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Sunday, September 30, 2001
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Exploiting Nostradamus
Nostradamus' predictions surface every time a major event occurs.
AJIT DUARA explains why these quatrains are open to
misrepresentation.
IMMEDIATELY after the tragedy on September 11, there was a hoax
doing the rounds on the Internet. It quoted a prophecy of
Nostradamus to illuminate the devastation in New York City. It
was pretty explicit and went like this:
The quote on the Internet is signed "Nostradamus" and dated 1654.
Michel de Nostradame, to give him his real name, never wrote such
a quatrain and he died in 1566, 100 years before the date
attributed to this piece of creative invention.
For centuries, the quatrains of Nostradamus have been subject to
manipulations and interpretations to suit the times and troubles
of various interest groups. So who was this man? What did he
stand for?
His biography is very moving. He was born in 1503 at St. Remy in
Provence, France. A highly educated and intelligent man, he was
well versed in literature, history, medicine and astrology
(astrology was then a legitimate subject of learning). His
greatest achievement, however, was not in astrology but in
medicine. He was able to prevent many cases of bubonic plague -
which was then raging across Europe - by advocating cleanliness
and prescribing vitamin C. As the plague visited a town,
Nostradame would arrive, at great risk to his own health, and
organise a cleanliness drive in homes and on streets. He gained
fame and honour by this simple but intelligent method.
Sadly, God had a different script for him. His wife and children
contracted the plague and, by a tragic irony, Nostradame - the
saviour of many towns across France - was unable to save his
family. They died in 1537.Traumatised and in deep depression,
Nostradame became a wanderer and began questioning the purpose of
his existence. For six years, he suffered in self-imposed
obscurity and then reappeared with a new course for himself. He
said he could see visions of the future and wrote them down in
"The Centuries", 10 volumes with a 100 quatrains each, in which
he made his predictions. The first edition, containing centuries
one to four, came out in 1555. But because such prophecies might
have been seen as the work of the devil, he hid some of their
more explicit meanings in riddles, puns and anagrams.
It is because Nostradame deliberately obscured his work, as a
form of self-censorship, that they are, today, so open to
misinterpretation and exploitation. Nevertheless, some verses are
uncanny and there is clearly a psychic power that he had gained
after his personal suffering and his contribution to humanity.
But the method of Nostradame is quite different, for example,
from that of Vedic predictive astrology. He simply saw things in
his mind's- eye and described them, well-read man that he was, in
the literary format of his time - the quatrain. The hoax on the
Internet is a clever amalgam of a number of existing verses. It
is easy to combine two verses and apply them to the tragedy in
New York. Take Century 1, quatrain 87:
Now assuming that the "New City" is New York, what are "Arethusa"
and the "river red"? Or take another verse, Century 5, quatrain
65:
What is the mumbo-jumbo about the "lady in the hot coals"? The
persuasive believer would say, if you combine the first two lines
of each quatrain into a single quatrain look at what you will
get:
Now this newly invented quatrain is free from mumbo-jumbo and
fits the tragic events of the past week. You might ask, by what
logic do you combine these particular verses to form a single
unit? Nostradame must have had a working knowledge of numerology.
The number for century 1, quatrain 87 is 7 (1+87=88=16=7) and 7
is also the number for century 5, quatrain 65 (5+65=70=7). So
they are part of one unit and you can combine them. This is the
kind of manipulation that is possible.
Interestingly, Nostradame was smarter than his translators,
interpreters and self-appointed experts. He predicted that these
manufacturers would all fail, saying so in a verse, towards the
end of all his predictions - Century 9, quatrain 81. Read it and
it will make your hair stand on end!
To use a Latin phrase with which Michel de Nostradame, in his
time, would have been familiar - quod erat demonstrandum, or as
we used to write after our geometry homework in school, Q.E.D.
(Quite Easily Done).
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