Unveiling Nostradamus: The Life, Works, and Legacy of History's Enigmatic Prophet

Join us as we explore the fascinating life and career of Michel de Nostredame, better known as Nostradamus, beginning with his birth in 1503 in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France. Discover the complexities of his family's Jewish heritage and the societal pressures they faced to convert to Christianity. We discuss how the mystical teachings of the Kabbalah may have shaped Nostradamus' later prophetic works. Learn about his early education at the University of Avignon, which was interrupted by the bubonic plague, and his subsequent travels that informally trained him as a physician before his studies at the University of Montpellier.

We journey through Nostradamus' early authorial career, starting with his publication of an almanac in 1550, which laid the foundation for his reputation as a mystic. His almanacs paved the way for "Les Prophéties," a collection of 942 quatrains that would captivate readers with predictions about political and social events. Our discussion highlights how Nostradamus' ambiguous style allowed for broad interpretations, touching on his focus on historical figures and significant events like wars and natural disasters, which have sparked intrigue for centuries.

Listen in as we interpret Nostradamus' prophetic works, examining the methods he employed and the Renaissance-era influences that shaped his writings. From the revival of Neoplatonism and Hermeticism to the public's fascination with astrology, we unravel the layers of meaning behind his prophecies, including those believed to predict modern events such as climate change and global conflicts. Finally, we reflect on Nostradamus' legacy, his connection to the French royal court, and the myths surrounding his life and tomb, which continue to captivate imaginations and inspire analysis today.

Episode Transcript

(00:04):
The man known to history as Nostradamus was born in 15 O3 as
Michel the Nostradam. The exact circumstances of his
birth are unclear, but he is believed to have been born in
December of that year in the Provence region of southern
France, most likely on either the 14th or 21st in the town of

(00:27):
Saint Remy de Provence. His father was Jean or Jacques
de Nostradam, A notary who worked for the government in
Provence. Michel's mother was Rainier, a
granddaughter of Pierre de St. Remy, a prominent physician in
the town of St. Remy, Jacques and Rainier had at
least nine children, though the precise number is unclear, a not

(00:49):
unusual occurrence in a time of patchy birth records and high
infant mortality. The Nostradam family had a
somewhat shadowy background. And there is little information
about Michelle's childhood. The family was possibly Jewish
in origin. This placed them in a difficult
position because the Jewish people had come under severe
persecution in France and other countries such as England in the

(01:12):
High Middle Ages, with governments issuing orders for
them to either leave those dominions entirely or convert to
Christianity. Many converted but continued to
practice Judaism in private. The Nostradam family held out
for many centuries to come, in part because the weak,
decentralized nature of the French crown made royal

(01:33):
enforcement of such directives in regions such as Provence
difficult. Evidently, though, the pressure
to convert was significant enough by the mid 15th century
that Michele's grandfather, his father Jacques Father, a man
named Cresquas of whom we know little other than he worked as a
money lender in Avignon, decidedto finally convert to Roman

(01:55):
Catholicism. When he did, he adopted the
Christian name Pierre and the surname Nostalgam, which means
Our Lady, a symbol of his havingconverted on our.
Ladies Day, a significant religious festival at the time,
celebrated on the 25th of March.Michel's Jewish background may
have been somewhat significant. There was a major strain of

(02:19):
mysticism and esoteric knowledgeinvolved in Jewish literature
and thought in Europe in the late medieval and early modern
periods, ones which influenced Michel's later writings.
Foremost here was the Jewish Kabbalah, a school of thought in
Jewish mysticism which sought toexplain the relationship between
an unchanging, eternal God and the finite world of.

(02:42):
Mortals. This focused on sacred texts,
many of them away from the mainstream of Judaism, and a
good deal of which utilized language and rituals which were
open to myriad interpretations. The language could often be
vague and of an apocalyptic nature.
For instance, the most central text within it, the Zohar, is a

(03:04):
group of books offering mysticalcommentary on the Jewish Torah.
Significantly, the Kabbalah emerged most strongly within the
Jewish communities of Spain and southern France in the 12th and
13th centuries, and so the Nostradam family were most
likely exposed to this extensively in the centuries
that followed. Scholars have long noted the

(03:25):
influence of the Kabbalah. And Jewish mysticism on
Nostradamus later writings. We know almost nothing about
Michelle's earliest years. A theory that he was educated in
his childhood with his maternal grandfather, and it was from him
which he gained some of. His earliest training as a
physician is certainly spurious,as Pierre de Salveimi died when

(03:49):
Michelle was still an infant. What is clear is that in 1518,
when he was 14 years old, Michelentered the University of
Avignon, one of France's oldest universities, having been first
established in 13 O3. There he began studying for his
baccalaureate, a degree which, like nearly all educational
curricula in Europe at the time,was heavily centered on grammar,

(04:13):
rhetoric and logic, and the works of Greek and Roman writers
such as Aristotle and Cicero. However, Michel's time here was
cut short by a major outbreak ofthe bubonic plague in southern
France 1 which forced the college authorities to close the
institution. This was standard procedure at
the time, and when major plague outbreaks occurred, those who

(04:35):
had the means to do so tended toflee from cities and towns to
rural areas to avoid the crowdedurban settings in which disease
proliferates. The closure of Avignon in the
late 1510s inadvertently led to a formative period in Michel's
life. He took the opportunity to begin
travelling widely and it was during this period, when he was

(04:58):
moving around Western Europe, that he seemingly undertook much
of his initial training as a physician in an informal
capacity. Unfortunately, we have few
precise details of what exactly he was doing during these years
or where he was undertaking his studies.
But we can. Glean much by assessing the
state of medical knowledge in Europe in the 1520s.

(05:21):
This was a time prior to the medical revolution of the 17th
and 18th centuries, when the first scientific assessment of
how to treat ailments began to be undertaken.
Instead, the treatment of illness in the 16th century
relied to an overwhelming extenton practices with little medical
efficacy, particularly bloodletting, the practice of

(05:41):
drawing off a significant amountof blood from a sick individual.
Owing to the belief, inherited from Greek and Roman physicians
such as Galen, that the body's health was based on the
balancing of humors such as bile, it was believed that
bloodletting could serve to recalibrate the body humors.
Elsewhere, medical practice was based on folk remedies and

(06:04):
limited forms of surgery. A huge array of ailments which
we would consider minor today could result in death in the
16th century owing to the unavailability of basic
medicines such as penicillin andthe fact that there would be no
vaccines available for another 21/2 centuries.
Given this, the medical knowledge which Michelle would
have acquired in the 1520s was as much based on folk remedies

(06:28):
and sheer hope that it was on any hard science.
The details of Michelle's life become somewhat clearer in the
late 1520s. He had evidently established
himself as an apothecary in southern France at some point in
the mid 1520s. And in 1529, he decided to
acquire greater knowledge still in his field by attending the

(06:50):
University of Montpellier. The University of Montpellier
was home to one of the oldest formal medical schools in
Europe, having been established here as far back as the 1130s,
though this was predated by the medical school founded in
Salerno in Italy in the 11th century.
However, Michel's time here, like his sojourn at Avignon A

(07:12):
decade earlier, did not last long.
Within weeks, the college authorities at Montpellier had
learned that he had worked as anapothecary prior to entering the
university. This was a clear violation of
the university statutes, which prohibited students from having
previously engaged in a manual trade at a time when Europe's

(07:32):
universities was still the preserve of the affluent sons of
the nobility and the Gentry. Thus, just weeks after he
arrived there, Michelle was expelled from Montpellier.
A copy of his expulsion order has survived and is found in the
archives of the University of Montpellier to this day.
While he would doubtlessly have seen his expulsion from

(07:55):
Montpellier as a set back, Michelle, who was still just in
his mid 20s, seems to have takenthe rebuff as a motivation to
further his own personal studiesand business.
Thus, in the course of the early1530s, he began to specialize as
a Plague Dr., the kind of physician who in the early
modern times treated those afflicted by the monstrous

(08:17):
bubonic plague. Though it is most usually
associated with the apocalyptic Black Death outbreak of the
1340s and 1350s, one which killed upwards of 1/3 of
Europe's people, the plague continued to strike at different
parts of Europe with regularity over the centuries that
followed. It was particularly common in

(08:37):
southern France, which lay alongthe main trade routes between
Italy and northern Europe, the passage of people through which
often led to outbreaks such as that which closed Avignon when
Michel was there in the late 1510s.
Despite its virulence, methods for treating the plague remained
limited, though the effectiveness of social

(08:57):
distancing and quarantining werewell known.
Thus, the term quarantine itselfderives from the Italian for 40
the number of days which ships were required to wait at anchor
in the harbor of a port like Venice before unloading their
goods if they were coming from aregion where there was known to
be a plague outbreak. Michelle's method for fighting

(09:19):
the plague was the use of rose pills, which he devised himself.
These consisted of a mix of rosepetals, sawdust from green
Cypress trees, cloves, calamus and line aloes.
These by themselves would have been completely ineffective.
But in tandem with his rose pills, Michelle also directed

(09:40):
individuals in a plague impactedtown or village to ensure that
the bodies of those who died from the disease were quickly
removed and buried, and that surfaces were washed and kept
clean. He also recommended to people
that they get plenty of fresh air.
And unlike the vast majority of his contemporaries, he didn't
recommend bloodletting as a way of staving off the disease.

(10:02):
Thus, while his rose pills were useless, Michelle's
prescriptions around sanitationswere positive.
These sanitation measures must have been effective, for in the
early to mid 1530s, his reputation as a plague Dr. grew
around southern France, and he was regularly called upon by
communities where disease had broken out to visit them and

(10:25):
offer advice. In time, this in short, he
became financially independent. For instance, when the plague
broke out in X, the capital of Provence, in the late 1530s,
Michelle headed there and helpedthe city authorities stop its
spread. They subsequently rewarded him
with a penchant for life for hisservices.

(10:45):
Michelle had also married by this time.
In 1531, he had taken up an offer presented to him by Jules
Cesar Scaligier, an Italian physician who was living in the
town of Argent in southwestern France.
Once there, Michelle married a local woman whose name was
possibly Ariet Donkos. They quickly had two sons

(11:06):
together, but the marriage endedin tragedy when Michelle's wife
and two children were themselvescarried off by a plague outbreak
in 1534. It may have been his personal
tragedy that caused him to redouble his efforts at
developing methods of stopping the virulence and spread a
plague. And his time at Agen was
significant for other reasons. Scaliger, who had first invited

(11:30):
him to the town, was a formidable scholar with a
reputation throughout Europe, one who had engaged in debates
in print with Desidarius Erasmus, the leading European
scholar of the first half of the16th century.
Thus, while in Agen, Michel was able to make use of Scaliger's
extensive library. While we cannot be sure what he

(11:51):
read here and how it influenced his subsequent writings,
doubtless anything he was perusing in print during these
years could be viewed as an influence on Michel's subsequent
written works. In 1538, an event was to occur
which would influence the courseof much of the rest of Michel's
life and without which we may never have heard of him today.

(12:13):
That year he was accused of heresy in France.
This was a dangerous time to be seen as a heretic.
The Protestant Reformation had swept across Germany and was
beginning to infiltrate large parts of Western Europe, France
included. Fearful, no doubt of
extraordinary punishment, Micheldid not attend his trial and
effectively went on the run. Much of this was within France

(12:36):
itself, and it appears that his crime, whatever had led him to
being accused of heresy, was limited enough that he was able
to continue working in Provence and other regions.
However, he also travelled further afield to Italy.
It was here that he established contacts within the printing
industry, the capital of which in southern Europe was located

(12:57):
at Venice. Though he did not begin
publishing just yet, Michelle would soon and it would be owing
to his Italian influences. Meanwhile, in the mid 1540s, he
returned to France, where he wasyet again involved in fighting a
plague outbreak in the city of Marseille.
Shortly thereafter, he finally settled down in Salon de

(13:18):
Provence, and it was here in thelate 1540s, where he started a
second family after marrying an affluent widow by the name of
Anne Porssard. They would have three sons and
three daughters in the years that followed.
Moreover, between his wife's ownfinancial means and the
extensive pensions and payments he had accrued himself as a

(13:39):
plague Dr. over the years, Michelle was in a position to
settle down as a writer as he entered what we would now term
middle age, but which at the time was seen as old age.
Michelle's authorial career began in 1550 when he published
his first book. This was an Almanac, a kind of

(13:59):
small booklet or pamphlet. These short and cheap
publications were the foundationof the publishing industry in
16th century Europe, a time whenfull books were still expensive
to produce, but small 816 or 32 page booklets could be mass
produced quickly and sold for a reasonable price.
Accordingly, almanacs on all manner of different subjects,

(14:22):
from the religious disputes which were ongoing between
Catholics and Protestants to agricultural matters and recipe
books, were produced across Europe at the time.
Almanacs were a kind of subgenrewhich offered information on a
subject relevant to that year. Michelle's first one was on
astrological predictions and he was inspired to write it after

(14:44):
visiting Italy again and meetingwith his acquaintances in the
publishing sector. There.
Here he took the decision to Latinize his name and identify
himself as Nostradamus on the cover, a flourish of showmanship
which would have enduring implications.
The Almanac was a commercial success, and in the years that

(15:04):
followed he continued to publishat least one on an annual basis.
Unfortunately, despite the fact that they sold well at the time,
copies of these have generally not survived down to the present
day, and it is generally not possible to determine how
Nostradamus prophetic writings evolved in the early 1550s from

(15:24):
the almanacs into what would later become his more well known
prophecies. We do know the general structure
of the almanacs. These consisted of 12/4 line
long poems or quatrains, ones which offered predictions for
the coming year couched in rhyming language.
These were written in vague, esoteric, almost secretive

(15:46):
language of a kind which was certainly of interest and
peculiar to the mid 16th centuryreader, and which also had the
added advantage of being open toa very wide interpretation.
They were instantly popular, andas they were, Nostradamus
determined that they were a goodformat for him to continue
writing in. Thus, even as he was producing

(16:09):
his annual almanacs in the firstyears of the 1550s, he was also
conceiving of a much more extensive project where hundreds
of quatrains would be written ona vast array of supposed future
events that would occur in Europe and beyond.
He was encouraged in this by hisgrowing reputation as a
clairvoyant and Mystic in southern France during the

(16:31):
1550s, and as his almanacs became well known, it was common
for wealthy French nobles, merchants and members of the
Gentry to seek him out for his thoughts on their affairs and
what the future might hold. Then eventually in 1555, he
published the first section of his great work, which he termed
The Centuries originally, but which he eventually named The

(16:54):
Prophecies, and published the first volume of as Le Premier
Centuri U Propheti at the city of Leon that year.
The Prophecies consist of 942 quatrains spread over 10
centuries. This was the cumulative amount
which was eventually brought together and published as a

(17:15):
single edition in 1568, shortly after Nostradamus death.
However, the publication historywas fragmentary and the 1st
edition in 1555, for instance, was restricted to 353 quatrains
and a preface. Much like his almanacs.
These were rhyming 4 line poems which offered highly ambiguous

(17:36):
prophetic statements about what might occur in the future.
For instance, one of the very first quatrains stated that when
the litters are overturned by the whirlwind and faces are
covered by cloaks, the New Republic will be troubled by its
people. At this time, the Reds and
whites will rule wrongly. This is ambiguous enough that

(17:57):
people of future years and generations could read very many
different things into it at different times.
Moreover, because the prophecieswere not said to have specific
reference to individual years, unlike the almanacs, the
contents of these quatrains could theoretically relate to an
event at an indeterminate point in the future.

(18:17):
It was this combination of vagueness and prediction that
would eventually allow Nostradamus prophecies to be
interpreted in a seemingly limitless number of ways.
The topics covered by Nostradamus were varied, but
tended to center on what might broadly be termed political and
social events. There was extensive talk of

(18:38):
kings and Queens and empires andkingdoms throughout the
prophecies. Much of it was also historically
rooted with reference either to people and places from the
distant past or to the passage of time beyond Nostradamus own
time of writing, as one would expect from a work of prophetic
rhymes. An indicative passage was the

(18:59):
following, towards the end of the 1st century of quatrains.
At the time, Cyprus will be frustrated of its relief by
those of the Aegean Sea Old Onesslaughtered, but by speeches and
supplications their king seducedthe queen More.
Elsewhere, famous heroes of the ancient world such as Hannibal

(19:20):
the Great Carthaginian general who marched with elephants over
the Alps at the start of the Second Punic War with Rome in
the 3rd century BC is mentioned.Other passages mention Greek and
Roman gods and goddesses frequently, while Nostradamus
was also preoccupied by weather cycles and the movements of
fleets on the great seas. Unsurprisingly, he was

(19:41):
fascinated by wars and natural disasters, and the prophecies
are effectively an endless catalog of awful events and
periods of turmoil yet to come. In human history.
The geographical range of the prophecies was very
considerable. Editions of the book which were
printed included subtitles such as.

(20:03):
Represents part of what is now happening in France, in England,
in Spain, and in other parts of the world, indicating that
Nostradamus perceived his work as relating to events which
would occur well beyond the parochial concerns of southern
France. For instance, place names which
are given in the text include references to parts of
Scandinavia, the Mediterranean, the Black Sea, Eastern Europe

(20:26):
and the Ottoman Empire, which atthe time had grown to encompass
much of the Balkans, Middle Eastand North Africa.
Some of this was indicative of the times Nostradamus was living
in when he was born. In the first years of the 16th
century, Europeans had just discovered concrete ways of
travelling around Africa by sea and to the Americas by sailing

(20:48):
westwards from Europe. The prophecies reflect the
revolutionary changes which wereoccurring in European
conceptions of geography, and indeed the myriad new peoples
they were coming into contact with as they voyaged out.
Ever. Further from Europe it is also.
Telling how specific many of thereferences were, he is often not
just referencing countries well away from France, but individual

(21:11):
cities and islands closer to home.
There are scores of specific cities, towns, and provinces in
places like France, the Low Countries, and Italy directly
mentioned. Given his concern with classical
motifs, the names used by the Romans for parts of Europe were
also often employed. More broadly, the fact his work
covered such a large array of geographical places has made

(21:35):
Nostradamus's works more timeless and pertinent to a
greater array of people than they otherwise would have been.
As esoteric as Nostradamus writings were, hundreds of years
of scholarship on the prophecieshas revealed that they were
written in a fashion which drew extensively on specific sources.
For instance, Nostadamus was often anxious to mimic events

(21:57):
surrounding kings, Queens, warlords, kingdoms and empires
in his quatrains, with talk of plagues visiting empires such as
Rome, rulers being overthrown, and great changes striking
republics and kingdoms. In order to acquire inspiration
for how he wrote these quatrains, he delved deeply into
classical history, reading workslike The Lives of the 12 Caesars

(22:21):
written by the Roman historical biographer Switonius, and the
comparative historical biographies of eminent Greeks
and Romans composed by the 2nd century AD.
Greco, Roman historian. Plutarch.
Elsewhere, he consulted more contemporary prophetic works by
religious figures, such as the writings of Girolamos
Savonarola, a Dominican Friar who established A brief lived

(22:45):
theocracy in the city of Florence in Italy in the 1490s.
We know this because the very early stages of the prophecies
contain a series of biblical quotes which are written in an
almost identical order to how Savonarola had used them in a
text he wrote over half a century earlier.
The similarity in the choice of biblical quotes and their

(23:07):
arrangement is too similar for it to have been coincidental.
Another major the work which he utilized was the Mirabilis Libe,
or Miraculous Book, a compendiumof predictions by Christian
Saints and divines which have been collected since the 11th
century and which was only finally published in France in
1522. Many other passages of the

(23:28):
prophecies have been found to extensively utilize similar
texts or paraphrase entire passages.
How Nostradamus used the texts which he employed as source
material remains a matter of considerable academic dispute.
Some scholars believe his reading of them was ordered and
systematic, with the French doctor leafing through volumes

(23:50):
in his study in Salon de Provence until he found passages
which inspired him. However, others, whose views on
Nostradamus are admittedly less favorable, proposed that he
simply threw open books like theMirabilis Libe randomly and drew
inspiration from what was written on whatever page he
landed on, fashioning propheciesout of the contents of these

(24:11):
haphazardly chosen sources. Exactly what mental space he was
in as he conducted his work has also been widely debated.
Advocates of Nostradamus have been key to view him as
meditating in a special way before.
He was inspired by some prophetic vision in his study,
perhaps by flame gazing or some other transcendental approach,

(24:33):
but in the only extant pieces ofwriting and personal
correspondence in which he actually described his writing
method. Nostradamus stated that he.
Merely tried to attain a position of mental calm and
tranquility before preparing hisquatrains.
There was nothing mystical in his process and he repeatedly
denied that he was a prophet of any kind.

(24:55):
We have to also examine Nostradamus and his work against
the intellectual backdrop of the16th century.
This was a time when the scientific revolution was in its
infancy. During Nostradamus lifetime,
Nicolaus Copernicus would publish On the Revolutions of
the Heavenly Spheres, a work which revolutionized European
conceptions of existence in identifying how the planets of

(25:19):
the solar system orbited around the sun rather than the earth
being the center of existence. It was also a period when the
new Renaissance learning, which had emerged in Italy during the
14th and 15th centuries, was spreading N over the Alps to
France, Germany, the Low Countries, and England.
The Protestant Reformation beganin Germany in 1517, calling into

(25:42):
question all of the established beliefs of the Church, and
Europeans were beginning to explore the world.
The Americas were discovered by various Italian, Spanish, and
English Mariners in the 1490s and 1500s, while the Portuguese
had discovered the sea route around Africa to India and China
in the early 1520s, when Nostradamus was just entering

(26:04):
his adult years. The first circumnavigation of
the globe was accomplished by a Spanish expedition LED initially
by Ferdinand Magellan. Everything at this time was open
to interpretation and every yearbrought the possibility of
unique ways of viewing the world.
Such a world was conducive towards individuals like
Nostradamus producing prophetic and esoteric or secretive works

(26:28):
of the kind that he did. A strain of European
intellectual debate in the 16th century which was particularly
relevant to Nostradamus writings, was the revival of
Neoplatonism and Hermeticism. These were intellectual
movements that had emerged in the last centuries of the Roman
Empire and which focused on esoteric or secret forms of

(26:50):
knowledge. For instance, Hermeticism, the
name of which was taken from theLate Antique movement associated
with the fabled scholar Hermes Trismegistus, focused on areas
of study like magic, astrology and alchemy.
These were real subjects of scholarly dispute in European
Nostradamus time, and formed thebasis of the scientific studies

(27:12):
of many scholars like Giordano Bruno, a 16th century Italian
scholar who blended astrology, protoscience, Hermeticism, and
Neoplatonism together in his work, and Sir Walter Riley and
John D in Elizabethan England, each of whom were looking to
find the Philosopher's Stone, the substance which it was

(27:33):
believed would allow individualsto turn any substance into gold.
Hermeticism, Neoplatonism, astrology, and prophetic
writings were all part of the mainstream of intellectual
discourse in 16th century Europe, and Nostradamus was very
much writing within this tradition.
Our own scientific age might look about these forms of

(27:55):
inquiry as backward or primitivetoday, but the reality is that
this open minded form of intellectual exploration was a
key element of the development of the scientific revolution.
Thus, Nostradamus was writing ata time when individuals such as
himself, with a background in medicine and proto scientific
inquiry were often incorporatingastrology, prophecy, and other

(28:17):
forms of esoteric knowledge intotheir writings.
Nostradamus's writings, though, are not remembered today for the
intellectual landscape in which they were written, but for their
alleged predictions of major historical events.
One of the most striking of Nostradamus's prophecies which
is believed to have come to pass, concerns the Great Fire of

(28:39):
London. In early September 1666, a small
fire in London spread until it burned down a huge proportion of
the city. The death toll was relatively
minor, but it destroyed most of the medieval city.
In its aftermath, many fans of Nostradamus began to point
towards a specific quatrain in his prophecies, which seemed to

(29:00):
predict this. This red quote, The blood of the
just will commit a fault at London.
Burned through lightning of 20 threes.
The six, the ancient lady will fall from her high place.
Several of the same sect will bekilled.
This has been interpreted as a direct prediction of the Great
Fire, most obviously because of the specific references to a

(29:23):
great burning of London, but also because the reference to 20
threes, the six which could be interpreted to add up to 66.
However, there was no lightning involved in the Great Fire,
rather it started in a Baker's workshop.
Very few people died, unlike Nostradamus's reference to
several of the same sect being killed, and the reference to an

(29:46):
ancient lady has no obvious reference to the political
circumstances of England at the time.
Nevertheless, the Great Fire andthe seeming reference to it
further augmented Nostradamus's reputation in the latter stages
of the 17th century. While his prophecies did range
over a wide array of geographies, inevitably there

(30:07):
was a particular focus on Franceand French affairs.
Unsurprisingly then, avid Nostradamus readers have
identified several major events in French history which the
Provencal Plague Dr. was believed to have predicted.
The most prominent was the French Revolution and the rise
of Napoleon Bonaparte. There is an extensive series of

(30:27):
quatrains in one of his centuries, which foretells a
time of great strife and civil discord in the country, followed
by a new ruler emerging here. Nostradamus states quote of a
name which was never held by a French king.
Never was there so terrible a Thunderbolt.
Italy, Spain and the English tremble.

(30:47):
This certainly fits with Napoleon.
He came from a Corsican family of a middling social Class 1
which was actually more Italian than French, and which had never
been anywhere near ruling Francein the past.
His wars did involve England, Italy and Spain, and the Spanish
peninsula became a key centre ofthe Napoleonic Wars from the mid

(31:08):
1800s. However, the skeptic might note
that times of civil strife usually result in the emergence
of entirely new ruling dynasties, while Italy, Spain
and England has three of France's immediate neighbors.
Would be the most likely to end up at war with France.
Another major political figure in modern European history, who

(31:30):
Nostradamus is alleged to have foreseen the emergence of is
Adolf Hitler. 1 of Nostradamus'squatrains runs as follows.
From the depths of Western Europe will be born of poor
folks, a young child who by his tongue will seduce a great many
people. His fame will spread to the
Orient. The more extended section within

(31:51):
the centuries explains how this individual will engage in
villainous, wicked, infamous oppressions, and also refers to
an adulterine Dame, which proponents of the view that
Nostradamus predicted the rise of the Third Reich suggest is a
coded reference to Nazism. The section ends by referring to
the earth being rendered. A.

(32:12):
Horrible black in countenance asa result of the actions of this
individual and his followers. The whole slew of other
quatrains are also noted as being relevant to the general
course of the Second World War. For instance, 1 section, which
refers to a large mastiff being driven from a city and then
surprised at an alliance which is formed, would be read as

(32:33):
referring to England being driven from France and Paris in
1940, and the somewhat unusual nature of the alliance which was
briefly agreed between Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia
between 1939 and 1941. Elsewhere, Nostradamus is
believed to have predicted the nuclear bombings of the Japanese
cities of Hiroshima and Nagasakiin August 1945.

(32:57):
At the very. End of the Second World War.
The passages are admittedly verytenuous.
For instance, Nostradamus statedquote within two cities there
will be scourges the like of which was never seen, while
elsewhere he foretells within the same quatrain.
That famine within plague will occur.
Some have viewed the latter phrase to be a reference to

(33:19):
radiation sickness. In any event, the reference to
two cities has a long standing literary significance stretching
all the way back to the Old Testament, and Nostradamus's
decision to use this phraseologywas not unusual.
Other quatrains, which are entirely vague, have been
applied to prominent political events 18 years after Hiroshima

(33:41):
and Nagasaki, when President John F Kennedy was assassinated
in Dallas, TX. Many individuals noted the
significance of Nostradamus's statement that quote from on
high evil will fall on the greatman.
Others noted that the same quatrain went on to state a dead
innocent will be accused of the deed.

(34:01):
These are wholly vague passages,and belief in the idea that they
refer to JF KS assassination assumes that Kennedy was both a
great man and that Lee Harvey Oswald, his supposed assassin,
was innocent of the crime. Surely 1 of Nostradamus's most
famous prophecies concerns his supposed prediction of the

(34:21):
attacks on the twin towers of the World Trade Centers on the
11th of September 2001 by Al Qaeda.
It is hard not to see why the relevant quatrain states that
quote 2. Steel birds will fall from the
sky on the metropolis. The sky will burn at 45°
latitude. Fire approaches the great new

(34:42):
city. Immediately a huge scattered
flame leaps up. Within months, rivers will flow
with blood. The undead will roam the earth
for little time. The two steel birds here, which
Nostradamus refers to as fallingfrom the sky on a great city, is
a striking statement about the planes which crashed into the
two towers, while the scattered flame which he refers to as

(35:05):
leaping up would certainly matchwith the inferno which was
unleashed above downtown Manhattan that morning in 2001.
Moreover, the reference to rivers of blood being shed
within months is a striking portent of the fact that the
United States would invade Afghanistan just weeks later and
later Iraq in response to the attacks.

(35:27):
Fans of the significance of Nostradamus's prophecies
certainly have a strong argumentthat quatrains such as these are
strikingly prophetic. And then there are the more
recent events. Still, many have noted the
relevance of a quatrain pertaining to 2022, in which
Nostradamus stated because they disapprove of his divorce, a man

(35:50):
who later they consider unworthy, the people will force
out the King of the Islands, a man will replace him who never
expected to be king. Some have seen this as being of
reference to Prince Charles's divorce from Princess Diana and
the negative public sentiment which attached itself to him.
As a result, Charles has recently ascended as King

(36:10):
Charles the Third of the United Kingdom, and some have viewed
this quatrain as being an indication that he will be
forced to abdicate, perhaps in favor not of his eldest son,
Prince William, the designated heir, but his youngest son,
Prince Harry, a man who never expected to be king.
Other quatrains have been identified which seem to predict

(36:31):
the war which has been in train in Ukraine since the spring of
2022, and even passages which predict the disastrous
consequences of climate change. In the latter respect, the
quatrains referring to the sun becoming so hot that the Black
Sea will boil are particularly relevant, with Nostradamus
consequently predicting that thedenizens of the Mediterranean

(36:53):
and nearby regions would be starved owing to the changing
weather patterns. Of course, all of this raises a
question. If Nostradamus allegedly
predicted so many of the era defining historical events, then
what might his prophecies have had to say about events to come
in the 21st or 22nd centuries? The portents are mixed.

(37:15):
NASA and Elon Musk might be disappointed to learn that
Nostradamus poured cold water onthe idea of a successful
colonization of Mars, stating that, quote, the light of Mars
will go out. He also, somewhat worryingly,
seemed to predict a Great War would break out in 2023, but
that it would only last for seven months.

(37:36):
But perhaps the most disturbing quatraying of all predicts a
breakdown in the global food chain and the advent of a real
life version of The Walking Dead.
In what must surely be one of his most upsetting quatrains,
Nosodamis informs us that quote.So high will the bushel of wheat
rise, that man will be eating his fellow man.
Thus, Nostradamus's predictions of future events are not for the

(38:00):
faint hearted and should probably be avoided by anyone
with an. Overt tendency towards panic
shopping, A major issue which needs to be taken into
consideration when assessing Nostradamus's prophecies, is
their inherent vagueness. This was not just in terms of
the esoteric rhyming language used, but also in terms of other

(38:22):
methods Nostradamus employed to deliberately shroud what he was
saying. The Frenchman was writing at a
time when charges of being a prophet or proponent of dark
magic could bring about charges of heresy, an experience which
Nostradamus had already had in the 1530s and which he had no
wish to repeat. Accordingly, when he wrote the

(38:42):
prophecies, he used a mix of different languages, including
French, Provencal, Italian, Latin and Greek, in a deliberate
effort to disguise what he was saying in places and allay any
doubts that he was an agent of the devil.
Moreover, some specific place names and other words which he
employed can be interpreted in acompletely tangential fashion.

(39:05):
Such is the case with his reference to Rousseau in one
instance, which analysts have taken to refer to the 18th
century Swiss philosopher. But Rousseau was hardly an
uncommon name in the Provence region in the 16th century.
More tellingly, many analysts have insisted that Nostradamus's
reference to Hista in Germany inone of his quatrains prophesized

(39:28):
the rise of Adolf Hitler. That is, until such time as we
consider that history was simplya name for the lower part of the
River Danube in the 16th century.
Thus, in addition to Nostradamus's prophecies being
incredibly vague, there are manifold issues with how modern
readers have read them without any awareness of the 16th

(39:48):
century context in which they were written, or indeed the many
classical and literary illusionswhich are contained within them.
One final point which should be noted concerning the overall
structure and content of the prophecies, and indeed their
vagueness, is the lack of specific dates.
One would think that in a collection which set out to

(40:10):
provide prophecies of future events that it would be
necessary to provide a great many dates.
But in actuality, for the periodbetween 1588 and the year 3797,
Nostradamus only references 9 specific dates.
Subsequent readers have sought to suggest that other elements
of the text make it possible to identify the general period in

(40:32):
which an event would occur, suchas the reference to the Great
Fire of London, which occurred in 1666.
However, there is no doubt that the lack of dates is a serious
issue when evaluating Nostradamus's work.
He himself explained this away as being a product of the books
cyclical notion of time, one in which the events of the past,

(40:54):
when the Egyptians, Greeks and Romans ruled the Mediterranean
through to his own day and centuries into the future all
had a kind of timeless quality in which wars, natural disasters
and political swings to and fro were repeated.
But despite his statements aboutwhat he called transmutations of
time, Nostradamus was simply adding an additional layer of

(41:18):
vagueness and uncertainty to histext by generally refusing to
add any details that could tie his prophetic events to a
specific year or date in the future.
Curiously, for a text which has gone on to become one of the
most instantly recognizable works of the last half a
Millennium, the prophecies were not initially well received when

(41:39):
the centuries of them were published in Lyon in 1555.
Such was the esoteric nature of Nostradamus writings, and the
importance of doom contained within them, that many people
suspected him of being a proponent of dark magic or an
occultist. Michel may have been concerned
enough by the suspicions raised at this time that it led to him

(42:01):
burning several of the more controversial texts which he
held in his study in Salon. However, despite the tepid
initial reaction, his publishersagreed to continue publishing
additional centuries of quatrains in the years that
followed, and as sales picked up, additional editions were
published in Paris. The work which Nostradamus
intended to run to 10 full centuries, amounting to 1000

(42:25):
quatrains, was never finished inits entirety.
Nostradamus death prior to completing the work in the mid
1560s would ensure that, but it was very close to completion and
so in 1568 the first full volumeof 942 quatrains was published.
It has been speculated that a small number of previously

(42:46):
unpublished quatrains which wereadded into this full edition of
of 1568 were the work of anotherwriter, but in any event, the
overwhelming majority were indisputably the work of
Nostradamus and formed the basisof his prophecies, such as they
have been read, studied and. Commented on ever since the

(43:07):
almanacs and the prophecies werenot Nostradamus, only written
output in his later years. Among his other works is a text
which he composed at some date in the 1550s on Egyptian
hieroglyphs entitled The Auros Apollo.
The text comprises 182 verse epigrams and concerns the nature

(43:28):
of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the system of symbols and pictograms
which were used as a written language in Pharonic Egypt
between the 3rd and 1st millennia BC.
Nostradamus work was almost entirely based on the
hieroglyphica written by Horapolon of Manteus, a Greek
scholar who lived in Egypt in the 5th century AD, at a time

(43:50):
when the Eastern Roman Empire still held sway here, and
Alexandria, the capital of Egyptin the north of the country at
the time, was still one of the world's great centers of
learning, though in decline. Nostradamus had presumably
relied on a translation of Horapolon's work from Greek into
Latin, which had been completed some years earlier by a French

(44:12):
scholar by the name of Jean Mercier.
Nostradamus did add some of his own commentaries briefly
throughout the text. What is unusual about these is
that to the world of 16th century France, ancient Egyptian
hieroglyphics were a complete mystery.
They would not be translated successfully until the 19th
century, following the discoveryof the Rosetta Stone by

(44:34):
Napoleons forces in Egypt at theend of the 1790s.
It is interesting though, that the French astrologer and seer,
whose writings were so consumed with esoteric knowledge, showed
an interest in a secret, indecipherable language of the
ancient past. Nor was this his only other
work. In line with his long experience

(44:56):
as an apothecary physician and plague, Dr. Nostradamus also
composed a number of works in the 1550s on medical topics.
The principle such text was a work on cosmetics and medicines
published in 1555. This was referred to as a
cookbook, included recipes for preserves, and is a good example

(45:18):
of the peculiar manner in which the preparation of medicines
could overlap in the 16th century with other pursuits.
Whether one was making health foods or cosmetics, all involved
ingredients derived from nature and thus could often have
strikingly similar properties. For instance, a recipe early on
in Nostradamus text was for nutmeg oil, an ingredient which

(45:41):
was variously used for medicines, makeup, and for
cooking with. Elsewhere in the text,
Nostradamus provided details of how to clean and whiten ones
teeth or to make an aphrodisiac around the same time.
He was also. Working on a paraphrased
translation of the protreptic, amedical text written by the
ancient Roman physician Galen over a Millennium earlier.

(46:05):
Thus, what should be clear from all of this is that while
Nostradamus is almost entirely remembered for his prophecies
today, he was working on a wide array of written texts and
translation on many different matters in the 1550s.
All this scholarly work and published output soon increased
Nostradamus fame in France beyond what he had ever enjoyed

(46:29):
as a successful plague Dr. back in the 1530s and 40s.
Eventually, Nostradamus range ofadmirers stretched all the way
to the Royal Court in Paris. Back in 1533, the heir to the
throne, Prince Henry, had married Catherine de Medici, a
scion of the powerful Florentinebanking and political family.

(46:50):
Eventually in 1547, she became Queen Consort of France when
Henry ascended as King Henry theSecond.
Catherine brought a Renaissance Italians love of astrology and
almanacs with her to France in 1550, 55 and after coming across
Nostradamus Almanac for that year, she summoned the
Provencalcia and Dr. to Paris. One of the quatrains in his

(47:14):
Almanac for that year hinted at a threat to the royal family and
she wished to learn. More Though initially fearful
for his life, he was received warmly by the Queen.
Thereafter, she regularly corresponded with him, seeking
advice about future events, but then, following her husband's
death in an unfortunate joustingaccident in 1559, she

(47:36):
effectively became Regent for her sons, who was still too
young to rule in their own stead.
Catherine's faith in the Provence seer's prophetic
abilities was cemented by that time.
Nostradamus had after all, written in one of his quatrains
a few years earlier that quote the young lion will overcome the
older one and that it would comeabout by a ruler being pierced

(47:58):
through the eye. A prophecy which became highly
relevant when Catherine's husband was killed by having a
piece of a joust break off and penetrate into his eye and his
brain. Thus it was that under
Catherine's patronage in the 1560s, Nostradamus was promoted
to the positions of a royal councillor and also as physician

(48:19):
in ordinary to the young King Charles the 9th.
This brought Nostradamus an additional pension and some
considerable protection against any charges of engaging in
heresy or dark magic. Thereafter, a sign of his
growing affluence was seen in his and his wife's investment in
a scheme launched in 1556 by theFrench engineer Adam de Capon to

(48:42):
build an extensive 25 kilometer canal to bring water from the
River Durrance to Salon de Provence, with the goal of
irrigating what was a region prone to summer droughts.
The Nostradams owned a 113th share in the Endeavour, and it
proved to be so successful that de Crapon subsequently extended
the canal all the way N to the River Rhone and South to near

(49:06):
the Mediterranean coastline at East.
As a result of this, as well as his many pensions which accrued
over the years for his work as aplague Dr. and a physician,
along with the royalties from his growing body of published
works, the Notre Dame family were able to live a relatively
comfortable life in Salon de Provence in the 1550s and 1560s.

(49:29):
So he, his wife and six childrenremained in the same small house
in the town which is still standing today, and which
indicates that his was no lavishexistence by any means.
By the 1560s, Michelle was suffering from increasingly ill
health. His primary affliction was gout,
a type of arthritis which manifests in periodic bouts of

(49:51):
painful inflammation of the joints.
Despite his patronage by the royal family, he experienced one
last clash with the church authorities in the early 1560s,
when he was briefly imprisoned at Marinyan on the.
Orders of the local Bishop. However, this was not on account
of any charges of heresy or occultism, but rather because he

(50:12):
had failed to acquire the necessary permission from the
local church authorities before publishing one of his almanacs.
Such permissions were increasingly necessary in a
country where the church authorities were anxious to
screen any works for hints of religious descent as France
descended into a series of religious wars in the early
1560s which would last for the next 4 decades.

(50:35):
By the mid 1560s, Nostradamus illness had deteriorated to the
point where his gout was causingedema, a disease which results
in major fluid retention and then swelling around the body
and which, in a chronic state can severely impact on one's
mobility. In the summer of 1566 his
situation had deteriorated to the extent that he put his legal

(50:58):
and financial affairs in order through his will.
His estate, which he bequeathed to his wife and children, was
substantial though not lavish. He died shortly afterwards,
either on the night of the 1st of July 1566, or the early
morning of the second. The story which was related
afterwards that he had told his private secretary Jean de

(51:19):
Chavigny the evening beforehand that he would not find him alive
at sunrise, seems a little too good to be true, though no doubt
such a prophetic prediction of his own demise did nothing to
harm sales of the first full edition of the prophecies when
it appeared 2 years later. He was buried in the Franciscan
church in the town of Salon. Nostradamus's tomb has had a

(51:44):
strange afterlife which has reflected the Provence Al
Prophet's own rather peculiar afterlife as a writer.
When he died in 1566, he was interred standing upright in the
Church of the Cordelier of Salonin Salon de Provence.
There he rested for over 130 years until, in 1700, the town

(52:06):
council determined to move his body to a more prominent crypt
in recognition of his lasting fame.
During the process of doing so, a necklace was found on his
skeleton bearing the inscription1700.
The townspeople quickly reinterred him following this
ominous revelation, the details of which may have been
elaborated. He rested again for 91 years

(52:29):
before a group of soldiers from the French Revolutionary period
drunkenly broke into his tomb in1791.
The tomb was only restored following the intervention of
the town mayor, who convinced the soldiers that Nostradamus
had not been a nobleman. Nostradamus had the last laugh
however, as he had once foretoldthat evil will come to the man

(52:51):
who opens the tomb. The soldiers were apparently
attacked by some counter revolutionary forces not far
from Salon and killed. To a man, it is a fitting end to
the strange intersection of fateand the prophecies of Michel de
Nostradam. Over the centuries, views
regarding Nostradamus's reputation have varied markedly,

(53:12):
but much of the time since his death in 1566, attitudes towards
his writings were positive. For people living through the
calamities of the Wars of Religion in the 16th and 17th
centuries, his talk of kingdoms experiencing disaster after
disaster resonated. His reputation was enhanced
following the Great Fire of London, which was noted as being

(53:33):
a first major event that he clearly seemed to have
predicted. Unsurprisingly, new editions of
the prophecies continued to appear.
There have been over 200 editions of the work since the
16th century in many different languages.
And it is. One of the.
Best selling books of the last five centuries.
By this standard. Sales were particularly strong

(53:55):
during periods of crisis when fans of the French plague Dr.
dipped in and out of his writings in search of supposedly
prescient remarks on coming misfortunes.
This high regard for Nostradamusreached its peak in the 20th
century when his writings were picked up on as having predicted
Hitler, the nuclear bombs, and the Kennedy assassination.

(54:16):
Quacks emerged in tandem with authors of books on Nostradamus
making claims that they could communicate with the Frenchman
from beyond the grave through hypnosis.
Many 20th century books on him were reflective of the interest
in dark magic and occultism thatpeaked between the 1960s and
1980s. As well as this, elements of
Nostradamus life story became exaggerated or entirely

(54:39):
fabricated. Recently, a more stark realism
has set in and several studies have appeared since the 1990s
which attempt to refute the ideaof Nostradamus as a genuine
prophet and instead highlight the vague, unspecific nature of
his predictions. Today, Nostradamus is a major
figure in popular culture. Very few people have ever sat

(55:01):
down to read a copy of his prophecies.
Yes. At the same time, very few
people are unaware of who the 16th century French prophet was.
His name conjures up the idea ofa long lost seer who predicted
regular periods of doom grippinghumanity in centuries to come.
Accordingly, his imprint on popular culture is extremely

(55:22):
wide, with dozens of best selling books having been
written on the Provenceol astrologer, as well as hundreds
of television shows and documentaries relating to his
prophecies and how they have been interpreted.
Several films have even been made about Michel de Nostradam,
including a short film nominatedfor an Academy Award in 1941 and

(55:44):
a feature length documentary narrated by Orson Welles in
1981. The title of the latter, The Man
Who Saw Tomorrow, gives a flavour of how Nostradamus is
usually depicted in modern popular culture.
More recently, the French plagueDr. has even popped up as a
figure in the Assassin's Creed series of video games, with a
character having to solve a series of riddles in Paris

(56:07):
allegedly created by Nostradamus.
Thus, the ways in which Nostradamus has featured in
popular culture down to the present day is as varied as the
manner in which his writings canbe interpreted.
Michel de Nostradam's writings have certainly fascinated
readers for centuries. His life story itself is rather

(56:27):
less examined, and indeed, as wehave seen, there are substantial
sections of it for which there is an almost total lack of
detail, particularly so in his earlier years.
What is perhaps most striking about what we do know about him
is that he did not have any special background at all in
astrology or the dark arts of any kind which would have

(56:48):
facilitated his writings. Rather, his principal profession
during his working life was as aphysician and a plague Dr. He
acquired quite a considerable reputation for his work in
southern France, but in reality his abilities in this field were
more to do with his common senseapproach to sanitation than any
alleged efficacy conveyed by hisrose pills.

(57:12):
But what was perhaps more notable about his work as a
plague Dr. was that it afforded him enough financial success in
the 1530s and 40s that he was able to dedicate himself largely
to writing in the 1550s and 60s.Secondly, it led to him
travelling widely and coming into contact with scholars who
broadened his literary range. But thirdly, and perhaps more

(57:34):
importantly, this life as a plague Doctor Who saw death and
devastation wherever he went must have imbued Nostradamus
with a deep sense of foreboding and dread, or certainly at least
a preoccupation with death and destruction.
This preoccupation is surely themost defining characteristic of

(57:55):
the prophecies. A casual reader of the hundreds
of quatrains which Nostradamus published in the 1550s and 60s
will not be greeted by an overtly positive array of
rhymes, but rather continuous portents of death, hell,
destruction, fire, droughts, famines and plagues.
This was Nostradamus stock and trade, and surely what has held

(58:17):
the attention of so many people ever since.
Had he written hundreds of quatrains on topics such as boat
building or dressmaking, they would most likely have been
forgotten about a long time ago.But the preoccupation with death
and destruction, along with the inherently vague and esoteric
manner in which the prophecies were written, have ensured that

(58:38):
they have survived the test of time.
Nearly 5 centuries after they were written, men and women
still pour over the quatrains ofdoom, seeking hints and
predictions of future apocalyptic events.
And such was the manner in whichNostradamus wrote his verse that
given a long enough time, an event can nearly always be found

(59:00):
to correspond to a passage. What do you think of
Nostradamus? Do you think his writings were
prophetic, or were they just ambiguous enough that subsequent
generations have been able to read an enormous amount into
them? Please let us know in the
comments section. And in the meantime, thank you
very much for watching.