Nostradamus, Bibliomancer: The Man, The Myth, The Truth

By Peter Lemesurier

Do you think Nostradamus, the famous 16th century "Prophet of Provence," was some kind of magician, perhaps a doctor, astrologer, and seer, too? If so, Peter Lemesurier's revelation that he was really just an ordinary man using an equally ordinary technique may come as a shock.

After re-examining the original sources, Lemesurier concludes that Nostradamus was in fact neither a doctor nor an astrologer, nor even (by his own admission) a prophet. He merely believed that history repeats itself, thus and projected known past events onto the future. To do so, he used the process of bibliomancy—randomly selecting extracts of randomly chosen books, then claiming "divine inspiration."

Unsurprisingly, he has almost never been proved right.

• Language: English
• Publisher: New Page Books
• Release date: Aug 20, 2018
• ISBN: 9781601637178

Peter Lemesurier

Peter Lemesurier is the author of many works on the world's great mysteries and is widely regarded as the leading English-language expert on Nostradamus. He has written several books on Nostradamus, including the best-selling Nostradamus Encyclopedia, the authoritative The Unknown Nostradamus, and Nostradamus: The Illustrated Prophecies. Born in 1936, he has been a musician, teacher, translator, author, and jet pilot. He has twice been invited by the town of Salon-de-Provence (Nostradamus's hometown) to lecture in French on the seer, and has appeared on numerous TV productions and radio programs, including, Discovery Channel, History Channel, National Geographic Channel, and UK's Channel 4. He lives in Pembroke, UK.

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Part One

The Prophet

005

1

Nostradamus: Mighty Seer?

Ever since the 16th century, the name of Nostradamus has attracted about itself an evergrowing cloud of mythology. Every major event in world history, from those of his own lifetime to those of 9/11 and beyond, has been followed—but never preceded—by a rash of popular books claiming (usually by dint of deliberately twisting either his words or the events) that he had successfully predicted it. To date there have consequently been more than 2,000 of them. As a result, the conviction has become ever more widespread that he must have been a most extraordinary, mysterious man—as, indeed, he would have had to be to justify all the prophetic claims. This in turn has led to a further cumulative rash of colorful speculations about who he was and what he did during his lifetime, based partly on linguistic misunderstanding, partly on hearsay, and partly on sheer invention. In this chapter we shall consider such propositions in fairly general terms. (In Chapter 2 we shall then examine them in greater detail and compare them with what the contemporary documentary evidence actually reveals.)

How on earth did he do it? How could Nostradamus, that mysterious 16th-century Prophet of Provence, possibly have managed to predict—as is widely believed—such events as the following, most of them centuries in advance:

006 The death in a joust of King Henri II of France in 1559?

007 The rule of Oliver Cromwell between 1653 and 1658?

008 The Great Fire of London of 1666?

009 The French Revolution of 1789?

010 The life of Napoleon Bonaparte up to 1821?

011 The foundation of the Institut Pasteur in 1888?

012 The First World War of 1914-18?

013 The Russian Revolution of 1917?

014 The abdication of King Edward VIII in 1936?

015 The activities of Adolf Hitler up to 1945?

016 The Second World War of 1939-45?

017 The nuclear destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945?

018 The Apollo moon landing of 1969?

019 The Challenger space shuttle disaster of 1986?

020 The death in a car crash of Diana Princess of Wales in 1997?

021 The catastrophic attack on New York’s World Trade Center of September 11, 2001?

022 The world financial crisis of 2008?

023 The End of the World in December 2012?

The answer, alas, is that he didn’t. True, lacking information to the contrary at the time, I myself have gone along with some of these suggestions in the past. But closer examination (see Chapter 2) reveals not only that the prophecies quoted just do not fit the events, but that only one of them is even dated (let alone as shown), namely the prediction in the royal dedicatory letter prefacing the 1558 edition of his major work Les Propheties of some kind of new age beginning in 1792. According to Nostradamus, this was when the Romans would start to redress years of persecution of what appears to be the Roman Catholic Church—precisely the reverse of what actually happened at the time, in France at least.¹ But then, astrologers had in any case long been forecasting major political and religious changes for 1789 (a remarkably accurate dating, as it happens, for the French Revolution) because of a predicted multiple planetary conjunction for March of that year, so the idea can in any case barely be counted as his.² True, on one or two occasions Nostradamus refers vaguely in his prefatory texts to that he calls the common advent and to popular revolts generally (which were, of course, nothing new), but never to any specific one. Out of the 942 quatrains (four-line verses) in the work, only 18 are in fact tied down to any particular date. This means, of course, that only 18 are specific enough to be usefully counted as predictions in the first place—and all of these turned out to be wrong in the event (short of deliberately twisting them to fit the events or vice versa, that is), including his famous prediction for 1999 (the last of his claimed datings before 3797) in verse 72 of his 10th Century, or book of a hundred verses. This runs as follows:

024025

This translates fairly literally as:

[In] The year 1999, seven months,

of the region shall come a great defraying King

to resuscitate the great King from Angoumois

before, after March/war/Mars, reigning with good fortune.

The source of the verse, therefore, is fairly obvious. Whatever else it may refer to, it refers back to the apparently miraculous restoration to health in his Madrid prison of the evidently dying King François I, duc d’Angoulême (capital of Angoumois), in August 1525, which apparently resulted from a personal visit from his host and jailor the Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, who was also king of Spain, and led to the resumption of his reign the following March. The unusually precise projection of the event into the future to July 1999 evidently results from the fact that no less than five planets (Jupiter, Mars, Venus, Mercury, and the moon) were in exactly the same signs (Taurus, Scorpio, Virgo, Leo, and Cancerto-Scorpio respectively) on both occasions, so allowing Nostradamus to deduce that the events over which they had originally presided would be repeated when they did so again in the future, in terms of what I have called comparative horoscopy.

This in turn allows us to attempt a free-ish English verse-translation that reflects the style of the original:

When 1999 is seven months o’er

From thereabouts shall a great hosting King

Restore the King from Angoumois once more,

Who’ll reign propitiously once come the spring.

Needless to say, however, the event simply failed to recur as predicted when the six planets resumed their former positions in July 1999—and certainly not along the lines confidently predicted by innumerable modern doom-mongers, both in print and on the Internet, to the effect that the verse portended the coming of the Antichrist, a Mongol invasion, the Third World War, a devastating cometary impact, and/or the imminent end of the world. As indicated, the word ciel here evidently means region, rather than sky (just as it clearly does at I.98 and II.45); the Roy deffraieur of the original printings (known to specialists as A and X; see the CD for the latter) meant defraying King and not (as it did later, once creative editors had inserted a gratuitous apostrophe) King of Terror; and the word Angoumois had nothing to do, whether anagrammatically or not, with the much-vaunted Mongols (not least because the suggested source-word Mongolois just didn’t and doesn’t exist in French)—even if most of the American and British commentators had never heard of this well-known French region. As a result, the historical context makes it clear, in addition, that Mars refers here to the month, rather than to war or to the planet of the same name.

But you wouldn’t have thought all this if you had believed most of the popular books on the subject. Even at the date of writing, the verse is still being belatedly invoked, especially on the Internet, as a sign of dreadful things to come for the world at large. By contrast, though, in the light of the above you can at least start to get some idea of how Nostradamus possibly tried to get a handle on the future.

If the vast majority of the Prophecies are undated, and if even those that are dated are (as in this case) for the most part wildly wrong, this has to mean that they are at best catch-alls, applicable whenever an event apparently of the type described comes around again—as it surely will. Thus, if I were to predict that a famous and much beloved old person with blue eyes shall die of a serious disease in the city of the angels it would inevitably come true sooner or later—and probably sooner rather than later. If I were Nostradamus, the enthusiasts would then no doubt immediately jump to the conclusion, as soon as the next famous film star died at a great age in Los Angeles (as, alas, they regularly do), that this was the very event that was being prophesied—notwithstanding the fact that the same thing would assuredly happen again repeatedly in the future, and for that matter would probably have already taken place a good many times in the past as well.

This would especially be the case, of course, if I had cast it in typical Nostradamian form, and numbered it in such a way as to tempt them to read an actual date into it (as, alas, they often do):

XX.12

Un bien aimé au grand renom & bruict

Yeux bleus vers mort la teste inclinera:

Par le grand mal long temps attaint au lict

En cité d’anges mourir enfin viendra.

or, in free English verse-translation:

XX.12

An agèd blue-eyes, loved, of great renown,

Toward the grave shall bend a weary head.

Racked with disease, long time in bed worn down,

In angel-town he’ll go to join the dead.

—notwithstanding the fact that Nostradamus is not known to have written a twentieth Century (book of a hundred verses) in the first place!

That is not the worst of it. Most of those who make such claims as those listed above—including the English-speaking authors of many popular books on the subject—know next to nothing either about Nostradamus, the texts, or even the 16th-century French in which they are written. Few of them, indeed, have ever seen an original text, or even know sufficient French to understand the latest French research; some of them unashamedly admit that they know no French at all. As a result, every one of the claims listed is the result not of reading what the texts actually say, but of shamelessly twisting half-understood words retrospectively to fit the proposed event, or in some cases even twisting the event itself to fit the words. It is an age-old technique, even used by Nostradamus himself (see Chapter 2), but it hardly does credit to the idea of prophecy.

No quatrain, as far as I am aware, has ever been used in advance to predict in terms any event that was not probably in the offing anyway.

Yet the media who are so keen to capitalize on such ideas determinedly take no notice. It is not just a matter of the literary publishers. The Discovery Channel and History Channel in particular are perfectly happy to invite onto their periodic Nostradamus pick-n-mix television spectaculars whole droves of alleged psychics and fortune-tellers and dreary would-be esotericists who know next to nothing about the subject, and have consequently swallowed all the secondhand myths hook, line, and sinker. These they then shout as loudly as possible from the housetops, as do the non-specialist American scholars who are unwise enough to join them. (Pierre Brind’Amour, late Professor of Ancient Studies at the University of Ottawa, was undoubtedly the leading Nostradamus authority of his day³; but I currently know of no North American Nostradamus scholar worthy of the name. Nearly all of them, as might not unreasonably be expected, are French.) The louder they shout, the less they seem to know—and, in particular, the less French they seem to know.

Nor are such prophetic myths the only ones they trot out, either. There are possibly more unfounded biographical myths about Nostradamus than about almost any other figure known to history, and so these, too, are duly aired again and again, virtually ad nauseam:

026 He was a descendant of the Israelite tribe of Issachar.

027 He was educated by his grandfathers, both of whom were former physicians to the court of Good King René of Provence.

028 He attended Montpellier University in 1525 to gain his First Degree.

029 After returning there in 1529 he successfully gained his medical doctorate.

030 He went on to lecture in the Medical Faculty there until his views became too unpopular.

031 He supported Copernicus’s heliocentric view of the universe.

032 In around 1542 he visited the abbey of Orval in northeastern France, where he deposited one or more sets of his early prophecies.

033 In the course of his travels he performed a variety of prodigies, including raising the dead and identifying a surprised future pope.

034 He successfully cured the Plague at Aix-en-Provence and elsewhere.

035 He engaged in scrying using either a magic mirror or a bowl of water.

036 He was joined by his secretary, Chavigny, at Easter 1554.

037 Having published the first instalment of his Propheties, he was summoned by Queen Catherine de Medici to Paris in 1556 to discuss with her his prophecy at quatrain I.35 that her husband, King Henri II, would be killed in a duel.

038 He then examined the royal children at Blois.

039 He bequeathed to his son a lost book of his own prophetic paintings.

040 He was buried standing up.

041 He was eerily found, when dug up at the French Revolution, to be wearing a medallion bearing the exact date of his disinterment (which somehow manages to change according to the account!).

As I originally pointed out in June 2006 in the Wikipedia article on Nostradamus from which most of the previous list is adapted,⁴ there is not a scrap of contemporary evidence to support any of these ideas. Most of them are based on unsourced rumors either started by his son Caesar and/ or his secretary, Chavigny, or as fact by much later commentators such as Jaubert (1656), Guynaud (1693), Bareste (1840), Torné-Chavigny (1860), and Le Pelletier (1867). Others are based on modern misunderstandings of the 16th-century French texts, or even on pure invention. Even the often-advanced claim that quatrain I.35 had made Nostradamus’s name in his lifetime by successfully prophesying King Henri II’s death didn’t actually appear in print for the first time until 1614, 55 years after the event and 48 years after Nostradamus’s death.⁵ (Once again, see Chapter 2.)

The upshot, then, is that we have to abandon not only the widespread myths about Nostradamus’s uncanny prophetic successes, but most of the popular biographical claims about him as well. In short, it is back to the drawing board—back, that is, to the actual archives, the original printed texts (see the CD) and a much more rational assessment of who he was, what he was trying to do, and how he tried to do it.

In view, consequently, of the plethora of patent untruths about him that have by now become widely accepted by the public at large, the results may well turn out to be somewhat surprising, not to say disquieting….

042

2

Nostradamus: The Claims Examined

Vague, exaggerated claims about Nostradamus’s prophecies and life story are nothing new. They are the meat and potatoes of the popular Nostradamus industry. All the while nobody has access to the original texts (unlike you, who now have access to a selection of them via the accompanying CD), or knows enough French to understand them if even they did. The speculators are fairly safe—particularly given that the French in question is 16th-century French, which is quite different from the modern variety, and that Nostradamus used even this in a cryptic way of his own that owed a great deal to the convoluted Latin syntax of the celebrated Roman poet Virgil.

This idiosyncrasy was more than enough to fool the seer’s own printers, who quite often could make no sense of them and consequently muddied the water even further by making dozens of gratuitous printing errors, so it is no surprise if it also bamboozles most modern readers, too, particularly English-speaking ones. The inevitable corollary, however, is that it is among the Anglo-Saxon nations that Nostradamus’s verse is most commonly misunderstood and consequently misrepresented.

There is an obvious antidote, though: to carefully examine all the claims listed in Chapter 1 against what the original French sources actually say. To this end, therefore, I now propose to relist those claims alongside a note of the texts concerned, and then to analyze each of them in turn. (Readers who would prefer to take such technicalities as read are, of course, at liberty to proceed directly to Chapter 3.)

After centuries of misrepresentation going right back to Nostradamus’s own day—and particularly to the retrospective books on him and his prophecies published in the 1590s by his admiring secretary, Chavigny, who was above all concerned to prove his late Master right in the light of events—the first reliable archival research into the life of Nostradamus was carried out by Dr. Edgar Leroy, a psychiatrist at the Clinique Van Gogh (formerly the abbey of St.-Paul-de-Mausole, which would later be transformed into a mental asylum patronized by the painter Van Gogh himself), only a few hundred yards to the south of Nostradamus’s birthplace in Saint-Rémy and alongside the ruins of ancient Glanum. In its final version, it was published in his Nostradamus, ses origines, sa vie, son oeuvre of 1972.

His principal successor was Pierre Brind’Amour, professor of Ancient Studies at the University of Ottawa, who in 1993 published his absolutely seminal Nostradamus astrophile. This went much further than the astrology to which its title ostensibly refers, even though it certainly analyzed it in great detail. Brind’Amour’s subsequent Nostradamus: Les premières centuries ou prophéties, a detailed academic study of the second printing of the 1555 edition of the original Propheties (see the CD), appeared shortly after his death from cancer in 1995.

Since then a great deal of further research has been done. It is to be found mainly in works such as Professor Bernard Chevignard’s Présages de Nostradamus (1999), Dr. Elmar Gruber’s Nostradamus: sein Leben, sein Werk und die wahre Bedeutung seiner Prophezeiungen (2003), and Jean-Paul Clébert’s massive Prophéties de Nostradamus (2003). Further archival and bibliographical work has been carried out by Michel Chomarat and Dr. Jean-Paul Laroche at Lyon, where Chomarat’s Nostradamus section in the Municipal Library now amounts to well more than 2,000 editions, as well as by Robert Benazra, who, in collaboration with Chomarat, discovered and revealed two of the missing original Nostradamus editions in the 1980s. Detailed research into the historical origins of Nostradamus’s prophecies (first suspected as early as the 18th century) has likewise been going on for some years, notably in the admittedly somewhat uncertain work of Roger Prévost,¹ as well as, more reliably, in that of Brind’Amour² and Gruber³—to say nothing of my own published researches.⁴ It has also been pursued online, where the combined work of Gary Somai⁵ and myself has possibly been most prominent. Meanwhile Jacqueline Allemand, director of the Centre Nostradamus at Salon, has helped impartially to coordinate all the various research efforts