sovereign-to-come is “Ogmion,” or the “French Hercules”—an appellation that appears in Erasmus’s 1502 Latin translation of Lucian’s Death of Peregrinus. In celebration of Henri II’s royal entry into Paris in 1549, the new king was depicted on an arch of triumph as the “Gallic Hercules.” Unlike the Spanish Hercules, Charles V, often represented as enfettering the columns of Hercules (i.e., Gibraltar) by his sheer strength, the French Ogmion instead was here shown binding his subjects together by his word—with delicate gold and silver chains running from his tongue into their listening ears (see 1.96). Governing not simply by military power, but rather by the force of eloquence, the figure of Ogmion incarnates Nostradamus’s humanist ideal of an enlightened and cosmopolitan French monarch in the tradition of that great patron of arts and letters François I, who even created a chair for the study of Arabic at his new Collège des Lecteurs Royaux :