Nostradamus: A New Look at an Old Seer

[SidDithers]

http://www.csicop.org/si/show/nostradamus_a_new_look_at_an_old_seer/

Nostradamus, history’s most famous prophesier, continues to fascinate. Claims that he foresaw the rise of Napoleon and of Hitler, among other world events, are being supplemented by assertions that he divined the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001, and the end-times brouhaha over 2012.

I have taken a fresh look at several of his more famous quatrains, translating them from sixteenth-century French into rhymed English verses—no easy task!

snip

1. The Death of King Henry II. One of Nostradamus’s most famous prophecies—number I:35—is also “the verse that made his reputation” (LeVert 1979, 67):

Le lyon ieune le vieux surmontera,

En champ bellique par singulier duelle,

Dans caige d’or les yeux luy creuera:

Deux classes vne, puis mourir, mort cruelle.

My translation:

The young lion shall overcome the old,

On field of battle by single duel;

He’ll smash his eyes with a casing of gold:

Two fleets one, then to die, a death cruel.

Published in 1555, this verse is said to predict the accidental death of King Henry II, the quatrain’s “old lion.” Reportedly, during a French jousting tournament in 1559, a splinter of a broken lance went through the visor of the King’s golden helmet (Nostradamus’s “cage of gold”) and thence through his eye into his brain. He subsequently suffered and died “a cruel death” (Roberts 1949, 20).

Alas, the quatrain was clearly not intended to refer to Henry. Just three years after publishing it, in mid-1558, Nostradamus penned a letter to the king, saying that he expected him to live a long life and predicting wonderful things in his future. Moreover, a tournament is not a “field of battle”; the verse refers to “eyes,” plural; and there is no known precedent for a golden helmet (gold is a soft metal), certainly not in the case of Henry (Randi 1993, 175). So Nostradamians are simply retrofitting, attempting to adapt later events to the French seer’s murky statements. The same is true of the word classes—interpreted by some Nostradamians as “wounds” (from Greek klasis).1 (It may mean “classes” or “knells” or—if the word is really the Latin classis—“fleets.”) The sense of the verse is that an old leader is slain by a younger one, thus unifying their forces.

Always good stuff from CSICOP.

Edit: formatting fixed. Coding wasn't available when the post was made back in April / 11. Cool that we can fix it 10 months later

Sid

[sybylla]

2. Yeah, and he also predicted the end of the world in 1999

Hence the song, "Party like it's 1999"

As far as I'm concerned, there isn't anything about Nostradamus anyone should be taking seriously.

Edited to add that at Cal Tech's Nostradamus FAQ page they say this:
http://alumnus.caltech.edu/~jamesf/Nfaqs.html

Question. Didn't Nostradamus say the world would end in (pick one) 1984, 1999, 2000, 2012?

Answer. Nostradamus clearly stated, in plain French that his prophecies would extend to the year 3797 ( See preface ). It is not clear whether this (or is not) the end or the world E.Leoni states: '.... this will be the year when the roll is called up yonder.' Keep in mind that this is Leoni's interpretation.

[damyank913]

4. Yes but did he say which world?

Did ya see what I did there...?

[Warpy]

3. I read that as "an old beer."

Too bad, might have made more sense my way.

[Lyric]

5. I think Nostradamus was like Reality TV for the Middle Ages.

I don't think he was ever meant to be taken seriously.

[dimbear]

6. Line 3: In a cage of gold he will gouge out his eyes.

Line 4 has a real stumper: classes. Other translators think it may mean 'wounds.'

You have me there.

At any rate, cheery little verse.

[Cherchez la Femme]

7. Joe Nickell is hardly a scholar in medieval French!

Personally I wouldn't even trust him in modern French,
with an open French-English dictionary!

I used to attend CSICOP meetings in Buffalo waay back in the late 70's/early 80's. I eventually stopped going because most if not all the presenters were just as biased and even more close-minded than the believers they, in no uncertain terms, made fun of.
At that time they lost a lot of members who were also upset at the deliberate bias -- in all fairness it was gratifying to see at least half the audience rise to their feet and call speakers out on especially egregious, misrepresent-at-any-cost,
and sin of all sins: deliberately ignoring any data/evidence which did not fit their debunking theories

Over the years it has gotten worse, not better.


What is the use of intellectual inquiry if one is going to be as biased on their side as any of opponents on the other?

--Please note, this is not a blanket denunciation of every CSICOP author--


Since then I have instead subscribed to The Fortean Times... they are no fools (on the whole -- I've read a couple articles that have gone beyond known evidence) but know how far they can legitimately debunk without sounding like nay-saying fools themselves.
Fine writers, and one can never go wrong with Loren Coleman!


Edit:
BTW, the HTML for block quotes is simply
<blockquote>
</blockquote>
with brackets, of course

[AlbertCat]

8. he divined the terrorist strikes of September 11, 2001

I saw that on the boob tube... it was hysterical!

There was some illumination that had a stone tower burning with "airplanes" around it that was supposed to divine the 2001 attacks. No mention of the Pentagon or the flight that went down in PA. There was only one tower...made of stone, not glass, and the "airplanes" were clearly ships with sails reflected in water (so that they appear like lozenge shapes with a "wing", the sail, on top and underneath, the reflection of the sail)

So basically he predicted a tower would burn sometime in the future. OOOOOooooOOOOoooo...CALL AN EXORCIST!

[dimbear]

9. Michel de Notre Dame has a less famous brother, also a fraud, named Jehan.

Jehan wrote a thoroughly fake biography of the more famous troubadors. Clearly he had a great deal of information in his hands which we haven't got nowadays, shame he was an incorrigible liar. Strange, very strange family.

[laconicsax]

10. Isn't it cool how his ramblings are only seen to predict events AFTER they occur?